Journal sielwolf's Journal: Writing for Crap 5
I hate crap conspiracy theory. Luckily most of it can be ignored since it is only supported by leftfield wackos who's on comical simplicity is the best argument against their theory. Flat-Earthers, anti-flouride movements, mind altering lasers from satellites, black egyptologists, Christians with Christ as Aryan/Black/anything but a semitic Jew.
But the set I save my venom for is the conspiratorial theory couched in scientific "reasoning" and rationale. Wearing a tweed jacket and making the Noam Chomsky rounds is all that is needed for some; better than any experimental evidence. The posture and the pose, along with a definitive sociological agenda, is accepted wholeheartedly as a Truth. An absolute in a world where none exist.
The real cornerstone of the market are the intrigued middle-class. Hipsters and the like. Those who take the pose of a revolution and thus support their stand with laughable literature. Now if they just read Che all the time and kept to themselves, I wouldn't give a shit. The problem is when they decide to beat the war drums in getting Their Message out. It has become their True Calling.
I never minded Edwin Black. I was never really bothered by his bestseller, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation . But then a year or two ago my local alternoweekly, the Cleveland Free Times, had the image of Hitler on their cover. A blue armband with IBM's logo imposed on his sleeve.
Oh for the love of... what the fuck is this shit?
The general hypothesis of IBM and the Holocaust... well actually there isn't one. It is all fucking implied, like the greatest marketing slight of hand. The idea is that International Business Machines played an integral and pivitol role in the Holocaust and should be equally blamed for the resulting X million deaths. How are they to "blame"? Because they provided automation for the processes behind the Final Solution. Oh, and Thomas Watson, CEO of IBM, was a nazi symp.
Wow... nice fucking "evidence". Quotes are quite appropriate since it is all unrelated historical points supported by no hypotheses, experiments, corollaries, or causalities. No. It is the "science" of your run of the mill Joe Blow in the street. It is the black box alchemy that he can blissfully ignore and blindly follow. To him hot air keeps up airplanes, Pop Rocks explode on contact with carbonation, and gasoline is a magical elixir that keeps the gnomes in your car engine happy. But let's go through these above accusations from front to back.
Thomas Watson was a Nazi (or a sympathizer, since in the common man's eye there is no difference). Well no shit. So were a lot of people. A lot more people than we like to admit were "Nazis". Henry Ford was a big fucking Hitlerite. So were members of the British royal family. Why? Because they appreciate clarity of vision, central control. Because they (in varying degrees) hate Communists and Jews. The funniest thing is how common such ideas are. Being an anti-semite does not entail having a "Hate Fucking Kikes" tattoo on your forehead. Think the Jews control international banking? Have implicit rules running Hollywood? Are clannish? Tight with money? Xenophobic? Tricksters and scheister who are parasitic upon societies? That there is good reason that the only other nomadic people in Europe are the Gypsies? Abstractionists?
Such ideas were common social etiquette at the time. And are backdoor accepted thinking now. Watson's embracing of Hitler is meaningless when it only shows that he was stupid/brave enough to explicitly state what everyone else was thinking. And remember what a scourge Communism was at the time. Communist Parties were overt across the world. Ready to overthrow "decent" society. Unionists, feminists all ready to destroy all of Western civilizations. Only in hindsight is National Socialism the "obvious" evil it is now. It's like one giant cosmic farce. Like the one who gets the joke last laughs the loudest. History is now being rewritten in an absolutist palette of black and white. It isn't to say that the ideas or actions weren't horrific. But to do so with such a childish view of obviousness is laughable.
Now look at the amazon.com review on the above link. What words jump out at you? "Crucial", "indespensable", "enabling". The implication is clear: the Holocaust would not have happened if it wasn't for IBM. Um... whaaa? What is the support? The chaotic survival-of-the-fittest clashes Hitler induced in his bureacracy? This plays into the previous point. If we assume that all the nazis were homicidal maniacs beholden to the Devil himself and incapable of normal human interaction, then naturally they couldn't have run the Final Solution. But IF Nazi Germany wasn't composed wholy of Colonel Klink and Indiana Jones' villains then you can't assume any of this shit. This mass dehumanization is the most disturbing aspect of this writing. Hitler et al were able to obtain power and hold onto it because of their humanity. Affable, electric, enticing, congeninal, war heroes. It's the same sort of thinking that makes people believe paranoid schizophrenics are all Hannibal Lecters instead of the sad broken human beings they really are. Any deviation is stripped of its human element and multiplied into ridiculousness. The scary thing about such thinking is how it would prevent people from electing the same sort of person since they expect them to have six arms and shoot fire from their ass.
It also ignores the area of German excellence in other areas of the Wehrmacht: the Heer's brilliant modern strategy, the 3rd Generational Army design inherited from the Prussians when most Allied armies were still stuck in 2nd Generational Napoleanisms, the brilliance of their R&D (no other Army fielded the combined force of the FW-190, V-2, and Tiger tank). Black has decided to simplify the Germans to jackbooted, goosestepping Captain America villains. Like any other wacko argument, any conclusions are void when the assumptions are complete bullshit.
