Mirror,mirror on the Wall: Of Übermensch und Untermensch

[Guest guest]

Andrew Greeley: 'Dehumanizing others is no virtue'

 

August 04,2006

Chicago Sun-Times

 

To hate other humans or to feel no pain at their

suffering, it is necessary to dehumanize them, to

write them off as less than human.

 

The Nazis are the classic example of this

dehumanization. Germans were the obermensch, the

master race. Jews, Slavs, Gypsies were the

untermensch, the inferior peoples who barely had the

right to exist.

 

The Puritans dehumanized Native Americans, white

Americans dehumanized African Americans, Irish

Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland

dehumanized one another, as do Jews and Arabs in the

Mideast, and Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

 

In every case, one attributes to the " other "

characteristics that prove that they are not fully

human by the use of stereotypes -- " illegals, " for

example.

The American soldiers who tortured, beat, raped and

murdered Iraqis dismiss their victims as " rag heads. "

The rest of us are able to ignore the pain and the

grief of ordinary Iraqis, as I learned from responses

to my last column, by arguing that Iraq was involved

in the Sept. 11 attack or that Saddam Hussein killed

far more than have died under our inept and unplanned

" occupation. "

 

The first argument is ignorant. Bush administration

officials have admitted in whispers that no evidence

has been found of a link between al-Qaida and Iraq. It

is also immoral because it assumes that revenge is

appropriate.

 

The second argument reveals twisted immorality.

Because Saddam was a mass murderer, Americans are not

responsible for our failure to protect Iraqis when we

have taken charge of their country.

He was worse than we are, he killed through

commission, we kill (for the most part) through

omission.

Our only sins were to make war on the basis of false

arguments with little understanding of the people

whose social system we destroyed and to establish an

occupation of arrogant incompetence.

 

Thus the ineffable Paul Wolfowitz, the intellectual

architect of the Iraq war, could say, " I think that

there are ethnic differences in Iraq, but they are

exaggerated. "

 

Right! The Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites will be too busy

celebrating our liberation to kill one another. It is

unlikely that Wolfowitz assumes any responsibility for

what went wrong.

 

So you see, the e-mail that makes this argument

implies, why should we feel any guilt because Saddam

was much worse than we are?

Baldly stated, that argument is nonsense and immoral

nonsense at that.

Yet many Americans are still ready to use it to wash

their hands of the pain and suffering, the fear and

the horror of innocent Iraqis we have betrayed.

 

Joel Preston Smith, one of my e-mail commentators,

writes he was in Iraq before the war and after it

began. " If I hadn't been treated so well, maybe I

wouldn't feel so connected to the families and friends

who sheltered me, fed me, helped me do my work.

But I see the vast majority of Iraqis as incredibly

kind, thoughtful people. And it is a knife in my

heart, every day, to see them suffer. "

 

Many Americans do feel a similar knife,

but many others dispense themselves from any feelings

of grief or responsibility.

 

Moreover, when Americans finally " cut and run " -- as

Ronald Reagan did in Lebanon -- there is no reason to

think that Baathist leaders of the insurgency

(from the safe haven of Syria)

will not re-install Saddam or someone as bad as he

was.

 

The man who was to lead the military police contingent

into Iraq was promised 20 battalions of MPs.

At the last minute, to prove Defense Secretary Donald

Rumsfeld's point that not many troops would be needed

to dispose of Saddam, his contingent was cut to three

battalions.

If he had his full complement, he might have been able

to prevent the looting that provided weapons for the

insurgency. Rumsfeld dismissed the looting as

something that was inevitable and not important.

" Stuff happens. "

 

Are all Americans responsible for the administration's

ignorance and arrogance in Iraq?

Surely not.

Yet those who still defend the war with clichés and

phony arguments despite all the published evidence to

the contrary are whistling in the dark as they pass

the graveyard.

 

Copyright 2006, Digital Chicago Inc.

 

-- ---

 

07/19/06

01:54:46 pm, Categories: Voices, 5986 words

The Untermensch Syndrome: Israel’s Moral Decay

By: Manuel Valenzuela

 

 

Atelier © Helnwein

 

The labeling as anti-Semitic of anyone critical of the

state of Israel’s policies in the continued

destruction of Palestinian identity and the increasing

domination into American foreign policy no longer has

the sting of threat or intimidation it once mastered.

