Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman
Dear KindleKitten,
I want to thank you for offering an amazingly civilized and well-considered response. Your account of sititing in the seats of the Nuremberg courtroom is moving and I find the points you've raised compelling. In ithe 90's made a great number of visits to Germany in my capacity as author but I had very different impressions. In fact, on my first night there, I asked my host, the head of a cultural institute, whether there was a rising Neo-Nazi problem in Germany and he promptly replied:"No!". An instant later, a van screeched past pursued by two police cars wth spinning blue lights and all three veered onto an embankment, braked, the van doors flew open, out jiumped a group of skinheads who charged up the hill as the police leaped from their cars and gave chase. At the top of the hill were hundreds of skinheads rioting against hundreds of police. During my tour, especially in East Germany, I encountered numerous skinheads driving around in autos that displayed the Confederate flag and everywhere I went, in gas stations and the like, I noticed confederate flag key chains, confederate flag antennae ornaments, confederate flag patches, pens, et al. When I asked one of the officials at University of Erlangen why the prevalence of confederate flags he explained that since the Swatstika is banned in Germany, people use confederate flags as a substitute totemic expression of their true sympathies. KindleKitten, I saw a hell of a lot of confederate flags while there. Across Germany, Neo-Nazis were burning Turkish women and children alive in their own homes, including in places like Solingen, the birthplace of Adolf Eichman, one of the chief administrators and policy makers of the Final Solution. And today, in Europe, anti-Semitism has reached levels unseen since World War II. The Jews of France are in flight, emigrating to Israel and other places, because things have grown so perilous for them in their home country. Imagine the irony of that! I'm the son of a French Jewish Holocaust survivor who must watch French Jews once more driven out by anti-Semitism. Incredible!
You describe my essays and responses as harangues. True, some of my later responses have grown defensive. I think this is due, in part, to the extraordinary hostility that has erupted on this and other tech-freindly websites in response to my essays on Evergreen Review and The Huffington Post. I want to point you to, if I may, the responses on this website. I have been called every name in the book. I have been threatened with axphixiation by plastic bag. I have been the butt of every sort of vileness imaginable. Why? Because i express opinions that do not concur with the
veneration of hi-tech that is the premise of this and other like websites.
In other words: get with us or face vilification and abuse. Which is my point.
Where here on this site among these hundreds of responses is a single trace of evidence to support the view that electronic book replacements and hi-tech will usher in some new dawn of enlightenment. In fact, yours and one others is the only genuine evidence of civilizational high intelligence evident throughout this entire thread--a thread that now exceeds 300 posts. I'm afraid that my brief experience on this website confirms my worst fears, that hi-tech is fostering a new breed of uncivil and largely ignorant barbarians who may indeed have accesss to thousands of texts but in no way benefit
from them because they are unsupported by any sort of civiilizational tradition, such as books and book culture. May I point out that among the Nazis were amazingly cultured and well-read individuals, who listened to music by Bruckner and Wagner, attended ballets and theater, read books by Goethe, and went out in the evening, pulling on their white gloves, to
axphixiate and incinerate Jews 3,000 at a time (capacity of the chambers at Auchswitz--they were the size of football fields) using new technology.
It is not only what one reads but cultural respect for the medium of its transmission that produces civilization, decency, tradition. Here, I encounter a very snide, Nazi-like culture of jeering and hurtfulness and most of all, of
herd-like conformity that positively astonishes me! Not a single voice of dissent! Only a lot of backslapping and heehawing and above all, self-reighteous smugness that, too, reminds me of the National Socialists.
But then, there is you and I want you to know that because of your fine statement I will reread what you've written and consider and reconsider and reconsider again. You have given me pause for thought, if only to probe and revisit my assumptions, to see where they can be better focused or if needed, changed.
But you stand alone among these hundreds. If one in three hundred Americans are like you, that is cause for hope but not very much hope.
Many many more like you will be needed to pursuade me that we are not on a downward slide to hell.
Thank you!
With regards,
Alan
What I don't understand is why the need for the new technology in the first place? What is wrong with books? Libraries? The argument
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