The Height of Egoistic Barbarism

"Tragedy," as proposed by Charles Segal, the Harvard literary scholar, "deals with situations where the division between civilization and savagery no longer seems to apply. Where this division is disturbed, so is the very nature of man and his humanity." [Segal, Tragedy and Civilization, pg. 30]

Near the end of WWII, America's leaders lost their ears, and soon their head. They did not listen to the Great Voice, that great spiritual force that guides men in times of uncertainty. It is not that their moral judgment was absent, but that their judgment was fatally one-sided. America is the Good Hero. End of story. Truman & co were so secluded that for them the war was abstract. The decision to drop the bomb was made without thinking out the potential consequences, other than scaring the pants off the Russians. Like the fanatical American politicians today who eye war in every country with an eye in the beginning of its name, they had too little of a spiritual foundation to discriminate between individuals and nations. Through their eyes, the individual's life does not exist, thus, is not accounted for in the scheme of world affairs. For the occupiers of the machinery of death, a single human life is not sacred. "The modern world is desacralized," said Jung, "that is why it is in a crisis. Modern man must rediscover a deeper source of his own spiritual life. To do this, he is obliged to struggle with evil, to confront his shadow, to integrate the devil." [Obtained from Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters].

Concentrating too much on the Nazi horror in WWII while sidelining America's own, has put us in a place where every American killing is justified because they were once the heroes in the 'good war.' I don't like comparing tragic events without knowing the history leading up to each, and without putting them in proper context, but there are stark similarities between America's secret aims in the Manhattan Project, to create a bomb and eventually use it on a population, and Germany's plans for the Holocaust. Though the motives for, and historical consequences of each horror are different, they both stem from the same uncivilized tendencies in modern states. The biggest difference that I see is that the Nazis in Germany disappeared from history after WWII, while America's barbarism has only advanced, and all Americans are victims of it.

Claiming the bomb, and his sleepy mother, science, as a badge of progress is like pseudo-Christians raising the bible above their heads and calling it moral authority. Until human evil is integrated and assimilated into the psyche of man and not cast out, which Jung, the Alchemists in the Middle Ages, and Eastern teaching have all suggested, there will be more 'good' wars. For now, there is no such thing as science for science's sake. In 1941, Orwell pointed out the fallacies of Utopian men searching after ever more progress, ever more efficiency, ever more centralized order. "Modern Germany," said Orwell, "is far more scientific than England, and far more barbarous. Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement, of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age. Science is fighting on the side of superstition."

In the pursuit of evil, and of communism, the two being morphed in American's minds, America has come to destroy itself. The cool and calculated Americans, the people who draw quicker, who never die, and always save the day--- have brought a dark night to the rest of the world. 64 years after Hiroshima and there still exists the same anti-evil impulse in America, which is now being zoomed in on 'terrorism' aka innocent foreigners abroad, and political dissidents at home. America's leaders, and a significant majority of their people have not gotten rid of the heroic fantasies of themselves. That is why every American must be reminded by what Arthur Silber acknowledged:

We murdered hundreds of thousands of citizens of a nation that would have surrendered very shortly in any case -- and we did it to "send a message" to another country.

And the whole world got the message, that America has an excess of barbarism, and is led by scathing psychopaths, who are just as delusional as most of their constituents. I don't want to be so harsh, because there are positive historical developments occurring in the underbelly of the nation, in the back alley of the people's psyche. There is a great awakening, and a possible revolution on the horizon, but for the moment we must go back to Silber:

In one sense, that is not surprising: people are not generally willing to view themselves as vicious and cruel murderers, killers who did not need to murder on the scale and in the manner they did. To avoid that harsh and devastating truth, they must tell themselves fables and myths. And their lies are always enthusiastically embraced by a public which must delude itself in the same way, always without exception.

On this anniversay, Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers, reccounts his thoughts as a kid after learning about the potential use of the atomic bomb and what it would mean for the future of humanity. He writes:

Suppose, then, that one nation, or several, chose to explore the possibility of making this into a bomb, and succeeded. What would be the probable implications of this for humanity? How would it be used, by humans and states as they were today? Would it be, on balance, bad or good for the world? Would it be a force for peace, for example, or for destruction? We were to write a short essay on this, within a week.

I recall the conclusions I came to in my paper after thinking about it for a few days. As I remember, everyone in the class had arrived at much the same judgment. It seemed pretty obvious.

The existence of such a bomb--we each concluded--would be bad news for humanity. Mankind could not handle such a destructive force. It could not control it, safely, appropriately. The power would be "abused": used dangerously and destructively, with terrible consequences. Many cities would be destroyed entirely, just as the Allies were doing their best to destroy German cities without atomic bombs at that very time, just as the Germans earlier had attempted to do to Rotterdam and London. Civilization, perhaps our species, would be in danger of destruction.

And later, after realizing mass murderers are in charge of America, he says:

I remember that I was uneasy, on that first day and in the days ahead, about the tone in President Harry Truman's voice on the radio as he exulted over our success in the race for the Bomb and its effectiveness against Japan. I generally admired Truman, then and later, but in hearing his announcements I was put off by the lack of concern in his voice, the absence of a sense of tragedy, of desperation or fear for the future. It seemed to me that this was a decision best made in anguish; and both Truman's manner and the tone of the official communiques made unmistakably clear that this hadn't been the case.

It's easy to get caught up in Truman's miscalculations, and trying to put America's choice in the context of the cold war, but let's not lose sight of the real source for violence, which presents itself as the stand-in for the universal good, and that is the State.

Kierkegaard shares his thoughts on the fallacy that the State is there to improve men. He said:

The state is human egoism writ large, very expediently and cunningly composed so that individual egoisms intersect one another correctively. The state is, to that extent, no doubt a safeguard against egoism, through pointing to a higher egoism which copes with all the individual egoisms so that these must egoistically understand that egoistically the wisest thing to do is to live in the state. Just as we speak of a calculus of infinitesimals, so also is the state a calculus of egoisms, but always in such a way that egoistically the most prudent thing seems to be to enter into, and be, in this higher egoism. But this indeed, is anything but the moral abandoning of egoism. The state can reach no further; so it is just as doubtful one can be improved by living in the state as it is that one will be improved in a correctional institution. [Kierkegaard: Papers and Journals, A Selection. Pg. 622]

The American State can reach no further than turning into a correctional institution, which is already the life for far too many of its citizens. America is a madhouse, and I sincerely believe that. But that doesn't mean that all Americans are mad, just as being a hostage doesn't make you guilty in a bank robbery. Only slaves are hostages, which means free men who aim their conscious rage on the real criminals, and not the puppet on the podium, are liable to be judged if they don't take immediate action and kill the fascist plans for society.