A Warning From Auschwitz

[reprehensor]

MEDIA ALERT: A WARNING FROM AUSCHWITZ

March 16, 2005

By: David Edwards

How Do You Shoot Babies?

Facing execution for his role in the murder of more than 1 million people, many of them children, Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Hoess, reflected on his life and works:

"Today, I deeply regret that I did not spend more time with my family." (Hoess, 'Auschwitz, The Nazis and the Final Solution,' BBC2, February 15, 2005)

Hoess of course lies at the extreme end of the spectrum, but his inability to recognise the extraordinary horror of what he had done is by no means exceptional. Mike Wallace of CBS News interviewed a participant in the American massacre of Vietnamese women and children at My Lai.

"Q. You're married?
A. Right
Q. Children?
A. Two.
Q. How old?
A. The boy is two and a half, and the little girl is a year and a half.
Q. Obviously, the question comes to my mind... the father of two little kids like that... how can he shoot babies?
A. I didn't have the little girl. I just had the little boy at the time.
Q. Uh-huh... How do you shoot babies?
A. I don't know. It's just one of those things." (Quoted, Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority, Pinter & Martin, 1974, p.202)

more@link

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Really stunning article.

[Kagemusha]

1. The US goes by some silly myth its soldiers don't 'do as they're told'

Of course they do. Of course they do, and if they didn't it would be a national scandal. It's easy to tell the Germans they shouldn't do what they're told but that Americans should because of faith that in America, there is a functioning democracy. Today we have Abu Ghraib. We'll have other tests in the future.

[Selatius]

2. Oh, this just hit an excruciating nerve with me

My folks lived in Vietnam during the war. I was born in the US, but that war has left its mark.

[Journeyman]

3. A quote from Michael Herr's Vietnam masterpiece, "Dispatches". . .

(paraphrased)

And the helicopter gunner was asked, "How can you shoot kids?"

And he replied, "Just don't lead 'em as much."

[teryang]

4. I heard a lot of descriptions of alleged combat stressors

from Vietnam vets like this:

I shot the old man because he killed a neighborhood dog for food.

I went on the sampan and I killed everyone on board including the women. There was no weapons.

When I was in Vietnam, I did whatever I wanted. If I wanted something I took it. If someone tried to stop me, I killed them.

What amazed me was that the moral guilt that was eating them alive was misconstrued as combat survival guilt. But what they described wasn't combat, it was simply murder.

[applegrove]

5. I think that when you turn people into brown shirts and teach them

to regress to adolescence where there is a disconnect between their actions and the pain it causes someone... then you have them. It is about 'growing people down'. Getting them to think in black and white. And even social workers will fall for it if the sociopath in control of their 'experience' make it somehow logical to them.

Pretty much everyone on the planet will fall for the machinations & introduced reality of a very good sociopath. Unfortunately there are a few in the Bush WH. Bad enough that there are those who studied and followed the 'tools of Hitler' or the 'tools or the sociopaths'.

[Kenneth ken]

6. ...

"Not doing harm to others,
Not bowing down to the ignoble,
Not abandoning the path of virtue -
These are small points, but of great Importance."

- Nagarjuna (see the end of the article)


I like this too: The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. In writing letters to journalists, we strongly urge readers to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.