Every every recent Summer Olympics about seven billion unique individuals lend at least half an ear to its ongoing results.
But about ten seconds after the starter's gun goes off during the 100 metre sprint for men, we with television sets learn about someone who is superlatively unique : the fastest human on the entire planet (at least for a few weeks).
Were the Nazis' WWII efforts to kill the Jews 'unique' ?
Of course - all genocides are unique - all events, like all individuals, are unique.
But the overall tenor of the secretive Nazi intentions, never carried out fully, suggested that they eventually intended to kill every last Jew on the entire Earth, just as if they were smallpox viruses.
Unlike say Rwanda's Tutsis, huddled together handily in a relatively small area, Jews were to be found in practically every country on Earth, so an effort to kill all of them required an extremely ambitious plan to conquer the whole Earth first.
The geographic sweep of this genocide marks it as unique in human history to date.....
Showing posts with label genocide. Show all posts
Showing posts with label genocide. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
Monday, June 29, 2015
Progressive plenticide : the Poor will no longer always be with us, just like the Smallpox Virus, Newfoundland Beothuks, Tasmanian Blacks, the Unfit and the Jewish Bacillus ...
Eugenicists around the world, in every country, once planned to do to the physically and mentally 'unfit', the 'work-shy' poor and the entire Jew and the Roma populations what civilized society had already done to many small aboriginal populations and would later do to the smallpox virus - eliminate them for all time.
And not necessarily by gas and bullet : just ensuring there was not enough food, medicine, housing, jobs and land worked wonders on what was left of the world's dwindling aboriginals in 1940....
And not necessarily by gas and bullet : just ensuring there was not enough food, medicine, housing, jobs and land worked wonders on what was left of the world's dwindling aboriginals in 1940....
Friday, June 19, 2015
"last of Polio & Arsenic under lock and key in Atlanta" - headline
A headline we will never see is some news release from the science folks in Atlanta proudly announcing that some dangerous element (arsenic and plutonium come to mind) have been newly almost totally eliminated.
(Or liquidated with extreme prejudice, in double speak.)
Because actually other life forms are the only possible competitors to humanity.
Even the smallest and weakest are possible 'competitors' in ways that no deadliest element ever could be.
Everything outside of life (reductionist scientists in the Era of Progress believed) could be easily reduced down to the basic slave-like atoms of the hundred of so elements and then turned to what ever task civilized humanity had at hand.
So even the deadly elements could be safely left alone.
Instead, by means of pesticides, herbicides, insecticides,germicides, genocides we have sought to eliminate any and all living rivals, no matter how small or how weak.
Polio is one example of a near total 'success' in this effort.
The Nazis obviously hoped that they could also totally eliminate the 'bacillum' of the Jew, as they bizarrely (but probably genuinely) regarded this religious and ethnic grouping of their fellow human beings.
The moral underpinnings of this wholesale plenticide of all other lifeforms were two fold.
The first was the scientific delusion called Chemical Reductionism - the warped belief that thanks to progress in chemical synthesis we no longer need the valuable-to-humanity products produced by other beings ( with synthetic chemical food pills replacing bread from wheat plants for example.)
The second was another scientific delusion called Biological Progress.
This was the idea that we could phase out all other rival lifeforms (including the unfit versions of humanity itself) in a logical yet humane manner - by speeding the gradual elimination of the least useful-to-humanity first, as obviously being more 'unfit' in the eternal struggle for life.
(So if Germany could successfully invade and conquer Poland, then ipso facto, the Poles were manifestly unfit.)
This was the moral background then to a battle royal at the height of another war (WWII), between proponents for two possible forms of penicillin : Ancient natural or Modern synthetic ...
(Or liquidated with extreme prejudice, in double speak.)
Because actually other life forms are the only possible competitors to humanity.
Even the smallest and weakest are possible 'competitors' in ways that no deadliest element ever could be.
Everything outside of life (reductionist scientists in the Era of Progress believed) could be easily reduced down to the basic slave-like atoms of the hundred of so elements and then turned to what ever task civilized humanity had at hand.
