11/15 On Pain

Chosen Passage: 

"Photography, then, is an expression of our peculiarly cruel way of seeing. Ultimately, it is a kind of evil eye, a type of magical possession. One senses this very clearly in places where a different cultic substance is still active. The moment a city like Mecca can be photographed, it falls into the colonial sphere (p. 40)." - Ernst Jünger, "On Pain"

Response: 

The reason I chose this passage that was also part of the lecture is because I actually completely agree with it. This passage is talking about the way photography is one of those technological advances that has changed the way we perceive pain and how it has affected people on a globalized scale. At this particular point the discussion has already turned to the "objectification" of people, like the dehumanization I've discussed previously. Photography has definitely added to this change of perception because, as Ernst mentions, it has basically desensitized people to accept horrific events without so much attachment in order to deal with the emotional trauma that follows it. This passage speaks truth when he refers to photography Mecca and having that become part of the colonial sphere. I can honestly say I never thought about it that way but every time someone takes a photo of something that is meaningful or of any importance, such as the holy site of Mecca, or even photographs of indigenous un-contacted tribes, it does become a form of colonization. We cross the boundaries of comfort for those people just to capture a moment in a photograph (as an anthropologist in training - this is a huge no-no). Yet at the same time if we don't see these things and people then we would never really grasp and understanding of them. It's almost like choosing the lesser of two evils.

Going back to the lecture and Totalitarianism photography does share it's importance in trying to drive out the nihilism in people to allow them to be function cogs of society. Everyone has a job to do and everyone needs to deal with the realities of life outside of this job and within this job to become efficient. We suppress pain by coming face to face with it and accepting it as a part of reality. I can contribute by saying that the internet, one of the greatest technological advances of all time has given birth to a new type of mentality that is completely desensitized from the horrors of the world. It only takes a few clicks before you end up in that really dark part of the internet that hordes video archives of people being mutilated, self mutilation and even death (such as decapitation and all other sorts of things). People have even developed a sort of gore fetish where they get some kind of pleasure out of seeing blood and mangled body parts because it's something not everyone can handle. So this idea of living a meaningless life changes by becoming desensitized. The meaning of life changes and is accepted as being a part of death as an equal counterpart. At some point we will all stop existing, everyone eventually dies, one way or another and having these kinds of photographic proof of that allows for an acceptance of death. People accept it and no longer fear it because they can say they have seen some of the worse scenarios that can play out. They might even consider themselves so lucky to not be those unfortunate ones. Photography then does capture us in a way by allowing us to see what would otherwise be considered taboo. We cross the borders of no return once we become exposed and for some it provides a sense of superiority for being able to "handle" watching those kinds of things. People then become boastful and feel as if they can take on the world they live in. Photography has flipped the script of Nihilism in this sense. It has changed people from allowing to wallow in misery and force the exposure of the horrors of life to being forced to see these things as a type of reform of mind.

Totalitarianism requires submission. People need to understand their function in society and work in society by leaving behind these emotions that tie them down to a possible mental breakdown about how terrible the realities of life are. To be a function human being you need to accept life as it is and realize that there are many things you cannot control and there is nothing you can do. People find it much easier to be told what to do than have to think for themselves - it takes the guess work of out life. It reminds me of the prison mentality - being institutionalized. People who are released, after years and years of being in prison, find it hard to adapt to every day life and holding down a job for this reason. There was no guess work when they were in the prison, day time, night time, breakfast, lunch and dinner, physical activity and so on - everything was provided in a scheduled manner. In the outside world they would need to make all of these things happen for them, they would need jobs to provide those meals, and clothes and other utilities necessary for living in society. It's interesting the way that Totalitarianism holds to some one these qualities but makes people break out of that prison mentality and accept their life as a cog in society. You gotta do, what you gotta do.

I think people should understand that life isn't just some 9-5 job. I think people need to understand what is happening in the world and accept their limitations in terms of bringing change to something no one is trying to change. Like the Sentinelese tribe from the North Sentinel Island who over the years have been declared the most hostile uncontacted tribe in the world, it took several deaths and show of complete rejection of the outside world before it was officially declared to never receive contact by enforcing a three-mile exclusion zone (reference below). There are some things people simply cannot change and they need to understand that is okay. We are not part of a Totalitarian government but everyone still has jobs to do that allow society to continue moving. The expulsion of nihilistic thought is hard to do and Ernst tries to rationalize pain as something that can be manipulated if the right pieces are in place. However, this is also something unrealistic because people are constantly trying to control every aspect of their lives, emotions towards daily lives and politics is not something that can be easily manipulated. People are set on their ways sometimes and acceptance of that is also part of our reality.



