Execution wall between Cell Blocks 10 and 11 at Auschwitz. Here, several thousand Poles and Russian prisoners of war lost their lives. Eventually, the executions were moved to other locations, including Auschwitz II – Birkenau. The blacked out window to the left is Cell Block 11, the gynecological torture center. Though it seems vaguely ironic, the Nazis decided that the constant executions were apparently too much for the women being tortured to withstand, so all the windows facing the yard were shuttered. Photo by Eric Francis.
WE ARE ACCUSTOMED to the story of the Nazis being about mass murder, hearing about thousands at a time gassed and cremated. At the beginning, the killing happened one person at a time; and inside the gas chambers, it also happened one at a time even though hundreds of others were present. Was it really the tendency of the Nazis to kill millions that made them what they were, or was it their nonexistent value on the life of an individual?
In seeing the scene above, you are witness to a Nazi execution facility. People such as your mother, your sister, your grandfather, your boyfriend or yourself were forced to strip naked, walk barefoot out into the cold, face that wall and be shot in the back of the head. Their killers could not face them. The pattern of that compressed string was the last thing they saw before they died. These people had no trial, no lawyer and had committed no crime except for existing. The philosophical rationale was that certain groups were undesirable. But it always comes down to an individual person being held as worthless.
This is how we must think of the Holocaust: remembering that each life was indeed a life; that each person who was murdered experienced the fear, horror, shame and loss of being thrown violently from the Earth, for nothing — on the basis of a lie. Imagine facing that wall yourself, and that wall being the last thing you see before you close your eyes and brace for whatever comes next, however it might feel. Imagine that this conduct was a government policy perpetuated under color of law (that is, supposedly legal), which many people approved of, and many, many others stood silent as it went on.
Part of how it went on was because people had no rights. The German government, in part by terrifying people, and in part by blatant trickery, had suspended them all, just like the American government is doing now. People were convinced they were safer without their rights. The German government committed many of its crimes on foreign soil, just like the American government is doing now. But the most menacing thing that both have in common is that the enemy can be anyone, including you. Then, step two: You have no right to prove otherwise.
As I explained yesterday, this scene is the yard between Cell Blocks 10 and 11 at the first Auschwitz camp. Cell Block 10, the gynecological torture ward, is visible in the background. The black covering on the window is there to prevent inmates of Block 10, themselves in incredible pain and fear, from seeing what was going on outside their window. Of course, they could hear most of it — the screams of those hanging with their arms behind their backs; the orders of vicious military men; condemned people wailing and crying; the shots fired; the wagons coming and going for the corpses.
It was all done for ‘good reason’ — these people were speaking against us, they were polluting our pure race, this one was caught giving food to someone, this one is gay. Once you can visualize their murder, do the political rationales matter? Once you can feel the pain they experienced, do the reasons make a difference? Does it really matter that it’s happening to ‘other people’? At what point do you identify with what is happening enough to see yourself in the situation, and speak up?
Really, I think that it’s so easy to relate to that we must go into denial, and fast. We must pretend that it’s not happening, that it cannot happen, that it won’t happen.
That’s exactly how it happens. Scenes like the one above are why I object to the death penalty in any form, under any circumstances. Even if you agree with the thin logic that those found guilty of crimes should be executed, you still have the problem of the innocent. Many innocent people are what is called exculpated or acquitted after they are convicted, and even after they have already been killed [see first link below if you are curious]. Many go to their deaths stating flatly that they are guilty of no crime, sometimes after having had their appeals thrown out on technicalities.
The stories of people who spend 15 years on death row, only to be freed, or who are exonerated while in their graves, are so heartbreaking it’s no wonder they are ignored. Nobody wants to think it’s possible that supposedly ‘democratic’ governments are strapping innocent people to gurneys and stopping their heart with drugs, or putting them into gas chambers where they are made to inhale cyanide gas (along with test animals to make sure the gas is working properly). Except for the size and scale, I see no difference between this and what was done in Auschwitz, because the mentality is exactly the same.
