January 11th, 2007

Executive summary

It all started with this thought: "Only the truly certain build death camps" and I realised that that thought transcends all the usual suspects: not religious or political zeal, not territorial or lifestyle threats ... just those folks who are so certain of themselves and so certain of the wrongness of some other group that they can't tolerate being wrong about themselves.

For those who still have remaining fragments of reading comprehension

So, do you know who builds death camps?

Not people with certain political outlooks. Not the right or the left. Not even really political extremists, though that is getting close to the point.

It's not Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, etc. ... and that's because religion itself means nothing. Not because of threat of invasion, physically, culturally, violently, quietly, loudly ... or any other way.

Not lifestyle choices, not genetic sexual predispositions, not behaviours of the socially-engineered, not socio-economic status or the number of possessions (or lack thereof), and not cultural values.

Not philosophy.

Not because some look different, talk in a different tongue, walk a certain way, comb their hair in a certain direction (or don't comb it at all), and not because of where they make their home, even if it is no home at all.

And definitely not because someone/something/some way of being is ever a "threat to internal security".

Oh sure, all of the above have been cited as reasons for extermination and genocide, and people with the means and willpower to incarcerate, kill, enslave, mutilate ... or even just marginalise or shun have variously used them in the dreadful histories of humanity.

But the real reason why humans are able to justify the awe-inspiring evil that they do on each other is comprised of three parts. That is, you can't have death-camps and genocide without all three:

  1. By making themselves absolutely certain of their beliefs.
  2. By making themselves absolutely certain of error of others' beliefs.
  3. Then having that certainty challenged.

Only the certain build death camps.

You see? Contextualists don't kill.

At this point I think of Adolph Hitler, who really started hated Jews around the time, as a young man, he thought they were "stealing all the women" that he was attracted to. Basically, he couldn't get laid, so he both capitalised on and contributed significantly to the wildfire of Jew-hating that ended with millions dead, and a legacy of terror and agony that spans all races, religions, classes, and outlooks.

One last thing to remember: In order to do anything you like to people, you must first convince yourself that they are somehow not human. As soon as you start thinking of the other guy as sub-human, or somehow stupid or diminished, or perhaps inferior in some fundamental way, you can start treating him any way you like. It's a two-stage process. First you start belittling and crticising, then you escalate into dominance and finally killing.

Sound familiar?

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