On occasions where I participate in discussions with people regarding what has happened to our country during these first years of the 21st century – especially considering the mindset of conservatives, neocons, republicans, “Tea Party” fanatics and the rest of the intellectual bottom – feeders; then there’s the Kochs, the politicians they own and the regressive vision they have for this country - the inevitable questions seem to consistently arise: “With all this technology and media at our disposal, why can’t people simply accept facts for what they are without resorting to revisionism?” Or, “Faced with the reality of the facts, why aren’t the American people motivated to leave their comfort zone and act on them?” Or, “How can those people be so completely out of touch with humanity?”
Instead of trying to draw from my personal life’s experiences which seem pathetically insignificant and tame in comparison to the murderous character of the current political mindset, I instead chose to look to history and study some documented cases of what ideological subversion’s effects have on people who willingly bypass critical thinking and blindly accept the convoluted fallacies of a herd mentality hook, line and sinker. Then, as I was rereading a book I had last put down 35 years ago, the following passages flew up in my face like voices of the damned screaming from the grave.
If you’ll read on and put those words in the context of today’s average mindset, perhaps you’ll have a similar reaction to mine…
The author of the following passages has been dead for nearly 34 years. Given the point in his life at which he put them to paper between 1948 and 1955, it would appear that nothing external had been forcing him to record these observations; in fact on first blush it would seem from most pedestrian interpretations that superficial guilt compelled him to create a public record that might sound almost pithy in its attempt to feign contrition. However, in consideration of his role in one of human history’s more unspeakable horrors, it might be argued that was intended instead as a cautionary warning for future generations – not only from a political point of view, but from the broader standpoint of how easily a human being’s humanity can lost in the servitude of dogma. Thus:
“I recall a tour through the Linz steelworks in the summer of 1944 where prisoners were moving about freely among the other workers. They stood at the machines in the lofty workshops, served as helpers to trained workers, and talked unconstrainedly with the free workers. It was not the SS but army soldiers who were guarding them. When we came upon a group of twenty Russians, I had the interpreter ask them whether they were satisfied with their treatment. They made gestures of passionate assent. Their appearance confirmed what they said. In contrast to the people in the caves of the Central Works, who were obviously wasting away, these prisoners were well fed. And when I asked them, just to make conversation, whether they would prefer to return to the regular camp, they gave a start of fright. Their faces expressed purest horror.
“But I asked no further questions. Why should I have done so; their expressions told me everything. If I were to try today to probe the feelings that stirred me then, if across the span of a lifetime I attempt to analyze what I really felt - pity, irritation, embarrassment, or indignation - it seems to me that the desperate race with time - my obsessional fixation on production and output statistics - blurred all considerations and feelings of humanity.
“An American historian has said of me that I loved machines more than people. He is not wrong. I realize that the sight of suffering people influenced only my emotions, but not my conduct. On the plane of feelings only sentimentality emerged; in the realm of decisions, on the other hand, I continued to be ruled by the principles of utility. In the Nuremberg Trial the indictment against me was based on the use of prisoners in the armaments factories. By the court’s standard of judgment, which was purely numerical, my guilt would have been greater had I prevailed over Himmler and raised the number of prisoners in our labor force, thus increasing the chances of more people for survival. Paradoxically, I would feel better today if in this sense I had been guiltier.
“But what preys on my mind nowadays has little to do with the standards of Nuremberg nor the figures on lives I saved or might have saved. For in either case I was moving within the system. What disturbs me more is that I failed to read the physiognomy of the regime mirrored in the faces of those prisoners - the regime whose existence I was so obsessively trying to prolong during those weeks and months. I did not see any moral ground outside the system where I should have taken my stand. And sometimes I ask myself who this young man really was, this young man who has now become so alien to me, who walked through the workshops of the Linz steelworks or descended into the caverns of the Central Works twenty-five years ago.
“One day, some time in the summer of 1944, my friend Karl Hanke, the Gauleiter of Lower Silesia, came to see me. In earlier years he had told me a great deal about the Polish and French campaigns, had spoken of the dead and wounded, the pain and agonies, and in talking about these things had shown himself a man of sympathy and directness. This time, sitting in the green leather easy chair in my office, he seemed confused and spoke falteringly, with many breaks. He advised me never to accept an invitation to inspect a concentration camp in Upper Silesia. Never. Under any circumstances. He had seen something there which he was not permitted to describe and moreover could not describe.
“I did not query him, I did not query Himmler, I did not query Hitler, I did not speak with personal friends. I did not investigate – for I did not want to know what was happening there. Hanke must have been speaking of Auschwitz. During those few seconds, while Hanke was warning me, the whole responsibility had become a reality again. Those seconds were uppermost in my mind when I stated to the international court at the Nuremberg Trial that as an important member of the leadership of the Reich, I had to share the total responsibility for all that had happened. For from that moment on, I was inescapably contaminated morally; from fear of discovering something which might have made me turn from my course, I had closed my eyes.This deliberate blindness outweighs whatever good I may have done or tried to do in the last period of the war. Those activities shrink to nothing in the face of it. Because I failed at that time, I still feel, to this day, responsible for Auschwitz in a wholly personal sense.”
- Albert Speer
Quoted from
Inside the Third Reich – 1970
And so as help for the unemployed languishes in the halls of Congress – as the criminals who brought America’s economy to its knees and raped the real estate market through speculation on the sacrificial alter of unregulated, unrestricted capitalism continue to rake in unimaginable profits at the expense of the last vestiges of the Middle Class – as fundamentalist dogma replaces historical fact, critical thinking and science in education – as voting rights continue to incrementally disappear under the boot heels of right wing revisionist legislation because they have no intentions of representing people who make less that a quarter million dollars a year – as women continue to be regarded as breeding stock and domestic servants instead of equal partners in maintaining a civilization – are not the wealthy elite purchasing the politicians who codify such governance being “…ruled by the principles of utility”, finding “… no moral ground outside the system…” to see the consequences of their actions… and are those politicians who do the bidding of the wealthy elite becoming “… inescapably contaminated morally; from fear of discovering something which might make (them) turn from (their) course, (they) close (their) eyes.”?
I fear for my children and the kind of country that they will call "home" in their final years: Which of the corporatized denizens on Capital Hill will force them to be slaughtered in the name of an oligarch’s security in another ginned-up war? Which religious / political / sexual / racial group will be anointed as the next scapegoat on which to heap the blame for all of America’s troubles, and where will the concentration camps be built to “cleanse America’s soil”? Texas? South Carolina?
America had better wake up and do it fast – especially in these upcoming elections. We have more than enough historical evidence that giving ANY conservative in either party the slightest amount of political responsibility on any level is like someone who thinks it’s acceptable to have just “a little” cancer.