In as much as a dog cannot get beyond being a dog in terms of how it behaves and interacts with the world, similarly, when it comes to human beings – Homo sapiens -we cannot get beyond ourselves in the way we are in the world. In that sense we will always be limited by our ability to perceive the world and interact with it as well as with each other. Those limitations are determined by what we are; they define us and are a function of our genetic disposition as determined by our place on the phylogenetic tree.
Science tells us that Homo sapiens, the first modern humans, evolved from their early hominid predecessors between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago and began moving outside of Africa starting about 70,000-100,000 years ago.
And so I have this simple question: Preceded by Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis, do we have any reason to believe that we, Homo sapiens, are the end of the line when it comes to the evolution of the humanoid species?
To answer this in the affirmative is a little presumptuous, don’t you think? I can only speak for myself when I say that I don’t believe we are the finished product that evolution had intended us to be – and not by a long shot – and that it is entirely conceivable that we will be superseded by a superior edition of Homo sapiens . And they might well look back at the current edition of the species as Homo ignoramus or perhaps Homo perniciosus – given the amount of planet-wide environmental destruction our iteration of the humanoid species is leaving in its wake.
“I wish that I could say I was optimistic about the human race. I love us all, but we are so stupid and shortsighted that I wonder if we can lift our eyes to the world about us long enough not to commit suicide. (Isaac Asimov, 1920-1992)”
Lets face it: we can’t help ourselves, collectively, as a species. When I say “defective” I mean to say exactly that, in that we appear to be unable to do what should come naturally, easily and fruitfully should we apply ourselves to our vast potential as an intelligent, innovative and creative species with the realization that it is absolutely essential that we live and work together as one, in harmony with each other to the benefit of everyone without exception.
Instead, we compete, we fight, we destroy – each other and the place that nurtures us – without regard for a future that we must necessarily share together. But no one should be that shortsighted, that thoughtless, that self-destructive, or, simply put: that stupid!
And have we not all been hewn from the same piece of rock – this planet, this earth, so why are we fighting each other? When we fight each other, we are fighting ourselves. What is the origin of the conflicts within us?
It seems such a simple choice to make, doesn’t it: working out differences through negotiating solutions peacefully, with the understanding that these must always a matter of give and take. This as oppose to getting your way to the detriment of others, even going as far as the wholesale slaughter of those who are absolutely helpless to do anything about it. History shows that time and time again we haven’t been able to make the right choice in such matters.
And so here we are, seemingly helpless to get our act together. No, God won’t help us all; no figment of our imagination can be conjured up to protect us from ourselves. In the end, we are the only ones that can help ourselves. But the whole of our history tells it all, and sadly the conclusion has to be: we are a defective species, akin to a rudderless ship about to wreck itself on the shores of ignorance, arrogance and self-deception.
I can’t imagine that this is what the cosmos had in mind when it brought us about, and my guess is that it will likely do away with us – or, more likely, allow us to do away with ourselves – before giving it another try: to evolve a creature worthy and able to make use of the incredible creative powers that have been instantiated by it to achieve its raison d’etre, whatever that might be. All I know is that we are definitely not that creature.
French author and 1957 Nobel laureate Albert Camus once wrote:
Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end.
When I read this the first time many, many years ago I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, i.e., I was unable to identify with “the absurdity of everything all around us”. Most of the things going around me seemed to make reasonably good sense most of the time and if there was something going on I didn’t quite understand I was quite confident that it made sense to someone else.
However, over the years I have come to the realization that this is all a matter of one’s point of view, and that – yes – life, existence, appears to make little sense when you take a step back and consider the human effort as a whole, including its history, when seen from the vastness and complexity of a seemingly infinite material universe. And as it has been said, the universe remains absolutely silent on these matters: it fails to provide the very reasons for its existence and everything that can be found in it, including our lives.
By way of a simple analogy, accepting this is a lot like waking up one day and discovering that you are travelling on a train with an unknown destination and having absolutely no prior knowledge from where it departed from or how you ended up being on board. With little choice other than accepting the fact of the matter your options are going to be limited in terms of what to make of it.