A society that resorts to murdering its undesirables becomes complicit in a “final solution,” and the voices that are silenced in such a proposition stand as martyrs to our failure to understand the essential organizing law of humanity — thou shalt not kill.
A Special Comment about Lying by Keith Olbermann
Juvenile Offenders on Death Row
Ho! Mr. Goatfish:
“I remember like you having the same difficulty negotiating the end of the Other and the beginning of Me.”
Not exactly what I said. But I guffahed at the ‘negotiating the end of the Other’ part. Indeed s/he/it only *wishes*I would have trouble with that step!
Conscious definition of personal will? Mebbe. What I think of as the Bigger Body has a very different agenda than “I” do, what with my little materialisms and petty jealousies and sudden intransigencies and spray-on/wipe-off doubts. (The ego is such a petulant donkey sometimes, no?) Although it occasionally seems a touch ‘megalomaniacal’ to my petit-boho self, I just go ahead and accept the BB’s Grand Story about the meaning of my choices and predilections, and set things up to align with that design.
It means I am motivated by oversized projects, to be sure, but also means that I am Not Bored. Ever. ‘Pretty important after the first million years or so on this wet rock currently called Earth.
“The great French Resistance leader Rene Char once said that we have to be able to withstand –intramuros– the presence of adversaries as cold-blooded as microbes. As someone with certified Neptunian issues, the challenge for me has not been in the simulation/emulation, but in knowing how to accept the findings, as well as keeping very clear about where the labyrinth ends. ”
All right then, I think I do now understand what you mean, Missus Mystes. This might be an organic type of empathy, the instinctive action of bringing Other in. I remember being borderless as a child, and I remember like you having the same difficulty negotiating the end of the Other and the beginning of Me.
I understand this process as the conscious definition of personal will. Moving into and out of Self/notSelf can be seriously disorienting if you don’t have that going on first. I think you must be pretty great at this, better than I ever was anyway.
:). Thanks for the birthday wishes. I am a Capricorn, critical and under fire as we speak.
~j
Oh crap. Unless you’re a Capricorn? If so, no wonder you read (gentle) askance at my mystologisms.
JanesDefense wrote: “. . . I spent some time tracking it down today, and incongruously found not only the book but also the passage and the page: 107, the month and day of my birth.”
Happy Birthweek! Hope you are finding something more celebratory to do (great literature notwithstanding…) during this jumpin-jack-flash month.
M
JanesDefense :
“It seems you are suggesting that one allow one’s personality to disintegrate in order to accept, and reintegrate; and that somehow the acceptance will act as a defense.”
Yeahno… hmmm… Here’s where having a vagina comes in handy. Those of us who have had the experience of bringing someone *into* our bodies (and out, in the case of birth) can more readily construct/deconstruct this labyrinth-not easily in the case of a murderer or a murdering system, but it is do-able.
Think of a mise-en-abime. We are all adept at the construction of masks (the very meaning of ‘persona’), this one just has to be particularly well-developed, to the point of behaving *exactly* like your natural awareness. But it is still just the merest veil thrown over the Infinity that you are.
(Uh, back to the sequence. Prelude to Everything: Get into a working relationship with that Infinity/Eternity. I know this is counterintuitive and flies in the face of most mystic literature, but it is *entirely* possible to have a Self and a not/Self in the same percept. There are five spots in consciousness where both are palpable. Get real with those.)
The great French Resistance leader Rene Char once said that we have to be able to withstand –intramuros– the presence of adversaries as cold-blooded as microbes. As someone with certified Neptunian issues, the challenge for me has not been in the simulation/emulation, but in knowing how to accept the findings, as well as keeping very clear about where the labyrinth ends.
So each day contains a practice where I locate my (not)self/self in the continuum of Bliss/Emptiness. Subsequently, that little slash marks the opening – where the Other is brought in.
