Bulletin #701
Subject: Between the Hammer and the Anvil, Corporate Resistance
to Democratic Socialist Movements Contesting Labor Exploitation and the
Imperialist War Economy.
11 June 2016
Grenoble, France
Dear Colleagues and Friends of
CEIMSA,
The young Polish author and poet Tadeusw Borozski (1922-1951) was
23 years old when he was released from Dachau in 1945, at the end of the War.
He had been an art history
student in Warsaw University. The son of Christian parents, he was captured by the German
SS in a trap when he went looking for his girlfriend who had visited an
apartment where members of the Polish resistance met. He spent three years in
Auschwitz and Dachau, between 1943 and 1945, entering Auschwitz just weeks after Germans decided to stop sending "Aryans" to the gas chambers. He set as his post-war goal,
should he survive, “to tell the truth about mankind to those who do not know
it.”(p.175)
Borozski did survive the concentration camp experience --for a few
years anyway-- and he wrote a series of almost anecdotal short stories
describing his experiences during his nearly three years of imprisonment in the
Nazi concentration camps. His book, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,
was published posthumously by Philip Roth in 1959, eight years after he had
committed suicide in Warsaw, at the age of 29. Like Varlam
Shalamov’s terse but eloquent descriptions of the Russian Gulag slave
labor camps in Kolyma Tails, Boroaski’s
stories offer readers stark descriptions of the causes and effects of human behavior, after people have been reduced to living in less than human
conditions, and when they no longer have access to the normal range of human
emotions. This book is by no means a binary account of human/non-human
behavior; instead Borozsky is able to uncover the
hypocrisy, the treachery, the banal acceptance of deception, betrayal and of
collaborating daily with one’s oppressors. In one of the final essays in this
book, he looks back on the three years of his “European over-education” :
The four of us became involved in a heated discussion with
the poet, his silent wife and his mistress (the philologist), by maintaining
that in this war morality, national solidarity, patriotism and the ideals of
freedom, justice and human dignity had all slid off man like a rotten rag. We
said that there is no crime that a man will not commit in order to save
himself. And, having saved himself, he will commit crimes for increasingly
trivial reasons; he will commit them first out of duty, then from habit, and finally
–for pleasure.
We told them with much relish all about our difficult, patient,
concentration-camp existence which had taught us that the whole world is really
like a concentration camp; the weak work for the strong, and if they have
no strength or will to work –then let them steal, or let them die.
‘The world is ruled by neither justice nor morality; crime is not punished nor
virtue rewarded, one is forgotten as quickly as the other. The world is ruled
by power and power is obtained with money. To work is senseless, because money
cannot be obtained through work but through exploitation of others. And if we
cannot exploit as much as we wish, at least let us work as little as we can. Moral duty? We believe neither in the morality of man, nor
in the morality of systems. In German cities the store windows are filled with
books and religious objects, but the smoke from the crematoria still hovers
above the forests . . . . (p.168)
‘Europe will be lost. We are living here day after day, separated only by a
fragile dyke from the deluge rising around us; when it breaks through it will
tear away man’s freedom like a suit of clothing. But who knows what the man who will chose to defend himself may be capable of. The
fire in the crematorium has been extinguished, but the smoke has not yet
settled. I would not like to have our bodies used as kindling. Nor would I want
to light the fires. I want to live, that is all.(p.169)
The young author had lived
among men and women of all ages --including captured politicos, and arrested
criminals, and various ethnic groups who had been hunted by the corporate state
authorities across Europe. Submitting to this new corporatist culture
inside Nazi concentration camps --with their own special hierarchies, which
crystallized among the inmates in their desperate quests for individual survival-- had a dehumanizing effect on all the inmates and
collaborators. This is the cruel subject of Borozsky’s
illustrative stories in This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, and
the lessons to be learned are contemporary.
In the 9 items below,
CEIMSA readers will recognize the concentration camp behavior which
colors our lives today, where corporate culture is promoting the tunnel
vision of “rational choice” theory that focuses on “each person for
him/herself” with such narrow aims for rewards that might keep us alive at
least a little longer, but little more than that . . . . This is the familiar modus
vivendi in today’s neoliberal society, with its
technically controlled consumerism, which no longer simply anticipates
our desires, but actually manufactures them for profitable commercial
exploitation, in the fictitious name of individual “freedom” and personal
fulfillment. “When the going gets tough; the tough go shopping!” reads one
California bumper sticker from the 1980s.
Sincerely,
Francis Feeley
Professor of American Studies
University of Grenoble-3
Director of Research
University of Paris-Nanterre
Center for the Advanced Study of American Institutions and Social Movements
The University of California-San Diego
http://www.ceimsa.org
a.
John
Pilger on the Threat of World War Three
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article44824.htm
Video
"Under
Obama Nuclear war head production is greater than under any post cold war
president."
Multi-award winning author and filmmaker John Pilger
gives his take on the threat of World War Three as Britain's defence secretary Michael Fallon jets off to Singapore for
the Asian Security Conference where the keynote address will be given by U.S. Defence Secretary Ash Carter.
===========
b.
NATO Exercises Encircling Russia: U.S.
Might be Sleepwalking into a Doomsday Scenario
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=16493
As U.S. destroyers and warships enter the Black Sea for the first time since
the Cold War, NATO's ten-day military exercises encircling Russia threatens
peace in Europe says Richard Sakwa, Professor of
Russian and European Politics at University of Kent
===========
c.
Corporate Media Obscures Muhammad Ali's
Anti-Imperialism
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=16468
Historian Gerald Horne says we can't let Ali's legacy be written by people like
former president Bill Clinton, who will be speaking at his funeral
===========
d.
Democrats Launch Severe Attack on Free Speech to Protect
Israel
by
Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Fishman
===========
e.
Crimes of the War on Terror
(Should George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Others Be Jailed?)
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176150/tomgram:_rebecca_gordon,_justice_for_torturers/#more
by
Rebecca Gordon
===========
f.
Anglo-America: Regression and Reversion
in the Modern World
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article44808.htm
The
Anglo-American drive to establish a global regressive social order has pushed
billions of workers on five continents into destitution.
by
James Petras
===========
g.
Jill Stein to Bernie Sanders: Run on
the Green Party Ticket & Continue Your Political Revolution
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/6/9/jill_stein_to_bernie_sanders_run
===========
h.
"The
Campaign Will Go On": Sanders Backers Vow to Keep Fighting to Change
Nation & Democratic Party
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/6/10/the_campaign_will_go_on_sanders
===========
i.
Mr. Sanders Goes to
Washington: Obama Presiding Over "Not a Marriage But
a Truce"
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=16508
Bill Curry, Former Clinton White House Counsel, says Sanders has built an
independent political movement that is going to hold the Democratic Party
accountable to the base; what is required is a frank recognition of the policy
differences between the base and the leadership