 

For too long this masquerade has been used to silence

those opposing anything Israel, shouted at anyone

disseminating truth and seeking justice. Like the boy

who cried wolf, this charade has lost its power or

hypnotic control,

and today only serves to breed more anger and

resentment against the apologists and smear mongers

protecting the cancerous tentacles of Zionism and the

crimes against humanity it spawns.

 

A once powerful marketing tool used to sequester valid

criticism and deny truth to millions has been eroded

thanks to its overlords’ continued over abuse and

labeling of the term ‘anti-Semite’ to anyone even

remotely critical of anything associated with Israel

and the tentacles of Zionism.

 

To criticize Christianity does not make one

anti-Christian.

To criticize Islam does not make one anti-Muslim or

anti-Arab, just as uncovering truths about the Bush

administration does not make one anti-American or

unpatriotic.

To speak truth about any government in the world does

not make us racist or xenophobic to the people of that

nation. Why then should criticism of Israeli and/or

her government’s policies subject us to false labeling

and acts of intimidation whose only purpose is to

silence truth into submission and hijacking justice

from ever emerging and being served?

 

The time has come to stop bending over to the dictates

of intimidation and scare tactics used by Israel’s

protectors, defenders and apologists.

 

The time has come to say “Never Again” to such

fictional libel and slander whose only purpose is the

continued subjugation of truth and awakening.

The labeling of “anti-Semite” does not bother us, nor

does it stop us from writing truth to justice and

reality to intimidation because we refuse to be

frightened into submission and silenced into

acquiescence by a mechanism we know to be false.

 

Our convictions, search for truth and want for justice

supercedes the trash invented to protect the

malfeasance ruining humanity and the crimes

perpetrated against our fellow human beings.

The time has come to stand up and be heard, refusing

to believe the smears and the labels, instead living

life in truth, devoid of veiled threats and

intimidation tactics whose power over us continues to

erode thanks to its incessant overuse and abuse. So

smear if you must, defenders, appeasers and apologists

of human wickedness, continue to blindly believe in

the majesty of a fiction you know to be false,

ensuring your daily complicity in the crimes against

humanity being committed by those you protect and

defend.

 

We are above your labels, above your intimidation and

smear tactics, following the path of truth in the

voice of our writings and in the convictions of

humanity

If pursuing truth, fighting criminality and

awakening justice makes us anti-Semites,

then guilty we are.

If seeing the dehumanization, exploitation and

utter destruction of the Palestinian people makes the

voices of reason anti-Semitic, then guilty we stand.

To defend the humanity of other Semitic people is to

defend humanity itself. To speak out against injustice

and dehumanization makes us human, to defend it makes

you complicit.

 

An Unbearable Likeness of Being

 

Here we are, living in the first decade of the 21st

century, and still the violent animal in the human

condition exists, thriving inside our carnal passions

and still primitive mammalian brains, oozing out of

humanity to release the demons of evil that only homo

sapiens are capable of wielding.

 

Persisting in our primate selves as it has for

millions of years, the greatest symptom of our disease

remains uncontrolled, dominating the far reaches of

man’s Earth, turning barren once fertile soil and

forever despoiling the utter beauty our civilization

possesses. Man killing man, erupting violence upon our

fellow humans, destroying what our own hands create,

decimating energy and beauty, life and opportunity,

this is the story of what our species has become.

 

Through tribal affiliation and identity, which the

nation state now is, (a tribe on steroids) the potency

of violence and ill-treatment against others seen as

different or alien is manifested.

 

The human condition dictates that auras of superiority

appear with every tribe.

What is nationalism today but a belief that our tribe

is the best in the world, that the group of humans we

are attached to in unity, be it of ethnic, racial,

religious or regional (nation state) parameters, is

the preeminent assembly of all humanity?

 

Beliefs of supremacy of one’s tribe and inferiority of

others have marked man from the very first cluster of

family clans.

In order to achieve this most human psychological

need, other subgroups have to be considered lower in

stature, considered third-world, savages, barbarians

and lesser humans, while others must be conquered and

subjugated.

 

In the minds of those groups seeking to invade,

conquer, pilfer and exploit, the invaded and conquered

must be seen as sub-human, creatures not worthy of

protection or life.

The human mind, in order to justify the ruthlessness

it will inflict on less able peoples, creates the

impression that those now controlled are sub-humans

and therefore not immune to the restrictions of human

morality. Sub-humans are not humans, after all, and

can be treated like animals or worse, like dirt.

 

The Nazi ideology of placing its Aryan blood above all

others, believing its Germanic peoples the pinnacle of

civilization, reflects a perverted mass psychosis

brought on by a malevolent leader and a hypnotized

tribe – namely Germany.

