In summary, this author tells us that the "Hitler did it," dog won't hunt. The roots of the horrors of the holocaust was not just a hiccup along the path of Western moral development , but was a giant step up the ladder in a straight line progression of moral development into our modern world.
The roots of the holocaust do not lie just in Hitler's anti-Semitic obsession, or in the obsequiousness of his henchmen, or even in the mindless cruelty of his followers, or the moral indifference of the German character (which is an embedded racist theory in itself), but within the weaknesses inherent in our Judeo-Christian ethics and the way the Western world has arranged to manage them.
And more importantly, he tells us that pretending that it is otherwise, pretending that we are more moral than Hitler, that our religion or our democratic institutions make us morally superior, when this is indeed at least arguable, leaves us morally disarmed against the very same weaknesses that led to the European Holocaust and the near two dozen unacknowledged holocausts that have occurred, since.
Our denial simply disarms us against the reality of the kind of humanity we have become since Hitler's days: a society that lives on moral credit and on its own self-reinforcing moral bluster, pretending not to know that our everyday actions continue reducing our collective cultural moral inhibitions so low that we are capable of crimes at least as dastardly as those of a Hitler.
But unlike Hitler, we have now perfected the bureaucratic and military technology that will allow us to do so even more efficiently and effectively than Hitler, and will allow us to do so seamlessly as Mr. Obama has demonstrated through his and Mr. Bush's drone technology and strategy.
They both did so without ever having to see or acknowledge the consequences of the damage of their handiwork. and also without having to experience the likely low-tech boomerang effects yet to come? In fact, arguably we have taken yet another giant step down the same path as Hitler, of "buffered collective murder:" Each of those "stand-off" drones have been launched in our collective names.
We are the culture that glorifies the kind of video gaming that is little more than a subliminal training ground for "stand-off bureaucratic technocratic targeting."
We are the nation that has become the training ground for the first generation of expert drone targeteers. Those who sit at a computer console and kill, and the culture sees nothing morally reprehensible about this?
As well, as we speak, one of the movies up for an Academy Award in the U.S. is that of a sniper, who hides in the shadows and "picks off" innocent men, women and children, just as Mr. Obama's drone program does? They are all considered American patriotic (and moral) heroes?
If this is not a new step in the same direction as the technocratic death machine begun during the European Holocaust, would someone please tell me, what is? 100 Stars.
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