So even the deadly elements could be safely left alone.
Instead, by means of pesticides, herbicides, insecticides,germicides, genocides we have sought to eliminate any and all living rivals, no matter how small or how weak.
Polio is one example of a near total 'success' in this effort.
The Nazis obviously hoped that they could also totally eliminate the 'bacillum' of the Jew, as they bizarrely (but probably genuinely) regarded this religious and ethnic grouping of their fellow human beings.
The moral underpinnings of this wholesale plenticide of all other lifeforms were two fold.
The first was the scientific delusion called Chemical Reductionism - the warped belief that thanks to progress in chemical synthesis we no longer need the valuable-to-humanity products produced by other beings ( with synthetic chemical food pills replacing bread from wheat plants for example.)
The second was another scientific delusion called Biological Progress.
This was the idea that we could phase out all other rival lifeforms (including the unfit versions of humanity itself) in a logical yet humane manner - by speeding the gradual elimination of the least useful-to-humanity first, as obviously being more 'unfit' in the eternal struggle for life.
(So if Germany could successfully invade and conquer Poland, then ipso facto, the Poles were manifestly unfit.)
This was the moral background then to a battle royal at the height of another war (WWII), between proponents for two possible forms of penicillin : Ancient natural or Modern synthetic ...
Sunday, May 17, 2015
Revulsion + Reductionism = Plenticide
Plenticide (eugenics, genocide, pesticides) : human civilization of the Modern era seems determined to get rid of all of its nearest and dearest , leaving just a tiny 'saving seed' of the most perfect and the purest of humanity to exist all alone in this vast lifeless Universe.
It just didn't make sense : for the more evidence that emerged that the universe was old, vast and empty the harder humanity, circa 1930, tried to eliminate most of what little life was confirmed to exist in the universe : that of Earth itself.
Perhaps, you might argue, they hoped to find lots of new companions from among the little green people kitted out in metallic scales and bearing two heads that would surely be found on places like Mars.
But does that wash ?
In a culture consumed with fears that "black" men, black because one drop of black blood was enough to define them as negro and not because they looked in anyway black, might marry their daughters and then perform unspeakable crimes of miscegenation ?
Could a species that regarded it as a serious crime for its members to marry other members of that same species if they looked at all different (the felony of miscegenation) and trying to kill off all other of the familiar lifeforms on planet Earth, ever find something in common with the unfamiliar lifeforms from planets with physical conditions so different from that of Earth ?
Not the ray guns would be blasting all those seductive little green women to death faster than you can say Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon.
Flash Gordon, a Yale educated WASP, didn't even truck with consorting with alien women from this planet (ie recent Catholic or Jewish immigrants to America) - so why expect him to indulge in miscegenation with aliens from other planets ?
No we can only account for this new emphasis on plenticide in the modern era by seeing it as the result of two simultaneous reactions combining.
One was a near universal 'revulsion inwards' reaction among educated humanity to science's 'natural history' revelations that the totality of reality and lifeforms was far far greater than ever imagined and far far more entangled together in complicated ways.
A revulsion against miscegenation in every sphere and in every dimension.
Living and marrying only within one's ethnicity and class seemed far more simple and predictable.
But this inwardness and sense of go-it-alone autarky seemed only realistically possible because other branches of science were, at the same time, claiming that below the surface complexity of reality, it was actually extremely simple and predictable and even controllable.
Scientific reductionism promised that all that now existed or could ever exist, Man could easily synthesize from the atoms of useless rocks, with the limitless energy of the splitting atom.
Not only did WASP males of circa 1930 now feel revulsed at the thought of having sex with their black female slaves, they also no longer needed the strong backs of black male slaves either, as machines had replaced them.
Neither was wanted or needed on this pure voyage into the progressive future.
Hence : Revulsion + Reductionism = Plenticide.
It just didn't make sense : for the more evidence that emerged that the universe was old, vast and empty the harder humanity, circa 1930, tried to eliminate most of what little life was confirmed to exist in the universe : that of Earth itself.
