I don’t know what specifically prompted me to put I You We Them - Journeys beyond Evil: The Desk Killers in History and Today on hold at the library. The typical process is I’m reading about something that references a source, so if I want more information, I check the Fairfax County system to see if they have it. Could be a book review, could be a tweet, I just put it in the system and pick it up when it’s ready.
Some books take a while, of course—especially if there’s
been a book review in WaPo; by the time I hit the catalog, I’m number
347 in the queue. So when I finally get the “it’s here” notice, I’ve forgotten
when/why I put it on hold.
That wasn’t the case with this one; I think it might have
been a few days between my request and receiving the ready notice. I was
delayed for a few days because I wanted to finish Book and Dagger (about
academics’ roles in the OSS during World War II) before I launched I You We
Them. So when I squeaked into the local branch one day before the hold
expired this week, it was a surprise to see this was waiting for me:
All I knew about it was the title and the subject matter,
which is “desk killers”. It’s a term (translated from the German Shreibtischtäter)
that came up in the wake of Luigi Mangione shooting Brian Thompson, CEO of
United Healthcare in December. The term was initially applied to Nazi bureaucrats
and other white collar workers who made the genocide machine run so
efficiently, but there have been arguments that we have plenty of desk killers
working in enterprises ranging from pharma to oil to auto manufacturers to
insurance companies.
Well—let me just say that I was somewhat nonplussed to find
something more than 1000 pages long and weighing 1.25kg.
And that it’s only Volume I.
(Imma be a while.)
©2025 Bas Bleu
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