Banksy’s Manifesto

They all were dying, and the only thing that started to bring back their humanity, their individuality… was lipstick.

I’m quoting, roughly, from Banksy’s manifesto. Banksy’s the guy who just recently launched a funny “guerilla attack” on Paris Hilton’s debut album.
But the humor, in my high-fallutin opinion, falls a bit flat. So I
resort to Banksy’s own website to dig up some dirt, only to find myself
gazing at the kind of story that made me wish I had written.

Banksy’s manifesto contains this extract from the diary of
Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO who was among the first
British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945. The key word here
is something red and surprisingly vital; watch out.

“…Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too
weak to stand proping herself against them as she cooked the food we
had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just
anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentary which was
scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself
with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a
child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived,
though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of
lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were
screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don’t know
who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did
it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I
believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women
lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you
saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their
shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post
mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last
someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were
someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on the arm. At last they
could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to
give them back their humanity.”

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