Looking forward to reading the story but what if he’s an OF member 😁
Another engaging read. Thank you.
So this older fellow decorated his entranceway with a flag of the Third Reich, alongside the Schutzstaffel and Totenkopf. These symbols remain ugly reminders of humans’ capacity for abject cruelty, and the logical, terrifying extreme of the herd mentality.
Yet, ‘He was quick to insist he wasn’t a Nazi sympathizer or racist…’.
I believe him as much as I do those who insisted ‘they had no idea what was going on…’.
To quote Lou Reed: “you can’t believe the goodly-hearted; the goodly-hearted made lampshades and soap…”.
Yea I was fairly sure I knew the kind of person I was dealing with by that stage. The stories he told of his times over in PNG were not funny or hilarious, they were morbid and horrific, yet he was laughing while telling them. Describing kids in a village dying of cholera so vividly that I gained a new insight into what a horrible means of death that must be, and giggling when he said “shitting themselves to death”.
He sort of oscillated between expressing a love and fondness for the people and the land and his time there, and then describing people and events in a way that made the islanders seem more like livestock than human beings. Maybe he both loved them and had no respect for them? There definitely was no hatred that he expressed but I can’t help but think they must have hated him and his mates.
Ash, this perfectly describes what Hannah Arendt referred to as the ‘Banality of Evil’.
It never ceases to amaze - and horrify - me how easily people are willing to ‘pull the legs off spiders’ if given a green light. Except these aren’t thoughtless children playing with insects, of course: they’re humans abusing fellow humans (viewed casually as ‘vermin’, in National Socialist parlance). We’ve seen this recently in Bucha, Ukraine, and we’ll see it again. And again.
Hahaha, very funny watching people shit out their guts. A real comedy act. The mind boggles.
The upside here is you rescued a fine watch from the clutches of a devil.
Very good story, and I’m more interested in ever in what’s going on with the illustrations. No offense intended if I’m wrong, but is there any AI involved? The hallway illustration is downright uncanny—I was morbidly curious to see what those photos on the wall were supposed to depict, but zooming in just makes them even more mysterious and alienating.
You’ve got a very good eye! Marielle did the first set, for the second and third we used AI, Trev spends a long time iterating over them and fine tuning them to get them just right. I’m pretty happy with the results thus far.
An interesting read. I never even knew there was an Omega Stories section!
On the subject of collecting such morbid memorabilia, I personally think it odd but one of my favourite musicians Lemmy of the band Motorhead had a huge collection of Nazi stuff!
