Stanislaw Lem's Holocaust

On Incomprehending the Comprehensible

Excerpt from above video: 

Professor Elana Gomel writes in her essay on "Provocation": It is only in modernity that genocide comes into its own as a motiveless, purposeless act of extermination. The Holocaust is an event of our present and even more of our future. The murder of 6 million Jews wasn't caused by Untamed Evil from our past, but by a new form of Evil emerging from modernity itself. From forces of modernity we are barely starting to comprehend. And as soon as we do comprehend them, we fast find ways to uncomprehend them. Incomprehensive Evil is quite simply the understanding that the entire ideological apparatus of Nazism, to quote Professor Gomel, was "nothing but a window dressing for the desire to kill."

We have many ways of avoiding this realization. We talk about Nazism as nationalism, or class struggle. We pretend the Nazis were genuinely deluded by an actual belief in their nonsense mystifications of Jews as "an alien species". But the reality, that we are desperate to incomprehend is just this: Humans like to humiliate, torture and kill other humans. Nazism was nothing but a theatrical justification for those dark desires.

But that pleasure wasn't only the act of murder, it was murder for a higher cause. Murder to serve a greater good. Murder with meaning. The true pleasure is the act of violence that is justified by a "Transcendent Purpose". Killing that makes us not killers, but Saviors. To truly do bad things, people must believe they are doing good things. So the Ethics of Evil requires the invention of a "Transcendent Purpose," and that requires The Ethics of Kitsch.

I don't think I properly understood the argument presented by Stanislav Lem in "Provocation", or the Holocaust itself until my third reading of the story, deep into the process of making this video essay and these lines. Hitler's conquest consisted in the careerism of lumpens, simpletons, Non-Commissioned Officer's sons, Baker's Assistants, and Third Rate Writers who longed for high position as salvation.

The saturation of our culture with Nazi imagery can't help but impart a certain glamour on these symbols: the Hugo Boss uniforms, the Eagles, nine crosses, the black and the red. So it's easy to forget that Nazism was a movement of the subpar, and the semi-educated. A mob of mediocrity that had killed, or forced into exile, the talented, and the skilled. When the narrow imagination of the Nazi mob turned to creating a mystification for itself, to provide "Transcendent Purpose" for the desire to kill, what it made was a monstrous kitsch. A self-satisfying Ego trip of bad art and recycled symbolism.

What's horrifying about the Nazi officer burning bodies, or the mob beating a mother and her daughter in the Lyiv ghetto? I keep looking at this Photograph to try and understand isn't that these are deities of War, but that these are very mediocre people indulging a cheap desire to humiliate and kill, covered over with a kitsch fantasy of meaning. And that this is the truth of the Holocaust.

Stanislav Lem completes his warning against modern Evil with an examination of how the Ethics of Evil, and the Ethics of Kitsch, are spreading through Modern culture. The second volume of "Genocide, Foreign Body Death" examines how modern terrorism replicates the Nazi Ethics of Evil. No doubt Len would have recognized the kitsch mystification of young martyrs live streaming the deaths of entire families for a place in Eternal Paradise.

But the death camps and terrorist attacks of the 20th century are only a foretaste of what the Ethics of Evil, and the Ethics of Kitsch, hold in store for us. What more is left to Mankind in the field of these dark activities? What other games with death will he invent, sometimes veiled, sometimes exciting with a bloody strip tease?

With this unanswered question ends "A History of Genocide" by Horst Aspernicus, and Stanislav Lem's lifelong search for the truth of the holocaust. Modern culture contains many people lost in the Ethics of Evil, and the Ethics of Kitsch. Lem tells us that if you are only honest enough to comprehend this reality, you will will see them clearly hiding behind their kitsch mystifications, looking for easy victims. Just waiting for a provocation

More -  Elana Gomel, 'Stanislaw Lem "Provocation": the Ethics of Genocide'