Perhaps, you might argue, they hoped to find lots of new companions from among the little green people kitted out in metallic scales and bearing two heads that would surely be found on places like Mars.
But does that wash ?
In a culture consumed with fears that "black" men, black because one drop of black blood was enough to define them as negro and not because they looked in anyway black, might marry their daughters and then perform unspeakable crimes of miscegenation ?
Could a species that regarded it as a serious crime for its members to marry other members of that same species if they looked at all different (the felony of miscegenation) and trying to kill off all other of the familiar lifeforms on planet Earth, ever find something in common with the unfamiliar lifeforms from planets with physical conditions so different from that of Earth ?
Not the ray guns would be blasting all those seductive little green women to death faster than you can say Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon.
Flash Gordon, a Yale educated WASP, didn't even truck with consorting with alien women from this planet (ie recent Catholic or Jewish immigrants to America) - so why expect him to indulge in miscegenation with aliens from other planets ?
No we can only account for this new emphasis on plenticide in the modern era by seeing it as the result of two simultaneous reactions combining.
One was a near universal 'revulsion inwards' reaction among educated humanity to science's 'natural history' revelations that the totality of reality and lifeforms was far far greater than ever imagined and far far more entangled together in complicated ways.
A revulsion against miscegenation in every sphere and in every dimension.
Living and marrying only within one's ethnicity and class seemed far more simple and predictable.
But this inwardness and sense of go-it-alone autarky seemed only realistically possible because other branches of science were, at the same time, claiming that below the surface complexity of reality, it was actually extremely simple and predictable and even controllable.
Scientific reductionism promised that all that now existed or could ever exist, Man could easily synthesize from the atoms of useless rocks, with the limitless energy of the splitting atom.
Not only did WASP males of circa 1930 now feel revulsed at the thought of having sex with their black female slaves, they also no longer needed the strong backs of black male slaves either, as machines had replaced them.
Neither was wanted or needed on this pure voyage into the progressive future.
Hence : Revulsion + Reductionism = Plenticide.
Saturday, May 16, 2015
LIFE is rarest thing in Universe, not some obscure precious metal
So why was Thirties humanity so eager to destroy 99.99% of it, in an act of collective plenticide that would have dwarfed the Nazi genocide of Jews and Romas ?
For in virtually all the illustrated fantasies about future life spawned by a raft of interwar era popular science magazines, humanity is seen as living inside an man-made plastic bubble on stark rock planets.
Inside the bubble, we humans are using some futuristic form of atomic energy to turn the bare rock into synthetic versions of all the things humans need to survive.
LIFE (other life anyway) was clearly 'not wanted on this future voyage'.
Today's children might innocently think 1930s humanity would instead cherish every last example of LIFE, from invisible bacteria to blue whale, if only as companions to share humans' otherwise incredibly lonely existence on a vast totally empty and hostile Universe.
But instead educated humanity during the Great Depression sought, via Eugenics, to eliminate every example of humanity that didn't fit their concepts of perfection and normality.
And the educated's casual acceptance of over-fishing and over-hunting, combined with scientific humanity's enormous research into various lethal forms of pesticides, suggested that the 1930s thought they could get along, quite nicely thank you, without other lifeforms competing for Earth's supposedly limited non-biological resources.
But LIFE is actually far more unstable than even the most unstable metallic element.
And no, lifeforms can't really survive by taking in each other's laundry.
Lifeforms can only flourish and reproduce by recycling each other's poop, because LIFE actually makes use of very little of the rock that makes up almost all of this planet.
Instead, we earthlings live out our entire lives on the Earth's surface , surviving off of and in the debris LIFE itself has created over four billion years.
We living beings ceaselessly recycle each other's waste products or decaying dead bodies, constantly re-creating the humus of LIFE.
Remember, all the oxygen we humans need to survive is just a waste product to the plants and microbes that need to throw it off if they too are to survive.
Meanwhile many of the microbes, in turn, only survive by consuming the dead bodies of other life - humans among that number.
