On Becoming the Enemy(bostonreview.net)
bostonreview.net
On Becoming the Enemy
http://bostonreview.net/politics/jason-stanley-becoming-enemy
33 comments
In kindergarten I asked a friend why "Hitler didn't like Jews". He said his grandmother was Jewish and he didn't like her, which made sense to us. When I was 9, my Jewish best friend and I had friendship armbands in neon colors, which I loved to bits, exclaiming that "I'm a Neon-Nazi". Still totally clueless, it was still all just words to me. The deeply appalled reaction of his mother was like a gut punch, probably like my innocent but horrid statement was to her.
When I was 11 and alone, I randomly changed channels (we only had the 3) and was faced with a bunch of corpses being shoved into a grave by a caterpillar. I remember that as if it was yesterday, and with everything I learned since then, that was the horrible anchor. But like you probably too, I wouldn't want to unsee it either. And I still sometimes can't help but wonder about the streets I walk through. Did some of those houses see people get dragged out and carried to their murder? How would the dead judge our too common unwillingness to speak out against injustice, even though we're very free to do so in comparison to them? There's so much, but I fear it less than I fear looking away.
While I also think testimonies, big and small, by real people (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/user/YadVashem/videos ) are important and need to be preserved, I can honestly say that for me, they were not really necessary, that is they came long after this had already become and integral part of me. Even "just" what can be read in books sufficed, but that's because I went looking for it, because I needed to learn. Similarly, I think it's perfectly possible for people to be so jaded to even shrug off a testimony given in person. So that's both good and bad news, I guess?
When I was 11 and alone, I randomly changed channels (we only had the 3) and was faced with a bunch of corpses being shoved into a grave by a caterpillar. I remember that as if it was yesterday, and with everything I learned since then, that was the horrible anchor. But like you probably too, I wouldn't want to unsee it either. And I still sometimes can't help but wonder about the streets I walk through. Did some of those houses see people get dragged out and carried to their murder? How would the dead judge our too common unwillingness to speak out against injustice, even though we're very free to do so in comparison to them? There's so much, but I fear it less than I fear looking away.
While I also think testimonies, big and small, by real people (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/user/YadVashem/videos ) are important and need to be preserved, I can honestly say that for me, they were not really necessary, that is they came long after this had already become and integral part of me. Even "just" what can be read in books sufficed, but that's because I went looking for it, because I needed to learn. Similarly, I think it's perfectly possible for people to be so jaded to even shrug off a testimony given in person. So that's both good and bad news, I guess?
>How would the dead judge our too common unwillingness to speak out against injustice, even though we're very free to do so in comparison to them? There's so much, but I fear it less than I fear looking away.
The dead were people too, not saints. They share the burden of creating an unjust society.
The dead were people too, not saints. They share the burden of creating an unjust society.
[deleted]
I worry what happens when the last of those that actually remember any of this die and all we're left with is the stories and the grainy footage. Humanity's track record for repeating mistakes is not encouraging.
There have been acts of genocide since World War 2 so it's not really a memory problem. To have countries not repeat mistakes like this would need a new approach?
The memory thing can be tricked. "This time is different", "These savages deserve it" and "We need to preserve ourselves against this invasion" are excuses I hear every day.
tropo(1)
"We need to preserve ourselves against this invasion"
Are you seriously equating disallowing entry to systematic extermination?
Are you seriously equating disallowing entry to systematic extermination?
[deleted]
[deleted]
There was genocide since long long before WW2. Genocide is nothing new to humanity.
> To have countries not repeat mistakes like this would need a new approach?
The old approach is the best approach. Novels and movies are a good way of passing this information in a way that appeals to our intelligence and to our feelings.
And I'm not only talking about "Schindler's List", but also on the topics in X-Men commercial movies.
What we can't experience ourselves, we can learn it from books and movies. Oral history did that for millennia, and it survived in myths and religion even beyond it was intended. Each time you recommend a good book that teaches a lesson, you are part of that chain of shared knowledge.
The old approach is the best approach. Novels and movies are a good way of passing this information in a way that appeals to our intelligence and to our feelings.
And I'm not only talking about "Schindler's List", but also on the topics in X-Men commercial movies.
What we can't experience ourselves, we can learn it from books and movies. Oral history did that for millennia, and it survived in myths and religion even beyond it was intended. Each time you recommend a good book that teaches a lesson, you are part of that chain of shared knowledge.
> There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.
-- Hannah Arendt
Read the serious thoughts of the heavy weights who lived through that time. Don't other Nazism, so many things that made it tick have since metastasized, not vanished. I would say we're constantly reenacting it on various scales, and to during that then solemnly swear to never forget that one horrible thing is kind of perverse in its own right.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/jamie-stern-weiner-norman-f...
> I remember once asking my mother, ‘How did you do in your studies?’ She replied, ‘What are you talking about? How could you study under those conditions?’.
> When she saw the segregation of African-Americans, whether at a lunch counter or in the school system, that was, for her, like the prologue to the Nazi holocaust. Whereas many Jews now say, Never compare (Elie Wiesel’s refrain, ‘It’s bad, but it’s not The Holocaust’), my mother’s credo was, Always compare. She gladly and generously made the imaginative leap to those who were suffering, wrapping and shielding them in the embrace of her own suffering.
