Monday, January 27, 2020
Thinking the unbelievable, an odd coincidence.
Sunday was a very active day for me, I was hoping that I would get a good night's sleep out of it Sunday night, unfortunately not. As usual I woke up at 2:30 in the morning. I was wide awake, my thoughts were extremely clear, I was remembering places and names of people etc, that couldn't come to me during the day. I have been reading a book which I will discuss once I have finished reading. The book had me thinking about humanity and what a bunch of morons we mostly are. My thoughts drifted towards the second world war and the worst of the worst, Nazi death camps. I started to think about the reality of it.
It suddenly hit me that a country built a murdering factory! This is not just some racist guy that runs into a group of people that he hates.. and starts shooting. No this is something much worse on an industrial scale. Imagine groups of people had meetings about finding the best sites to build people killing factories. They made accurate drawings of the types of buildings, gas chambers and holding camps to build. They would also look at the most efficient way of mass murdering people and also think about ways of disposing the bodies after. Just like they were going to build a factory that makes cars.
I was thinking about something I heard months ago on a documentary, they found scratch marks on the cement walls as people tried to claw their way out of the gas chambers. It's hard enough to mark a cement wall with a piece of metal, imagine doing it with fingernails. Imagine the fear when you realize that you are being poisoned, imagine seeing your family die around you.
Unbelievable that people could be so diabolical; however on the other hand as I get older I don't think it's unbelievable, I think it's very natural for humans to do this. I have come to realize that humans for the most part like to be stupid, they like to be kept in the dark and be led by people who will pretend to do the thinking for them... , not only allow them to remain stupid, but encourage them to remain so.
I lay there in my bed until five, when I got up and turned on the news, the radio host said that today is a commemorative day for the victims of the holocaust. That startled me, I hadn't been listening to the radio the day before. What a bizarre coincidence to be thinking of people who died in these camps, only to get up and hear it's a day to remember them. In my reading about the holocaust today, I was surprised to read six million Jews and eleven million others were murdered. I want to know more about these others, the Jewish people were the main target but nearly double the amount of non Jewish people were killed, I wasn't aware the non Jewish number was so high!
We used to think, how did this happen? Now we can see how easily it can happen, we can't look back and feel superior, there are plenty of people today who wouldn't see anything wrong with this happening again to the people "they" don't like. I thought humanity would be so advanced by now in their thinking, now I feel that maybe we are regressing.
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7 comments:
If you think of humans as livestock then imagining this is not difficult at all. It is a stretch to say that the Nazis adopted animal agriculture practices directly (usually we want our cows and pigs healthy when we slaughter them, not starving) but they were certainly inspired by such.
As for how people made and designed the gas chambers: that is how organizational hierarchy works. Do you think the people making armored vehicles to be used in Yemen feel any compunctions about doing so?
Lurker, they didn't see them as livestock going to be processed for meat, they saw them as vermin to be exterminated, eradicate from the landscape. Dirt that needed to be clean away. Also as well I think there is a difference in manufacturing something for war which may or may not be used in combat, compared to a giant facility that will kill hundreds and hundreds of men, women and children a day; however I guess people didn't say no to Hitler when he came calling. I'm sure in thirty years people will look back and wonder why nobody stopped the stuff we see today.
Over the last few weeks I saw a push on Twitter to get the Auschwitz twitter account to one million followers before the 75th anniversary of its liberation. I started following and they made their goal. Daily they post facts about some of the victims (e.g. someone born on that day and whether they perished or survived). It’s disturbing but something we cannot forget. Man’s inhumanity to man.
Like Anne Marie said, we can’t let our guard down because it can happen again.
It happens because people don't speak up what a hatemonger speaks.
Ithappens when good people do nothing.
Yes, vermin is a better analogy than livestock. I think the procedures are much the same -- the logistics and the mechanisms for extermination. These days we gas turkeys and minks, albeit using more humane methods than Zyklon B.
Sixpence is right. Dehumanization is key, and we dehumanize the targets of our war manufacturing in the same way (or drape them in fairy tales about "killing the bad guys and protecting the innocent"). We think we are so much better because we are not Nazis, but we aren't all that different.
Compare and contrast the actions of those Germans we valorize as being human rights activists today, and how we pilloried MLK for his "Beyond Vietnam" speech.
Let us not ignore the fact that anti-Romani attitudes persist to this day. There are a whole lot of respectable Europeans who continue to view gypsies as vermin.
Hatred, dehumanization and power are a deadly mix. Seeing the rise of fascist ideology again in our lifetimes is a huge red flag about the potential for new atrocities.
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