LIFE only comes as one complete - indivisible - package and this package currently seems to be unique to this single tiny little planet in all the vast Universe.
So, no The Sixth Extinction and Plenticide isn't murder : its murder-suicide ....
For in virtually all the illustrated fantasies about future life spawned by a raft of interwar era popular science magazines, humanity is seen as living inside an man-made plastic bubble on stark rock planets.
Inside the bubble, we humans are using some futuristic form of atomic energy to turn the bare rock into synthetic versions of all the things humans need to survive.
LIFE (other life anyway) was clearly 'not wanted on this future voyage'.
Today's children might innocently think 1930s humanity would instead cherish every last example of LIFE, from invisible bacteria to blue whale, if only as companions to share humans' otherwise incredibly lonely existence on a vast totally empty and hostile Universe.
But instead educated humanity during the Great Depression sought, via Eugenics, to eliminate every example of humanity that didn't fit their concepts of perfection and normality.
And the educated's casual acceptance of over-fishing and over-hunting, combined with scientific humanity's enormous research into various lethal forms of pesticides, suggested that the 1930s thought they could get along, quite nicely thank you, without other lifeforms competing for Earth's supposedly limited non-biological resources.
But LIFE is actually far more unstable than even the most unstable metallic element.
And no, lifeforms can't really survive by taking in each other's laundry.
Lifeforms can only flourish and reproduce by recycling each other's poop, because LIFE actually makes use of very little of the rock that makes up almost all of this planet.
Instead, we earthlings live out our entire lives on the Earth's surface , surviving off of and in the debris LIFE itself has created over four billion years.
We living beings ceaselessly recycle each other's waste products or decaying dead bodies, constantly re-creating the humus of LIFE.
Remember, all the oxygen we humans need to survive is just a waste product to the plants and microbes that need to throw it off if they too are to survive.
Meanwhile many of the microbes, in turn, only survive by consuming the dead bodies of other life - humans among that number.
LIFE only comes as one complete - indivisible - package and this package currently seems to be unique to this single tiny little planet in all the vast Universe.
So, no The Sixth Extinction and Plenticide isn't murder : its murder-suicide ....
Thursday, April 30, 2015
COMPLEXITY based science from SIMPLICITY based science : the post 1945 shift
Eugenics, the central science of Modernity, was a form of Reductionism and Plenticide.
Eugenics was all about reducing the existing 'impurities' it felt were present in the gene pool : like all of Modernity's sciences, it thought reality - in this case represented by the gene pool - would work much better if only it was much simpler.
But today's scientists generally seek to increase, enlarge, deepen, diversify the gene pool : they fear keeping all of our survival eggs in one small, shallow, inbreed, genetic basket.
Today's scientists have come to see that reality is inherently and permanently complex rather than being something that seems (temporarily) to be complex but really is fundamentally simple and simplifiable.
Now they see that human and planetary survival depends on having many, many possible solutions readily available to meet many, many possible problems.
So plentitude - 'the more the merrier' is their cry - not reductionist plenticide, genocide and euthanasia.
Eugenics was all about reducing the existing 'impurities' it felt were present in the gene pool : like all of Modernity's sciences, it thought reality - in this case represented by the gene pool - would work much better if only it was much simpler.
But today's scientists generally seek to increase, enlarge, deepen, diversify the gene pool : they fear keeping all of our survival eggs in one small, shallow, inbreed, genetic basket.
Today's scientists have come to see that reality is inherently and permanently complex rather than being something that seems (temporarily) to be complex but really is fundamentally simple and simplifiable.
Now they see that human and planetary survival depends on having many, many possible solutions readily available to meet many, many possible problems.
So plentitude - 'the more the merrier' is their cry - not reductionist plenticide, genocide and euthanasia.
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
1945's PROGRESS report : the newest and the biggest had produced atomic bombs and Auschwitz --- the oldest and the smallest had produced penicillin
The newest and biggest (dare we also say the brightest?) human civilizations at the top of the ever upward and outward arrow of progress had given the 1945 world nuclear and genocidal horror - but the tiny weak stupid fugal slime cells at the oldest bottom of that arrow of progress had given us life-saving penicillin.
