Atrocity Gods

zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org
Mon Mar 19 09:53:15 EST 2007


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Atrocity Gods by Ashley Howes
<http://one-state.net/howes.html>http://one-state.net/howes.html

About the proposed EU Holocaust Denial Law

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present 
controls the past." George Orwell, "1984"

If the EU is going to craft new 'Holocaust Denial' legislation, 
surely it must first be defined. Mainly it is used to label those 
who, in the opinion of the one using the term, minimize the suffering 
of Jewish Holocaust victims and thereby foster the potential for 
future state-organised mass murder. The imagery of the 
über-industrial Holocaust is so gut-wrenchingly horrific that anyone 
challenging the story is deemed criminally guilty of intent to incite 
racial hatred or civic disorder.

The subjectivity involved in evaluating intent explains the many 
glaring examples of double standards surrounding the 'holocaust 
denial' controversy. For example: the 'establishment' historian Raul 
Hilberg states that the number of those murdered in Auschwitz was not 
four but one million, whilst the total number of Jews who died in WW 
II was not six but five million. When he makes such revisions, this 
is not considered 'denial'. Yet when an 'unapproved' historian such 
as David Irving cites the same figures or, for example, that the gas 
chamber at Auschwitz is a post-war Soviet construction, during his 
trial in Austria he was not allowed to bring in the Auschwitz 
director to testify because no question regarding the truth or 
falsehood of any aspect of the Holocaust was allowed. In most courts 
where such cases are tried, there is virtually no defence against 
'denial' accusations even if the revision in question is generally 
agreed-upon by 'non-denier' Holocaust historians.

Not only do these surreal double standards make Kafka appear a 
realist, but also the changing story makes defining the Holocaust, 
let alone 'denial', almost impossible. Although all mainstream 
'approved' historians accept that the systematic mass murder of 
millions took place more or less as narrated, the specifics have 
changed considerably in the light of new evidence, usually uncovered 
by those they label 'deniers'. At first, the method was not gassing 
but steaming, mass burnings and so forth, with people sentenced to 
death based on numerous eyewitness testimonies (without 
cross-examination). Later, gassing was established as the main method 
with hundreds of further eyewitnesses recalling in graphic - and 
conflicting - detail as to how this was perpetrated in camps in 
Germany proper. But years - and more testimonies, convictions and 
executions - later, all mainstream holocaust historians agreed that 
there were no gassings within Germany, rather outside, most of them 
in the Auschwitz complex. But when later forensic analysis, witness 
cross-examinations and other documentary analysis (train schedules, 
official German inmate records released from Russian archives, trials 
etc.) revealed that this too was inaccurate, the numbers in Auschwitz 
shrank from four to around one million, though the global total of 
six million remains.

Whether or not the total is accurate or even important, always 
overlooked is this glaring fact: the latest approved version means 
that previous versions, largely based on eyewitness testimonies in 
this 'most documented event in world history', were false. In other 
words, even though we know for certain that many events - such as 
making soap from Jewish fat - did not occur as related in sworn 
testimony used to execute 'war criminals', pointing this out or 
challenging any aspect of a decades-old narrative riddled with 
inconsistencies and thousands of outright lies can be construed as 
hate speech, whereas the original falsehoods, which themselves are 
clearly hate speech - indeed blood libels - are neither characterized 
as such nor are the perpetrators prosecuted.

What matters, it seems, is not the facts but simply who is telling 
the story. 'Kosher' storytellers can revise the narrative freely 
whilst their non-kosher opponents are sent into solitary confinement 
for years, such as Zündel and Rudolf in Germany. Right now, the 
kosher historians all 'deny' the following: that gassing happened in 
German-based camps, that soap was made from Jewish fat, that six 
millions were killed systematically, that four millions were killed 
in Auschwitz, and most - but not all - that Hitler gave written 
orders for mass extermination. They are not guilty of 'denial'. 
However, if any non-kosher authors state any of the above they can be 
prosecuted for the crime of hate-speech.

From Denial to Confession

Even assuming such a thought-crime statute were to be passed, it 
should not exclusively refer to those denying only the Jewish 
Holocaust during WW II. The point is often made that the Jewish 
Holocaust receives disproportionate attention because other 
genocides, such as in Ukraine, Armenia, China or Russia, are 
generally ignored. Although true, this still misses the key issue, 
namely the Holocaust's main function as propaganda whose purpose is 
to preserve our sense of self-worth and honour by demonising the 
enemy in order to deflect attention away from the atrocities 
perpetrated by the victors.