 

In the delusional world of the Nazis, Jews, Gypsies

and Slavs were considered inferior.

These peoples were labeled ‘untermensch,’ the German

word for sub-human.

As such, labels became reality and reality became a

holocaust, resulting in millions of deaths and untold

levels of suffering.

When a group of people like the Nazis begin to

believe in the sub-human label they propel, the group

afflicted becomes the equivalent of animals, free to

be killed, tortured and dehumanized, free to be robbed

of freedom, opportunity and happiness.

 

The Nazis, however, are not alone in exacerbating this

phenomenon. On the contrary, it has been as pronounced

in human history as advancements in technology.

As long as there have been competing tribes the

concept of untermensch has existed, released over and

over through centuries and millennia.

 

No nation or culture is immune; no epoch is innocent.

With every war, invasion, occupation, domination,

enslavement, oppression, exploitation,

genocide and ethnic cleansing that has marked human

time on Earth untermensch has been implemented,

used by the powerful to justify the crimes, rapes,

murders and dehumanization inflicted upon innocent

fellow human beings.

 

Untermensch is the tool used by the human brain that

grants man the power to destroy humanity and all its

virtues while inflicting untold levels of misery onto

men, women and children without the interference or

burden of human guilt, laws, theology, morality or

righteousness getting in the way.

 

Yet our minds cannot fathom the long reaches of a

history marked by incessant war, death and violence.

Understanding the constructs of time and space are not

talents we have evolved.

Grasping the enormity of the passage of time, with the

rise and fall of tribes, clans, city states and

empires, the evolution of human society and

spirituality from cave to metropolis, the genetic

altering and evolution of diversity coming together

and adding to the human spectrum,

and the conquests, genocides and environmental

changes created by our ancestors is not a skill

endowed into our primate brains, and thus the enormous

jigsaw puzzle that is human history remains a mystery.

 

We can barely put together the pieces of our own

eighty year existence on the planet, even as it is a

puzzle that we experience first hand.

 

How then are we to fathom hundreds of thousands of

years of modern human existence, generation upon

generation, century after century?

 

In an existence estimated at five million years, from

primates living in trees to the dawn of living in

one-hundred story skyscrapers, man has not deviated

from our mammal selves.

Our passions, emotions and behaviors yield to the

animal inside us, and throughout our existence it has

come out again and again to unleash terror on our

unsuspecting species.

 

For millions of years our species has consisted of one

continuous epoch of aggression against each other,

with periods of calm in between, – controlled at the

individual level but becoming an unleashed monster at

the tribal – destroying all we have achieved and the

beauty inherent in our existence.

Mammals we are, and mammals we will remain, yet the

ego of our existence and the theology of our beliefs

will not let us awake to our greatest truth.

 

Humankind’s greatest demon is also our greatest

threat, condemning us to continue a long history of

self-inflicted war, death, suffering and subjugation.

In this quandary we find ourselves trapped in, much

like every generation that has come before,

and, if we fail to learn and evolve, every generation

that has yet to come.

The worst of humanity opens the books of history once

more, and in Iraq and Palestine we find what has been,

what is, and what will become.

 

The Reign of Terror upon ourselves continues the slow

erosion of our existence along the inevitable path of

self-destruction we traverse.

 

Is it any wonder that the virus attached to us since

we left the jungles of east Africa keeps reappearing

again and again, stomping its seal of death, violence

and misery on the face of human civilization,

especially when we punish our own kind with the tools

of despair, suffering and dehumanization?

Can we expect the microscopic reign of modern man to

purge an evil that primitive man could not exorcise in

hundreds of thousands of years?

 

Untermensch is part of the disease we possess,

or rather possesses us, attached to the constructs of

fear and hatred, ignorance and superiority,

emboldened by the tribe or nation state.

 

The mega-tribes of today only serve to strengthen and

release the fury of human evil onto those less

fortunate.

It is a syndrome that, until now, has yet to be

contained.

Its vicious mechanisms erode the basic foundations of

humankind, birthing suffering and human destruction,

both in spirit and in life, rendering all six billion

of us less human every day.

 

Into the depths we descend, living the misery of

Iraqis and Palestinians, feeling the pain that the

powerful inflict on the weak, losing energy with each

drop of blood that is shed and cowering in shame with

each act of decaying dehumanization.

