[extropy-chat] 'History' and the fulcrum of 1945

[Hubert Mania]

Amara wrote:

> You are familiar with some ideas of Jung of the shadow-self? We
> are most upset by those aspects that we recognize in ourselves
> and our impulse is to reject it, sometimes violently. I think
> that it was numbing to see the 'beast-within' expressed to the
> magntitude that was expressed in WWII. Probably it rendered
> psychologically mute a layer of people closest to the ground zero
> of the horror, the next layer closest could maybe express a bit
> more, and so on. In any case, if faced with something approaching
> that kind of horror, you did whatever it took to not be there
> again, war-avoidance, to the extreme.

Thank you, Amara, for your understanding.

I can give you a tiny part of the view as a post war german school boy.
Certainly, everyone here on this list has experienced or heard of a local
vietnam veteran going mad, killing his wife or still behaving like a warrior
in the relatively peaceful environment of a us suburb. Now imagine, you are
a german school boy of 7 or 8 years and ALL male persons, your father, your
uncles, some of your older cousins, your teachers, priests and doctors . . .
they all are WWII veterans. They are mass murderers in the name of fascism,
some of them, maybe the barber of your home town and the neglected drunkard
at the end of the street who lost his job 10 years ago, even contributed
their share to the unimaginable event called holocaust or shoah.

The question that the simpler minds among them did not get an answer for in
the 1950s is: How could it be unjust to torment, gas and burn the jews when
you obey the order written on official government papers with the swastika
on it, lots of double "S" in the rank descriptions of your army superiors,
and - most important for a german subject - a stamp of a Berlin authority
that immediately dispels his occasional worries and moral conflicts and
makes his participation in the killing industry of Treblinka or Auschwitz an
act of necessity. We are at war with the whole world, aren`t we?.

The barber of your childhood still exposes the attitude of a sadistic SS
pig. He does not cut your hair, he "executes" his job, in a similarly
contemptuos way he had cut off the hair of jewish women, a few minutes
before they went into the gas chambers. What's so bad about it? We are at
war with the world, and jewish hair can be used for pillow fillings. It can
be processed into the felt shoes the german submarine soldiers are wearing.

So, as a little boy you are surrounded by mass murderers. Not a single male
I got to know in the 1950s and 60s could serve as an example. The "souls" -
you know what I mean - of these men were destroyed. A lot of them died
young, my father with 46, he served in an execution commando in Belgium and
Italy, never touched a gun again after the war and drowned his guilt in
booze, literally drunk himself to death. I never met a man who by some
degree was NOT at a new war with himself about his involvement with the Nazi
army. Most of them abused alcohol in an attempt to kill the shadow
personality Amara was talking about (C.G. Jung).

One of the worst thing about growing up in post war germany, at least for
me, was to be confronted with the distress of the perpetrators exclusively.
There was no victim left in my home town, you could get to know or talk to.
Because they were all dead. Killed by the mass murderers I met in the
streets every day.

To make it clear: I did not feel this way when I was a boy. These are my
reflections as a man of fifty years. Subjects like holocaust and the
personal guilt of the asshole soldier "in the fields" were taboo in post war
germany. Those who survived built a new nation. There was this incredible
economic boom and in the 1960s germany was second rang again among
industrial nations. Musing on the subjects of Exi list and the obsession
with weapons in the usa I can confirm: this is very deep gap between the
cultures. I am 50 years old now and never in my life I had a gun in my hands
that could kill. I never knew a single person who has shown me a gun.
Describing myself as an "excellent rifleman" two days ago in my mail
exchange with Mike Lorrey was of course the attempt of my shadow beast,
"Nietzsche's Dragon", to reflect Mike's mind. I hope the absurdity of my
other claims in this mails showed the satirical character of the answer. I
never knew how to use a gun.

Soldiers don't get punished for their killings. In some exceptional cases
they get punished for so called war crimes. For me every minor injury that
is suffered by civilians AND soldiers in an attacked country, in a
preemptive war, is a war crime. But the majority of returning soldiers are
left alone with their personal guilt. A german soldier surviving WWII and
returning to his home town is a mass murderer. An american soldier returning
from Falluja is a mass murderer. I urge everyone of you: please watch out
for those who wage war in the name of freedom and democracy. Watch out for
government actions that reduce your freedom for the promise of security.
There is no such thing as security. The us population is kept in permanent
fear and is fed with a strawman "enemy". The surveillance structures that
are built on these artificially fanned fears right now are a big step
towards a new kind of totalitarian state that might lead to a nice or
comfortable (german: gemuetlich) fascism, with concentration camps and
torture outside the us territory. There is a new world order arising and we
better watch out.

humania