Reference: Sentinelese Article          

11/8 Nazism

Night and Fog

As I recently mentioned in my last post Night and Fog demonstrates a lot of different perspectives on Nazism in Germany. The scene that I chose I think is pretty obvious since I also discussed it last week. The scene is the part of the film (second link) where the S.S Officers are put on trial and deny fault in the atrocities they carried out on behalf of their superiors and personal decisions.

In this scene, several officers are put on trial and the simply state they are not responsible for the crimes against humanity they are being accused of. The narrator follows up by asking the simple question, "They who is responsible?" The reason I chose this particular scene despite having so many other options that show the true horrors of the Holocaust is because this scene speaks to me in more than one simple perspective. It also makes me question why, and how evil like this tend to exist in the world. This scene supports the article I discussed in my last post as well; It shows the fact that the S.S Officers did not believe what they were doing was wrong because no one was reprimanding them for their actions. It wasn't until outside forces finally brought down Hitler and the Nazis that shame fell upon all those who supported this heinous cause. As discussed in the lecture there were many factors that brought about the rise of Nazism in Germany and everything fell together in pieces that basically made these events inevitable. That does not excuse the fact that no one was aware of the level of violence that would come of it, or the fact that this turned out to be a full blown genocide meant to eliminate anyone that didn't fit the aryan criteria. 

This scene made my thoughts go a step deeper by analyzing how it is that these S.S Officer could have functioned. I do believe that some officers truly didn't consider themselves at fault and placed blame on their commanding superiors that provided them with orders. I also believe many lied and were fully aware of their actions as well as were proud of their job and hate towards anyone that wasn't like them - especially jews. However, the evil that sits at the root of these events I believe go further into the psyche of the officers. I believe that there is a certain mindset that needs to be so terribly engrained that allows someone to starve, decapitate and to put it simply, kill another human being that they have no relation to. I believe there is a level of dehumanization that goes into their mental training when they were working their shifts at these concentration camps. I believe they went beyond breaking the spirit of these people - they dehumanized them. By dehumanize I mean treat them in such a way that they don't consider the jewish people, the disabled people or anyone else they picked up to cargo them out to concentration camps, human. In the film they also showed what they did with the bodies of the people. They had warehouse sized rooms filled with hair. They bulldozed bodies into ditches just as they would piles of trash and they hacked up the bodies, piling their heads into baskets like vegetables in time of harvest. They harvest. They harvest skin for books and other items, bones for hair brushes, tooth brushes, bodies for soap and so on. To consider making objects out of human remains doesn't sound like something a rational person would do. In reality, this is all irrational. The idea that you can look at person and say they are nothing like you, despite the fact that they clearly are, it's sicking. The officers changed the appearance of these people by shaving their heads and starving them to death. This was the first step. They them their material belonging that they carefully chose to keep, their clothes and their hair - they made sure to make them look as inhuman as possible. Amongst each other it would be difficult to tell these starving bodies apart but for the SS officers it was easy for them to set themselves apart and do what they thought they had to do. They broke these people both in mind and spirit to carry out their task. It wasn't that just Hitler was this amazing charismatic leader that was going to place Germany at the top of the global power game. It wasn't just that he stepped in at just the right time, and declared himself Die Fürhrer. It wasn't just that people had lost hope in humanity as Nihilism spread. It was the fact that this was a thoroughly calculated task of genocide against everyone that wasn't of the aryan race. Jews in particular, much like in most of history were used as the scapegoats. The ones that were to take the blame of Germany's recent stroke of perpetual bad luck. 

Someone needed to pay the consequences of what was happening to Germany. Someone needed to make these people feel better - to rid of them of this sense of meaninglessness towards life. Someone needed to make things better. That was the role of the victims. That was the purpose their lives served. They gave these officers a sense of duty to the country. They were doing these things for the greater good and they were getting rewarded. They dehumanized these people so that they could see them as objects that could be processed into something else. The destruction was internal and became external as politics became more involved, and ways of disposing the bodies with more quickness became an issue. These officers are to blame. Always have, always will be. They can't simply be excused as being brainwashed, and not knowing at all what they were doing. There is a level of consciousness that goes into all of this. It is impossible to tell if higher ups specifically asked them to shoot babies in the air or throw a piece of bread at a group of starving people and watch them tear each other apart despite being fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters. There are certain things as describe to Eli Wiesel's book Night and demonstrated in Night and Fog that one would think it's an act of the individual and not a command. 

