a valid comparison? Why/Why Not?
We have closed our hearts to animals, Costello concludes, and our minds follow our hearts (or more strictly speaking, our sympathies). Philosophy, (Costello argues) is powerless in its ability to push society in the right direction as it fails to engage with one`s sympathies. Ironically, the burden is placed on something other than one`s rational dimensions, in which philosophy so frequently refers to. Our sympathetic imaginations, to which poetry and fiction appeal more than philosophy, should extend to other animals. As readers it is our duty to be continually vigilant to the methods in which fiction and discourse structure our view to omit acts of evil that we find ourselves subconsciously engaged in.
As a result of the theories presented by Costello (by way of Coetzee) and the comparison made between the slaughter of animals and the treatment of Jews during the holocaust, can I agree and say that such a comparison is valid? First and foremost can we conclude that Costello protests too much? As a result of my understanding of the text, it would be plausible to propose that Costello is self aware. Costello anticipates her most hostile critic, acknowledging “how talk of this kind polarizes people & cheap point scoring only makes it worse” (Coetzee 22). The conversation which she refers to is a correlation between the way her fellow human beings treat animals and the way in which the Third Reich treated Jews. “By treating fellow human beings – beings created in the image of God, like beasts” (she says of the Nazis). “They themselves become beasts” (Coetzee 21). She then continues: “we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich...
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...n pleasure? Costello highlights her difficulties in accepting that she is one of the very few who struggle to comprehend this. Consequently, Costello`s main thrust of her argument is epistemological as opposed to political or even moral.
The challenge Costello presents to her audience is to consider for a moment that what we enjoy at the dinner table is in reality an act of murder. Are the actions that human beings regard as ethically moral in reality violence that we inflict, at the expense of another beings life? In this milieu what results is not only a holocaust that is invisible but one that in many ways presents itself as the holocaust which saw over 6 million Jews murdered. In such a context, the production of thought, of human culture itself cannot be anything other than the continuous production of omission, deceit and epistemological unconsciousness.
Most narratives out of the Holocaust from the Nazis point of view are stories of soldiers or citizens who were forced to partake in the mass killings of the Jewish citizens. Theses people claim to have had no choice and potentially feared for their own lives if they did not follow orders. Neighbors, The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, by Jan T. Gross, shows a different account of people through their free will and motivations to kill their fellow Jewish Neighbors. Through Gross’s research, he discovers a complex account of a mass murder of roughly 1,600 Jews living in the town of Jedwabne Poland in 1941. What is captivating about this particular event was these Jews were murdered by friends, coworkers, and neighbors who lived in the same town of Jedwabne. Gross attempts to explain what motivated these neighbors to murder their fellow citizens of Jedwabne and how it was possible for them to move on with their lives like it had never happened.
In Maus, Spiegelman shows how jews were being dehumanized by using mice to represent the Jews and cats to represent the Germans.Cats hunt and attack mice just like Germans killed and attacked many Jews. Like in Night, Spiegelman father went through the same thing, the Germans took Jews to Auschwitz, they took mostly kids some only two or three years old, “ The kids would scream and scream, so the Germans would swing them by the legs against a wall and they never screamed again.” (Spiegelman, 108). The Germans did not care if the Jew was a child they would still hurt them. The Jews would hide from Germans so they would not be taken away, “ A tunnel made from shoes! be prepared on a moments notice, everything was ready here so 15 or 16 people could hide.” (Spiegelman, 121).Just like mice hide to not get killed so did the Jews, they would hide from the Germans so they would not get hurt or killed. The Germans treated the Jews horribly, “ We knew the stories- they will gas us and throw us in the ovens.This was late 1944… we knew everything. And here we were.” (Spiegelman, 157) The Jews were scared because of all the bad stories they heard from others and their experience. The mice were not accepted by the Germans, they did not like them which is why the were seen as
The arguments of Christopher Browning and Daniel John Goldhagen contrast greatly based on the underlining meaning of the Holocaust to ordinary Germans. Why did ordinary citizens participate in the process of mass murder? Christopher Browning examines the history of a battalion of the Order Police who participated in mass shootings and deportations. He debunks the idea that these ordinary men were simply coerced to kill but stops short of Goldhagen's simplistic thesis. Browning uncovers the fact that Major Trapp offered at one time to excuse anyone from the task of killing who was "not up to it." Despite this offer, most of the men chose to kill anyway. Browning's traces how these murderers gradually became less "squeamish" about the killing process and delves into explanations of how and why people could behave in such a manner.