Same planet, my dear, but the Dames are getting suited up for Peace Games. Have you noticed?
“There’s a sequence. Get them out of order and you turn into a monk. We’ve got enough of those, goddesslove’em. Using sexual energy (ardor) is a BIG part of this sequence, but as it emerges as primal intelligence, capable of seeing exactly where the adversary lives (Just think of the precision you bring to your lover’s subtle body, then transfer that to perceiving the contours of the adversary’s psychotic organization. Get it?), and being ready until the last nanosecond to sponsor their return to Reality. After that, the only thing you can know of is –paradoxically enough– their Absence. ”
Wow. That’s all I can say to that. I wonder if it works. You seem to be on some planet I can only see during the Equinox from where I live, but this strategy does sound productive. The farthest I’ve gotten is to conclude that if I could really understand, at the permeable level, why people do the unspeakable, then I would be insane. I put a lot of thought into that conclusion. It seems you are suggesting that one allow one’s personality to disintegrate in order to accept, and reintegrate; and that somehow the acceptance will act as a defense.
Maybe. I’m not in the headspace to try a thing like that at the moment. In fact I do seem to be hugely upset at the moment.
“Thank you for going to all the trouble to dig out that MyLai passage”
:). It’s no trouble at all. I work around books. Finding obscure paragraphs is something I can do a lot more easily than negotiating the pyschotic.
~j
JaneDefense: The whole ‘immune system’ metaphor when dealing with malice doesn’t rule out the “no” of which you speak (and keep those examples coming, honey… ~shudder~spark#).
As I understand it, the refusal, the ‘no,’ is part of the Yes-package. As I said above, love is a moment in the process; internalizing (consciously, yo!) the Other is another moment. Then there is yet another moment which is entirely Uranian in its precision and unpredictability. When I say the ‘bigger body’ gets into the game, some people would call it the Mind (but I have recent experience that indicates that it all comes under the heading of Body); and that ‘bigger body’ has a wisdom that knows exactly how much, when and what kind of firepower produces a singular effect: to separate the malicious from their hatred long enough to offer them this choice: It’s love or nothing, kiddo.
Paziers (warriors-in-love) have to master the ability to invoke this moment. Have to.
After that moment has passed (and yes, you also have to double-up, emulating the adversary’s existential pattern *while* offering a hand out of the abyss… not a cheap trick, I tell ya), if the offer is spurned, the next phase is even trickier, since you lend the adversary the mirror you have been using, and they destroy *themselves* with it. No touchee, from that point on. No hatred, no fear, no malice. Not even a little bit. You are clear water from that moment on.
There’s a sequence. Get them out of order and you turn into a monk. We’ve got enough of those, goddesslove’em. Using sexual energy (ardor) is a BIG part of this sequence, but as it emerges as primal intelligence, capable of seeing exactly where the adversary lives (Just think of the precision you bring to your lover’s subtle body, then transfer that to perceiving the contours of the adversary’s psychotic organization. Get it?), and being ready until the last nanosecond to sponsor their return to Reality. After that, the only thing you can know of is –paradoxically enough– their Absence.
Essentially, when one proffers that gift, the adversary empties themselves into a particular kind of Enlightenment. That’s really all you need to be aware of.
***
Thank you for going to all the trouble to dig out that MyLai passage. Thank Goddess the author had a chance to write it and do something besides breathe and vomit it daily. I propose that we meditate on this author; I will be thanking him directly in my prayers today.
“But what do you do when someone is just deluded and under an intense paranoiac trip thinking “these people” are enemies who are plotting to kill us? ”
Dude, I don’t believe that the Nazis thought some eight year old girl, or any of their neighbors in streetclothes were enemies who were trying to kill them.
