{"id":2487,"date":"2018-10-31T10:10:35","date_gmt":"2018-10-31T17:10:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/essays.rsree.com.org\/?p=2487"},"modified":"2018-10-31T10:10:35","modified_gmt":"2018-10-31T17:10:35","slug":"the-night-of-broken-glass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/essays.rsree.com\/index.php\/2018\/10\/31\/the-night-of-broken-glass\/","title":{"rendered":"The Night of Broken Glass"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Kristallnacht-1938<\/p><\/div>\n

This November it will be exactly 80 years ago that a\u00a0wave of\u00a0anti-Jewish savagery and destruction broke out across Nazi occupied Europe on November 9 and 10 in 1938. \u00a0Known as \u00a0the Kristallnacht<\/em>, or the\u00a0Night of Broken Glass<\/em>, after the shards of shattered glass that lined German streets in the wake of the pogrom – broken glass from the windows of synagogues, Jewish-owned homes and businesses were ransacked, plundered or destroyed during the violence, \u00a0often by neighbors and acquaintances of the victims.\u00a0These November pogroms marked the start of the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

Hateful, riotous and violent events such as these raise the chilling question how people can be made to turn on their fellow citizens en masse<\/em>, to the point of destroying their properties and livelihoods, or even by killing them.<\/p>\n

Such events do not occur in isolation, of course, and are often years in the making, and typically the outcome of\u00a0a climate of division, misinformation, mistrust, intimidation, hate-mongering and fear.\u00a0 At bottom lies the vulnerability of the human race to being manipulated by folks who claim that they have the answers to all their problems, and who are able to convince others of their creed by appealing to the most basic instincts of our species, amongst which greed and fear are the more susceptible\u00a0 ones.<\/p>\n

In addition, their appeal feeds on another intrinsic feature of the human race, namely the need to belong to the herd.\u00a0 Described by Nietzsche<\/em> as the obedience of the individual to the mass, blindly and without reflection<\/em>, and perhaps best characterized by his near-contemporary existentialist writer Kierkegaard<\/em>, when he said that \u2026 we men are constantly in need of \u201cthe others,\u201d the herd; we die, or despair, if we are not reassured by being in the herd, of the same opinion as the herd.\u00a0 <\/em>And,\u00a0 as Simone Weil once remarked,\u00a0 people find comfort in the absence of the necessity to think.<\/em><\/p>\n

Clearly, such basic human tendencies work directly against the willingness and ability to think about the morality of our actions for ourselves – as individuals – as well as the courage to act accordingly, regardless of diverging mass opinions. This as opposed to being purely driven by instinct,\u00a0 something that would have urged our animal ancestors to prefer the safety of numbers by remaining within the herd,\u00a0 for no other reason than being a member of the same species with the need to conform.<\/p>\n

That the latter can be a contributing factor in the occurrence of mass violence –\u00a0including\u00a0 state sponsored genocide,\u00a0as in the case of Nazi Germany – can be seen in the context of the herd instinct being alive and well and continuing to thrive amongst the more vulnerable-minded of our species, particularly in the religious and political spheres.\u00a0 And if our history has shown us anything it is the fact that such outbreaks of mass violence can be initiated by those who have a purpose for it, or,\u00a0 if they are afflicted with a pathological need to dominate others and the obsession with the exercise of power.<\/p>\n

Not easily understood if you are not affected by it – and essentially a delusion about one\u2019s own power or importance – Adolf Hitler<\/em> rise to power resulting in WWII is perhaps history\u2019s most\u00a0deadly example of how millions of people can be murdered for no reason other than that someone believing in their own divine purpose and invincibility is able to motivate others to blindly act out their deadly manic or paranoid disorder for them.<\/em><\/p>\n

This couldn\u2019t happen in our day and age you say? But you only have to watch the large adoring crowds at various Trump rallies and their absolute delight in chanting \u201cLock Her Up\u201d to understand how the masses can be manipulated and potentially motivated to commit a heinous act.<\/p>\n

With the oratory skills of a pulpit bully and employing a 5th-grade\u00a0 vocabulary largely limited to hollow phraseology such as \u201cit\u2019s gonna be great, it\u2019s gonna be fantastic!\u201d, a large and primarily anti-intellectual crowd for whom truth is a function of what they want to believe as opposed to what is actually the case\u00a0 – after being told what they want to hear, e.g., how deserving they are, or how wonderful they are\u00a0 \u2013 can be made to focus on an illusionary enemy<\/em> who is made out to be standing in the way of their entitlements, a promised utopia, and conceivably set afoot from there, and never mind the consequences.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This November it will be exactly 80 years ago that a\u00a0wave of\u00a0anti-Jewish savagery and destruction broke out across Nazi occupied Europe on November 9 and 10 in 1938. \u00a0Known as \u00a0the Kristallnacht, or the\u00a0Night of Broken Glass, after the shards … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[478],"tags":[15,151,170,199,232,255,256,379,386],"class_list":["post-2487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-people-politics-culture","tag-adolf-hitler","tag-genocide","tag-herd-instinct","tag-instinct-versus-reason","tag-kristallnacht","tag-mass-violence","tag-mass-manipulation","tag-spinoza","tag-state-sponsored-violence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/essays.rsree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/essays.rsree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/essays.rsree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essays.rsree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essays.rsree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2487"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/essays.rsree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2487\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/essays.rsree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essays.rsree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essays.rsree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}