Perigee: Publication for the Arts (Poetry, Fiction, Non-Fiction, Photograhy, Art)

Perhaps it is time to stop imagining that Germany under National Socialism simply went insane, or that Hitler's oratorical genius "hypnotized" the German people into compliance, or that the genocide of the Jewish and Romani peoples is historically inexplicable—and instead, accept the fact that the "enemy" is always subhuman, quintessentially evil, and deserving of extermination. That is to say, perhaps it is time to accept that collective human savagery is a perfectly common tribal phenomenon--upon which our very nation was founded.

Our species engages in collective slaughter so pervasively that it is not only an integral feature of our nature but among our most salient and remarkable characteristics. Human tribes, as a matter of course, massacre and subjugate less powerful tribes--reverting afterwards to the comforting myth that they themselves are rational beings whose behavior is governed by ethical codes of the highest order. It was self-defense, we say to each other, or we had no better options, or we did it for their own good. "It is easy," Noam Chomsky once observed, "to believe what we find convenient to believe."

To imagine that the subjugation of Iraq is qualitatively different from our subjugation of Cuba, the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Haiti and of our own indigenous population, is to indulge in obfuscating distinctions. Tribal armies do not fight for some distant people's freedom and democracy. The United States has slaughtered millions of innocent people over the past half century, has sponsored and armed numerous dictatorships, and has helped to overthrow democracies in nations such as Iran, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Chile and, most recently, in impoverished Haiti--nations upon whom we have never cherished mercy. But at home the myth of America's defense of world freedom remains largely intact. The latest bombing is always an aberration, a violation of America's time-honored etc. etc.

The unending history of human warfare goes like this: once the Other has been blamed and condemned and has been pushed outside the circle of moral concern, the impulse to see him suffer horribly and die in anguish is, however much we deny it in our public discourse, a passionate, joyful, all but orgiastic human response. With ease we turn from the sufferings of others as if such events were not happening or were of no account. It is child's play to convince ourselves that their punishment is well deserved. Later, in calmer times, the joy in slaughter is not to be spoken of. Recall the descriptions by Bartolomew de las Casas of Spanish troops finding novel and entertaining ways to murder the indigenous peoples; the cheering throngs of the Roman Coliseum delighting in the agonizing deaths of their victims by ravenous beasts; the festivities that would accompany a public beheading in Renaissance Europe; the array of torture devices employed by the Inquisition; the sadistic joy of the German and American prison guards in torturing their inmates; and the excited grins on the faces of lynch mobs. Or, merely consider the pleasures of recreational sadism, the Sunday citizen with his beloved son in a small boat on a calm lake, enjoying the delights of hooking fish thru the mouth and letting them writhe at their feet until dead. Oh, but that's entirely different, you say! No. It is entirely the same: the Other is always unworthy of life.

Pride in one's own tribe is likely to be a function of historical denial. The Nazis were Everyman, and it is time we ceased demonizing them. If even today mainstream American historians remain loathe to speak of the Indian wars as genocidal, and we remain perfectly at ease with the extermination of the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and if we continue to pretend that the Palestinian homeland was not stolen by European immigrants (the disquieting truth at the center of the current world conflict), is it not somewhat mean-spirited to prohibit Historical Revisionists and other Aryan Nation buffs from characterizing the Holocaust against the Jews as a Zionist myth?

As for the pieties of well-meaning Christians and Jews who venerate the holy scriptures, let us recall the bloodthirsty genocides accomplished under the guiding hand of Yahweh. Again and again the God of the Hebrew Scriptures mandates that his chosen people destroy this or that entire population: "But in the cities of these people which the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord your God has commanded." And surely the explicit warning by the beloved god of the Christians that all nonbelievers are to suffer eternal torture puts to shame the American amateurs in the hellholes of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Eternal torture! This, let us recall, from the god of love whose pious acolytes sit over their dinner plates of roasted cow, broiled pig, and breaded lamb, piously praying for peace on Earth. I mean, you've got to be kidding! The state of the world today? Friend, the state of the world is what it has been since Homo satanicus—tribal man—first strode the plains, strutting about in his tigerskin diapers, brandishing his cudgel and pointed stick, happily searching for something to kill.