For example, it is time the Allies cease 'denying' a literal 
holocaust (death or sacrifice by fire) that we perpetrated against 
about 900,000 Germans, mainly civilian women and children in 
phosphorous-aided firebombing raids. [photo] We deliberately burned 
them to death, thousands of them roasted alive in airtight bomb 
shelters which remained so hot from the raging flames in the 
fire-induced tornadoes outside that, when the doors were opened long 
after the raids were over, the sudden inrush of oxygen caused 
families of desiccated corpses to spontaneously burst into flames. We 
literally roasted living people to death. There are many photographs; 
but few have seen them.

gaskammer

Similarly, it is time the US admitted how many hundreds of thousands 
(some say well over a million) of German prisoners we starved to 
death in open fields, with US guards, as ordered by Eisenhower, on 
pain of execution, not to provide any food or shelter whatsoever. The 
detainees ate all the grass available, drank rainwater and died in 
their hundreds of thousands. We did this. Also, the post-war forced 
winter march of several million ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe 
during which over two million starved or froze to death - not to 
mention, no doubt, other atrocities along the way.

One of the first to raise this explicitly was Justice Wennenstrum in 
the Chicago Daily Tribune, February 23rd 1948, shortly after quitting 
the Nuremberg Trial proceedings in disgust:

     "If I had known seven months ago what I know today, I would never 
have come here. . . The initial war crimes trial here was judged and 
prosecuted by Americans, Russians, British and French with much of 
the time, effort and expenses devoted to whitewashing the Allies and 
placing the sole blame for World War II upon Germany.... The 
prosecution has failed to maintain objectivity aloof from 
vindictiveness, aloof from personal ambitions for convictions. It has 
failed to strive to lay down precedents which might help the world to 
avoid future wars." (Chicago Daily Tribune, February 23rd, 1948).

Many say that the main value of remembering the holocaust vividly is 
so that 'never again' as civilised peoples will we allow such horror 
to arise in our midst; this is a convincing point, and usually 
sincerely made. However, by overlooking much of the overall story in 
favour of allowing one particular slant to dominate the 
meta-narrative and thus core identity of 'modern' society, we are 
already doing it again. How else to explain how we believe that since 
1990 we have starved and slaughtered well over one million Iraqis, 
mostly women and children, through sanctions, bombing and invasion 
all in the name of 'justice', 'decency' and 'freedom'? The only way 
we can buy into such self-serving deception is because of this 
powerful belief in our own righteousness. This belief allows us to 
'deny' that we have perpetrated such war crimes because, thanks to 
our meta-narrative, we do not perceive ourselves as capable of such 
crimes even whilst actually committing them, as we are collectively 
doing even today. Belief trumps facts every time.

More importantly, this collective collusion on our parts drives the 
process. Even assuming 'ruling elite societies' exist, it is not they 
who pull strings in a vacuum, rather we who need puppet-masters to 
assume responsibility for determining our collective imperatives in 
the right sort of 'feel-good' way. So the murder of a million Iraqis 
in the past decade, and the displacement of over three million since 
2003, is the result of our own mutually engendered 'conspiracy' for 
which we are all responsible.

The Atrocity God
'Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!' 
- Sir Walter Scott

How can 'good' people like us be the ones perpetrating such crimes 
even now? Answering this question reveals the ongoing function of the 
Holocaust narrative in our lives today.

The Holocaust is part of a much larger history involving most of the 
world during the past century. However, the emotional core of WW II, 
itself the essential crucible in which today's world order was 
forged, is experienced viscerally within the Holocaust imagery. This 
is of far greater emotive import than the outer official 'history'. 
For us today, the pith of the entire catastrophe known as World War 
II is captured in the imagined mental image of a few score naked 
civilians huddled together in a shower room dying an unspeakably 
horrible death. This vivid imagery provokes immediate, viscerally 
felt horror. Just as we would deplore anyone who tortures an infant, 
we feel natural revulsion towards the perpetrators.

To understand this dynamic as it plays out today, we need to examine 
the nature of the belief system. Since the WW II Holocaust narrative 
helps shape our belief in who we are as people by defining our role 
in this seminal period of modern world history, its function is 
similar to that of a deity - in this case one whose imagery focuses 
on atrocity, cruelty, injustice, anguish, hatred and so forth. 
Strangely enough, the past and current examples of our crimes 
mentioned above are not because of 'holocaust deniers' who in essence 
question the veracity of this 'Atrocity God', but its adherents who 
believe that by 'worshipping' images of hatred, injustice and 
brutality they can in turn dish out atrocity themselves without doing 
wrong, because 'they' who make us fear atrocity, deserve to suffer it 
themselves, whilst 'we' who fear and fight against atrocity, are 
always reasonable people acting in reluctant but heroic self-defence. 
This sort of view allows Israel, for example, to keep taking more 
territory in the name of self-defence without seeing the glaring 
hypocrisies involved. Zbigniew Brzezinski remarked on this during a 
recent congressional hearing about Iran, namely that after some sort 
of attack on 'us' - false-flag or otherwise - we could then go after 
them 'defensively'.