Not a good year, then, for the whole idea of Progress itself....
Not a good year, then, for the whole idea of Progress itself....
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Genes-o-cide only covers some of the crimes of Hitler,Stalin and Tojo : Triage-cide instead ?
It was Stalin who got the West to agree that the UN definition of genocide shouldn't including killing everyone belonging to a political, economic or social group.
(Clever - because that was exactly the sort of mass killing that Communists, rather than Fascists, much preferred ---- not that Communists didn't kill ethnic groups like the Poles as readily as Hitler killed economic groups like German trade unionists.)
Gene-o-cide or Genetic-cide betrays its dusty old Modernity roots : the focus on the "fact" that people are fixed forever by their forebearers' genes, so as to remain your enemy even into future unborn generations.
Hitler acted upon those ideas - insisting that killing Jewish and Roma babies would prevent them coming back as adult destroyers of the Aryan race.
Stalin, too, often killing the children of those he deemed traitors claiming they were tarred by their erring parents' brush.
The Soviets definitely won this dictionary war ---- today most of us limit genocide to killing people related genetically, rather than seeing it extends to masses of murdered people only related by all holding the same party or trade union or football team card.
Raphael Lemkin the Jewish Polish lawyer who first coined the term genocide more than 75 years ago, wanted it to encompass the mass killing of any group that had something in common - in both their eyes and in the eyes of their killers.
His occupation - he was a Polish lawyer - was a favorite group to kill, much sought out by both Germans and Russians : for being ethnically Polish and for being economically upper middle class and for being intellectuals and for being potential leaders.
Thrown in being Jewish as well and presto : you have five good reasons to want him dead.
Unfortunately for academics doing head counts, you can only kill someone once - so what column of dead exactly would you have placed Mr Lemkin, if he had been killed in Timothy Synder's Bloodlands during WWII ?
He would have been, above all else, yet another individual killed by global Modernity's craving to mass triage its way into a permanently perfectly frozen Utopia.
Triage-cide might well be a more accurate word to describe the intent behind all of these highly varied killings done by all these highly varied killers, all of whom saw themselves as modernists .....
(Clever - because that was exactly the sort of mass killing that Communists, rather than Fascists, much preferred ---- not that Communists didn't kill ethnic groups like the Poles as readily as Hitler killed economic groups like German trade unionists.)
Gene-o-cide or Genetic-cide betrays its dusty old Modernity roots : the focus on the "fact" that people are fixed forever by their forebearers' genes, so as to remain your enemy even into future unborn generations.
Hitler acted upon those ideas - insisting that killing Jewish and Roma babies would prevent them coming back as adult destroyers of the Aryan race.
Stalin, too, often killing the children of those he deemed traitors claiming they were tarred by their erring parents' brush.
The Soviets definitely won this dictionary war ---- today most of us limit genocide to killing people related genetically, rather than seeing it extends to masses of murdered people only related by all holding the same party or trade union or football team card.
Raphael Lemkin the Jewish Polish lawyer who first coined the term genocide more than 75 years ago, wanted it to encompass the mass killing of any group that had something in common - in both their eyes and in the eyes of their killers.
His occupation - he was a Polish lawyer - was a favorite group to kill, much sought out by both Germans and Russians : for being ethnically Polish and for being economically upper middle class and for being intellectuals and for being potential leaders.
Thrown in being Jewish as well and presto : you have five good reasons to want him dead.
Unfortunately for academics doing head counts, you can only kill someone once - so what column of dead exactly would you have placed Mr Lemkin, if he had been killed in Timothy Synder's Bloodlands during WWII ?
Triage-cide rather than genetic-cide ?
He would have been, above all else, yet another individual killed by global Modernity's craving to mass triage its way into a permanently perfectly frozen Utopia.
Triage-cide might well be a more accurate word to describe the intent behind all of these highly varied killings done by all these highly varied killers, all of whom saw themselves as modernists .....
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