> For my mother, the Nazi holocaust was a chapter in the long history of the horror of war. It was not itself a war – she was emphatic that it was an extermination, not a war – but it was a unique chapter within the war. So for her, war was the ultimate horror. When she saw Vietnamese being bombed during the Vietnam War, it was the Nazi holocaust. It was the bombing, the death, the horror, the terror, that she herself had passed through. When she saw the distended bellies of starving children in Biafra, it was also the Nazi holocaust, because she remembered her own pangs of hunger in the Warsaw Ghetto.
-- Norman Finkelstein
Read Sebastian Haffner's book about the times in Germany before the Nazis and see if you can find parallels, I found it uncanny. Everybody and their dog is all about numbers, be it users, money, hits. Not about judging your workmanship with your own mind. Judging "objectively" is something we actually pretend we can do, rather than something only lunatics would assume for themselves.
Hannah Arendt again:
> The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.
> One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.
> Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all.
> For legends attract the very best in our times, just as ideologies attract the average, and the whispered tales of gruesome secret powers behind the scenes attract the very worst.
> The fanaticism of the elite cadres, absolutely essential for the functioning of the movement, abolishes systematically all genuine interest in specific jobs and produces a mentality which sees every conceivable action as an instrument for something entirely different.
> The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.
> Since no one is capable of forming his own opinion without the benefit of a multitude of opinions held by others, the rule of public opinion endangers even the opinion of those few who may have the strength not to share it. This is one of the reasons for the curiously sterile negativism of all opinions which oppose a popularly acclaimed tyranny. [...] public opinion, by virtue of its unanimity, provokes a unanimous opposition and thus kills true opinions everywhere.
> The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
> There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
> If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to "demand" its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant.
> The net effect of this language system was not to keep these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, "normal" knowledge of murder and lies. Eichmann's great susceptibility to catch words and stock phrases, combined with his incapacity for ordinary speech, made him, of course, an ideal subject for "language rules."
> When confronted with situations for which such routine procedures did not exist, he [Eichmann] was helpless, and his cliché-ridden language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of macabre comedy. Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.
> The ideals of homo faber, the fabricator of the world, which are permanence, stability, and durability, have been sacrificed to abundance, the ideal of the animal laborans.
> Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena - homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.
> What has come to light is neither nihilism nor cynicism, as one might have expected, but a quite extraordinary confusion over elementary questions of morality — as if an instinct in such matters were truly the last thing to be taken for granted in our time.
> There are more than a few people, especially among the cultural élite, who still publicly regret the fact that Germany sent Einstein packing, without realizing that it was a much greater crime to kill little Hans Cohn from around the corner, even though he was no genius.
> The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.
> I'm more than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is possible today only on the fringes of society, where one then runs the risk of starving or being stoned to death. In these circumstances, a sense of humor is a great help.
> As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.
> When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.
> For the idea of humanity, when purged of all sentimentality, has the very serious consequence that in one form or another men must assume responsibility for all crimes committed by men and that all nations share the onus of evil committed by all others. Shame at being a human being is the purely individual and still non-political expression of this insight.
> Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.
> The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
Since the comment is way too long either way I decided to cut my own rambling rather than these quotes I think are all dearly important and as timely as ever. FWIW, I consider this sharing the best I know of, I can put things in my own words but not this well. And if it makes just one person go to the library and get a bunch of books by Hannah Arendt, it's worth it.
-- Hannah Arendt
Read the serious thoughts of the heavy weights who lived through that time. Don't other Nazism, so many things that made it tick have since metastasized, not vanished. I would say we're constantly reenacting it on various scales, and to during that then solemnly swear to never forget that one horrible thing is kind of perverse in its own right.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/jamie-stern-weiner-norman-f...
> I remember once asking my mother, ‘How did you do in your studies?’ She replied, ‘What are you talking about? How could you study under those conditions?’.
> When she saw the segregation of African-Americans, whether at a lunch counter or in the school system, that was, for her, like the prologue to the Nazi holocaust. Whereas many Jews now say, Never compare (Elie Wiesel’s refrain, ‘It’s bad, but it’s not The Holocaust’), my mother’s credo was, Always compare. She gladly and generously made the imaginative leap to those who were suffering, wrapping and shielding them in the embrace of her own suffering.
> For my mother, the Nazi holocaust was a chapter in the long history of the horror of war. It was not itself a war – she was emphatic that it was an extermination, not a war – but it was a unique chapter within the war. So for her, war was the ultimate horror. When she saw Vietnamese being bombed during the Vietnam War, it was the Nazi holocaust. It was the bombing, the death, the horror, the terror, that she herself had passed through. When she saw the distended bellies of starving children in Biafra, it was also the Nazi holocaust, because she remembered her own pangs of hunger in the Warsaw Ghetto.