 

The Untermensch Syndrome is alive and well, resilient

as ever, surviving as long as humans exist, thriving

off our own shortcomings, evolving with each passing

generation and festering once more to infect

yet one more amalgam of human tribes from which

enlightenment seems never to arrive.

 

Unholy Land

 

In the land claimed holy and promised the madness of

humankind persists, extending the perpetual violence

and oppression of the weak by the powerful.

Palestine today tells a story of human evils past and

present, of the worst actions capable of being

manifested by the human phenomenon.

Lands ancient and strategic, crossroads and focal

points of man’s brief history, once more seem engulfed

by competing claims and boiling hatreds.

 

Malevolent crimes against humanity,

those activities that repulse and anger,

are methodically being perpetrated against peoples who

have been raped of all their ancestors once possessed.

Atrocities and dehumanization on an unparalleled scale

are being committed, becoming

the present reincarnation of the past’s dreaded evils.

 

In no other place on Earth is the suffering of our

brothers and sisters so prevalent.

In no other region is the tyranny and wickedness of

humanity so present.

For the lands holy and promised have been cursed by

archaic fables, beliefs and myths, by fictional claims

of days long extinct, condemning its native

inhabitants to the bowels of Hades and the desolate

realities from which loud cries go unheard.

 

To be Palestinian Arab in the land usurped by European

Jews is to be considered untermensch in the territory

your forefathers once called home.

The devastation fifty-five years of invasion,

occupation and state terrorism has had on both people

and land has created the conditions by which Gaza and

the West Bank can today be called Hell on Earth,

pockets of destitute emptiness

where opportunity is extinct and any relevant

future is a but a hollow fantasy.

 

Unearthed from the colon of the planet Palestinians

dwell, the squalor in the occupied territories is

beyond compare, instituted and exacerbated by the

state of Israel in acts of unhindered and systemic

malevolence.

The intent of such inflictions of emotional distress

and incessant pain and suffering is the breaking point

of millions of Palestinians, the realization that it

is better to leave the land you know and love rather

than live in perpetual imprisonment of spirit and

humanity.

 

The desire to expand borders and territory, an

addiction to greed and the aspiration to cleanse

Palestine of Arabs manufactures in the Israeli

government a policy of wicked objectives bursting with

cold and calculated cruelty.

Thus, the ill-treatment of Palestinians by Israel

makes life so unbearable, so hard and depressing that

it is a triumph of the human spirit that so many

remain, unwavering and strong, even as the weight of

utter wickedness is enforced generation to generation.

 

Living in the occupied territories is like living in

Warsaw ghettos of the 1930’s and South African

Bantustans.

It is akin to dwelling in Indian reservations, those

cesspools of nothingness in the lands of America from

where millions rotted away their once vibrant

existence.

Gaza and the West Bank are squalors of humanity acting

as giant prisons, where dense refugee camps are

considered cities, their perimeters encircled by

fences, walls, Israeli tanks and the ever watchful

eyes of trigger-friendly snipers.

Enormous prisons within occupied lands, preventing

contiguity, freedom of movement and any semblance of a

sovereign state are the true definition of the West

Bank and Gaza Strip.

 

To live inside these vast prisons and internment camps

is to struggle with the daily existence of Israeli

suffocation and dehumanization that you know is

purposeful as it is deliberate.

It is to feel Israeli claws strangulating your

esophagus, denying you of the air to breathe and the

sustenance you need to survive.

 

Life under Israel’s merciless rule means that sixty

to seventy percent of your people are unemployed,

unable to provide for their families, as commerce is

almost non-existent and access to Israeli business

almost impossible.

It is to live in worlds of child undernourishment and

lack of healthcare, as Israel’s policies make indigent

millions of families who desperately need to feed and

treat their children.

 

To be Palestinian is to be trapped in a vicious circle

that refuses to let you escape. From birth your

undernourishment outmaneuvers your development,

stunting your growth, making your immune system weak

and altering your ability to learn.

Lack of nutrients and perpetual levels of stress make

your environmental upbringing unlike anything on

Earth, a constant battle being lost by both your body

and mind.

 

Psychological behaviors associated with extreme levels

of stress and dangerous levels of undernourishment

affect hundreds of thousands of your fellow brothers

and sisters.

Feelings of imprisonment and virtual subjugation, not

to mention the extreme hatred of anything Israel your

environment forces upon you creates unsurpassed hatred

in your mind. Education is limited,

resources to tap the oasis inside you is but a dream

and the talents and abilities ingrained in your being

get eroded more and more with each passing year.

