10:47 p.m. - 2003-09-22
extremism in the defense of liberty
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musings (this one's a downer)
documentaries on the nazis are always on, and they're horribly hypnotic. i worry about it a bit. clearly it is a good thing that we are in a place as a culture that we can speak so frankly about what was, fifty, forty, even thirty years ago an unspeakable evil in many places and many circles. but i fear we will become death-obsessed this way, or worse, that the ambitious and unscrupulous will see, in the archival footage dredged up by the history channel, a vision of what could be for them - the power to bring together men around a goal of systematic destruction.
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since my childhood i have somehow been wired to find the atomic bomb compelling. seeing drawings of mushroom clouds in history books, it impressed me aesthetically: it was pure, and unrelenting. it was much later that i read 'barefoot gen' and so many other things that brought that gorgeous fireball back down to earth.
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i have no conclusions to draw here, and no really valuable insights to offer. i'm just unsettled, watching the history channel and seeing how utterly /easy/ it was for men like himmler, set loose in an ideological bureaucracy with tremendous resources at his disposal, to very carefully and methodically bring about genocide. this is a lesson that i think i have not gotten in school. i don't know if that means anything.
but, do you find that scary? that the right person in the right place at the right time, with the right connections in the right climate, can so profoundly and so tragically blight the history of the human race?
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i think comparisons between the circumstances of germany in the 1940s and any present political situation are dubious at best, but on infinitely smaller scales, in stupendously smaller ways, i think the reagan administration and the current bush administration represent meaningfully similar situations in terms of the administrative and the material. ideological administrations guided by their own sense of moral superiority, with a barely discernible chain of command, capable of great indiscretions in the right hands. oliver north, thank god, is no heinrich himmler, and he never had an SS to command. but we are not as secured as we'd like to think against aberrations and the zealotry of petty henchmen.
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these are some of the most poorly-formed and unclear political thoughts i've yet posted here. thankfully this is a webjournal and not any kind of forum for essays or other things in which a point and some amount of substantiated evidence would be expected. just call it stream of consciousness and go grab a coke. i'm going to go to the loo and come back and write something more agreeable in here.
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