Questioning Mythic Enclosures and How they Structure Goods and Evils        

            Heinrich Himmler, as Head of the SS, oversaw and implemented the creation of the Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany, in which at least 11 million people were liquidated for racial and political reasons; because they were Jewish, Socialists, Gypsies, homosexuals, disabled  or non-Aryan.  The picture of Himmler, that will be key in a later chapter,  is that of Himmler reading the Bhagavad Gita to shore up his courage and detachment so as to be able to watch women murdered in the gas showers at Auschwitz. But this picture is not as simple as it might seem. I must bring in other areas of history to bring out the meanings of this picture.

            The racism that inspired Himmler to act, and the resulting attempt to eliminate whole sectors of the population of Germany during World War II, was not the unique event that it is sometimes portrayed as,  but part of a much larger historical movement, which augments rather than diminishes the scope and horror of the holocaust. Each man's or woman's death is unique.  Each large scale killing, each atrocity, is also unique. But the Nazi holocaust can also be understood as a small part of a much larger and more insidious tradition of European atrocities. Many of the atrocities since the Nazi Holocaust, Innocent the III or Columbus share a common pattern. But it would be a mistake to believe that the Nazi Holocaust is an historically unique event that forever establishes the standard of metaphysical evil.

             The concept of evil, like the god concept which it compliments, is an essentialization, an abstraction, a fiction extrapolated from experiences and reactions to real or imagined events. The concept of evil, like that of god, has a history and the history of the use of the concept of evil indicates that the concept is a psycho-social and mythological generalization whose purpose is to legitimize one form of knowledge/power while stigmatizing another. Evil is not a concrete existing event or force, as is power, murderousness, war or hate: evil is a mythological construct, whereas murder  or the effort to exterminate is a fact, an action and a motivation.

            The concept of evil is an orchestrating mechanism which justifies actions. It is an element in a system of knowledge and power. The Nazis called the Jews 'evil' and  the holocaust resulted in the deaths of 6 million Jews: 30-80 million Native Americans died in the Conquest yet the Native Americans were considered 'evil' savages lacking in civilization by the Europeans; or 4 million Vietnamese were killed in the American invasion of Vietnam to stop the 'evil' of "communism". [1] These atrocities were all conducted by those who believed in their own benevolence, goodness and moral responsibility;  in their own eyes they murdered because of their exceeding goodness and overflowing mercy: as Innocent III had murdered  Albegensians,  Augustine had advocated the murder of Donatists, or Truman ordered the murder of people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Therefore, the term evil is meaningless, or not meaningless but rather merely hides an agenda of power and knowledge. Continuing to refer to a metaphysical existence of evil merely serves to help perpetuate the illusions of beneficence and supremacy that have accompanied atrocities.

             Moreover, the concept of evil is a hindrance to talking about the history of atrocities. As Chomsky has pointed out,  the US propaganda system "consistently portray people abused in enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government will be unworthy. The evidence of worth may be read from the extent and character of attention and indignation".[2]  In other words, despite the US killing over 4 million Indo-Chinese during the Vietnam war, this is hardly known in the US, whereas the number of Cambodians killed by a communist dictator, Pol Pot, in Cambodia is exhaustively discussed.  Or, the Native Americans were killed by disease and a few bad Europeans,  not, as in fact, their near extermination was planned and implemented by Christians, Columbus, Jefferson, Washington, Jackson and other heroes of Manifest Destiny.

             Atrocities committed by the US and its allies are ignored, while those committed by enemies are exhaustively recounted, exaggerated or lied about. At the time of the atrocities against Native Americans they were pictured as hateful, vile, uncivilized savages, who had to be exterminated, whereas Euro-Americans were good, beneficent and only used force in 'defense of freedom' or the more current excuse of 'national security'. The historical record indicates American beneficence, even to its own people, is largely false. In contrast,  Native American wars were small affairs, generally, and they did not, as a rule, murder the women and children, as Europeans did and still do. Now that Native Americans are conquered and "removed" to impoverished reservations and prisons, a few positive cultural expressions of Native Americans are permitted. But the atrocities committed against them are neither admitted in their full horror nor recompense made. The Black Hills, Cherokee lands and the Badlands[3], should be given back, to mention only three of the hundreds of injustices and broken treaties that should be set right.. All that is allowed to Native Americans is assimilation or the pursuit of a fragmentary 'identity', not equality, much less apology.

            The attempt to exterminate Native Americans was a function of Western mythological systems acting through political economic, military and social implementations. Little attempt is made to plummet the origin of these atrocities in Euro-American ideologies, sciences, religions and culture taken as a whole,  because this would mean having to question the basic fabric of our current society.  Restitution would have to be made, those exploited by current American business and government would have legal recourse against their exploiters. The powerful will not let this happen: the ghettos must stay ghettos, the rich stay rich, and the poor suffer in silence.

            Rather than trying to read metaphysical principles into history it appears to be more useful to the cause of understanding and of helping to bring an end to atrocity producing situations to look at behavior and motivations rather than concepts of evil and good.  A  good example of this approach is R.J. Lifton's The Nazi Doctors, where he explores motive and ideology in Auschwitz doctors like Mengele and Wirtz without reducing the inquiry to another metaphysical justification of 'them verses us'.  He notes for instance the uselessness of the metaphysical concept of evil in the nuclear cold war and criticizes the "absolutised vision of American virtue and Soviet evil or the reverse" that characterized and still characterizes, beyond the cold war and after the weakening of the Soviet Empire, the nuclear threat to the world. Lifton notes a fundamental relation between the ideological and historical dynamics of Cold War politics and the ideological and historical occurrence of the Nazi Holocaust: both depend upon the drive for total power and the bid for hegemony over history.       