 

You see the vanishing energies of neighbors,

acquaintances and family that die at the hands of the

IDF and the Israeli government’s callous disregard for

your people.

After all, to them you are nothing but untermensch,

lower to or on equal par with animals.

 

From an early age you realize that, since you are seen

as sub-human, IDF soldiers treat you with impunity,

allowing themselves the pleasure of taunting your

friends, shooting your cousins, demolishing your home

and dehumanizing your mother, all done knowing that

accountability does not exist.

 

Growing up Palestinian is to see with one’s eyes the

hatred boiling inside the cities you live in, where

the fruitless throwing of rocks towards tanks by

dozens of youth is the only vent from where their

bursting fumes can be released.

Later on in life, these youngsters will become

members of the resistance, graduating to Kalashnikovs

and home-made bombs, lurking at night to defend their

ever disappearing homeland.

In this society, death at the hands of the Israelis is

so commonplace that it is celebrated, becoming both a

rallying cry and mechanism of strength. Martyrs are

elevated to the skies above, becoming the role models

of the very young and the heroes of the populace,

their faces plastered on posters lining streets and

walls.

 

In this society, born of occupation and seething

hatred, the only way to keep living is to keep dying,

and the sadness of such reality is that just as our

children wish to become pilots and firemen,

theirs strive for nothing more than martyrdom.

 

It is this that Israel’s policy of untermensch has

created, a mechanism where every day creates new

resistance fighters and revolutionaries seeking the

triumph of the human spirit and the dawn of

independent freedom.

 

Collective punishment upon millions of Palestinians

goes hand in hand with the Untermensch Syndrome, where

the acts of a few result in the decimation of the

many. When millions of Arabs are considered sub-human,

long living in lands claimed by false divinity and

thousand year old fables of peoples primitive and

unenlightened, their death, destruction and prolonged

suffering is inconsequential.

It is state sponsored terrorism that has lasted more

than eighty years in a pre-emptive attempt to

ethnically cleanse by subjugation, dehumanization and

cold and calculated suffering.

 

Breeding of fear by the intimidation of army

incursions, tank deployments, sniper killings, Apache

helicopter missiles and fighter jet low altitude

flyovers is state sponsored terror, stressing out

millions and making life under occupation an

unbearable existence.

Imprisoning millions and subjecting them to perpetual

indigence, without ability to traverse their own lands

or go one day breathing tranquil airs of calm and

freedom is collective terror upon a populace.

Not knowing if your home is next to be demolished by

monstrous Caterpillar bulldozers, usually with a few

minutes warning by the IDF is state terrorism, robbing

families of their homes and their belongings, leaving

thousands without the only dignity they ever

possessed.

 

Treating Palestinians as untermensch allows young

Israeli soldiers, most of whom are born hating

Palestinians, to walk over innocent people only trying

to survive day to day.

Stinging verbal abuse, humiliating body searches,

purposeful closures and damning delays at checkpoints,

where the Untermensch Syndrome can be seen in full

bloom, exhibits the wicked treatment of the powerful

over the weak.

Selected closures that can last days that in effect

prevent Palestinians from getting to work,

indiscriminate authority to harass and stop anyone

from passing, the apartheid mechanism of different

license plates for Jewish settlers – with unhindered

passage through checkpoints – and Palestinians – who

oftentimes wait hours in line before being allowed

through – are all symptoms of the sub-human treatment

and collective punishment of Palestinians.

 

Even ambulances, oftentimes transporting gravely

injured or sick people, many of them pregnant women on

the verge of giving birth, are forced to endure long

hours waiting at IDF checkpoints,

with the full knowledge of soldiers.

Many of these people, not unexpectedly, end up dying

while waiting, as precious time is squandered and

criminally left to pass.

 

If this is not terror, then what is?

If this is not collective punishment and a symptom of

the Untermensch Syndrome,

then where has our humanity gone?

 

When an occupying power gives carte blanche to its

military to treat the occupied as sub-human, crimes

against humanity are not too far behind and the moral

fabric of those imposing the will of the powerful

through the barrel of a gun quickly vanishes.

 

In Palestine, and as has become quite apparent in

Iraq, indiscriminate and methodical dehumanization,

without regard for human rights, has flourished

through the aura of ethnic, state and cultural

superiority and the invincibility of modern military

might.

 

Pitting rock throwers against Apache helicopters and

Abrams tanks is nobody’s idea of a fair fight,

and in this unequal capacity to wage war we can see

how the Untermensch Syndrome is furthered.

