This essay is published in Unlikely Stories
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students. —John Ciardi
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"If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace with a military band playing softly, and a cinematograph working brightly; then I'd go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the halt, the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile a weary thanks; and the band would softly bubble out the Hallelujah Chorus."1
In 1908, thirty-three years before Auschwitz, this prophetic piece issued from the pen of D.H. Lawrence. H.G. Wells, in his Anticipations (1902), revealed a remarkable enthusiasm for eugenics: "And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races, the black...the yellow men...the alleged termite of the civilised world, the Jew?"
Virginia Woolf made the following entry in her diary: "On the tow path we met and had to pass a long line of imbeciles...They should certainly be killed."2
In Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness (1902), we find a similar juxtaposition of the tendency to do good and evil in the pamphlet written by the white man Kurtz in the jungle for the ‘improvement' of the black man: "'By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,' &c., &c. From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know....There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!'"
In his The Holocaust Industry (2000), Norman Finkelstein observes that the Nazi policy of Lebensraum consciously invoked America's domestic policy of Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny was the supposed inevitability of American westward expansion. The expression was coined in 1845 by an editor (newspapers again!) who, at the same time, denounced the policy of other nations of "hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions". That ‘free development' meant the unfree development of others: it justified annexation of Texas, Oregon, New Mexico, and California, and later of US involvement in Alaska, Hawaii and the Philippines.
The Nazi regime merely carried out the eugenic policies of Wells, Lawrence and Woolf (and Kurtz!): According to Friedlander, "Nazi regime systematically murdered only three groups of human beings: the handicapped, Jews and Gypsies". And Finkelstein observes: "...it was the death invented for handicapped Germans that was then inflicted on Jews."
Unsurprisingly, "body fascism" went hand in hand with the elimination of imperfect people. Welfare provisions were designed to make the Germans healthier and more fertile, and ethnic Germans were repatriated from other parts of Europe. One film director who shot to fame depicting perfect bodies was Leni Riefenstahl. She caught the drama of the pole vault by placing cameras in holes beside the sandpit; she used four cameras (one underwater) to capture the bird-like flight of the divers who never seem to hit the water. These have become commonplace, but she was the pioneer.
"...Were the will there we could learn much about ourselves from the Nazi experience," observes Finkelstein. After World War II, Hannah Arendt noted that "the subterranean stream of western history has finally come to the surface...."
What explains this streak of insanity in the history of the west?
As usual, we have to go back to the Greeks.
"...in all well-ordered states every individual has an occupation to which he must attend, and has therefore no leisure to spend in continually being ill," observed Plato.
"And therefore our politic Asclepius may be supposed to have exhibited the power of his art only to persons who, being generally of healthy constitution and habits of life, had a definite ailment; such as these he cured by purges and operations, and bade them live as usual, herein consulting the interests of the State; but bodies which disease had penetrated through and through he would not have attempted to cure by gradual processes of evacuation and infusion: he did not want to lengthen out good-for-nothing lives, or to have weak fathers begetting weaker sons;--if a man was not able to live in the ordinary way he had no business to cure him; for such a cure would have been of no use either to himself, or to the State."
Lawrence, Woolf and Wells were clearly ardent devotees of Plato.
We find a similarly utilitarian view of human beings in Aristotle. The love of persons is alien to Aristotle – only their goodness, pleasantness and usefulness count. Thus, for both Plato and Aristotle, there is no room for compassion – only for efficiency. "...the slave is only a living instrument of the good life" maintains Aristotle. "He exists for the state, but the state does not exist for him."
And here lies the terrible western secret: slavery. Only western civilisation was built on slavery, both in antiquity and in modernity. Europe's terrible crime of importing 16 million slaves into the New World has never been expiated. Without that import, capitalism would have been impossible. And without capitalism, Europe and America as we know them today – aggressive, ruthless, predatory. Thus, while Germany has paid $60 billion in compensation to holocaust victims, not one farthing has been paid by the United States to the descendants of exploited slaves.
