War in Ukraine? If the Flattening the curve or flattening the global poor? Marketed as life-saving public health measures, lockdowns triggered death and economic devastation on a global scale while doing Red Lines host Anya Parampil speaks with award-winning filmmaker and screenwriter Oliver Stone about his new film Anti-war veterans explain how US lost Afghanistan while leaders lied, profited. US suffocates Cuba for unwavering, victorious anti-imperialism at great cost.
Red Lines with Anya Parampil. Gaza resistance: beginning of the end for apartheid Israel? More Reports. The Biden administration has sanctioned Eritrea and Ethiopia for alleged crimes against the Tigray people. In so doing, he helped to authorize an outpouring of work, continuing to this day, by scholars and artists who probe the delicate question of Jewish collaboration in the Holocaust.
However, even Levi did not escape criticism. Indeed, the common trait among four individual survivors vividly portrayed in the memoir is their repugnant selfishness. Instead, he worried that the survivors would be falsely heroized, and would be seen as ethically and psychologically uncompromised, despite their brutal experiences. I might have sup- planted him, in effect killed him. What I had seen and experi- enced proved the exact opposite. Those who survived were the worst, that is to say, the fittest.
The best all died. In The Survivor , Des Pres employed excerpts from dozens of survivor accounts in his attempt to create a composite image of the survivor. The selected texts revealed that, through a combination of individual strength and group solidarity, the survivors actively resisted and ultimately defeated the Nazi assault on their humanity. He strongly rejected the idea that survival resulted from either heroic individualism or selfless col- lectivism. Stripped of their free will, Langer concluded that virtu- ally all of the victims are beyond moral judgment.
Furthermore, he contends that we observers must not forego our obligation to reflect, in both ethical and juridical terms, on what occurred in the camps and ghettos, even if we are unable to reach clear conclu- sions about culpability. Summary and Discussion of the Essay Levi begins his essay by noting our general human tendency to adopt overly simple Manichean schemas to understand complex historical events and social phenomena.
The network of human relationships inside the concentration camps was not simple: it could not be reduced to two blocs, victims and persecutors. People who read or write the history of the camps nowadays have a tendency, indeed a need, to separate evil from good, to take sides, to reenact the gesture of Christ on Judgment Day: over here go the righteous, over there the wicked.
Young people in particular demand clarity and sharp distinctions. Since their experience of the world is limited, they are not fond of ambiguity.
Their expectations, for that matter, reproduce exactly the expectations of the new arrivals in the camps, young and old.
The enemy was outside but also inside. Initiating an important theme in the essay, he also suggests that the extreme violence of the camps laid bare general truths about human nature, which can be glimpsed in our behavior inside any kind of alienat- ing, oppressive space, such as a large factory. The rise of the privileged — not only in the camps but in all human society — is a disturbing but inevitable phenomenon. It is a duty of the righteous man to wage war on every undeserved privilege, but it is a war without end.
Wherever power is exercised by the few, or by one man alone, against the many, privi- lege is born and proliferates, even against the will of power.
But power normally tolerates and encourages it. This category is a gray zone, with undefined contours, which both separates and connects the two opposing camps of masters and servants. It has an incredibly complicated internal structure, and harbors just enough [complexity] to confound our need to judge.
The extreme tension of the camp tends to augment their numbers. It does not. It degrades and assimilates them, especially those who are more willing, more neutral, and without political or moral backbone. A bond of complicity is thus forged between them and their masters, and there is no turning back.
Question arise immediately, convulsive questions that are hard to answer in a way that reassures us about human nature. Why did they accept this job? Some individuals did revolt, and some refused to serve, preferring to die. Moreover, those who chose to cooperate with the SS did so under severe coercion.
Levi notes that most members of the Sonderkommandos were recruited directly from the deportation trains, in the midst of confusion, exhaus- tion, and terror. Despite their collaboration, it is clear to Levi that the Sonderkommandos were themselves victims, and not to be grouped with the real executioners, the SS con- tingent that ran the camp.
In the end, Levi abstains from offering judgment on those who suffered so much. But there are extenuating circumstances: an infernal system, such as National Socialism, exercises a shocking power of corruption from which it is hard to shield oneself. It degrades its victims and assimilates them, because it requires major and minor complicity.
You need a solid moral backbone to resist it, and Chaim Rumkowski, merchant of Lodz, together with his entire generation, had only a frail one at his disposal.
But are we Europeans today any stronger? How would any of us behave if we were to be driven by necessity and at the same time tempted by something seductive? We make deals with power, willingly or not, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the walls are the lords of death, and that not far away the train is waiting.
Does the modern world truly resemble a sealed ghetto in which we live under the shadow of deportation and death? Fascism is not permanently on the brink of assuming terroristic governmental power. His point is far more subtle. If we wish to live a good life and enjoy just relations with our fellows, our conduct must be guided not just by this terrible history, but also by the knowledge that these awful possibilities are always much closer than we like to imagine.
Since Levi articulates a spectrum of complicity and suggests that all individuals are under the potential pressure of state power, might we infer that victims and perpetrators occupy a continuous ethical and juridical space? Above all, it is precious service rendered intentionally or not to the deniers of truth. These examples, drawn from scholarship in history, ethical philosophy, and literary studies, indicate possible trajectories for future research.
The unprecedented horror of the events made it particularly urgent to under- stand the links between state power, violence, and radical evil. From now on, evil is not simply one term in a dualistic system and no longer resides in the exercise of absolute power against the absolute victim. Instead, evil generates a tangle of subjectivities, a network of power relations that was best described by Levi.
0コメント