I have also read the Banality of Evil mentioned in the lecture and it tackles this same issue of consciousness in ones actions and who is to blame for what happened. It addresses the fact that the people committing these atrocities were regular people and not evil geniuses or anything that might look out of the ordinary. These were people, just like everyone else who went off on the wrong footing and landed in a very dark place. These are people that look like anyone else walking down the street who were also hauling dead bodies out of cargo trains to incinerate those who didn't survive. These were people listening to Hitler's words, reading Mein Kampf, and feeling as if the world was against them. The support of extremely wealthy companies and affluent people, as discussed in the lecture also helped provide a sense of security on their actions. They can't possibly think they're doing something wrong when such "great" people praise their work and efforts to changing the world. 

Going back to my chosen scene, I chose it because it incorporates the way that the people of Germany were broken. They were broken mentally and emotionally due to the horrors of war they had to witness. The millions of deaths and the idea of a Godless world that would allow things like this to happen and have them take the blame. The Nihilistic attitude was running at its all time high right before Nazism grabbed the reigns and tried to direct these people into a place false salvation. There is no salvation. This scene also made me think ahead. It made me think of the aftermath of the war and the downfall of Hitler. It made me think about the consequences and the wrath of hate people felt after finding out the true horrors of the Concentration Camps. It made me think of the people that are out there today who still believe in Hitler's vision of a world rid of anyone but them. It made me think of the Nihilism that continues existing even within our own society as we ignore the genocide currently occurring throughout the world and in places people definitely know about like North Korea. It made me realize that people always seek someone to blame and someone to take responsibility but it should be us taking responsibility. 

So when the Narrator ask "Who then, is responsible?" 

Humanity is. 

We find endless ways to destroy ourselves on a daily basis. It doesn't get more Nihilistic than that.       

11/1: Max Weber: Politics as a Vocation

"The administrative staff, which externally represents the organization of political domination, is, of course, like any other organization, bound by obedience to the power-holder and not alone by the concept of legitimacy, of which we have just spoken. There are two other means, both of which appeal to personal interests: material reward and social honor. The fiefs of vassals, the prebends of patrimonial officials, the salaries of modern civil servants, the honor of knights, the privileges of estates, and the honor of the civil servant comprise their respective wages. The fear of losing them is the final and decisive basis for solidarity between the executive staff and the power-holder. There is honor and booty for the followers in war; for the demagogue's following, there are 'spoils'--that is, exploitation of the dominated through the monopolization of office--and there are politically determined profits and premiums of vanity. All of these rewards are also derived from the domination exercised by a charismatic leader." - Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation (pg. 3)

Response:

     The passage that I chose from Weber talks about the domination that a charismatic leader holds over their administration and everyone involved politically speaking. More specifically it discusses what it is that these worker bees have to profit from by being obedient and allowing themselves to be submissive to their leader. Weber sums it up really well when he writes "there is honor and booty for the followers in war". In this statement he explains that the reason people allow there to be a dominant power is because there is personal gain. As mentioned in the lecture, Weber basically predicted the uprising of a fascism that requires a leader to hold these qualities of charism and domination.

        The reason I chose this passage was because it directly links up with Adolf Hitler and the rise of the Nazism in Germany. Before I ever really understood the factors that led to the Holocaust I always wondered as to why people allowed themselves to be persuaded by Hitler to eliminate an entire race of people. I questioned what kind of people these were and where was this hate rooting from that allowed such a tragedy to flourish and soak Europe in the blood of the innocent. I am fully aware of the fact that there has been plenty of revolutions and wars and other such tragic events in other countries (Stalin for example) but the Holocaust has always been looked at as one of the worst of the worst. So to really understand the rise of Nazism we need to analyze who the leader was and what allowed him to basically brainwash himself an army of followers. It starts at the root of the matter, and that is in the politics. We need to understand Hitler as a political figure that rose to power quickly after his assignment as Chancellor and his seize of opportunity after the death of Reich President Paul von Hindenburg. The opportunity laid before him, and as mentioned in the lecture, using Article 48 he legally became a dictator. Weber understood that this was something that would happen however, I don't think he could predict the future and could say who would rise to power, in which way or what would be the outcomes. Weber understood the signs and the conditions that would allow for something like this to happen. He understood that a leader needed to understand how the politics worked in order to seize control of it. He understood that through violence one gains control, because people need to both love and fear their leader to some extent. Hitler had the charismatic quality Weber describes as being an essential part of a rise in a dominant power. Hitler also had a staff of people that hung on his every word and believed what he said to not only be true, but what was best for the future of Germany. Hitler rationalized the irrational and he did this by motivating a broken nation through a unified nationalistic identity. It was time for the "great"(aryan race) to rise from the ashes and cleanse itself from the "wretched" (everyone that did not fit the perfect aryan criteria) that were holding them back. Hitler's staff must have been handsomely rewarded for their unwavering allegiance to the rise of Nazism by partaking in the "spoils" as Weber says.