When I write this I am once again reminded of Kafka’s short story The Passenger that I have written about elsewhere, about being confronted by an existential disconnect, the acute realization that the immediacy of the moment is unable to account for whatever situation you find yourself caught up in, e.g., what am I doing here, or: why am I here at all?
It is in this context – or more likely in the absence of any kind of context that would be able to account for it – and what I have frequently referred to as “the greater context” that some have deemed life or existence an absurdity, and a seemingly worthless exercise that is essentially without meaning.
However, it is once thing to conclude this about life, but – as Camus suggested – this should not be an end in itself. To contemplate one’s existence this way would be very much like staring down into the void – the realm of infinite nothingness. And to paraphrase something Nietzsche once said: if you stare into the void long enough, the void will look back at you, i.e., it will vacuum out your soul, and you might as well end it all right then and there.
Interestingly, to consider suicide as an option is according the Camus the one truly serious philosophical problem we face in life: Judging whether life is or is not worth living. But while this might be an interesting question for philosophers, one doesn’t need to be overly presumptuous for suggesting that the vast majority of people do not consider their existence a waste of time, and an absurdity which must be endured one way or another. Instead, they experience life as meaningful given that meaning is always relative and a function of what one is experiencing within the context of the here and now. Even in the darkest of times it is within the human spirit to try to make sense or look for meaning in what one is experiencing at the moment. “Hope springs eternal in the human breast” as Alexander Pope once said.
The bottom line is that we remain challenged to provide the meaning of life beyond the immediacy of finding ourselves immersed in it. As to the suggestion that there is no meaning beyond it was a consideration for Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl who suggested that “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.” And that “In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”
Finally, I believe that – as a species – we are initially prevented from looking beyond the immediate substance of our lives and seeing the apparent absurdity of it, as we remain preoccupied by the trivial and perhaps not so trivial. But that doesn’t mean that we are unable to encounter it and be challenged by it as a means to gain a greater understanding of the predicament we find ourselves in, e.g., why is it that we are here and what is it, exactly, that is expected of us?
Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act – S.C. 2000, c. 24
Russia’s totally unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and subsequent atrocities committed against that country, including the deliberate bombing of civilian targets causing the complete destruction of towns and villages and thousands of deaths among the Ukrainian population brings to mind earlier attempts to bring a country to its knees by targeting its civilian population.
Likely the most devastating example of this tactic was the detonation of two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945 by the US that killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people – most of whom were civilians. It led to the almost immediate surrender of the Empire of Japan on 15 August and formally signed on 2 September 1945, bringing the war’s hostilities in that region to a close.
Earlier that year a nearly equally abhorrent example occurred in Europe towards the very end of WW2 in February of 1945, when the capital of the German state of Saxony Dresden was firebombed during a series of joint British and American aerial attacks and which is believed to have caused the death of as many as 25,000 citizens. Exact accounts vary as it is likely many thousand more perished in this murderous fire storm, given the influx of undocumented refugees that had fled to Dresden from the Eastern Front, primarily from Silesia and on the run from Stalin and the Red Army. Tragically, most of the victims were women, children, and the elderly.
Looking back at this, I can’t imagine there could ever be a cause that would justify the wholesale slaughter of innocent men, women and children such as happened in WWII in Japan and Nazi Germany – as much as one might see the cessation of hostilities and the termination of a criminal and murderous regime as the justification for this.
But even if we should be able to conceive of circumstances so desperate that a nation fighting for its survival might see itself as having no other options than having to resort to the mass killing of innocent civilians on the opposing side, it is difficult to imagine that the deliberate destruction of Ukrainian cities and towns and the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians can be claimed by Russia to have been committed as a matter of ensuring Russia’s survival as an independent nation.
More likely, the only matter of survival here concerns Mr. Putin’s pathetic and malignant vision of a renewed Soviet empire, once upon a time a sorry assemblage of impoverished neighbouring vassal states held together by sheer terror under the absolute dictatorship of the murderous Joseph Stalin.
And how ridiculous is this: Russia – being a democracy in name only – “liberating” the independent Ukrainian nation from it democratically elected government by putting it under Putin’s governance, when it could only be seen as another step in realizing the extreme and deadly megalomania of the latter’s ambitions.
The conclusion has to be that Putin’s resort to terrorize and murder the Ukrainian civilian population in order to force its government to capitulate. makes the Russian invasion of that country a criminal act of the highest magnitude, and a crime against humanity by any other name.