One side seeks independence using only the weapons

their dwindling land provides while the other is

provided with the most sophisticated and lethal

technology known to man.

 

It is a battle of primitive versus modern, the Arab

animals versus the Israeli westerner. And so, in order

to try evening out the fight, suicide bombers, with

the desperation, hate, thirst for vengeance and

hopelessness ingrained in their atrocious actions,

compete with the state sponsored terrorism of guided

missiles raining down from the sky, artillery from

tanks and incursions by an infantry trained and

supplied with the best equipment American money can

buy.

 

The equation of occupied and occupier has been the

same for time immemorial, with the subjugated

resorting to the creations of the human imagination

and the resources at their disposal for weapons while

the conqueror uses rationales of untermensch to

deceive its own morality and unleash the fires of

human hell with the grand weapons of war that riches

provide onto the people invaded.

 

In Palestine, untermensch has meant the demolition of

thousands of homes without regard for human life.

It has meant the dehumanizing conditions by which

millions live under, usually in poverty and lacking

meaningful education, healthcare, infrastructure,

opportunity and future.

Israel’s treatment of an entire race of people has

destroyed the fabric of society and the aspirations of

its citizens.

 

The Untermensch Syndrome has resulted in centuries old

olive trees bulldozed for no reason other than to make

miserable the lives of the farmers who owned them.

It has categorized Palestinian as inferior to Jew,

marginalizing millions who are expropriated of their

land and homes.

 

Because of the Untermensch Syndrome Palestine has been

carved up into dozens of enclaves, separated by walls

or fences, imprisoning people in their towns and

refugee camps.

Traveling from town to town is virtually impossible.

Children have been separated from their schools,

university students from their colleges, workers from

their jobs, families from each other and farmers from

their fields.

This has been accomplished by Israel systematically

and without remorse, serving no purpose other than to

dehumanize and make unlivable the daily lives of

millions.

 

Lands with higher ground are routinely expropriated,

as are those with fertile soil and abundant water

aquifers.

These stolen lands are then granted to the swell of

settlers rushing into once Palestinian lands and

farms. In other instances,

Palestinian land is taken for bypass road

construction that now dissects the West Bank into

easily controllable blocks. Of course these roads can

only be used by Israelis and Jewish settlers, while

the Palestinians, whose land is now covered by

asphalt, can only watch as Jewish cars circumvent the

last vestiges of a land they once flourished in.

 

In the course of the present intifadah 3000

Palestinians have died compared to 1000 Israelis. The

terrorism has been mutual, one modern and

technological, the other born out of hatred and

desperation. Palestinians see their native

contiguously- inhabited land being gobbled up by

Israel and the never-ending stream of European and

American settlers.

Their water is being taken, their crops destroyed,

their livelihoods eviscerated. An enormous apartheid

wall is being built, separating camp from camp,

robbing them of still more land as it snakes deep into

occupied territory, making the West Bank an amalgam of

Bantustan-style reservations and internment camps.

The Untermensch Syndrome has been unleashed by an

Israel that is intent on ‘transferring’ out an entire

race of people.

 

Like a Virus the Syndrome Spreads

 

Like an enormous wave crashing on shore, the

Untermensch Syndrome is devastating everything in its

path.

In order to maintain a Jewish majority, which

demographics tells us is impossible if Arabs remain,

Israel is making the life of Palestinians a virtual

dungeon of misery from where air and light are

squeezed out of the dark, damp caves where

Palestinians now dwell.

The goal is as simple as it is macabre: the ethnic

cleansing of Arabs from the ‘Promised Land’ by means

of starving millions of a life worth living and

through the self-exodus of Palestinians who cannot

take the severe punishment and dehumanization any

more.

This clandestine maneuver would thus be seen as

self-inflicted and as an independent move by the

Palestinians, yet it is Israel pushing them off the

cliff through its criminal acts against humanity.

 

Much is said of physical torture, yet it is the mental

kind that truly kills and maims, condemning the

millions of Palestinians to a life unbearable at best

and cruel at worst.

For many decades now Israel has waged collective war

against the native inhabitants of Palestine, slowly

but surely implementing the means by which it can

achieve its ends.

Mental torture is a crime against humanity, in direct

contradiction to universal principles of humanity. It

has been persistent, incessant and coldly calculated.

If the treatment of the Palestinian people by the

state of Israel is not terrorist in nature and evil in

substance, then we have vanished underneath a rock of

shamelessness and barbarity,

becoming that which we most loathe.

