re: #193 Dizzy

This part of the comment stood out for me

So this ‘compassionate’ yutz travels to Auschwitz and his biggest take-away from the experience is that the Nazis had great org skills?
How depraved is that?

Years ago I was dating a woman who attended a cult-ish church, and when her then-15-year-old son was learning about the Holocaust in public school, what shocked him was the numbers, and how they knew the scale of what happened. I said something about the Germans keeping records…

Him: “They kept RECORDS?”

Uh, yes… Yes they did…

Jews and religion in general were a touchy subject with this family. I may have missed an opportunity to explain things like the process of dehumanization, or the idea that the Nazi notion of the “Jewish Question” was best understood in English if you translated it as “The Termite Question” (i.e. some guys deciding how to remove a non-human “infestation”), but then I’d have had to give both my girlfriend and her kid a crash-course in Anti-Semitism and European Christian culture’s teaching an essentially structural hatred of Jews… And it was a half-step from there to say, “By the way, what you believe and teach about Judaism in your church is pretty much classically Anti-Semitic, the difference is just a matter of passivity on your part.”

But I had already barked up that tree and it led nowhere, since I was dealing with 3rd- and 4th-generation “Church of Christ” adherence and I’m one guy up against decades of conditioning peculiar to the plains of NE Arkansas/Missouri border…

Which is pretty much why we split up eventually…

But, point is, there are a whole lot of people out there who don’t understand the process of dehumanization and all they see is the organizational skill, but it’s taboo in our culture to ask WHY the Germans organized murder so well. The answer is that if you don’t see people as people, it’s pretty easy to round them up like a commodity and do what you want to them.

Of course, if we attack the concept of dehumanization, suddenly the whole power structure of the modern Right falls apart, because if you see your designated enemies* as human, then how are you going to have any fun squishing them?

*The Natives, the Chinese, the Irish, the Blacks, the Mexicans, the Immigrants, the “Japs” living here, the Jews, the Muslims, et cetera… Pick an era, any era…