Just before the American Civil War, slaves were paid (in kind, of course) 10% less than a free worker. Robert Fogel of the University of Chicago estimates that they were defrauded to the tune of $24 billion in 1860 – at 6% interest in 124 years, that comes to $97 trillion dollars, nine times the national income of America. At 3% interest, the bill falls to $1.6 billion – the amount being claimed in the courts by blacks, so far unsuccessfully. These figures are merely for lost wages – not for pain and suffering.
There is, therefore, something rotten at the heart of western civilisation. For the fallible individual, neither Socrates nor Aristotle has any place. For the former, all individuals are rational, but ignorant. A fully informed individual would never do anything wrong – he rules out both incontinence as well as hypocrisy. Aristotle similarly maintains that all human beings work out their actions by means of reasoning from first principles. Only Plato found room for the irrational – but he was quick to degrade irrational people to the level of subjects to rational rulers. And everyone had to be useful – there was no room for the sick and disabled. This was obvious also from the idealised sculpture and bodies displayed in Athens. Take the ‘Apollo Velvedere', and the Olympic games.
These thinkers were merely products of a slave-owning society – they lived off slave labour. It was natural for them to degrade all humans to the level of instruments – and instruments are either perfect or dispensable.
Notes:
1 quoted in Norman Davies, Europe: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 860
2 quoted in Richard Vinen, A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century, (Cambridge, Ma: Da Capo Press, 2001), p. 13.
Check out Iftekhar's web page at http://www.iftekharsayeed.weebly.com
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students. —John Ciardi
Did you miss the Interdependency Issue? Check that out, fool!
David Brennan relinquishes control of his music choices for one year
rhetorical atolls emerging: An interconnected set of movies and digital weirdnesses by Jason Nelson
Four Paintings by Allison Schulnik
AE Reiff reviews Blood Orchid by Charles Bowden
Stick Figure Symbiosis: Frankie Metro reviews Re-positioning by Stephen Bett
An excerpt from The Diamond Kings of Clarence Checkeredfish by Brian S. Hart
The Ninth Circle: Fiction by George Sparling
The Cacophonous Croak: Fiction by U. P. Eople
Neolithic Woman: Fiction by Robin Wyatt Dunn
Ebenaezer Appies on burning South Africa's water to produce coal
Dispatches from Hurricaned NY by Cindy Milstein
Three Poems by John Dorsey
Three Poems by Clare L. Martin
Three Poems by Lyn Lifshin
Three Poems by David McLean
Three Quantum Poems by Mark Cunningham
Three Poems by Michael Mc Aloran
the surge (hurricane sandy) —: Poetry by Steve Dalachinsky
Three Poems by CL Bledsoe
Graphic Notations by Stroud
Hurricane Sandy's Austerity Lessons by Lucine Kasbarian
Yacov Ben Efrat on why Netanyahu and Hamas both hate the PA
"If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace with a military band playing softly, and a cinematograph working brightly; then I'd go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the halt, the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile a weary thanks; and the band would softly bubble out the Hallelujah Chorus."1
In 1908, thirty-three years before Auschwitz, this prophetic piece issued from the pen of D.H. Lawrence. H.G. Wells, in his Anticipations (1902), revealed a remarkable enthusiasm for eugenics: "And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races, the black...the yellow men...the alleged termite of the civilised world, the Jew?"
Virginia Woolf made the following entry in her diary: "On the tow path we met and had to pass a long line of imbeciles...They should certainly be killed."2
In Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness (1902), we find a similar juxtaposition of the tendency to do good and evil in the pamphlet written by the white man Kurtz in the jungle for the ‘improvement' of the black man: "'By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,' &c., &c. From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know....There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!'"
In his The Holocaust Industry (2000), Norman Finkelstein observes that the Nazi policy of Lebensraum consciously invoked America's domestic policy of Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny was the supposed inevitability of American westward expansion. The expression was coined in 1845 by an editor (newspapers again!) who, at the same time, denounced the policy of other nations of "hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions". That ‘free development' meant the unfree development of others: it justified annexation of Texas, Oregon, New Mexico, and California, and later of US involvement in Alaska, Hawaii and the Philippines.
