W.J. Astore
Coming to Hate Those You Kill
After attending a seminar at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum with Henry Friedlander, I taught my first course on the Holocaust just over two decades ago. I then continued to teach courses on the Holocaust until I retired as a professor of history in 2014. Having read dozens of books on the Holocaust, seen dozens of moviesand documentaries on it, and having talked to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, including Henry Friedlander, I learned a few things about how and why such a colossal crime against humanity happened.
When I took his seminar, Friedlander, who as a teenager survived Auschwitz, taught us that “You don’t kill the people you hate—you hate the people you kill.” It may seem paradoxical, but this insight is powerful. Normal human beings don’t want to be or become killers. Thankfully, killing isn’t easy, even at a remove. (Drone operators are known to suffer adverse symptoms from witnessing death at a distance.)
Yet, if you’re taught and told that you must kill, the moral, mental, physical, and other burdens of killing may drive you to hate those you are killing. “Look at what you made me do!” the killer thinks. You made me do this—and I hate you for it. Doesn’t matter that you’re a guiltless child, I still hate you.
I wonder about Israeli officials today, those who are in control of the demolition of Gaza. A few must truly hate Hamas, but there are many more, I think, who’d prefer not to be put in the position of ordering (or carrying out) massive bombing raids and ground invasions that result in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians.
How many in Israel, notably in the Israeli Defense Forces, will come to hate those that they kill? How many will succumb to hate as a matter of survival, a sort of mental coping mechanism?
Honestly, I don’t pretend to understand it all. Catchphrases like “man’s inhumanity to man” or “the banality of evil” seem too easy. I remember reading an interview with Primo Levi, another Holocaust survivor, who related an anecdote about his experience communicating with an unrepentant Nazi in Germany well after World War II. This man wrote to Levi to defend himself; unbeknownst to him, his wife snuck a note into the letter that read:
“When the devil is loose in the village, a few people try to resist and are overcome, many bow their heads, and the majority follow him with enthusiasm.”*
Whether you prefer “devil” or “evil” or “racist extremist” or some other term, history shows how humans readily unleash the most elemental barbarism when they believe they are threatened, especially when the “threat” is dehumanized.
Do we kill those we hate, or do we come to hate those we kill? Regardless of the causality here, the common words “hate” and “kill” tell us that to stop the hating and killing, we must simply stop. Stop killing. Stop hating. Find another way, a better way, a way that is life-affirming.
In teaching the Holocaust, I came across a multi-volume encyclopedia devoted to humanity’s genocides throughout history. Imagine that! An encyclopedia is needed just to document the almost countless times humans have engaged in mass murder against other humans.
Will Gaza (2023) become the latest entry in this devilish encyclopedia?
*Ferdinando Camon, Conversations with Primo Levi, The Marlboro Press, 1989, p. 37.
Bracing Views 
Appropriately philosophical, and darkly so. Thank you. Indeed, “…(no sentient being of good will can) pretend to understand it all.”
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… what’s hard and scariest is U.S. empire’s role in making-supporting this genocide to continue on… read somewhere 70 percent of Americans are against what’s happening in Gaza… that leaves a-third in favor.. how can it be so many … we’re so-removed-unaware
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Reminds me of this old story from the Bible. Verse 15 sums it up. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Samuel%2013&version=NLT 12 “No, my brother!” she cried. “Don’t be foolish! Don’t do this to me! Such wicked things aren’t done in Israel. 13 Where could I go in my shame? And you would be called one of the greatest fools in Israel. Please, just speak to the king about it, and he will let you marry me.”
14 But Amnon wouldn’t listen to her, and since he was stronger than she was, he raped her. 15 Then suddenly Amnon’s love turned to hate, and he hated her even more than he had loved her. “Get out of here!” he snarled at her
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Thanks for this. I had to get out my old Catholic Bible, which has this as “2 Kings, 12-15,” where Amnon simply “lays” with Thamar. Quite a euphemism for rape, right?
Reading on, I see that Amnon was killed for this rape–justice indeed. He rapes her then hates her.
Can’t say I was unhappy to learn of Amnon’s fate.
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RE: ISRAEL/PALESTING: The following is an insightful interview well worth watching with Gabor Mate, a Hungarian-Canadian physician.
Dr. Gabor Maté shares his reflections on Israel/Palestine including recent tragic events on and following October 7th, 2023. This conversation was recorded on October 28, 2023, and was facilitated by Hannah Maté. Gabor Mate has a background in family practice and a special interest in childhood development and trauma…
Resources – Cited in Video:
Places to donate:
The Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund – http://www.pcrf.net
Dror Israel – http://www.drorisrael.org
Please share additional worthy causes in the comments
Social media handles/links of voices/activism on the topic of Israel/Palestine:
Jewish Voice for Peace – @Jewishvoiceforpeace
Independent Jewish Voices – www. ijvcanada.og
If Not Now – @Ifnotnow
Democracy Now! – @democracynow
Gideon Levy – @levy_haaretz
Amira Hass – @Hass_Haaretz
Chris Hedges – @chrislynnhedges
Norman Finkelstein – @normfinkelstein
The Grayzone News – @thegrayzonenews
Ali Abunimah – @aliabunimah – and The Electronic Intifada https://electronicintifada.net/
Yousef Munayyer – @yousefmunayyer
Noura Erakat – @4noura
Aaron Maté – @aaronjmate
Daniel Maté – @danielbmate
Books recommended by Gabor in this video:
The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities by Simha Flapan
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Khalidi
Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom by Norman Finkelstein
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé
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Composed fourteen years ago and just as valid today:
With apologies to the shade of Percy Bysshe Shelley and his immortal poem “Ozymandias,” I offer here a brief meditation on the current, continuing, and contemplated depredations of the Apartheid Zionist Entity upon those captive Palestinian Arabs who had absolutely nothing to do with the German/Christian persecution of Jews in Europe before and during World War II.