 

What is occurring in Palestine today is nothing short

of criminal, reminiscent of the Nazi treatment of Jews

and all other untermensch during 1930’s Germany.

 

It reminds us of the extermination and subsequent

incarceration of Native Americans by a fledgling US

government riding the coattails of Manifest Destiny.

Reservations are today a sad reminder of the cruelty

and inhumanity by which the American government

methodically eliminated the indigenous peoples from

the birth of a new nation.

Parallels with the South African Apartheid Bantustans

are being made as more truth emerges from the cages of

the West Bank. The worst in humanity is now compared

to the Israeli treatment of the Palestinian people,

and not without merit.

 

The Nazi ghettos and treatment of all untermensch in

1930’s Europe during the reign of human malevolence,

which caused untold levels of suffering, anguish and

mental torture, lasted about a decade.

 

The Palestinian ghettos, Bantustans, reservations,

cantons, prisons, gulags or enclaves, – however you

wish to call them – on the other hand, have withstood

the sands of time for several decades now.

Under virtual imprisonment, unable to move freely,

without rights, liberties and freedoms and

increasingly under a state of siege and apartheid,

Palestinians find themselves struggling to survive

and remain living in the lands they have continuously

inhabited for thousands of years.

Their very existence is being threatened; their

society is being imploded. Mental torture has become

their way of life, like an unrelenting leash

controlling their lives, ceaseless in time and

devastating in magnitude.

 

They are, if you will, an endangered species,

considered sub-human by their occupiers and the

Israeli puppets in the White House and the Congress,

who, even after the International Court of Justice

overwhelmingly condemned the Apartheid Wall as illegal

under international law, voted overwhelmingly to

support Israel and condemn the Court,

also pressuring the cowardly UN to prevent the

imposition of sanctions on Israel. If our elected

leaders in Washington show such solidarity with the

state of Israel in its inhuman acts of criminality,

do they think of Palestinians as untermensch as well?

The implication sure makes it seem that way, as does

their treatment of the Iraqi people.

 

Those who were once called untermensch are today

subjugating those they consider untermensch.

 

The sub-humans of decades past have become the

subjugators and exploiters, spreading the disease that

once tormented their ancestors.

 

Those who once suffered enormously are today

inflicting untold levels of suffering onto an entire

group of human beings.

As if committing human evil on those it considers

sub-humans will exorcise the demons of horrors past,

Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians serves no

possible purpose other than to devastate millions who

are rotting away their existence in sewers of

hopelessness, hoping an entire people will simply

disappear or pack up and leave, thereby springing

forth a final solution to the Palestinian question.

 

The Untermensch has become the Übermensch,

the Nazi word for overlord, or supermen.

 

The cleansed have become the ones doing the

cleansing, and those upon whom human evil once

enveloped are today reincarnating that same malice

onto a world trying to never again repeat the errors

of past generations.

 

Yet the Untermensch Syndrome refuses to be laid to

rest, living like rats among humans, forever to follow

in our footsteps, feeding off our crumbs and forever

destined to haunt our inner demons.

If those it was once inflicted upon are today its

conductors and proliferators, does there exist hope

for the human race?

 

As long as we let it control us, the Untermensch

Syndrome will linger, separating us from each other,

seeing ourselves as superior and others as sub-human.

The situation in Iraq is a truth to this reality, it

simply repeats itself, no matter how enlightened we

think we are and no matter how modern we claim to be.

If the pattern persists throughout our existence, is

there reason to hope for its demise?

 

What makes us human is not our ability to kill and

destroy each other but our vast potential to bring

goodness to our fellow beings.

Killing, maiming and inflicting misery onto ourselves

is nothing new.

It is rather easy for humans to do this.

Just look back at history.

 

What is hard, and what makes us human, differentiating

us from the animal world, is the ability to turn the

other cheek, see each other as equals,

accept our incredible diversity and stop the madness

before we all end up smoldering from the fiery hell we

have contained in silos and missiles.

If we can create nuclear technology, enough to destroy

this planet thousands of times over,

can we not put our heads together and get along?

 

What is happening to the Palestinian people is a

travesty, one more black mark on an already bruised

human society.

It is up to the Other Superpower to seek change,

helping to bring an oasis of humanity to a suddenly

barren strip of earth. Our elected leaders will not

act, and neither will world organizations.

It is up to us, the people of the world, to stand tall

and shout with one united voice from deep within our

bodies that we are in solidarity with those considered

as untermensch, that if Palestinians are sub-human,

then so are we, because they are human just like you

and me, deserving of a life lived in happiness and

opportunity, free of occupation and tyranny.

