The Denial of the Victims

The Ominous Parallels | 1981 | Leonard Peikoff

[Noumenon]

...the power-lusters of the death factories did not pursue their quest with impunity. The opponents of man’s rights, trampling on the rights of others, were underscoring their own rightlessness. The crusaders against the individual, crushing the “self respect and self love” of their enemies, were losing their own in the process. The authors and rulers of a brain-wrecking dimension, learning to accept and adapt to it, were making themselves brainless.

No one, neither prisoners nor guards, could stand it or fully believe it.

The prisoners could not believe in a world in which the whim of the SS set all the terms of human existence, replacing reality as the basic absolute frame of reference. They could not believe in a world which seemed, in Hannah Arendt’s words, “to give permanence to the process of dying itself,” as if “some evil spirit gone mad were amusing himself by stopping them for a while between life and death…” They had to struggle to take in the kind of events they witnessed or heard about, such as major surgery performed on prisoners by trained doctors “without the slightest reason,” a survivor writes, and without anesthesia; or as another reports, an inmate being thrown for punishment into “a large kettle of boiling water, intended fro preparing coffee for the camp. The victim was scalded to death, but the coffee was prepared from the water all the same”; or youngsters being picked out at random, “seized by the feet and dashed against tree trunks”; or flames “leaping up from a ditch, gigantic flames. The Nazis were burning something. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load – little children. Babies! Yes, I saw it – saw it with my own eyes… Was I awake? I could not believe it. It seemed to me, I’m in another world…" It was so unbelievable, that many prisoners had hallucinations…

(Auschwitz survivor). “I lived as in a dream, waiting for someone to awaken me. This can’t be true; such things just don’t happen…”

By the nature of what went on behind the barbed wire fences, the concentration camps to most inmates represented, in essence, a universe which violates the basic law of existence, the Law of Identity.

Most prisoners could have coped with privation or with pain, or even (up to a point) with purposeful torture in a knowable world. They were helpless to deal with metaphysical disorientation. They could not cope with the eerie feeling that the solid objects and the facts of the past have vanished; that he universe itself, the realm and sum of that which is, has gone crazy. The concomitant of such a feeling is a state of paralysis.

Some prisoners were able to hold on to their knowledge of reality even during the camp experience. They were able to defeat the eerie “other world” around them by clinging to some kind of consistent convictions of their own, on the implicit premise that, the camps to the contrary notwithstanding, things are what they are. Many prisoners, however, had no lead to explain any part of what they saw, and they succumbed to the metaphysical pressure.

The most widely known of the latter cases are the columns of prisoners who marched to certain death with no attempt to put up a fight, despite the fact that they vastly outnumbered the guards. This phenomenon, often taken as a sign of cowardice, has nothing to do with the concepts of courage or cowardice, which are inapplicable in this context. These prisoners did know the fate in store for them – they had heard about it from others, or they saw the smoke coming from the crematoria, or they smelled the burning flesh – but most of them could not believe or deal with a universe where such a fate, on such a scale and without any reason, was possible. The result was inertia, vagueness, mental drifting, and obedience. Some undoubtedly were not disoriented, but chose passivity deliberately, as a form of suicide.

What disarmed the death-marchers was the converse of the Big Lie: the Incredible Truth, which cannot be accepted and which acts to annul the victim’s grasp of reality as such.

[Noumenon]

At this late date, one can only wonder if enough of us will awaken to the Incredible Truth of what is being done, and being done to us. If enough of us fully understood that Incredible Truth - that our once proud Constitutional Republic is being destroyed before our very eyes; that we are on the road, not just to slavery, but to slaughter and massmurder - then our rage could not be contained.

[dog breath]

Many people when faced with a dangerous situation will simply stand there stunned motionless in disbelief of what they are seeing. This often results in their untimely demise. There is something in the human mind that has trouble accepting that life is suddenly out of their control, numbing the essential urge to flee or fight. I think that this is true whether we are talking a real train wreck or a slow motion political train wreck.