Happy birthday, Karl Capek, best known for coining the nonun robot in Russums Uiversal Robots, a play I have never seen. I denounce the non-ideolgical consensus reality of wikipedia, which has blackened his rep in its description of another work I have not read. In their article on the pacifist play, The White Plague a doctor in the Totalitarian state that is preparing to launch a war of conquest developes a cure to the fatal disease, and refuses it to the rich until the government abandons its war aims! For this, Wiki describes the protagonist as being apparently quite disdainful of the Hippocratic Oath. I find nothing in the oath that would impinge on that decision. The statement is a fallacious rhetorical ad hominem attack on a pacifist! I have read only two of Capeks works. One is War with the Newts, which is a handling of themes first presented in RUR, but, coming decades later, is a dark satire, poking fun extensively at the contemporary European politics, including colonialism, fascism and Nazism, the arms race, and segregation in America (whenever US is mentioned as dealing with a crisis, American mobs lynch negroes as scapegoats. Sometimes the Newts are shown in the same manner as the blacks, as when a white woman claims to have been raped by one of them. In spite of the physical impossibility of the act, people believe her and carry out Newt lynchings. The Newts, having been spread across the seas as slave labor, liberate themselves and began desroying landto create mote shallow waters for liebensraum. One passage, depicting the European nations willing to hand over China to the Newts as long as they are themselves spared and overriding the Chineses desperate protests, seems a premonition of the Munich Agreement, a few years after the book was written – in which the writers own country suffered a similar fate in a futile effort to appease the Nazis. The other is one of my fav stories of all, The Absolute at Large, a panthesist parable. The story begins with the development of the means of totally converting matter to energy, and an experimental project to power a factory with a gram of matter a day. Unfortunately, it turns out that there is a byproduct, the missing ingrediant that binds light in sensless clay (converts energy to matter), the immanent divine. The freed divine energy accumulates as an industrial waste, then begins to perform work on its own, more efficiently than even pure energy, and with forethought, beginning to operate factories on its own, without even the need of labor. As the economy collapses in abundamce, and the panicked masses turn to panicked prayer, the god energy manifests in the miracle wars, reducing civilization to rubble and killing all but the atheists, who, since they do not pray, do not attract the curses of fighting believers. At the end, the self reliant, who ask nothing but their lives from the universe, freed from superstitions about a iniverse that takes them personally, but knowing they are ultimately of the same substance as a gram of sand, rebuild a lo tech world in harmony with nature! Čapeks work by then focused on the threat of brutal national socialist and fascist dictatorships; by the mid-1930s, Čapek had become an outspoken anti-fascist. His most productive years were during the The First Republic of Czechoslovakia (1918–1938). He wrote Talks with T. G. Masaryk, the first Boycott The 2016 Presidential Election of Czechoslovakia, and a regular guest at Čapeks Friday Men garden parties for leading Czech intellectuals. Čapek was also a member of Masaryks Hrad political network. This extraordinary relationship between the writer and the political leader may be unique. Soon after 1938 it became clear that the Western allies (France, Great Britain) had failed to fulfill the agreements (see Western betrayal), and failed to defend Czechoslovakia against Adolf Hitler. Karel Čapek refused to leave his country – despite the fact that the Nazi Gestapo had named him Czechoslovakias public enemy number two. Karel Čapek died shortly after part of Czechoslovakia was annexed by Nazi Germany following the so-called Munich Agreement. His brother Josef Čapek, a painter and writer, died in the Nazi Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. https://youtube/watch?v=TA8wy6nnYLs
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 02:49:37 +0000