The Nazi regime merely carried out the eugenic policies of Wells, Lawrence and Woolf (and Kurtz!): According to Friedlander, "Nazi regime systematically murdered only three groups of human beings: the handicapped, Jews and Gypsies". And Finkelstein observes: "...it was the death invented for handicapped Germans that was then inflicted on Jews."
Unsurprisingly, "body fascism" went hand in hand with the elimination of imperfect people. Welfare provisions were designed to make the Germans healthier and more fertile, and ethnic Germans were repatriated from other parts of Europe. One film director who shot to fame depicting perfect bodies was Leni Riefenstahl. She caught the drama of the pole vault by placing cameras in holes beside the sandpit; she used four cameras (one underwater) to capture the bird-like flight of the divers who never seem to hit the water. These have become commonplace, but she was the pioneer.
"...Were the will there we could learn much about ourselves from the Nazi experience," observes Finkelstein. After World War II, Hannah Arendt noted that "the subterranean stream of western history has finally come to the surface...."
What explains this streak of insanity in the history of the west?
As usual, we have to go back to the Greeks.
"...in all well-ordered states every individual has an occupation to which he must attend, and has therefore no leisure to spend in continually being ill," observed Plato.
"And therefore our politic Asclepius may be supposed to have exhibited the power of his art only to persons who, being generally of healthy constitution and habits of life, had a definite ailment; such as these he cured by purges and operations, and bade them live as usual, herein consulting the interests of the State; but bodies which disease had penetrated through and through he would not have attempted to cure by gradual processes of evacuation and infusion: he did not want to lengthen out good-for-nothing lives, or to have weak fathers begetting weaker sons;--if a man was not able to live in the ordinary way he had no business to cure him; for such a cure would have been of no use either to himself, or to the State."
Lawrence, Woolf and Wells were clearly ardent devotees of Plato.
We find a similarly utilitarian view of human beings in Aristotle. The love of persons is alien to Aristotle – only their goodness, pleasantness and usefulness count. Thus, for both Plato and Aristotle, there is no room for compassion – only for efficiency. "...the slave is only a living instrument of the good life" maintains Aristotle. "He exists for the state, but the state does not exist for him."
And here lies the terrible western secret: slavery. Only western civilisation was built on slavery, both in antiquity and in modernity. Europe's terrible crime of importing 16 million slaves into the New World has never been expiated. Without that import, capitalism would have been impossible. And without capitalism, Europe and America as we know them today – aggressive, ruthless, predatory. Thus, while Germany has paid $60 billion in compensation to holocaust victims, not one farthing has been paid by the United States to the descendants of exploited slaves.
Just before the American Civil War, slaves were paid (in kind, of course) 10% less than a free worker. Robert Fogel of the University of Chicago estimates that they were defrauded to the tune of $24 billion in 1860 – at 6% interest in 124 years, that comes to $97 trillion dollars, nine times the national income of America. At 3% interest, the bill falls to $1.6 billion – the amount being claimed in the courts by blacks, so far unsuccessfully. These figures are merely for lost wages – not for pain and suffering.
There is, therefore, something rotten at the heart of western civilisation. For the fallible individual, neither Socrates nor Aristotle has any place. For the former, all individuals are rational, but ignorant. A fully informed individual would never do anything wrong – he rules out both incontinence as well as hypocrisy. Aristotle similarly maintains that all human beings work out their actions by means of reasoning from first principles. Only Plato found room for the irrational – but he was quick to degrade irrational people to the level of subjects to rational rulers. And everyone had to be useful – there was no room for the sick and disabled. This was obvious also from the idealised sculpture and bodies displayed in Athens. Take the ‘Apollo Velvedere', and the Olympic games.
These thinkers were merely products of a slave-owning society – they lived off slave labour. It was natural for them to degrade all humans to the level of instruments – and instruments are either perfect or dispensable.
Notes:
1 quoted in Norman Davies, Europe: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 860
2 quoted in Richard Vinen, A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century, (Cambridge, Ma: Da Capo Press, 2001), p. 13.
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