# Unbroken ![rw-book-cover](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51oKyo6FXKL._SL200_.jpg) ## Metadata - Author: [[Laura Hillenbrand]] - Full Title: Unbroken - Category: #books ## Highlights - In the 1930s, America was infatuated with the pseudoscience of eugenics and its promise of strengthening the human race by culling the “unfit” from the genetic pool. Along with the “feebleminded,” insane, and criminal, those so classified included women who had sex out of wedlock (considered a mental illness), orphans, the disabled, the poor, the homeless, epileptics, ([Location 242](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYPPG&location=242)) - masturbators, the blind and the deaf, alcoholics, and girls whose genitals exceeded certain measurements. ([Location 245](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYPPG&location=245)) - Martin Cohn, an ordnance officer on Oahu, was once in a radar shack as a lost plane, unequipped with radar, tried to find the island. “We just sat there and watched the plane pass the island, and it never came back,” he said. “I could see it on the radar. It makes you feel terrible. Life was cheap in war.” ([Location 1334](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYPPG&location=1334)) - The crash of Green Hornet had left Louie and Phil in the most desperate physical extremity, without food, water, or shelter. But on Kwajalein, the guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them even as all else had been lost: dignity. This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness; to be deprived of it is to be dehumanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below, mankind. ([Location 2896](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYPPG&location=2896)) - Without dignity, identity is erased. In its absence, men are defined not by themselves, but by their captors and the circumstances in which they are forced to live. ([Location 2900](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYPPG&location=2900)) - Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure, and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty. In places like Kwajalein, degradation could be as lethal as a bullet. ([Location 2906](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYPPG&location=2906)) - For all Japanese soldiers, especially low-ranking ones, beating was inescapable, often a daily event. It is thus unsurprising that camp guards, occupying the lowest station in a military that applauded brutality, would vent their frustrations on the helpless men under their authority. Japanese historians call this phenomenon “transfer of oppression.” ([Location 3104](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYPPG&location=3104)) - She, like the Ofuna guards more than a century later, had succumbed to what Douglass called “the fatal poison of irresponsible power.” Of all of the warped, ([Location 3131](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003WUYPPG&location=3131))