Who's to Blame
Our human obsession with placing blame, beyond ourselves, is such as to diagnose the entire race of us with narcissistic personality disorder. Placing blame, finding guilt, and the satisfaction of punishment. It keeps on keeping on. Couple weeks ago, idiots shrieking for prosecution of parents whose child got into the gorilla cage. This week, fools calling to blame parents of a toddler attacked and killed by an alligator, as though blame must be placed for the horrific, and justice extracted. If blame must be placed, the blame is Ultimate, and justice has already been served.
In news this morning, a German court judges a 94-year-old guilty and sentences to prison for being an SS guard at Auschwitz. As though weeding out and prosecuting the last Third Reich participants will in time absolve the nation of complicity, which was total, enthusiastic and so total and complicit, that the only “justice” would have been to erase Germany from the map and eradicate the entire Deutsche Volk after April 1945, or the whole human race, the lot of us. Guilt-ridden, narcissistically, they think they are purifying themselves, washing their hands of the blood of the innocent, as though perhaps the master race will re-emerge once abluted, cleansed. But there is no way to assuage the Holocaust, or man’s other inhumanities to man, and stoning an old man in a wheelchair in no way mitigates the corporate guilt of a tainted nation massively guilty, and world, even untold decades later. No one can forgive but the victims and their generations forever unborn. And absolution cannot be earned anymore than can theological justification. If absolution is as mindless as waving the hand over in the sign of the cross, or finding a pathetic old man “guilty as charged,” the only way to penance is for all those who during the frenzy responded to Sieg, and each and every one of their descendants, to drink their KoolAde and resign the race.
Hiding from themselves and lacking perception, much less courage, to recuse, the guilty instead presume to judge and condemn. Not prison for one, or a few, penance would be an eternal reminder, perhaps to keep direct participants among themselves alive and in public as long as medically possible, alive and moving amongst themselves as reminder to themselves of what they all are; of what we all are; and finally, stalinesque, embalm and entomb the last corpse as eternal symbol of the worst that we can be.
Created in the divine image, the blame is Ultimate; and, as Carl Jung once suggested, the penance is the Cross.
eyes of Reinhold Hanning, 94, in the courtroom