Cozy, Scandalous
I met a refugee from Gaza Strip,
Who spoke to me with empty, staring eyes
Dumb words whose depth of pain I could not grip
With all the helping hands the world denies
While lapping up the lurid lies that slip
And roll so greasy off the practiced tongue
Of Zionists whose caged and wounded prey
Are told to flee and leave their dying young
To weep beside the corpses of their old
In darkened shattered former homes where they
Cannot refute the garbage we’ve been told
By glib Israeli liars trained to spread
A veil of darkness over crimes they’ve sold
As “Peaceful Co-Existence” — with the dead.
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2009
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And another in the same style inspired by our US/UK Zionist-bootlicking “governments” . . .
Oceania in 2023
The Secretive Collective Oligarchy
anointed by our courts as Power, Inc.,
produces Narrative, puerile and snarky,
intended for us proles to eat and drink
then swallow without tasting pure malarky.
Our role in life: to buy but not to think.
In charge, a schizophrenic and psychotic
cabal of cretins slithering through slime:
a “leadership” decrepit and sclerotic
long past whatever one could call their “prime,”
addicted to War’s treacherous narcotic,
resulting in a “government” despotic:
Assange in Belmarsh prison for no crime
The “Law” a mealy-mouth-noise pantomime.
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2023
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Wonderful! I’m sure I have my “window into the past” correct in assuming that you wrote this meditation on the heels of the 2008-9 murderous Zionist assault on Gaza. It was typical Zionist arrogance and cleverness and “never missing an opportunity to exploit an opportunity” that saw the 21-day psychopathological Zionist rage erupt just after Obama was elected and just before he took the POTUS oath of office….thereby assuring that neither the “former” ZioOccupied US administration [Dubya’s] nor the “incoming” ZioOccupied US administration would be able to consider, much less take, any executive-level action toward issuing a peep of outrage at that particular episode of Ziowar crimes. (Not, to be sure, that any “peep” would emanate from any source in ZioOccupied WashDC…but the Zionists couldn’t resist rubbing salt into the wounds of sane/aware Americans and hapless Palestinians.)
Ahh…the basards are that clever…may a razor-sharp cleaver descend on and slice through the Zionist *colonial head and proceed with resolve and vigor to sever it and all its myriad tentacles and extremities fully and finally…faster, please.
And you’re right, of course: “…just as valid today.”
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re the 28 Oct 23 Bracing Views “What Gaza Needs Now Is Mercy”…:
What Gaza ~ more specifically, the Human Beings who are still alive in Gaza ~ actually, really NEEDS is quite simple.
They need for the American People ~ specifically, the Citizens/Taxpayers/Voters of this nation ~ to pull their individual and collective heads out of their collective and individual asses, and to DEMAND that their so-called “government” ORDER Israel to immediately cease and desist all offensive military action in Gaza, declare a Cease-Fire, and ensure that any and all Humanitarian Relief ~ as in Edible Food, Potable Water, Functioning Fuel, and Basic Medical and Surgical Supplies and Equipment for starters ~ be permitted to proceed unhampered and unmolested by the IDF into the War Zone.
Unfortunately, given the number of Americans who are directly and/or indirectly benefitting from Israel’s Rape of Gaza ~ be they elected politicians, entrenched civilian or military bureaucrats, anointed political appointees, the propagandists of that government’s so-called “media,” and all them MICC cogs [workers, supervisors, managers, executives, board members, and shareholders] ~ what the People of Gaza NEED is not going to happen.
It is not going to happen for the simple reason that Americans’ heads are too far jammed up and in for them to do anything effective for and meaningful to the People of Gaza. Just like they have been about America’s War with Russia in Ukraine since February 2022, and the People of that war-destroyed land, country, and nation. And meanwhile, that MICC is raking in record earnings and profits that promise only to get bigger and better.
But if nothing else, one thing this whole Goat Fuck has demonstrated is Biden’s re-election strategy.
America has a history of “not changing horses in the middle of the stream” when it is involved in a War [think FDR, LBJ, Nixon, Cheney, and Obama]. And on November 5, 2024, Team Biden is counting on America being wrapped up in at least two wars ~ Ukraine and Gaza [and the regional conflict it is headed toward] ~ if not a third with China. And maybe even a fourth with Mexico. And Team Biden is looking forward to all of them.
Of course, at this stage of The Game, there may not even be a national election in November 2024. What would happen if there was another 9/11? Or ~ as is all but guaranteed ~ another Pandemic [but one that predominately kills young and healthy Americans as opposed to old and medically compromised ones like the last one]? Or another 2008esque “Too Big To Fail” financial “¢risi$,” but orders of magnitude worse even to the point of the almighty Dollar being displaced as the world’s Reserve Currency and a Default on America’s $33.6 TRILLION national, sovereign Debt?
And even if there is that election, there may very well not be an Inauguration of the next President and seating of the new Congress in January 2025. And if that happens, the American People will have nobody to blame but themselves.
All of which leads to one of those “Most Important Questions” confronting Americans that nobody likes hearing asked: “Will the United States of America survive to celebrate its 250th birthday on July 4, 2026? And if it does, will the American People be in any condition or mood to celebrate anything?”
Another way of phrasing that MIQ is: “CAN the USA survive?” And a better way of phrasing it is: “SHOULD the USA survive?”
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