Russia’s unprovoked and devastating war with Ukraine with as many as 12 million refugees on the move in and outside Ukraine brings to mind another massive refugee crisis in Eastern Europe, when at the end of WWII at the July and August 1945 Potsdam Conference on Policy for the Occupation and Reconstruction of Germany an agreement was reached to redraw the borders of Germany and Poland and the Soviet Union.
While the current circumstances involve completely different scenarios in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it behooves us to highlight once again the incredible inhumanity inflicted on ordinary folks who end up paying the price of warfare through absolutely no fault of their own.
Potsdam_agreement-1945 Stalin and Truman on the left.
As it turned out, the Potsdam agreement resulted in perhaps the largest documented case of state sanctioned ethnic cleansing on record, and one of the most disturbing events of relatively recent European history. It was a direct result of the US and England giving in to the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s demands to keep the part of Poland he had already annexed earlier under the secret Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with Hitler in 1939 as well as most of the German province of East Prussia.
Not only would two million Poles be forced to abandon their homes and lands and resettle behind the redrawn Polish/Soviet Union border (the Curzon Line) to the West, the entire ethnic German population east of the Oder-Neisse line was to be expelled and “repatriated” to the remaining German territory west of the Neisse River. The territories affected would be the German provinces of Silesia, Pomerania, and East and West Prussia, as well as sections of Czechoslovakia. This meant that a staggering number of around 13 million ethnic Germans would be forced from their former homelands where many of their families had lived and worked as far back as the 13th century.
While the plan was to allow for “the orderly and humane repatriation of Germans”, this didn’t quite work out that way. Around 5 million people were forced to flee almost immediately ahead of the Soviet red army advance into East Prussia in the manner of a vicious barbaric horde bent on raping, killing and – in general – ransacking everything in their path.
Rape, in particular, was the highlight on the pillager’s menu. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, then a young captain in the Red Army, described the entry of his regiment into East Prussia in January 1945 as follows: “For three weeks the war had been going on inside Germany, and all of us knew very well that if the girls were German they could be raped and then shot. This was almost a combat distinction”.
German Expellees leaving East Prussia
Of the remaining 8 million Germans that were forced to repatriate roughly 1.2 million did not survive the unassisted trek west across their now former homelands and through Polish territory to the relative safety of Allied-occupied German territory on the other side of the Neisse river. The survivors – typically not the very old or the very young, and mostly ordinary farm or small town folk who had done nothing more than toil ceaselessly for a living from dawn to dusk their entire lives – told of months and weeks of incredible suffering. They were habitually beaten, robbed of the few possessions they carried with them, the women raped repeatedly. Thousands of expellees committed suicide, not able to withstand the absolute barbarity inflicted on them any longer.
Expellees Leaving East Prussia
Looking back at this ignominious event some years later, the great 20th century humanitarian Albert Schweitzer, in his speech accepting the Noble Peace Prize in Oslo in 1954, said:
“The most grievous violation of the right based on historical evolution and of any human right in general is to deprive populations of the right to occupy the country where they live by compelling them to settle elsewhere. The fact that the victorious powers decided at the end of WWII to impose this fate on hundreds of thousands of human beings and, what is more, in a most cruel manner, show how little they were aware of the challenge facing them, namely, to re-establish prosperity and, as far as possible, the rule of law.”
When it comes to managing the vaccination process in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, it could well be that rules will be put in place to restrict the movement of un-vaccinated persons in the interest of public safety. The operative word is “could”, as at the moment there is a lot of discussion going on that front.
I can see situations where being vaccinated will be mandatory just to ensure that people don’t turn themselves into a lethal weapon and unwittingly end up killing someone because they are COVID positive – although they don’t know this and are a-symptomatic for the virus – and then give it to someone else who might die from it. This might happen in situations where social distancing isn’t an option – such as on airplanes – or when a population group is particularly vulnerable such as senior care homes where the vast majority of deaths (80% in Canada) have occurred.
It might be said that such restrictions infringe on personal rights and freedoms, but I see this more as just another way to ensure each other’s safety, e.g., such as restricting vehicles to speed limits or one-way traffic or mandatory stop signs so we don’t all end up killing each other when driving our cars.