This deceptive view is far more than simple self-serving opportunism: 
it is sincerely believed, something most critics and victims do not 
understand. Shortly after he left office, President Clinton said that 
his biggest mistake early on was to assume that his opponents were 
aware of their hypocrisies; however, later on he realised that they 
truly believed they were doing the right thing, which is why they 
were so powerful.

The 'prayer' invoking such demons into our world is any dynamic which 
solidifies antagonism between self and other - collectively 'us' and 
'them'. This 'satanic' prayer has great 'evil' power, and we see it 
invoked day after day in so many ways. By praying to such Manichean 
deities, we engender their type of emotion-based aggression to 
incarnate in reality. Our world takes on the atmosphere of our 
perception, as any mystic, lover or good housekeeper well knows, so 
we should be far more careful about the nature of the gods we 
worship. Our contemplation essentially summons them into our mind and 
body streams, invoking a living presence which then looks out through 
our eyes, walking amongst us, permeating personal and public life. 
This power, far greater than any individual's, is all pervasive but 
invisible and as such is a form of deity, or god.

Our 'belief' in this 'god' allows us to ignore the degree to which 
its living emotional impact shapes our collective identity by 
confirming us as those who combat demonic forces and from there being 
able to deny - sincerely - that we are anything but the good people 
we 'believe' ourselves to be. We enjoy cheap chocolate and coffee - 
the products of exploiting child (aka slave) labour, third world 
farmers, local governments and crooked international funding 
mechanisms - starve children, bomb civilian populations and so on, 
secure in the knowledge that we are the good guys who stood up to the 
totalitarian psychopath Hitler and the mesmerized fanatical German 
masses who gassed millions of living, innocents, huddled naked and 
helpless in chambers disguised as public showers.

The story IS the Deity

The meta-narrative is the peg on which we hang the rest of our 
self-righteous identity. Anyone who criticises 'us' is 'them', whom 
we are now cognitively 'programmed' to perceive as emotionally 
identical to those holocaust-perpetrating monsters of yore. Emotion 
always trumps reason by having a higher volume on the scale of 
experience, since emotions are felt viscerally in the body-mind, that 
agent which anchors our experience to specific place and time, aka 
'reality'. This is why arguing the facts never challenges a core 
belief system.

Furthermore, it is not the story that creates the Manichean dynamic, 
rather that dynamic which creates the story, our desire to have our 
cake and eat it, to perpetrate injustice and selfishness in the name 
of justice and altruism. Attacking the story is attacking ourselves 
and is therefore verboten. The debate about whether or not the story 
is true or its detractors thought criminals is a diversion; rather, 
we must become more aware of how we use it to avoid responsibility 
for our own crimes, past and present.

If we in the modern age feel that because of our reliance on science 
we are less ruled by belief or myth, we are fooling ourselves; there 
is no power greater in the human realm. Stories mirror how we weave 
physical, cognitive and emotional faculties into one overall tapestry 
of experience - aka 'real life'. Without narrative context, we could 
not progress moment by moment through getting up, bathing, dressing, 
eating breakfast, going to work and returning back home; we could not 
grow up, marry, raise children, age and then die in any coherent 
fashion.

Because all experience is filtered through this narrative cognitive 
process, 'real life' combines objective and subjective. Each 
individual at the family dinner table views the same 'facts' 
differently depending on how they fit into their own particular 
subjective 'story' or viewpoint. Similarly, we combine fact and 
fiction to fashion our collective identities from which manifest 
national institutions, language, dress, highways, schools, technology 
and so forth. This is called 'culture', something so quintessentially 
human and real, but which is clearly a blend of reality and artifice. 
Without such storytelling faculties, we could make no sense of space 
and time, there would be no society or culture. This faculty binds 
together our physical, cognitive, emotional and spiritual faculties 
into that which 'makes sense'.

So the ongoing story of life is a primordial art form; and the art of 
life is how we fashion the tale to engender mutually enlightening 
culture, not one that wags us into hell. Hell is where every 
interaction involves aggression and fear, i.e. intense angst and 
pain. Intensifying aggression between 'us' and 'them' is that which 
fuels the furnaces of hell.