 

For the moral high ground cannot be usurped as easily

as Israel robs Palestinian lands bearing higher

ground, strategic locations, water aquifers and

fertile land.

 

The moral high ground in this battle is on the side of

the occupied and subjugated, of justice and humanity,

of those resisting and fighting for land they once

possessed and freedom once enjoyed.

It is void and non-existent in the grip of the

occupiers, exploiters and criminals who produce life

unbearable and dehumanizing.

For this battle they cannot win because the travesty

of the Palestinians is the reality billions of eyes

and minds now see.

 

Is it any wonder why the rise in anti-Semitism

worldwide coincides with the escalating campaign to

destroy the Palestinian people?

Can we not see why Israel is considered the most

hated nation on Earth, from opinions resulting in the

last few years, and why its policies are endangering

innocent and peace loving people of Jewish faith

worldwide who only want to live free of the hatreds of

the past and in full acceptance of the happiness of

the years to come?

 

Never Again, Never Again

 

The time to boycott Israeli products has arrived. Let

the sanctions imposed by the Other Superpower begin,

unleashing the economic might of billions to punish

those few who care nothing for international law or

the universal declarations of human rights.

 

May the cancer spreading dehumanization and misery on

our fellow human beings stop being spread by the power

and medicine of the people of the world.

We succeeded once before, halting the destructive

forces of apartheid South Africa, now a nation

evolving forward in time, not regressing backwards in

history. We will once more quash wrongness, wickedness

and human evil. It is the echoes of justice and human

rights emanated by the voices of truth that will tear

down yet another wall of shame being built to imprison

and condemn.

 

Let us punish American and multinational corporations

that help arm the IDF, those that help bulldoze homes

and lives, those that profit from human misery and

those that through their instruments of death and

destruction contribute to the murder and slaughter of

innocents. Let us pressure our so-called

representatives to stand for human rights, dignity and

justice, not tyranny, misery and subjugation.

 

What is transpiring in the Holy Land is anathema to

human civilization; it is an embarrassment to six

billion people who are good, decent human beings. If

our governments refuse to act, then so we must, for

the sake of innocent and peaceful Palestinian and

Israeli people, for the sake of human decency and for

the sake of our future generations. Walls and fences

that imprison and dehumanize cannot stand, for they

help set mankind back in time to days dark and

repressive, unenlightened and barbaric.

Together, united as one we can become the massive

tremor that helps bring walls and tyranny down.

 

“Never Again” should not just be a catchy slogan,

an artifact at museums, a banner espoused but never

practiced or a phrase attached to nostalgia.

 

It should mean what it says, and, as the Other

Superpower, we should interpret it literally,

enforcing it upon those whose crimes against humanity

make us all less human by the day.

 

In numbers we find strength; in conviction, reason to

exist. Those seeking freedom can never be defeated;

the triumph of the human spirit can never be erased.

The seeds of justice have been planted, let us reap

its bountiful reward.

Let us once more make a beautiful oasis of a land both

holy and promised, devoid of barren intentions and

evil inclinations. Let olive trees grow anew, let

children play and laugh, may the light of day return

and once more bring forth skies of blue.

 

This essay, first published in August 2004, is

dedicated to the over 3000 Palestinian and 1000

Israeli dead, who, in the last five years, have

perished thanks to the sickness of human nature, as

well as to the hundreds of Lebanese civilians and tens

of northern Israelis slaughtered by the latest wave of

Middle East violence.

This essay is also dedicated to the thousands of

injured on both sides, the thousands more who have

lost loved ones, and the peace-loving,

tolerance-striving, justice-seeking peoples of the

Holy Land,

all of whom have suffered enormously for the last

four years.

May you have the strength to put an end to madness and

the worst in the human condition. May your troubled

land find the peace you and the world desperately

needs.

 

Manuel Valenzuela

is a social critic and commentator, international

affairs analyst and Internet columnist.

His articles as well as his archive can be found at

his blog,

http://www.valenzuelasveritas.blogspot.com

as well as at other alternative news websites from

around the globe.

Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached

at manuel. Mr. Valenzuela is also

author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel made available

at most online book sellers.

 

Source: Chicago Sun-Times

http://www.suntimes.com/output/greeley/cst-edt-greel04.html

 

 

 

 

This article comes from The Smirking Chimp

http://www.SmirkingChimp.com

 

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