LOL, wut?
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Sure, being useful is all well and good until the inevitable typhus or any of a raft of other fun diseases sets in. 0_o
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I’ve read Frankl’s book. He doesn’t go into details, but in the intro he talks about how he’s not proud of what he - and many of the other survivors - did to stay alive. And how the difficulty of making sense of a life after the Holocaust is compounded by the things one did. Quoting from memory: “The best among us died in those camps.” Which is one hell of a thing to say, and to live with, and to be glossed-over later by a brain-dead news host.
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Lots of good points made upthread, but event the fact that the conversation here revolves around concentration camps is already missing the point. Most Jews who were killed in the Holocaust never even saw a concentration camp. They were shot in open pits (as in Babyn Yar, Paneriai, and many, many other sites of various sizes) or killed in death factories like Treblinka, Belzec or Sobibor. Timothy Snyder makes the distinction in “Bloodlands”:
Some of those people had been previously forced to work in ghettos, but that was just a means to stretch time, not an alternative to death, regardless of anyone’s “usefulness.”
The public understanding of the Holocaust is skewed by Auschwitz, which is a very unusual place in that it was both a concentration and an extermination camp: others were generally one or the other. It is also very unusual in that it left behind thousands of survivors: other death factories were built, fulfilled their purpose and were dismantled leaving hardly any innocent witnesses.
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I’m sure Gutfeld has all kind of reasons why the Nazis would have considered comedians useful.
Also, seriously, fuck Gutfeld.
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Frankl did those operations before he was in the camps, not to survive or (IMO) to please the Nazis but out of a misguided attempt to relieve suffering and save lives and impart dignity. What he didn’t grasp was that the suicides of Vienna’s Jews were in large part political protests, an attempt to show the world that their lives under this monstrous regime did indeed have no meaning and never would.
Whatever his intent, he was unqualified to do the procedures described above, which didn’t extend the life of the person who attempted suicide beyond a day or two and which probably created more suffering. He also played into the hands of Austrian Nazis, who were so embarrassed by the spectacle of Jews committing suicide that they made it illegal (only they had the legal right to kill Jews).
Frankl is a complex figure in terms of the practise of moral and ethical philosophy. Whatever one thinks of him, he deserves to be cited by better people than a grinning fascist hatemonger like Gutfeld.
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Yeah, victims were left alive in the ghettos temporarily because they were already killing them as fast as they could.
Good point. The ultimate example of “survivor bias.”
One does wonder what is next in the right’s excuse of genocide explanations? The Khmer Rouse were practicing urban renewal? Franco was promoting land reform? The great defenestration of Prague was basically an amusement park ride? Seriously, fuck these guys.
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I have seen a lot of people saying that the slaves brought to the Americas were already slaves in Africa, so no one would be responsible for the nearly 400 years of slavery on the continent.
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I hate hate so much. I am more than intolerant of the intolerant, bigoted, mindless fuckwits on the right. Even those creeps who would be mere annoyances, the middle-of-the-road morons, are now spewing hateful garbage.
Wish their Daddy’d call all of 'em home.
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That makes NO sense. Just because you paid the thief for a stolen car does not give you the right to keep it. Similarly, just because you didn’t personally abduct somebody from their home does not give you the moral right keep them enslaved. And the importation of new slaves into the US was made illegal in 1818, so by the Civil War, very few of the slaves in the US were “already slaves in Africa.”
You know I like the modern practice of replacing the terms slaves and slave owners (holders) with the enslaved people and enslavers. It emphasized the fact that keeping people enslaved and torturing them so that they work for you is an ACTIVE process. Torture and the threat of torture was really the only thing that kept many from trying to secure their freedom by running away.
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This is one of those stupid points that some stupid people like to use to try to disqualify their “opponents”. If someone talks about racism and how today’s world was shaped by the injustice of slavery and that something should be done about it, these people say that black people enslaved other black people and sold them to Europeans. Thus, for them, any form of minority organization is nothing but sheer hypocrisy.
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