      I have previously taken a course that analyzes evil. What it was and how do we determine what evil is by looking not only at different written works, movie productions but also at historical events such as the Nazi Regime and the Holocaust. I was able to gain an important perspective on the way things were being interpreted by the Hitler's followers and his staff in command. Usually we look at works and accounts from survivors of the Holocaust or people who fought against it and even saved lives, but not so much as the people who truly took a part of the events as a Nazi. One of the things that I learned was from a reading titled "Blueberries, Accordions and Auschwitz: The evil of thoughtlessness by Jennifer L. Geddes" was exactly what Weber is discussing in Politics as a Vocation, the rewards of being a good "soldier" so to speak. In this reading we gain a perspective on what happens to "good" Nazi's. "Good" SS officers were sent to summer camps as rewards for their so called good work. In this reading there are photographs that show these people enjoying blueberries, playing accordions while laughing and smiling. They don't look like people that were grabbing dead infants by the ankles and throwing them into piles of other dead bodies. The don't look like people that were shooting infants for target practice, or prisoners in the back of the head and definitely not sending people by the hundreds into gas chambers. The look like happy, relatively average people. The article is actually about the way that Nazi's were doing their job and being rewarded for it creating a sense of ignorance of their wrong doings of "thoughtlessness". There was no thought process involved in their actions. They followed commands sent down from their superiors who rewarded them based of their performance. Sounds like the average job? You do good, you get rewarded. However, analyzing this in deeper level we see the way that these soldiers couldn't possibly think that what they were doing was wrong because they were being rewarded for it. It's like anything else in life, if you have a dog that rips up your couch and you give it treats despite this behavior, the dog will not be conditioned into stopping this behavior because it is not being chastised for it. If you reprimand the dog when it does do this, and not give it treats and maybe even place it in the corner for 10 minutes as a punishment then the dog will be conditioned to avoiding this behavior already familiar with the unpleasant consequence. People work the same way. If you don't tell someone what they're doing is wrong, the won't think it's wrong. These people were not only reinforced that their actions in the camps should be praised through rewarding trips but their superiors and the everyones charismatic Führer also reinforced that everyones actions was for their greater good. Germany had already suffered a terrible blow in WWI taking all the blame for everything, followed by the Great Depression they were demoralized and broken until Hitler eventually stepped in as their "ray" of hope to rebuild a broken nation into something they thought would be great. These people did not see killing their prisoners as a senseless act of violent genocide, they did not see these people as people (that is an entirely separate discussion). Weber understood that if you give rewards and if you can talk your way into the minds and emotions of people you can gain dominance over them. The passage I chose links up to Hitler's charisma and to the way he knew how to manage his people. Keep them happy also meant keeping their loyalty. Even when put on trial, SS Officers claimed no responsibility for their actions although they were CLEARLY at fault just as much as the commanding officers above them that gave them the orders(I am not sure if this was in the Night and Fog film I saw that I know we will see later in this class!). Their loyalties collapsed when Hitler collapsed and everything came crumbling down in a domino effect. As soon as they were faced with true punishment for their actions and they had no defense against the world's criticism and chastising accusations they were no longer smiling, laughing or thinking that what they were doing was wrong.

All of this ties back to Weber and Nihilism. The view of the world as being a place where through it all there really is no light at the end of the tunnel so one must learn to live by understanding the way things work (in Weber's case, the way politics works). Through all the horror seen by this First World War it is easy to understand that one can lose themselves in the disturbing reality of life. Weber wanted something he failed at obtaining but he predicted almost exactly what the outcome would be if the cards were laid out right, and they where and Hitler and Nazism rose. Even the idea of dominion over a people as a charismatic leader holds a sense of nihilism because people are willing to give up what they believe is right, separate themselves from reality to be efficient worker bees that reap the benefits later on (this was mentioned in the lecture, Weber's discussion on the disconnection that makes people good followers of dominant leaders). The lack of personal agency and allowing oneself to be driven by the desires of others and eliminating our own sense of morality seems nihilistic in the sense of what are you really but just a mere puppet? In the grand scheme of things everyone eventually dies but it seems that giving up yourself to that extreme to a charismatic leader is an early way to call it quits, especially when you are then punished for your actions by execution or life imprisonment. Weber truly was brilliant and understood the inner workings of politics well enough to know that man is mans greatest enemy.  








For those interested here is the article I was talking about: Blueberries, Accordions and Auschwitz