Reasonable people with some sense of social responsibility should not take issue with this, but it is clear that not everyone is that way inclined or appears to have evolved to the point that they are capable of thinking that way.
To take this latter point a little further, no doubt that in the end, when all this COVID trouble is over – here’s hoping! – there are going to be people who will proudly proclaim that they were able to survive this plague without being vaccinated or, for that matter, without wearing a mask or social distancing, so what was the big fuss all about?
However, it is less likely that they survived the pandemic unscathed regardless of their non-adherence to recommended public safety measures in light of COVID. More likely, it was the fact that the vast majority of people around them did follow the recommended procedures such as masking up and getting vaccinated and so prevented the anti-vaxxers from becoming infected with this potentially deadly virus even if they themselves were infected with it.
No, you couldn’t prove that of course, but you shouldn’t have to as this is merely an appeal to reason – and it is an unfortunate fact that, from the looks of it, not everyone is in possession of this faculty, and so they will not be able to get the point.
Oxford Languages defines phenomenon as “a fact or situation that is observed to exist or happen, especially one whose cause or explanation is in question.” That is to say, one might be tempted to ask themselves: did this really happen? Or: how could this have been possible?
I’m looking at this in the context of the 45th president of America now having left the White House, as reluctantly as that would have been the case. He rejected the outcome of a democratic election by declaring it to be fraud, and going as far as inciting an insurrection by urging a viscous mob to violate and ransack the US Capitol, and trying to justify this with the – since deleted – tweet on January 6, stating that “these are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away.”
The fact that he or his supporters could not produce one shred of credible and verifiable evidence in support of that bizarre and outrageous claim is just one more reason to refer to his turbulent and abysmally divisive four year term as the head of the USA as a unique phenomenon that requires some exploration.
I’ve written enough about this now ex-president in earlier posts to make it clear that, yes, I have an intense dislike for him – and for all the reasons that are perhaps best summarized by something his former National Security Advisor John Bolton once said about him: he has a hole where his character should have been.
If the 45th president of the United States has demonstrated anything during his noxious reign, it is the fact that he appears to be totally devoid of humanity. By the time he left office on January 20th, over 400,000 Americans had been killed by current pandemic, yet one would have a hard time recalling even one instance in which he publicly expressed genuine empathy towards the families affected by the tragic loss of their loved ones.
Nor did he demonstrate at any time the kind of resoluteness and determination required to address this deadly pandemic with the sense of urgency that one would expect from the leader of a country that is being ravaged by it. The conclusion has to be: he couldn’t care less! After all – be it one or 400,00 dead Americans – they are of no use to him, i.e., they will not be able to pledge fealty to him, let alone vote for him. At most they are an embarrassment for having died in such numbers during his term in office, to the point that when his presidency came to an end the USA had the highest number of novel corona-virus deaths in the world
Throughout his career in private business and during the last four years as a politician it has become very clear that the only person he cares about is himself. Add his inability to admit mistakes by always blaming others and deliver false and misleading claims on just about any subject should that serve his purpose: you have the textbook definition of a sociopath!
While he might seem to care about those who support him and appear to be loyal to him, the moment that seems no longer the case you may as well not exist, i.e., you are of no value to him, as many of his former supporters have found out. A case in point would be the situation his ever-loyal vice-president found himself in on January 6, 2021, when Mike Pence decided to uphold his country’s constitution and certify the election results – as he was legally required to do – instead of complying with Trump’s demand to throw them out so he could stay in office. More recently it appears his ever loyal legal sidekick Rudolph Giuliani has now been given the heave-ho, presumably for services perhaps not so successfully rendered.
So the question remains: how was it possible for a sociopath such as Trump to be elected as the 45th president of the US? I don’t believe I can offer any kind of unique insight into this – for me – baffling phenomenon but the short answer appears to be: he benefited from the significant and historically longstanding divisions within the country, by appealing to the disgruntled hard hearted side of the political spectrum and become their chosen champion to rebuild the USA in their image.
Moreover, he was able to transformed the Republican party from a political organization into a cult of personality that would endow him with a sense of reverence seldom seen within Western politics. The upshot was that he could do no wrong; he could count on their absolute support for whatever action he would consider necessary – legally or illegally – to make the country see things his way.