Because ultimately we can never separate fact from fiction, in the 
context of this issue what is most important is to see how we use 
narrative, including visceral imagery, to empower the Atrocity God to 
'bless' our belief that no matter who 'they' are and what we do to 
'them', we will always remain on the side of decency, 'freedom', 
'democracy' and so forth because 'they' are evil. Through such 
belief, we are possessed by the demon of self-serving deception - and 
it is deception, because of course 'they' are of the same nature as 
ourselves, breathing the same air and sleeping each night under the 
same celestial canopy of stars.

Propaganda in some form or another is a natural function of all 
States, for when all is said and done it involves how a collective 
tells its meta-narratives to itself. In other words, even a totally 
enlightened society will have its narratives, or 'propaganda'; the 
issue is whether or not they reflect sanity and wisdom rather than 
deception and neurosis.

Beyond the Manichean:

Whilst I was slowly writing this article, William Pfaff published one 
in the NY Review of Books about America's current myth of, or belief 
in, cultural exceptionalism. He too seems to be echoing the theme 
here that a society's 'meta-narrative' determines how we view 
ourselves, also that the life of a nation resembles the plot-line of 
any work of fiction, in this case tragedy.

"Schumpeter remarked in 1919 that imperialism necessarily carries the 
implication of

     an aggressiveness, the true reasons for which do not lie in the 
aims which are temporarily being pursued...an aggressiveness for its 
own sake, as reflected in such terms as "hegemony," "world dominion," 
and so forth...expansion for the sake of expanding.... This 
determination cannot be explained by any of the pretexts that bring 
it into action, by any of the aims for which it seems to be 
struggling at the time.... Such expansion is in a sense its own 
"object."[12]

Perhaps this has come to apply in the American case, and we have gone 
beyond the belief in national exception to make an ideology of 
progress and universal leadership into our moral justification for a 
policy of simple power expansion. In that case we have entered into a 
logic of history that in the past has invariably ended in tragedy."

Being alive at all is a great blessing, and any 'enlightened' society 
nurtures and celebrates this, whereas unenlightened ones pervert 
living into some sort of endless nightmare. All over the world 
billions of parents love their children and vice versa; all over the 
world, there is sun, wind, rain, trees, flowers, foods to eat. Each 
blade of grass and dewdrop thereon is saturated with a limitless 
abundance of basic goodness. However, any or all of us can become 
'possessed' by an Atrocity God or any other demonic principle which 
perverts our basically good nature into an overly selfish, 
I-versus-other dynamic.

Any aspect of human life that is essentially good, uplifted, decent 
etc. can be so perverted, be it speech, food, dress, thought, love, 
marriage, community, solitude, scholarship, monasticism, religion, 
politics, parenting - and so on ad infinitum. Such deception covers 
up our naturally good, kind nature, polluting us with the poison of 
hatred-spawning aggression from which comes all the horror of 
immorality, societal neurosis and war. Perfectly good people are 
capable of this, as we proved not only by the literally millions of 
atrocities we perpetrated during WW II, but also by the ways in which 
we continue to perpetrate more of the same whilst denying them - and 
again: sincerely so.

Interestingly, although natural and perverted can be differentiated, 
'good' and 'evil' are not simply two sides of the same neutral coin; 
rather there is fundamental goodness, and then its perversion. The 
Manichean fallacy is to perceive them as being essentially equal, 
like two different colours. Although philosophically seminal to the 
issue under discussion, it is beyond the scope of this short essay, 
not to mention the wisdom of its author, to expound on further as it 
deserves.

Even if we are 'good' and happen to be facing those possessed by such 
demons, the way to 'overcome' them is not by becoming worse demons 
ourselves, because such aggression only intensifies the demonic 
'us-versus-them' dynamic, making the Atrocity God stronger as 'He' 
seduces more of 'us' into being willing inhabitants in His hell 
realm. First we should not buy into deceit-derived 'us-them' 
dynamics; then, starting with our own view, we must find a way to 
perceive 'them' as 'us' and in turn invite them to feel similarly. In 
this way, we become of the same kin, which has the same root meaning 
as 'kind'. True kindness is a virtue, not a vice or weakness - 
contrary to what so many pseudo 'conservatives' nowadays preach!

If one is not under its spell, this sort of deception is quite easy 
to spot because it always involves using other to define self, often 
blaming someone else, or 'them', for one's own condition, a function 
of solidifying the (illusory) difference between self and other. 
Those who keep building their narrative edifices using the bricks and 
mortar of accusing others of being 'liars' or 'mass-murderers', for 
example, are reflecting their own state of hostility as projected 
onto others, whilst denying responsibility for their own aggression. 
So the us-versus-them dynamic is quintessentially aggressive.

