Getting Worse

I go by my instincts, and when someone makes a point that is especially pertinent, salient, or poignant, my radar bell goes off. This alertness of mine was triggered the other day when Douglas Murray, the brutally honest, conservative, brilliant British writer and thinker, gay and atheist, a self-confessed cultural Christian—as am I—was quoted online as having surveyed the extreme brutality that the Hamas terrorists executed upon Jewish slaughter of civilians on October 7, 2023.

 

His remark, that struck me, was that he compared the Hamas murderers and rapists as gleeful, eager, and exalted about their atrocities, and committing them, in contrast to the German police killers that gunned down Jews during World War II: the latter did their nasty deeds, but had to get drunk every night, really drunk, to live with themselves for the butchery they engaged in.

 

I believe Murray got his information from the book, by Christopher R Browning, Ordinary Men.

 

The point that Murray makes to the interviewer was that the German police were monsters but were not so self-deceiving as to brag about their work. Almost all of the Hamas raiders were ecstatic and laughing and sending recorded images of their butchery home to their families.

 

What Murray concluded that what the Hamas men did was worse than the Germans because they all enjoyed genocidal acts and were proud of themselves. He points out that as evil as the German police were against the Jews, Hamas was purer and eviller because they did as bad or worse, but were delighted and open about their genocidal atrocity.

 

It can get worse. That Hamas killers are eviller than were the German 101 killers from World War II is true: as Murray accuses Hamas of being, and he and I likely agree with the Israelis that Hamas must be wiped out to the last man, though the civilians should be spared as much as possible.

 

The Islamism of Hamas is pure demonism active on earth. It reveals my spiritual and moral axiom our worst natures are evident in action as ideology, mass movements, true believing, holy causes, and their fanatical orientation make warriors for the cause capable of doing absolutely the most repugnant acts against the targeted opposition, including their civilian population.

 

The more fanatical the killers are, the eviller they are, and it can get worse, and when they are totally rotten and wicked, they are militant in their pride that they are as murderous and destructive as they can be.

 

 

Below are three paragraphs that I copied from the internet book review from goodreads about Browning’s book. This book review that I copied and pasted from was online today, 12/16/2023; I will respond to what the unknown reviewer wrote there.

 

Goodreads review: “Ordinary Men is the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass shootings as well as roundups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. Browning argues that most of the men of RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions. Very quickly three groups emerged within the battalion: a core of eager killers, a plurality who carried out their duties reliably but without initiative, and a small minority who evaded participation in the acts of killing without diminishing the murderous efficiency of the battalion whatsoever.

While this book discusses a specific Reserve Unit during WWII, the general argument Browning makes is that most people succumb to the pressures of a group setting and commit actions they would never do of their own volition.  

Ordinary Men is a powerful, chilling, and important work, with themes and arguments that continue to resonate today.”

 

My response: Browning point is that these police killers—of perhaps 100,000 Jewish civilians—were ordinary men—regular Joes. Jordan Peterson and I believe that we are all born evil, and that any one of us, if a member of that police battalion, or if we Hamas soldiers invading Israel on 10/7/2023, we would have been as vicious as anyone of our own free will. We naturally are no better and no worse than these killers.

 

 On the other hand, if a German policeman from 1942 or a Hamas terrorist from 2023 were, as children, taught to love God, the self, and others, and to practice self-realization as their life’s work, they would do as well as any future anarchist-individuator supercitizen could be and do.  

 

We are all born in sin. We are all born evil, meaning we prefer hating, destroying, hurting, suffering, warring, playing sadomasochistic social games for rank, power, and wealth. We would rather fight with neighbors than work it out to everyone’s satisfaction. We are born altruistic, eager to self-sacrifice the independent, wholesome self to serve others: the family, the clique, the gang, the hierarchy, the state, the nation. We like being enslaved, told what to do and how to live by our leaders and the government.

 

We all have free will but it is weak and easily snuffed out. We all have consciences, but the most persuasive and generally accepted rationalizations provided us and adopted by us, from  our revered, altruistic religions, our collectivist governments, enable us to do the worst that they order us engage in. These justifications we internalize and live by, from our group. All of these layers of interconnected lies serve to snuff out the pilot light of our individual consciences so that we will do anything, anything at all to stay in the good graces of our pack, or unit, our battalion.

 

Browning wisely points out how the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptations and the altering of moral norms, serve to justify genocidal participation by soldiers, policeman and Hamas irregulars. Dennis Prager warns that people are sheep, and moral cowards, so the world may have more to fear from militarized hordes of sheep thana few wicked warrior criminals running amok.

 

For ordinary German cops and young Hamas irregular terrorists, they are not insane or pathological as a group, though they will become sicker and crazier the more violent they become, and the longer they shed the blood of innocent victims.

 

Browning divided the German people into e 3 groups: the eager killers (psychopaths), the majority of cops that did their murdering efficiently but without initiative, and a few that refused to engage in such butchery at all.

 

To convert the Hamas irregulars to be exultant about their genocidal acts, it is as if they have all become pathological, eager to kill, rape, mutilate and torture. That psychopathology is learned by ordinary soldiers or terrorists.

 

We need to make the young aware that they need to primarily individual-live, self-realize, to celebrate their individual identity, and live in accordance with self-care more than other-care, to ward them off against serving the cause or the state in the future to misbehave to such a cruel degree of degradation.