Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman
Dear FlorenceArt,
Yours is actually the sole reply from among 230 postings here that resonates with me (I have read each and every one: a private survey of e-book readers, to unearth signs of intelligent life: yours is the only evidence that I've so far found).
About my use of Holocaust imagery, I note that you reside in France. My mother was a French Jewish Holocaust survivor who was betrayed, at age 12, both by Western civilization and the French nation. In a world that engaged in futuristic Buck Rogers fantasies, she was hunted for years like an animal, first through the streets of Paris, then in the unoccupied zone in the south of France and finally through the mountains of northern Italy.
Her pursuers were not only German Nazis but French Vichy fascists and Italian Blackshirts. The means used to search for and identify Jews were, in part, sponsored by IBM, without whose early-stage primitive computor input the Holocaust could not have occured as it did. My people, the Jewish People, were exterminated by technological methods. In fact, it was the Nazi obsession with technology that in part fueled the Holocaust, as one technocrat after another sought to devise better means of more efficiently murdering ever-larger numbers of people. It was their way to climb the ladder of ambition.
The link between the culture of technology and that of mass murder were both unarguable and logical, since technology, though portending to serve man in fact enslaves him.It is even possible to think that technology in part precipitated the Holocaust, since the impetus to proceed was often the result of successful invention, which encouraged actions on an ever greater scale. It is the nature of technology to outstrip itself for no other reason than that it can. And so too with mass murder which, after a point, achieves a momentum of its own, which in turn frames its purpose.
At the heart of Naziism lay two principle focii: the Jew and the Book. The Nazis targeted both concurently. They saw control of the book and newspaper industry and their eventual destruction as integral to their plan for global domination. Their aim was to destroy the Jews and create a brave new world. In their attitudes to the book, they very much bore resemblance to today's tech-intoxicated aditvists who argue that books are "bound-dead trees", doomed to a deserved obsolescence, and who though they themselves barely read at all are fixated upon lifting texts out of the physicalrealm and
transferring them to electronic media, where they can be easily controlled and in all likelihood forgotten.
The Nazis, like today's hi-techers, presented themselves as forward-looking progressives enacting destinies beyond any average person's imagining. Butthogh they promised heaven, they brought hell. And I contend that the unchecked virus of technology that has invaded the very pores of human culture is rapidly ushering the downfall of all that makes humanity worthwhile. What it offers as replacement is a void of machines, apps, addictive games; there is no social fabric anymore, all of it transferred to the internet where each acts through the avatar of an invented online identity.
There is no relation to the haptic world, the world of touch, sensation, interface. Hi-Tech is literally appropriating the human and creating a black whole down which entire populations are dissapearing. And I maintain that hi-tech as is will produce, inevitably, the conditions that will lead to levels of barbarism and totalitarianism equal to or even surpassing those of the National Socialists.
Lastly, as the son of a survivor, I have learned to regard two factors as indicative of the health of a society: it's relation to the Jew in its midst, and its relation to the book.
And in both these, we in America are dramatically failing. Anti-Semitism in this country and around the world, and most certainly in France, is rife. And the widespread abandonment of books, bookstores nnd book culture, in favor of machines lead me to believe that our culture, our society, our civilization itself are heading for a monumental catastrophe.
About the offer to 'thumb-wrestle', that is a joke. Perhaps you're unaware of what thumb-wrestling is: a game one plays with children, an effort by one person's thumb to pin down another's thumb. Generally the game induces glee, laughter. That ought not to frighten you.
Both Proust and Stendahl understood what is callow about their societies and if they could not forsee that in a relatively short time modern society was about to turn
genocidally murderous, still, they knew where to look for signs--in those little epiphanies of personal or historical experience where, in a thunderclap, the whole truth is illuminated.
Thank you for your response.
Au Revoir!
Alan
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Yada, yada, yada, blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada... Alan, you are proving to be a broken record. Not only that, but it is one of those 'create a record yourself' records whereby the listeners are forced to hear some of the most out-of-tune, off-key, pitchy and mis-remembered-lyrics sets of songs ever heard by man.
Let's start with what your mother went through during WWII. Yes, I fully accept it was a HORRIBLE experience - I am glad she managed to survive. However, one must ask, did she, in *any* of her travails travel by auto, train or ship? Then she made *USE* of - GASP! - technology! Did she during all these experiences use a phone, telegraph or radio? Again, HORRORS! Technology! Perhaps she was treated for injuries or ailments which she endured? If the treatment was any more advanced than poultices wrapped with rough cloth or leeches to draw away the 'ill-humors' she (Please! I can't stand hearing this disgusting word!) benefited from technology!
Did the Nazis, Fascisti or Vichy do terrible things? Yes. But it wasn't their obsession with technology that made all this possible. It was their own twisted, sick views towards their fellow human beings that made this possible. To claim otherwise is stupid in the extreme. I grant you that technology in the form of poison gas and a few other things did make the process more 'efficient', but it wasn't the goal of science and technology to make this process efficient, that was the goal of the - say the word with me - politicians! That's right - government! Not science, but government is the culture most likely to create and maintain violence against humans.
Now it's clear that you think we need to have government 'control' that there 'ebil technology', that very 'debbil weed of science'. Really? Are you so ignorant of where the real problem lies? It's the politicians and their grotesque desires to control everyone they can which are the biggest threat we face - not whether some teenager wants to strengthen his thumbs by twittering every hour.
When you mature enough to understand this, please respond. However, as this may take a few more decades, I promise to NOT hold my breath.
Derek