Connell uses irony to instill a question in the mind of the reader”Is killing animals moral?”
Murders inflicted upon the Jewish population during the Holocaust are often considered the largest mass murders of innocent people, that some have yet to accept as true. The mentality of the Jewish prisoners as well as the officers during the early 1940’s transformed from an ordinary way of thinking to an abnormal twisted headache. In the books Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi and Ordinary men by Christopher R. Browning we will examine the alterations that the Jewish prisoners as well as the police officers behaviors and qualities changed.
The events which have become to be known as The Holocaust have caused much debate and dispute among historians. Central to this varied dispute is the intentions and motives of the perpetrators, with a wide range of theories as to why such horrific events took place. The publication of Jonah Goldhagen’s controversial but bestselling book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” in many ways saw the reigniting of the debate and a flurry of scholarly and public interest. Central to Goldhagen’s disputed argument is the presentation of the perpetrators of the Holocaust as ordinary Germans who largely, willingly took part in the atrocities because of deeply held and violently strong anti-Semitic beliefs. This in many ways challenged earlier works like Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland” which arguably gives a more complex explanation for the motives of the perpetrators placing the emphasis on circumstance and pressure to conform. These differing opinions on why the perpetrators did what they did during the Holocaust have led to them being presented in very different ways by each historian. To contrast this I have chosen to focus on the portrayal of one event both books focus on in detail; the mass shooting of around 1,500 Jews that took place in Jozefow, Poland on July 13th 1942 (Browning:2001:225). This example clearly highlights the way each historian presents the perpetrators in different ways through; the use of language, imagery, stylistic devices and quotations, as a way of backing up their own argument. To do this I will focus on how various aspects of the massacre are portrayed and the way in which this affects the presentation of the per...
The atrocities of the Belgian Congo and the Holocaust are two of the main events in history that have been responsible for the mass murdering of millions of people. Although these events significantly changed the course of humanity, and the story behind each one is very different, there are significant factors that make them alike as well as different. Many would agree that comparing two atrocities that affected the lives of so many people and gave a 180-degree turn to each of their countries would be something very difficult to achieve. However, by comparing the behavior of both the perpetrators and the victims of both cases we might be able to further understand the lack of morality and the inspiration that led to these awful events. The perpetrators in both atrocities tended to have a similar pattern of behavior when it came to the way they saw their victims. But, they also acted in ways where you can draw the conclusion that one set of events was not inspired by the other. These two sets of atrocities were reported to have a very similar number of victims. However, the Holocaust is one of the most reminded events in history as a period of shame, tragedy and sadness, while many still ignore the atrocities in the Belgian Congo.
