You’re Right, They Aren’t. Even Though You’d Like Them To Be.

From Sight and Sound:

Frankfurter Rundschau 21.09.2007

Arno Widmann reflects on the 116 newly discovered photos showing Auschwitz SS guards at rest on display at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in New York: "These aren't Abu Ghraib photos. The Auschwitz staff didn't photograph each other lashing out at the inmates, or while they were being murdered. Perhaps such photos will yet appear. But these images are even more horrible. Here we come close to the perpetrators. And with them, their deeds. The Abu Ghraib photos show us what people are capable of. The Auschwitz photos show nothing, they give us a sense of what we are capable of. In front of them we start to think about the circumstances that make murderers of neighbours."

Let’s set aside the disingenuousness of the statement and test the comparison’s trying to be made here: 1.6 million people were killed at Auschwitz, while no-one was killed at Abu Greib since the days of Saddam Hussein.

Ant the people in the pictures Arno “Winkler” Widmann is talking about appear to be enjoying themselves in a manner beneath the humanity of anyone who would be aware of what’s going in. With great Euro-élan, they once again make it look effortless. While being entirely unaware of how little change has been seen in the temperament and excitability of the garden variety European, the matter of the 150 million dead resulting from the European concepts of Marxism, Fascism, and other evolved forms of dictatorship and Fin De Ciècle public madness is blotted out of the mind, having never passed the unaware and unhealed soul.

So indeed, those fetishising the 3 weeks and 20-odd criminals abused at Abu-Greib very much need to put on a happy face while the comparisons flow, if they need that to diminish their confusion. To reiterate: we KNOW ABOUT THIS because the Army BUSTED THEY PEOPLE THAT DID IT. On the other hand, the German government and a large part of the society willfully constructed the concentration camps and protected their knowledge of them for as long as possible.

Even to this day there are people engaging in verbal contortions to convince others that Auschwitz was A-O-TAY.

Want a really apt comparison? Compare the European denial and willful ignorance of the abuse that minorities face in the radical, socialist-arab-nationalist, and areas where religious law dominates people – with the contented look on the faces of the photographed cited in Frankfurter Rundschau.

Really want to know what horrors people are capable of? No need to cite 3 weeks in an Iraqi Prison. One merely need look at European history within living memory, and in their desperate and paranoiac need to accuse others of something when it took them millennia to open up their borders even to one another across a patchwork of miniscule fortresses of “culture” on their own patch.