It was an excuse. Just like, as per my example from Tim O’Brien’s My Lai, those kids lost it and started killing people because it was hot and they were wired and nobody was gonna stop them. Good Christ, have some juice. Take a nap. Eat a cracker. Get sane. Here, I’ll write down the fucking Action Plan that makes you not kill anybody.
You are responsible for your actions. This is an absolute. Whether you realize what exactly you are doing at the time is immaterial, because the way life works is: you are going to find out. The whole point of going through the indignity of a human lifetime is to learn to act on certain types of knowledge before you find yourself negotiating the dead rodent odor in your apartment in Argentina, hallucinatory and dyskinetic because your mind is trying to protect you from the fact that you will never. Ever. Live through enough days to make it all right again.
“One would think this is the last country where such a thing would have happened, Germany being the cradle of philosophy and rational thinking. ”
Yeah. I know. They like to sell you this idea. My personal feeling is that they’d been psychotic since the late eighteen hundreds.
“I once read that at the beginning of this century an hegemonic power would try to take control of the world but…that they would be stopped by a cosmic force!!!!!”
Oh awesome! Course you don’t know what they mean by hegemonic. It could be Keanu Reeves again.
~j
“You feel this when it is activated, just like a breastfeeding mother feels her system responding to waves of disease from which her immune system is building its responses. It is a dullness/clarity cycle, with little shudders of вЂ?oh yeah’ built in as your bigger body gets into the game. Trust this. It is our best bet for creatively engaging these imponderable cruelties. ”
These are very big gorgeous thoughts Mystes. Cool and beautiful and helpful. But I am thinking in terms of no instead of yes.
Last night while I was writing the comment above I kept trying to remember something I read a long time ago. It was just the barest imprint of a few sentences. I knew I had read it when I lived in this collapsing lake house, and I knew it had something to do with Vietnam. So I spent some time tracking it down today, and incongruously found not only the book but also the passage and the page: 107, the month and day of my birth.
This is from In the Lake of the Woods, by Tim O’Brien, a veteran turned awardwinning author. It was a strange book to come out in 1994. No one cared at all about Vietnam that year much less My Lai. Everyone was rich and happy and roundly pleased with themselves and we had apparently reached the End of History, if you recall. But there it was, and there I was reading it:
” Please,” Sorcerer said again. He felt very stupid. Thirty meters up the trail he came across Conti and Meadlo and Rusty Calley. Meadlo and the lieutenant were spraying gunfire into a crowd of villagers. They stood side by side, taking turns. Meadlo was crying. Conti was watching. The lieutenant shouted something and shot down a dozen women and kids and then reloaded and shot down more and then reloaded and shot down more and then reloaded again. The air was hot and wet. ” Jeez, come *on*, ” the lieutenant said, ” get with it – *move*- light up these fuckers,” but Sorcerer was already sprinting away. He ran past a smoking bamboo schoolhouse. behind him and in front of him, a brisk machine-gun wind pressed through Thuan Yen. The wind stirred up a powdery red dust that sparkled into the morning sunshine, and the little village had now gone mostly violet. He found someone stabbing people with a big silver knife. Hutto was shooting corpses. T’Souvas was shooting children. Doherty and Terry were finishing off the wounded.
This was not madness, Sorcerer understood.
It was sin. He felt it in his own arteries, something vile and slippery like heavy black oil in a crankcase.
Stop, he thought. But it wouldn’t stop. Someone shot an old farmer and lifted him up and dumped him in a well and tossed in a grenade.
Roschevitz shot people in the head.
Hutson and Wright took turns on a machine gun.
The killing was steady and inconclusive. The men took frequent smoke breaks; they ate candy bars and exchanged stories. ”
This is what I was informed by when I wrote my post last night. I was thinking, they could have *not* created a murder camp outside of Krakow. They could have *not* performed experiments, gassed millions of innocents. There is choice involved. There is always a choice, no matter how deeply you have been abused or violated. You can feel the depth of that animal rage and fear or whatever sadistic evil that’s sitting at the bottom of your belly, and you can say *no*. You can say no.