-- Norman Finkelstein
Read Sebastian Haffner's book about the times in Germany before the Nazis and see if you can find parallels, I found it uncanny. Everybody and their dog is all about numbers, be it users, money, hits. Not about judging your workmanship with your own mind. Judging "objectively" is something we actually pretend we can do, rather than something only lunatics would assume for themselves.
Hannah Arendt again:
> The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.
> One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.
> Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all.
> For legends attract the very best in our times, just as ideologies attract the average, and the whispered tales of gruesome secret powers behind the scenes attract the very worst.
> The fanaticism of the elite cadres, absolutely essential for the functioning of the movement, abolishes systematically all genuine interest in specific jobs and produces a mentality which sees every conceivable action as an instrument for something entirely different.
> The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.
> Since no one is capable of forming his own opinion without the benefit of a multitude of opinions held by others, the rule of public opinion endangers even the opinion of those few who may have the strength not to share it. This is one of the reasons for the curiously sterile negativism of all opinions which oppose a popularly acclaimed tyranny. [...] public opinion, by virtue of its unanimity, provokes a unanimous opposition and thus kills true opinions everywhere.
> The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
> There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
> If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to "demand" its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant.
> The net effect of this language system was not to keep these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, "normal" knowledge of murder and lies. Eichmann's great susceptibility to catch words and stock phrases, combined with his incapacity for ordinary speech, made him, of course, an ideal subject for "language rules."
> When confronted with situations for which such routine procedures did not exist, he [Eichmann] was helpless, and his cliché-ridden language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of macabre comedy. Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.
> The ideals of homo faber, the fabricator of the world, which are permanence, stability, and durability, have been sacrificed to abundance, the ideal of the animal laborans.
> Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena - homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.
> What has come to light is neither nihilism nor cynicism, as one might have expected, but a quite extraordinary confusion over elementary questions of morality — as if an instinct in such matters were truly the last thing to be taken for granted in our time.
> There are more than a few people, especially among the cultural élite, who still publicly regret the fact that Germany sent Einstein packing, without realizing that it was a much greater crime to kill little Hans Cohn from around the corner, even though he was no genius.
> The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.
> I'm more than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is possible today only on the fringes of society, where one then runs the risk of starving or being stoned to death. In these circumstances, a sense of humor is a great help.
> As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.
> When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.
> For the idea of humanity, when purged of all sentimentality, has the very serious consequence that in one form or another men must assume responsibility for all crimes committed by men and that all nations share the onus of evil committed by all others. Shame at being a human being is the purely individual and still non-political expression of this insight.
> Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.
> The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
Since the comment is way too long either way I decided to cut my own rambling rather than these quotes I think are all dearly important and as timely as ever. FWIW, I consider this sharing the best I know of, I can put things in my own words but not this well. And if it makes just one person go to the library and get a bunch of books by Hannah Arendt, it's worth it.
And one of the most successful books of course being the Bible.
The new approach is changing human nature through genetic engineering / mind emulation.
The new approach is changing human nature through genetic engineering / mind emulation.
The trend looks good: https://ourworldindata.org/genocides/
According to that source, in 2012, for the first time in at least a hundred years, there were no ongoing genocides.
According to that source, in 2012, for the first time in at least a hundred years, there were no ongoing genocides.
Back up to 2 again in 2015. Not obviously any progress since 2000.
Also, here are some numbers on famine:
Data Dive: Slipping into famine http://www.reuters.com/article/us-datadive-famine-idUSKBN18M...
Also, here are some numbers on famine:
Data Dive: Slipping into famine http://www.reuters.com/article/us-datadive-famine-idUSKBN18M...
Well, that's kinda encouraging. Interesting to see the number of genocides fall off starting in 1989. Maybe normal statistical variation + dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991?
Not aware of that. Thanks for pointing it out!
Worth also mentioning that war itself is kind of petering out:
http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/articles/news_and_pol...
They must have not counted ISIS killings then, among others, which I would have thought are considered genocidal.
Yazidis' & Yemenis' to name a couple?
What about China's oppression of certain religious groups such as Falun Gong & Buddhists?
What about China's oppression of certain religious groups such as Falun Gong & Buddhists?
Considering we already have Antifa out and about I don't think we have to worry much, it seems the kids of today really do remember.
I'm genuinely curious to read more accounts of those very early days when Jewish people were first being treated like the enemy by a very small but vocal minority wielding righteous indignation as their weapon of choice.
"The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats." Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow
"The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats." Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow
I should buy a gun.
Depending on where you live, if you pay taxes you probably already have, millions of them, for atrocities on a scale that make Kristallnacht look tame.
Millions is a exaggerating
https://www.quora.com/How-many-guns-does-the-US-military-own says around 3 per military member (this is just handheld firearms). That puts it at well over 3 million with more than a million military members.
olewhalehunter said "millions" in the context of a singular "you", which is the exaggeration. Of course, collectively, all the US tax payers have paid for millions of weapons.
When learning about the Nazi time in history class I always had some amount of emotional distance between me and the subject.
Hearing survivors' accounts made away with that. That was when I, as a German(who had a grand-grandfather who fought for the Nazis), felt deep genuine regret and sorrow for the actions(or inaction) of my ancestors.
I worry what will happen when the last survivor dies.