That he was able to accomplish this over a relatively short period of time is remarkable, but it would be a big mistake to credit him with any kind of political savvy to make this happen. Instead, it was a case of being in the right place at the right time. Never short on ambition, his crude and abrasive in-your-face personae became the perfect medium to personify and give voice to the spiteful and less generous side of human nature on behalf of those on the political right wanting to express their resentment and anger with their country’s status quo.
Trump and the political right rise to power must be seen within the context of many Americans having been manipulated to perceive the looming threat of “socialism” during the eight years of the Obama administration. Despite being among the top world economic powers, the US remains the sole industrialized nation in the world without universal health care coverage. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) – nicknamed Obamacare – aimed to provide affordable health insurance coverage for all Americans – it would be portrayed as another major step towards socialism by those who opposed it.
In a few weeks it will be International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death-camp on January 27, 1945, by the Soviet army. There are many things that continue to disturb me when I think about this period in time again, in addition to the unimaginable evil of it: a state run people extermination program …
There continue to be folks today – imbeciles would be a good name for them – who deny that anything like the Holocaust actually happened. Typically, they will have their own demented ideological agendas that will prevent them from acknowledging the sickening truth of this event, but the well-documented fact remains that on January 20, 1942, in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, 15 high-ranking Nazi Party and German government officials got together under the leadership of Reinhardt Heydrich, chief of the Reich Main Security Office (including the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), Gestapo, and Kripo) to discuss and coordinate of what they called the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question“.
While the official minutes of this this meeting did not reflect the actual ways and means of the implementation of this state sanctioned policy – we know from actual testimony provided by Adolf Eichmann who was present at the meeting that an agreement was reached to pursue the annihilation of all Jewish people, and that this strategy was subsequently implemented with deadly efficiency, resulting in the murder of perhaps as many as 6 million Jewish people. This includes approximately 1 million Jews just in the Auschwitz complex alone (including Birkenau, Monowitz, and subcamps).
And so it happened that – while Nazi Germany was at war – at the outset life went on more or less as normal for the majority of the German population, but some of their neighbours were forced from their warm beds in the very early morning hours, given 15 minutes to get ready, fathers, mothers, their little children, grandparents, entire families, generations, standing there in front of their homes, in the gray morning light, shivering, frightened, crying, a small bag of belongings clutched under their arms, to be trucked away to local railway stations, then transported in unheated goods trains in the middle of winter – packed so tightly together – there was no room to sit down during a journey lasting often several days. Pitch dark inside, with a bucket or hole in the floor for a toilet, men, women, young and elderly, children, babies, women expecting, giving birth, and all this indescribably suffering had to be endured by thousands of people just so they could be gassed to death at a distant location.
From a 1943 secret report by a German army officer that was smuggled to the Dutch Resistance, for further distribution:
The trains with the victims arrive from all the occupied territories of Europe. They are made up of cattle wagons whose windows are barred with barbed wire, in each of the wagons there are 120 people. Depending on the weather, about 90 % arrive alive, although more than once last summer, 50 % were already dead from lack of water. After the wagons arrive at the camp, the people are whipped out and into the surrounding barracks, and locked in. The next day or several days later, depending on arrivals, 700 to 800 people are pushed together in to a courtyard. They are told to undress completely, the clothes must be put carefully in piles and the shoes lined up. Completely naked, men, women, children are pushed along a passage between two dividers of barbed wire. Then Ukrainian criminals begin to cut and shave the women’s and men’s hair. The hair is collected carefully because it is used to seal the joints [Dichtungen] of the submarines [U-Boot]. For long hours, the poor people must stand in the biting cold or the burning heat. As soon as some fall, worn out by the harsh cold or the burning heat, the henchmen lash the naked bodies of these poor people with the whips. The pain and the suffering that takes place in these corridors defy description. Mothers try to warm their infants against their own naked bodies. There is hardly any talking, only the eyes of the poor people express a nameless suffering and dulled resignation. This corridor leads to an