Picture courtesy of GraphicFreebies

We strongly suggest that you read books like Mein Kampf. We will discuss the reasons why in terms of Mein Kampf, because the issues related to it are so obvious and unsubtle, but they apply generally and in many kinds and degrees.

We all know that Hitler committed a monstrous evil. We have an almost unconscious feeling that anything related to him is contaminated and contaminating and must be shunned. We feel that the Nazis are or were people who were very different from us.We do not in any way advocate Nazism but we do think that is important for you to consciously know if and why you are not a Nazi. There is huge difference in the consciousness and awareness of someone who can say that he has read the works of the Nazi’s and has thought about it and doesn’t agree and the person who merely knows that it is wrong because someone else told him so. The Germans knew that it was right to kill Jews because someone told them that it was so. Many years ago people thought that it was right and proper to burn people at the stake if they believed that the earth was round. Once again they had been told that it was so. Hitler achieved something momentous. He persuaded an entire nation of people who were ordinary, educated and decent, no different from us, to assist in or at the very least, turn a blind eye to the mass murder of a people. These people were not even strangers on the other side of the world. They were people whom they had known as friends and neighbours and yet, within a few years it was possible for Hitler to get the Germans to view them as vermin that needed to be exterminated.How could he do this? What ideas and concepts and emotions did he offer his people that were so seductive and convincing that almost an entire nation fell for it. And not only the Germans, the Allies knew about the extermination camps and but didn’t do nearly as much to stop them as they could have either. Hitler’s ideas are not dead. They are well and flourishing. There is an upsurge of the Far Right in Europe and a general increase in racist attacks and fear worldwide. Many people today think like Nazis, they just don’t know it because they have never read the writings of the Nazi’s and so are blissfully ignorant. Do you know what part of your soul is Nazi. Would you recognize within yourself the same flaws and weaknesses that the Germans had that made them vulnerable to being talked into participating in genocide. And would you even begin to know if you were turning a blind eye to something that in a few years time will appear as horrific as the crimes of Hitler, except that at the moment it seems like the right thing to do.The saddest and most poignant part of the statements of Germans prosecuted for war crimes was their standard defense. It was “Das habe ich nicht gewust” or in English “I didn’t know”. I grew up in South Africa during the Apartheid years. I lived in Cape Town within view of Robben Island. I can honestly claim that for much of the time I didn’t know what was happening there. Most of the Afrikaners, the oppressors, were ordinary decent people who did not know of the atrocities being committed. And when they heard of them they were at first genuinely unable to believe that it was true. Like the Germans used to be, the Afrikaners are brought up in a culture of deep and unquestioning respect for people in authority. They could not believe that the government, the respected authorities, could possibly do anything like that.Do you know what is happening on your doorstep that you may be incapable of believing of seeing. Obviously not, or you would see it and believe it. It is much easier to become aware of these things in other people first. So we invite you to read the works of people like Hitler, to find out as best you can what actually happened. And then to attempt to see how you yourself, like the German people, or the Afrikaners or the Hutus or a Milosevic, may be capable of or be made capable of doing or condoning things that will one day horrify your children. As metaphysicians we aim to increase our level of awareness and consciousness. We claim to live by the ancient temple inscription “Know thyself”. All the people who commit these crimes and lesser ones, are ourselves. By understanding what happened with them, we create the possibility that it need not happen to us. That we will recognize when we are being maneuvered into or seduced by inhumanity and that we will have the option of saying no. If enough of us say no maybe we will be free to move on to the next step without being condemned to repeat that which has already been done so often that even in its horror it is banal and boring.

We challenge you to be increasingly conscious and aware. To understand the patterns of human history and action as best you can. To do what it takes so that as much as is humanly possible you will not one day stand before the judgment of your own heart, and say “It was there to see and I did not know”.

Author: Tamarinda 1/9/2002