The Drowned and the Saved (Continued)

Now that I've gotten in the routine of posting two times a week, I am going to try for three times a week starting today.

I there isn't much time left in the year, but I hope this will help make up for the three weeks when I didn't post at all.

Rein's comment in class today connecting Locke's arguments about power to the situation in the concentration camps as described in The Drowned and the Saved.

I think it is interesting the extent to which the Nazis when to dehumanize prisoners in the concentration camps, especially Jews.

In my mind, it must have required a combination true sadism on the part of the orchestrators of this plan for genocide and an insane lust for maintaining power by any means.

The latter, in my view, helps to explain why they would encourage such sadism among soldiers. People are not naturally sadists. It is an "acquired taste."

In essence, the drugs Nazi leaders chose to control both their population and soldiers were raw hatred and sadism.

Indeed, this is short-sighted if your goal is to keep yourself in power. No stable society has ever been founded on such principles. If left unchecked, eventually "the magician loses control of his spells," and all this hatred turns upon the leadership.

Not to mention, such a society can only exist as long as their are places to conquer and people to torment.

Even in theory, such a society is unsustainable.

This is why the choices Nazi leaders made baffle me, in on a pragmatic level.