One of the evident drawbacks of having animals depict human characters, is that they are figuratively and literally dehumanized. Humans are more complex than their primitive desires, impulses, and needs; and this fact could very easily be lost in translation with this choice of illustration. For example, it could be interpreted that the Germans who were drawn as cats, were behaving like the carnivorous species that they are, and chasing mice, because it is encoded in their natural instincts and a part of their primitive behaviour. This exempts the perpetrators, since it implies their lack of free will was affecting their every decision. It also implies that since the Germans are another specie, the mass murder of millions of people could never have happened by any other nationality, and that evil actions are based upon ethnicity, rather than a human’s negligence from their moral standings. However, Spiegelman was able to slightly deter from this indiscretion by giving each character dynamic personalities and pragmatic
The Holocaust was a very impressionable period of time. It not only got media attention during that time, but movies, books, websites, and other forms of media still remember the Holocaust. In Richard Brietman’s article, “Lasting Effects of the Holocaust,” he reviews two books and one movie that were created to reflect the Holocaust (BREITMAN 11). He notes that the two books are very realistic and give historical facts and references to display the evils that were happening in concentration camps during the Holocaust. This shows that the atrocities that were committed during the Holocaust have not been forgotten. Through historical writings and records, the harshness and evil that created the Holocaust will live through centuries, so that it may not be repeated again (BREITMAN 14).
For many years, people time and time again denied the happenings of the Holocaust or partially understood what was happening. Even in today’s world, when one hears the word ‘Holocaust’, they immediately picture the Nazi’s persecution upon millions of innocent Jews, but this is not entirely correct. This is because Jews
Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 film Inglourious Bastards entails a Jewish revenge fantasy that is told through a counterfactual history of events in World War II. However, this story follows a completely different plot than what we are currently familiar with. Within these circumstances, audiences now question the very ideas and arguments that are often associated with World War II. We believe that Inglourious Basterds is a Jewish revenge fantasy that forces us to rethink our previous understandings by disrupting the viewers sense of content and nature in the history of World War II. Within this thesis, this paper will cover the Jewish lens vs. American lens, counter-plots with-in the film, ignored social undercurrents, and the idea that nobody wins in war. These ideas all correlate with how we view World War II history and how Inglourious Basterds muddles our previous thoughts on how these events occurred.
Director Mark Herman presents a narrative film that attests to the brutal, thought-provoking Nazi regime, in war-torn Europe. It is obvious that with Herman’s relatively clean representation of this era, he felt it was most important to resonate with the audience in a profound and philosophical manner rather than in a ruthlessness infuriating way. Despite scenes that are more graphic than others, the films objective was not to recap on the awful brutality that took place in camps such as the one in the movie. The audience’s focus was meant to be on the experience and life of a fun-loving German boy named Bruno. Surrounding this eight-year-old boy was conspicuous Nazi influences. Bruno is just an example of a young child among many others oblivious of buildings draped in flags, and Jewis...
Among these modern principles are instrumental rationality, rule following, the ordering and categorization of all of social life, and a complex division of labor. When analyzed, all of these principles played a role in the mass extermination of the Jewish people. For Bauman, postmodernity is the result of modernity’s failure to rationalize the world and the amplification of its capacity for constant change. Bauman describes that there are two ways to minimize the significance of the holocaust as the theory of civilization, modernity, and of modern civilization 1) to present the holocaust as something that happened to the Jews as an event in Jewish history, and 2) to present the holocaust as an extreme case of a wide and familiar category of social phenomena. These perspectives make the Holocaust part of an individual history, not relevant or representative of the morality of modern
Kenneth Grahame’s use of personification by having animals represent humans in many of his stories can be interoperated as an analogy for how making selfish and rash choices, can cause humankind to look barbaric and primitive, just as animals.
The holocaust attested that morality is adaptable in severe conditions. Traditional morality stopped to be contained by the barbed wires of the concentration camps. Inside the camps, prisoners were not dealt like humans and thus adapted animal-like behavior needed to survive. The “ordinary moral world” (86) Primo Levi refers in his autobiographical novel Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man or Survival in Auschwitz), stops to exist; the meanings and applications of words such as “good,” “evil,” “just,” and “unjust” begin to merge and the differences between these opposites turn vague. Continued existence in Auschwitz demanded abolition of one’s self-respect and human dignity. Vulnerability to unending dehumanization certainly directs one to be dehumanized, thrusting one to resort on mental, physical, and social adaptation to be able to preserve one’s life and personality. It is in this adaptation that the line distinguishing right and wrong starts to deform.