iron door of a stone building. The door is opened and the 700-800 people destined for death are whipped inside until they are squeezed like herring in a barrel and unable to move. A three years old boy who tries to run away is caught and whipped back inside. Then the doors are hermetically closed. Outside the building, a large tractor is turned on, its exhaust fumes are pumped inside the building by a small window, I could see the effects on the victims inside. Packed in, the poor people were standing and waiting for their last moment, there was no panic, no cries, only a low murmur that could be heard from outside, as though a collective prayer rose towards the sky. One hour later, all were dead. Sliding windows were opened from the outside for the carbon monoxide to be evacuated. A half hour later, some Jews came – they owe their life to this dismal work which follows – to open a door in the back wall and drag out the bodies of the gassed people outside, before carrying them to the pits full of lime prepared for this task. They must remove rings from the fingers and open mouths to pull out gold teeth if there are any. Each installation keeps statistics of the number of killings [Tötungen]. Every day, in other words, every 24 hours, three or four killings[Tötungen] take place. This means that for the four installations [Anstalten], 8 000 to 9 000 deaths per day. In all, 6 million and a half people have already been killed in this way, including 4 million Jews and 2 and 1/2 “institutionalized individuals” or so-called “Deutschfeindlichen”. The program includes 16 million and a half people, in other words, all the Jews in the occupied territories and all the Polish and Czech intellectuals. In high places, there is currently an emphasis on rapidity and it is planned to use a more efficient method of killing. Cyanide gas has been suggested but apparently it has not been used yet, so the killing continues to take place in the cynical manner described above.
(March 25, 1943
The ultimate indignity to human life – but there really are no words in any language that could capture in any way the degree of terror, horror and pain that was inflicted on so many innocent men, women and children by the relatively handful of truly murderous individuals that made up the Nazi upper hierarchy.
Lithograph by Leo Haas, Holocaust artist who survives Auschwitz.
Most disturbing to me is the fact that this unbelievable sick and demented initiative was perpetrated by the leadership of a nation steeped in cultural significance as far as western civilization is concerned. And here we have Reinhard Heydrich – the Chair of the 1942 Wannsee conference – himself a talented classical violinist and son of a composer and professional opera singer, born into a family of social standing and substantial financial means, and often described as the main author of the Holocaust and the darkest figure within the Nazi elite. Hitler christened him “The Man with the Iron Heart”(*)
Oh – and before I forget – the Holocaust happened to certain people only because they were Jewish – but that seems hardly relevant, does it? I mean, how could such a factor be relevant? Unless, perhaps, you were in a country ruled by a mentally deranged homicidal megalomaniac who used its powerful army to act out his sick and deadly fantasies. No, it is the fact that this could have happened at all – where it happened, when it happened and how it happened – these the only things that matter here. How this could have happened – I don’t think I will ever be able to figure this out at all.
August 1945 -A boy averts his eyes while walking by the starved and emaciated corpses being extracted from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp following the defeat of the Nazi empire.
(*) It is perhaps worth mentioning that Mr. Heydrich’s iron heart stopped beating at the occasion of his death a few months after the Wannsee conference as the result of an attempt on his life on 27 May 1942 by a British-trained team of Czech and Slovak soldiers who had been sent on behalf of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile to assassinate him in an operation named Operation Anthropoid.
I have stated earlier that there is a pathetic streak of gullibility running through the human race and referred to it as “a debilitating if not fatal flaw by any other name, but seemingly so deeply embedded in our DNA that I’m not sure how we will ever get rid of it”. It is our species greatest weakness that leaves us wide open to all kinds deception and deadly mischief: the willingness to accept something as being absolutely true without one shred of verifiable evidence.
It is hard not to see our species as being defined by this fatal flaw! In particular the claims and beliefs of organized religion – which should have been dismissed a long time ago – that have lead to centuries of religious strife that resulted in countless of lives lost for no reason other than the competition between such beliefs and the vested interest that the various religious denominations had acquired in them.
Gullibility can be even deadlier – to the point of voluntary self destruction – as in the case of religious cult membership, one tragic example being the dead by suicide of more than 900 Americans, members of the People Temple cult in Jonestown, Guyana on November 18th, 1978, at the urging of their demented leader the “Reverend” Jim Jones.