~j
Hmmm… there’s needs to be some care with the ‘wag the dog’ impulses. I’ve spent substantial portions of the last two decades researching (closely) the causes of the social convulsion called ‘la Violencia’ in Colombia. Indeed everything the Nazis carried out is spread out across the Colombian countryside to this day. And the conclusion that I am coming to is that there is no political or social remedy to a miasma this deep. There is, however, cultivating the ability to step up the abyss and say : Yes.
“Yes” means you are able to completely realize the suffering that caused this massive need-to-destroy, see *all* the way in to it, and allow its contours to produce the corrective in your own being. It’s analogous to the way that breastfeeding mothers become little walking pharmaceutical companies: they inhale the virus/bacterium, and their bodies tinker with it, manufacturing the antigen which is transferred into the breastmilk.
What triggers this process, of course, is love. But love is a stage, the “yes” stage to a deeper, dharmalogical process in which you allow the system of internalizing, cauterizing, reintegrating to do its work.
You feel this when it is activated, just like a breastfeeding mother feels her system responding to waves of disease from which her immune system is building its responses. It is a dullness/clarity cycle, with little shudders of ‘oh yeah’ built in as your bigger body gets into the game. Trust this. It is our best bet for creatively engaging these imponderable cruelties.
Love and more,
M
~j, Eric,
This IS what drives me crazy. These Fucks. Folk, and I WILL give them “personality”, who perpetuate the most heinous acts upon this world, its people, creatures, environment…. twisted mother fuckers who can’t relate to empathy in any sense of the word. IT’S HERE, ALWAYS HAS BEEN. I think we were born from “above” and now we’re working (hard at that) our way back/to skyward. Some bastards will never get it… then again, how far does it go? Sickening truth? Each and every one of us. It’s the butterfly wing effect. Somewhere around the world a hurricane is picking up due to a butterfly deciding to fly, halfway around the world. (And hell yeah, I’m horrible at watching my own thoughts).
The FLESH TRADE still goes on, all over the world. Take your pick, militias in the congo, underage (this actually makes me want to kill, and I hate sayin’ shit like that) brothels in southeast asia (I’ve a daughter), thievery adoptions in central america, the totally inhuman porn industry in the U.S. …. on and on….. ?!? WTF!!
This is it I guess, in my words, opinions,…. I have history to look at (and thanks for keeping it alive/in perception). There are a lot of bastards who did a lot of stupid shit, AND IT’S STILL GOIN’ DOWN!!!!! Those of us who have a concience, heart, soul, have to be aware of the B.S. first of all (thanks) and then we need to take action, in our own BEINGS, that we stand up (maybe even to be shot down, or to kick some ass!) and make it KNOWN IN OUR ACTIONS that we will NOT PUT UP WITH THE BULLSHIT!!!!
This crap can’t happen, AND us be happy….. No.
There is work to be done, so please forgive my mind/mentality, (I don’t mean to ripple the vibe so harshly but….), I’m pretty adament about workin’ this shit through.
The world….. Us… You…Me… I’ts all the same, and we NEED to get it together.
(This time it’s beyond) LOVE,PEACE,HAPPINESS
Still here, Eric.
It would almost make more sense on a human level if these guys had said you know, we just fucking enjoy killing people. To have a supply of people to kill for bogus reasons is extremely fulfilling, it’s like having a sexy silverish Bentley only you get more exercise and you get out in the fresh air. It amuses and gives one a Weird Hardon and so far no one has stopped us, even the boring townies twenty minutes away who know full well that we are sick bastards who should be stopped.
They must have liked it. It’s so obvious.
Slamming a little girl against a yarn cube with a bullet was like fucking her forever, a bump from God, on the day red is the only real color suddenly. Slight taste of metal in the mouth. A bit of sweat on the upper lip.
They were like meth addicts. But their drug was abomination.
~j