Standing under the gates at Auschwitz and trying to make sense of this place whose every shadow is the very embodiment of evil, philosopher Jon Jacobs makes this profoundly important point:
Once you accept the proposition that people can be used without their consent, this is where you end. Philosopher Doug den Uyl then added, 'And the first step towards thinking people can be used without their consent is to claim that the individual exists for the sake of society.'Read the whole post at Stephen Hicks' site: Scroll down to those gates, stand in their shadow for a moment, and contemplate the certainty that man's proper state is to exist for his own sake, not for the sake of society. Down any other road is the path of destruction.
3 comments:
Bravo!
The thing I can't get my head around is that there are extent in North Korea concentration camps that are every bit as horrific as anything from the 20th century and this evil goes relatively unremarked upon. The murdering butcherers of Pyongyang have created a terrifying prison state whose economy depends very much on the slave labour of the gulags. We can see these gulags on Google Maps and in Google Earth, we can buy products from the camps in the West, we can read harrowing tales of death, torture, and survival by people that have been imprisoned or that were guards. There is no excuse for saying “we didn’t know”.
12 "political" prisons. 30 concentration camps. 200,000 people.
The gulags of North Korea must be watched.
And people need to know that there is an underground in North Korea that desparately needs all the help it can get.
"And the first step towards thinking people can be used without their consent is to claim that the individual exists for the sake of society."
It is a scary thought, isn't it?
And it's happening in places besides North Korea, although it needs to be pointed out that the Holocaust differs in one great respect which is that it was the planned extermination of several groups because they were of a particular race or religion, and obviously those of the Jewish religion were the foremost target of that systematic destruction.
Their being used without their consent was merely a sidebar, necessary to the German war effort.
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