The source from which the name of this blog sprang

Dada, for those who did not know, was an art movement that began in Zuerich (the "ue" is not a misspelling, it signifies the German umlaut or u with two dots over it) Switzerland in response to the horrible nature of conflict during World War I. One example of this type of art can be seen in the picture above, Kurt Schwitter's Merz 29A. Schwitter used collage made of found objects to create a new aesthetic that displays the irrational, the abursd and illogical side of human thought. Another better known example of Dada type expression can be found in the novel Slaughterhouse 5, in which the main character Billy Pilgrim upon seeing the horrible destruction of Dresden during World War II can only express what he sees with the nonsensical utterance "pooteeweet." There are no words within his vocabulary that can capture the moment. The fact that "powteeweet" is nonsense is then partly a commentary on the action of firebombing a city itself, and also a way to allow the reader to grasp just how unbelievable a sight the firebombing of Dresden was.
Dada is a rejection of the conventional in favor of the absurd, the nihilistic, and the nonsensical because those forms made more sense to the dadaists in light of what they saw in the war than did the previous conventions of art which favored romanticism. War is another world entirely unlike what one sees at home. The German soldier marching off to war in the summer of 1914 must have felt for all the world that he was a patriot fighting the noble fight for the Vaterland. But after the Schliefenplan failed to bring a quick end to the fighting, 19th Century warfare with its romantic cavalry charges was officially over, and the wondrous new technology of the 20th Century propelled the devevolution of the conflict into what was likely the worst form of warfare ever devised. Thousands of soldiers sat for hours in holes in the ground while artillery pounded their positions with bombs and mustard gas. They would be asked occasionally to come out of their holes to charge at the enemy in the futile hope of pushing their foe back a few miles as if that would somehow make some strategic difference. When exiting the holes the soldiers stepped into the barren wasteland of "No-Mans-Land" and charged at the enemy who sat bellow ground and picked off the chargers with their rifles and machine guns. It was all utterly stupid. Every battle was essentially pointless, and victory a myth. Consider the battle of the Somme. One million total casualties, and no clear winner. The Brits gained 5 miles of German territory in 5 months. That's not a very good ratio. The Dadaists had awakened to a new sense of what war was: bloody, awful, ruled by chance, without meaning, rationale, or truth. That is how I see war today. Look at the Lebanon, Hezbollah, Israel war. Two Israeli soldiers were kidnapped by Hezbollah and now Israel has killed over two hundred Lebanese in response, a number of them young children and civilians with no ties to Hezbollah. In response to that Hezbollah shoots of hundreds of rockets which land in entirely random locations, even killing some Arabs. On a purely rational basis, the lives of two men for the lives of hundreds does not compute. It never does in war. World War I began with the death of two people and by the end millions were dead. The peacemakers, the moderates, the compromisers are never there until the end. In the meantime only absurdism can express what happens in war. s9idfhdu9shaier9gj