Dan Gretton is a writer, activist and teacher. In 1983 he co-founded the pioneering political arts organisation Platform, in Cambridge, where he studied English literature. As well as working with Platform over many years on the human rights and environmental impacts of corporations, he has also developed radical initiatives in adult education and has lectured internationally on the subject of the 'desk killer'. After more than a decade of research, aided by a major award from the Lannan Foundation, he embarked on the writing of I You We Them. He currently divides his time between north-west Wales and east London, where he shares his garden with a family of foxes.
Meticulous, clinical and sobering, a shockingly important and
incisive book.
*David Olusoga*
I You We Them is a uniquely gripping journey around the landscapes
of mass murder.
*Phillipe Sands, author of East West Street: On the Origins of
Genocide and Crimes against Humanity*
This remarkably powerful book entails a dogged and worldwide
pursuit of 'the desk-killer', the government functionary or
business executive whose decisions so often cost human lives. The
model of this remote-control assassin is Hitler's architect Albert
Speer, but the German story is subsumed in a far more compelling
and modern investigation of the collective amnesia which so often
operates in the telling of national histories, including our
own.
*Spectator, Books of the Year*
Not since Gitta Sereny’s vast script of Into That Darkness arrived
on my desk have I read anything so disturbing as the early draft of
Dan Gretton’s book. I was shaken to the core by his brilliant
treatment of the Wannsee meeting… The book seemed to be humming
with life... much more alive than anything I’ve read for ages...
I’m certainly grateful for having been given the chance to read
this amazing work.
Great books never occur out of a desire for greatness, but often
out of a possessed persistence in the face of a chosen and
immensely difficult task. This is such a book. In it, through it, a
century speaks to us - not with the thunderous voice of History,
but in the intimate voice of a sequence of confessions.
A complex and exceptional book. Gretton's determination to bear
witness so long after the events themselves does not diminish the
power of his story. On the contrary his decision to make it
personal intensifies the impact... The book highlights how society
in general is susceptible to a form of collective amnesia, a wish
not to confront the troubling details in its past. John Berger
observed that "the role of capitalism is to destroy history... to
orientate all effort and imagination to that which is about to
occur". Dan Gretton's profound moral effort in this book is a
massive bulwark against that possibility and a guarantee that the
truth will be heard.
*New Statesman*
Brilliant... the writing has the power at times to mesmerise...
Gretton is a brave man to have stared so long and so intently at
the subject.
*Evening Standard*
A book of extraordinary importance and urgency - we need this book
now. For its determined, passionate, and vulnerable seeking; for
its insistence on what matters. Climate catastrophe tells us the
reach of the desk killer has never been greater. We must take the
hope and political will in this book as our own: forged in darkness
and therefore - inextinguishable.
Gretton raises profoundly unsettling questions about the capacity
for doing evil that exists within all of us, and the ways in which
the distancing effect of technology allows perpetrators to avoid
thinking about the consequences of their actions.
*Irish Times*
A testament both mighty and meticulous, a devastating case for the
prosecution, against which there is no defence. This book should be
compulsory reading.
*Jay Griffiths, author of Wild: An Elemental Journey/Savage Grace.*
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