Then, a more recent example that even the most bizarre and unsubstantiated beliefs can have deadly consequences for those that accept them as absolute truth happened in 1997, when members of Heaven’s Gate, a religious cult, believed that as the Hale-Bopp comet passed by Earth, a spaceship would be travelling in its wake—ready to take true believers aboard. Several members of the group bought an expensive, high-powered telescope so that they might get a clearer view of the comet. They quickly brought it back and asked for a refund. When the manager asked why, they complained that the telescope was defective, that it didn’t show the spaceship following the comet. A short time later, believing that they would be rescued once they had shed their “earthly containers” (their bodies), all 39 members killed themselves. (from a July 2020 article in the The Atlantic)
Today the practice of blindly believing the unsubstantiated is running rampant on the internet. Donald J. Trump supporters take note: he lost the election by more than 7 million validated votes. But since you believe that DJT would have been the obvious person to vote for, more or less guaranteeing a landslide victory, you have difficulty believing he lost the election. So when you hear claims that the election was rigged, you will want to believe that, even when there is no factual evidence in support of it.
This is an epistemological problem, and some will refer to this as examples of cognitive dissonance, defined as the motivational mechanism that underlies the reluctance to admit mistakes or accept scientific findings. Once we form an opinion on a particular topic, we refuse to believe anything contrary to our beliefs; even going as far as to reject factual information to rationalize our own opinion.
The question is, how did our species get as far as it has with this obvious flaw – something I consider an absolutely critical flaw, and responsible for much of the evil that people have inflicted onto themselves and others over the centuries.
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. (Blaise Pascal, 1623-1662)
First used as the title of a 1948 photograph of an American tourist in Havana, the term “Ugly American” refers to a stereotype depicting a certain type of American citizen as exhibiting loud, arrogant, demeaning, thoughtless, ignorant, and ethnocentric behaviour mainly abroad, but also at home. The phrase entered popular culture as the title of a 1958 book by authors William Lederer and Eugene Burdick. In 1963 it was made into a film starring Marlon Brando.
Following the highly divisive reign of the US administration over the last four years I would like to broaden the original characterization of the “Ugly American” personae beyond the already listed traits of “loud, arrogant, demeaning, thoughtless, ignorant and ethnocentric behaviour” and include some of the especially ugly traits frequently exhibited by its current president who is about to leave office after losing the 2020 presidential election by more than six million votes.
While is true that by expanding the definition we are less likely to refer to a stereotype and more to a unique individual, I feel that it is nevertheless a useful exercise to illustrate how truly ugly and unsavoury an individual can be and especially in a position of power and influence and effecting millions of people that find themselves at the receiving end of it.
The list of deplorable personal qualities that can be attributed to this exacerbated version of the Ugly American persona is too long to get a decent outline here but there is a summary in the Washington Post of November 12 by Michael Gerson that goes a long way in stating what is wrong with the current occupant of the White House. It features some of the more nefarious traits exhibited by Donald J. Trump while demonstrating his complete and unique unsuitability to take on the mantle of the 45th president of the United States back in 2016:
We see a dishonest president, spinning lie after lie about the electoral system. A selfish president, incapable of preferring any duty above his own narrow interests. A reckless president, undermining the transition between administrations and exposing the country to risk. A vain president, unable to responsibly process an electoral loss. A corrupt president, willing to abuse federal power to serve his own ends. A spiteful president, taking revenge against officials who have resisted him. A faithless president, indifferent to constitutional principles and his oath of office.
In short, this catastrophically flawed individual should have never been allowed to take the helm of a country, and especially not an influential and powerful country such as the United States.
Not surprisingly, the fact that it did happen has damaged the country in more ways than one. His demonstrated admiration for totalitarian leaders such as Putin has had a debilitating effect on the country’s democratic institutions by riding roughshod over its civil service and by the appointment of cronies and other assorted lackeys and sycophants. This includes members of his extended family in key position of government, apparently on condition of absolute loyalty to him alone. I would also include the somewhat sinister figure of the vice-president, his faithful apologist and a staunch champion of the white religious right. If you smell a contradiction here, you might be right – it’s either that, or in the interest of political expediency that Christianity has been redefined to allow for pathological liars such as the current president to be absolved from their sins.