This goes back to the deity principle: the deity image (like anything 
in life) is a symbol of its own nature. The Atrocity God, whilst 
pretending to champion the opposite, in fact worships atrocity, 
injustice, cruelty and so forth because that is the aggressive nature 
of its imagery - its viscerally, and thus literally embodied, state 
of being. The lie always reveals the nature of the liar just as the 
object of worship reveals the nature of the worshipper. For example, 
consider this famous quotation:

     "Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of 
hate - healthy, virile hate - for what the German personifies and for 
what persists in the German."

     Eli Wiesel, winner of 1986 Nobel Peace Prize

Since he is a leading member of 'the Church of Atrocity', such 
outrageous statements do not merit hate-crime prosecution. He is a 
part of 'we', and therefore 'good' (even worthy of a Nobel Peace 
Prize) so we all basically agree that his hatred is 'healthy', 
whereas 'theirs', of course, is beyond the pale. And yet the 
expression is clearly one of other-demonisation in order to justify 
hatred.

Criminalizing those who question core aspects of our collective 
meta-narrative only further empowers this Atrocity God, one of whose 
favourite deceptions is to prevent us from understanding that 
pointing out the falsehoods in our other-demonising, self-sanctifying 
narratives is not necessarily the same as saying that 'they' are all 
good and we are all 'bad'. In other words, if we strip away the 
victors' propaganda, we might find that the Germans of WW II were no 
worse or better than the British, American and Russians, or in other 
words that we are no better than they who are no worse than ourselves.

But saying this about past or current adversaries is regarded by many 
as so offensive that any statements intimating that our enemies are 
anything other than demons or that we are anything other than noble 
is ipso facto perceived - first emotionally and now legally - as such 
clear evidence of a 'hate crime' that no defence is even permitted 
and the perpetrators banished from society.

Threat to our individual or collective identity and thus sense of 
reality, engenders a viscerally-felt fear response, such inner 
emotional turmoil instantly projecting out distorted versions of 
other. Having thus projected onto other our own fear-spawned hatred, 
using the typical response of aggression which essentially places 
self above other, we strive to eliminate the threat. Our own fear, 
born of clinging to the false identities that give existential 
meaning to our lives, engenders such monsters. Rather than listen to 
what they have to teach about our own distortions, we destroy them. 
Because challenging the meta-narrative is threatening, arousing 
hatred in ourselves, those who claim that denial is a hate crime are 
sincere, but the question remains: whose hatred is in play: those of 
the deniers, or those who disagree with them?

Even considering such thought-crime legislation evidences the degree 
to which the us-versus-them Demon of Aggression, the Atrocity God, 
holds sway in our culture. And the obvious fact that such laws are 
now being introduced in Europe sixty years on indicates the 
narrative's seminal importance in our culture today.

I end this article with the following items for consideration:

If the above hypothesis is true that the 'story-telling' cognitive 
faculty essentially shapes individual and collective experience and 
also that the aggressive self-versus-other Manichean view drives the 
dominant meta-narratives in the West, then, 'scientifically' 
speaking, we should see certain future outcomes confirming it, such 
as:

     a) Should it be somehow perceived that most of our 
meta-narratives, including those from WW II, have been largely based 
on partisan propaganda, both Israel's legitimacy as a progressive, 
western democratic state and the West's general ability to keep 
portraying ourselves as the 'good guys' - even whilst actually 
perpetrating ethnic-cleansing or genocide - will be undermined, to 
the point that Israel will find some way of living at peace with her 
neighbours, albeit no longer as a racially exceptionalist entity, and 
America will abandon all of her military bases abroad.

     b) The US will not attack Iran in early 2007 as many are 
predicting because the story doesn't yet fit; or put another way: 
only when the story fits will they be able to mount and sustain an 
attack.

     c) People go along with more of the deceptive meta-narratives 
with the result that aggression and conflict intensify, while 
millions of ordinary people suffer and die needlessly, as happened 
not so long ago in WW II and has been happening more or less 
continuously in various regions, often with US and Western 
participation, ever since. The proof that such WW II based 
meta-narrative is still in play will be the degree to which current 
enemies are compared to those of yore.

=====

Ashley Howes is a Canadian citizen who grew up in the UK. He works in 
Sydney, Cape Breton, NS, paying modest bills and watching the larger 
world go by through the lens of the internet. Occasionally, he likes 
to voice his opinion as an individual  citizen of this our world.


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