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Thursday, April 05, 2007

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Is there such a thing as the most historically significant fart ever farted? Ernst Jünger thought so, as witness his description of reading Josephus's Jewish War, quoted here from Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason:

While the Jews gathered for the festival of unleavened bread, the Romans positioned a cohort above the hall of columns in the temple to keep an eye on the crowd. One of the soldiers in the cohort pulled up his coat, and with a mocking bow turned his behind to the Jews and 'let forth an indecent sound corresponding to his position'. That triggered a clash that cost ten thousand lives, so that one can speak of the most fateful fart in world history.

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