We should also not be surprised that there are significant repercussions internationally, when the impact of his fickle reign continues to be felt around the world due to the unpredictably of his actions. A notable decline in America’s prestige abroad since he took office in 2017 has negatively affected the US’ relations with both friends or foes while introducing a great deal of uncertainty regarding the status of various pending international agreements related to trade, defense, climate and health.
Donald Trump at the National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, on 21 November. Photograph: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP
And with respect to health, his decision to abandon the World Health Organization during the height of the current COVID-19 pandemic is nothing more than a cynical move to punish the WHO for his own failure to address the seriousness of the pandemic at the outset by not providing the critical national leadership it called for. The result has been that the US incurred 20% of all pandemic related deaths worldwide while representing only about 4% of the total world population. As the pandemic rages on, at the time that I write this Americans are dying at the rate of nearly one every 60seconds , for a total now approaching 280,000 since the disease was first detected in the country.
Furthermore, the most shameful aspect from a national leadership point of view is his total lack of empathy toward those members of society that have suffered greatly as a result of the pandemic and the hundreds and thousands of Americans that have lost one or more family members as a result of it.
It seems this president can find more time to play golf than provide some badly needed national leadership in fighting the virus that is running amok in his country. At the recent G20 summit he skipped the G20 summit’s “Pandemic Preparedness” event on November 21st to visit one of his golf clubs on the same day that a record 195,500 new Covid-19 infections were reported in a 24-hour period in the United States, according to Johns Hopkins.
But if there is one thing in particular that should be held against this president it is his treasonous effort to take advantage of the already deep divisions in his country, and in particular between Democrats and Republicans. And I say “treasonous” because if you are the duly elected leader of a country – you are obliged to represent ALL of your citizens regardless of whether they voted for you or not and do everything in your power to encourage the middle ground between them. Anything else ends up weakening the country even further, to the point of shutting down dialogue between the opposing ideologies, making any kind of cooperation just about impossible and paralyzing its government.
And so he has been playing the “us and them” blame game from the day he was installed in office. This proved to be perfect recipe for various social unrest much of which has already materialized in various cities around the country. Initially peaceful demonstrations for Black Lives Matter following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were seized upon by those elements in society with alternate agendas more focused on looting and the destruction of private and government property.
Today there are the shenanigans around the presidential election process, and his delusional and utterly baseless claim that there was massive voting fraud that will remove him from office as of January 20th. To date not one shred of evidence has been presented regarding the alleged voter fraud, and we’re looking at a situation so absurd that is making the US the laughing stock of the world. The worst of it is that the majority of Republicans voters – including state legislators, senators and the like – continue to support him in this efforts to get the election results overturned due to fraud, and going as far as to urge his supporters to send him money to help fund his fruitless attempts to overturn the election.
Of the remaining 8 million Germans that were forced to repatriate roughly 1.2 million did not survive the unassisted trek west across their now former homelands and through Polish territory to the relative safety of Allied-occupied German territory on the other side of the Neisse river. The survivors – typically not the very old or the very young, and mostly ordinary farm or small town folk who had done nothing more than toil ceaselessly for a living from dawn to dusk their entire lives – told of months and weeks of incredible suffering. They were habitually beaten, robbed of the few possessions they carried with them, the women raped repeatedly. Thousands of expellees committed suicide, not able to withstand the absolute barbarity inflicted on them any longer.
While he might seem to care about those who support him and
First used as the title of a 1948 photograph of an American tourist in Havana, the term “Ugly American” refers to a stereotype depicting a certain type of American citizen as exhibiting loud, arrogant, demeaning, thoughtless, ignorant, and ethnocentric behaviour mainly abroad, but also at home. The phrase entered popular culture as the title of a 1958 book by authors William Lederer and Eugene Burdick. In 1963 it was made into a film starring Marlon Brando.
Today there are the shenanigans around the presidential election process, and his delusional and utterly baseless claim that there was massive voting fraud that will remove him from office as of January 20th. To date not one shred of evidence has been presented regarding the alleged voter fraud, and we’re looking at a situation so absurd that is making the US the laughing stock of the world. The worst of it is that the majority of Republicans voters – including state legislators, senators and the like – continue to support him in this efforts to get the election results overturned due to fraud, and going as far as to urge his supporters to send him money to help fund his fruitless attempts to overturn the election.