Ok. So I'll give this to you: IBM's technology did help the Holocaust. But the most important part: helping does not imply pushing the button yourself. Just like a gun manufacturer cannot be blamed when a boy robs a bank. An automobile manufacturer can't be charged with manslaughter when your girlfriend runs you over, resting the rear tire on your head until it pops like a grape. Ozzy can't be blamed for your suicide. Nor can Maytag be seen as at fault for Sylvia Plath sticking her head in there to end the Pain, the Horrible Pain!!! The Instrument is without moral or ethic. It is amoral, not immoral. Likewise the Corporation behind the Instrument is not at fault. I can make a submachinegun that is easily modifiable to fully-automatic. But you can't blame me when Dylan n' Eric shoot up your school.
Why? Because crime is defined by one characteristic: the overt and blatant decision and action to commit it.
Sure, sue Colt. But if they didn't exist, someone else would've made the gun. Or they would've hit them with a car, or a sharpened toothbrush. Or beat them to death with a rock.
And that is the problem with the argument. You cannot use a hypothetical world with one difference as your reasoning. We are not fucking travelling across dimensions. You cannot say with prosecutorial certainty that if IBM didn't exist then the Holocaust wouldn't've happened. If Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't born, that doesn't mean someone else wouldn't've killed JFK. Or that the sun wouldn't rise in the East. Again arguing the Singular Path of History: subtract one cause, and an effect would never occur. Kill Hitler, no WW2. The confusion of causality and corallaries. Breaking into synogogues, rounding up everyone on the ledgers, and shooting them in massive pits worked pretty well out in Lithuania.
No, Black is a True Believer. A corallary is fact. Start at the effect and find any chain of causes and there is no dispute. My Rock of Tiger Prevention. He saw two things aligned: the crooked cross of the Nazis and the stamp of IBM both on one machine. This was is starting point, he says it himself. He then spends hundreds of pages justifying it. Bravo. Another academe wank demigod of self-importance.
Now he has another rambling screed, this time about Eugenics and the US. Hey look! He used "Master Race" and "United States" in the title! Mayhaps my boy has an *gasp* agenda?
This time he is showing the correlation of the US eugenics movement of the early 20th century and how it just happened to influence the Nazis (draw your own conclusions). This time, he's already worn out his fucking welcome. There is a superior work, The Undergrowth of Science , already published by someone with A) real arguments B) actual credibility: Walter Gratzer, editor at Nature magazine.
Black shows that he is obviously a wacko fuckwad by being completely subjective and wholesale ignoring a wider body of evidence (a mistake Gratzer avoids completely).
Ok, yes, eugenics was a belief that social, mental, and physical characteristics could be controlled and manufactured into a superior race via science and breeding.
But that is just the logical next step of Social Darwinism and Lamarckism, ideas that had existed for decades before the US eugenics movement. Shit, that even started in England by the cousin of Darwin himself and became the cornerstone of a lot of socio-biological thinking at the time. Eugenics wasn't unique. Shit, the Soviets were already working on their own anti-Lamarckism, Lysenkoism where external forces were the dominant factor instead of internal ones. Biology was then being split along political lines: monarchy/heirarchy/democracy along with darwinism on the right, communism/socialism with lysenkosim on the left.
Again this is something that our revisioinist history has wiped away: the National Socialist ideas of inherited genetic superiority were common place and accepted thinking. It's like calling someone in 11th century Europe a tool of the Pope. Well no shit, Sherlock, everybody in Europe was either a RC Christian or a member of a marginalized social minority.
It is the hubris of modern civilization to laugh or chastize the past. Everything is so "obvious" now. But these cockmasters are too dense to realize that their oh-so great inborn intelligence is the results of exceptional thinking and scientific breakthroughs over the last several thousand years, none of which they contributed to. It's so easy to laugh at a Terracentric universe, a flat Earth, or the barbarism of leeching, slavery, or witch-burning. But fuck that noise making. It is only the incompotence of the modern age that perpetuates such ideas. Their ease, makes them flippant when dealing with the past and the preciousness of these 20th century liberties. Their thinking lacks any perspective, or is far too attached to it. For this simple reason, history repeats itself. The writhing mass of retards.
Sweet Christ this is the most self-absorbed piece of crap I've ever written. How fucking appropriate. Oh well, I'm not getting paid for this shit. It's either this or running down the street with a FAL taking potshots at everyone I see.
My Misc. Thoughts (Score:1)
Oops. Ignore parent. (Score:1)
My *Real* Misc. Thoughts (Score:1)
For example, if you knowingly sold a gun to a pedophile, the
Conspiracy Theory (Score:2)
Good conspiracy theory is hard to come by, I agree, but anything with Lovecraftian implications really gets me going (google Denver International Airport conspiracy or dia conspiracy for some nice contemporary stuff with both Nazis and sleeping elder gods thrown in together). Nazis are played out, sure, but Cthulhu still has legs (insert pun).
There was something the other week I saw, mentioning a number of soldiers in Iraq coming down with symptons sinisterly labeled 'SARS-
Two Thoughts (Score:1)
First of all, I think that the reasons that people believe in this sort of thing are the same as those that underly beliefs in magic and demons and so on. Have you read The Demon-Haunted World, by Carl Sagan? Very interesting.
Second, Black's logic is much the same as Hitler's . You seem to come right up to this point, but you (IIRC) don't make it explicitly. This is Hitler's most lasting accomplishment - this blaming and dehumanizing thought process. Of course, he was not the or