            The drive to total power is suicidal. The destruction of others always requires a doubling or a splitting off of oneself from a common humanity. Lifton adds, " the perpetrator of genocide kills to cure himself as well as his people. As complete cure eludes him... he must use his own people and himself to continue the flow of victims"[4]. Power needs a "flow of victims" to feel itself as power. Native Americans had to be pursued to extinction, not merely to California. The 'health' of Euro-American culture depended on  eliminating the Indians, who were seen as culturally ignorant, diseased animals who had to be eliminated or herded like cattle onto the Reservations.  African Americans were likewise forced into ghettos, were they could be pursued with the stigma of crime and welfare.  To justify itself and confirm health, righteousness, truth and the power of Manifest Destiny, the 'flow of victims' must be preserved. Towards the end of World War II as the war effort was failing, a common propaganda slogan used by the Germans to encourage fighting despite impending defeat was "World Power or Ruin".  The "Fuhrer is always right", was another such slogan.  It is the nature of power to want to increase its hold and dominion, to perpetuate itself, even to the point of its own ruin.  The same dynamic can be seen in the attempt to create and preserve the American Empire. American beneficence is ceaselessly asserted, even as it destroys other cultures and peoples, creating global resentments, and systems of competitive revenge that are likely to ultimately undermine American power if not  the imperial project.

            Since total rightness, knowledge or power is impossible and can never be achieved, ruin is inevitable. Lifton notes that this drive to world power and conquest results in the paradox of "mobilizing the claims of spiritual altruism and scientific truth, and of opportunities for transcendence, as one presses toward mass killing in the name of healing". [5]  This describes not only the Nazi Empire, but the Chinese and American Empires. The American Empire still sees itself as the virtuous standard of moral internationalism, while it does not recognize its deep involvement in spreading of death, injustice and inequality around the globe. The religion of capitalism that is the engine of the drive to empire is most apparent where it is most opposed: the fanaticism of those who wished to preserve slavery; the legal persecution of 165 I.W.W. deserters in 1919; the McCarthy era; the effort to roll back the human and civil rights advancements of the 1960's; Reagan's war against Central America- these and a hundred other examples too numerous to mention here, demonstrate the American civil religion and the power of what Chomsky called the "secular priests" to enforce belief and punish dissent. The United States has the greatest prison population per capita in the world because it seeks to be the greatest power. It is not an accident that Latino, African American and Native peoples comprise the majority of those in prison, while white males comprise the majority of those in elite colleges or corporations. Corporate elitism requires victims, and these are taken from the ranks of the poor. The bad conscience of Harvard can be found on Pine Ridge Reservation. The bad conscience of the Cleveland Clinic, one of the foremost hospitals in the world, is in the ghetto down the street from the hospital. The bad conscience of Washington D.C. is in the Philippines, Guatemala, Nagasaki and a hundred other places of poverty, exploitation and death.

            If the Nazi holocaust is dethroned  from the position of unique evil then it can seen instead as  one of the latest of a long series of atrocities that goes back to the Crusades and includes in its subsequent development the atrocities against Native Americans committed by Columbus and those who followed him, the slave trade and the conquests of Africa, India, China, and eventually most of the world by the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, English and Americans. Looking at the holocaust in this way does not diminish its horror, but rather relates it to many other horrors, which, if looked at from the point of view of individual victims, are equally  indictments of the regimes of knowledge/power that are responsible. The South African system of apartheid, the Israeli persecution of the Palestinians and the recent atrocities in Rwanda[6] can also be brought into question. These atrocities all have in common the belief, shared by Himmler, that they were necessary for the good of the nation, god, history, or the state. The historically inevitable truth seemed in all these cases to be at stake and the elimination of the hindrance and threat to the realization of the mission of history seemed destined, necessary and even a sacred duty.

             Part of the difficulty in understanding that the holocaust is not a unique manifestation of evil, but the result of both political, economic and cultural factors arises from an unwillingness to perceive the relation of cultural symbols to political-economic realties. Symbols are considered somehow autonomous, abstract, Platonic entities, hovering somehow above history and outside of time.  History itself becomes such a symbol, as when Christ, Lenin or Henry Ford consider themselves the culmination of history. These symbols become orchestrating mechanisms for channeling practices, purposes and social agendas.  Himmler believed he was serving the cause of history by exterminating the Jews; just as General George Armstrong Custer was sure of both his own Manifest Destiny and that of the Nation when he rode into Indian villages and dismembered women and children. But the "march of history" for a Custer or a Himmler,  is  a grievous end to history or an end to the worlds of a Native American and a Jew. Metaphysical symbols and configurations of symbols change with different motives, purposes, political, economic realities or intentions, and with these changes, conceptions of history change. History and "objectivity" can always be enlisted to justify those who deal in death. The will to power or greatness must seduce history just as Machiavelli's tyrant Prince must negotiate with Fortune in exchange for a chance at transcendental glory, wealth, power or the prize of the "Mandate of Heaven".

            Knowledge systems create mythical enclosures or organized systems of belief. Systems of belief justify, sustain and orchestrate social powers and hierarchies of rewards and punishments, Even during times of peace systems of knowledge/power are dangerous because they orchestrate punishments in accord with social hierarchies and thus inevitably lead to injustices against those who are at the bottom of the social ladder. But when knowledge systems and mythic enclosures begin to fail, or when they conflict they become even more deadly. The mythic knowledge system of the West, with its mixture of Christian and scientific values  came into conflict with different systems of knowledge and power in the Americas, India, China and elsewhere. As some of these systems of knowledge/power began to fail under the onslaught of western aggression, they become more lethal. The history of Japan in the last 100 years illustrates this. China offers another example of the disastrous consequences of conflicts between differing belief systems.

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