On Tuesday, August 6, 2019, 04:53:02 AM CDT, vascojoao2003@... [hegel] <hegel@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

 

Paul, 

I was talking about the holocaust. I was arguing that the Jewish people, as a people, were, are, a form of reason, which, and this was the point, the Nazis didn't recognize - and that this was and is the fundamental irrationality of the holocaust. The infrastructure of all the violence. Irrationality, I proposed, was the lack of recognition of reason, moreover the reduction of the form of reason to an impossible, contradictory, shape - the immediacy of genes.

João.

---In hegel@yahoogroups.com, <petrejo@...> wrot

Mary,

Thanks for showing an interest in João's reflections on the Holocaust.

João wants to recognize that both Nazi and Jew held "chosen race" ideologies.  To some  degree, the Nazi ideology was a crude imitation of the Jewish ideology.  The Aryan wanted to be the "chosen people", never the Jews!

It was a form of historical envy; of "ressentiment" as Nietzsche might say.

The Aryan people had indeed lost all sense of history, as Hegel amply showed.  Caesar opened up Europe by conquest -- and the history of Germany was the history of its imitation of Rome -- down to her newest Religion -- Christianity.

The governments of Europe constructed their own Senates and elected their own Senators.  Everything became an imitation of Rome.

Gone were the Ayran runes, those primitive stone age alphabetical talismans.  They were now rejected as superstition -- along with all the quasi-Celtic superstitions of the Northern Europeans. 

By 1920, there was no memory at all in Germany of the allegedly "glorious" days before Christianity arose.  It had been suppressed for more than 1,500 years. It was gone.

However, the world history of the Jews remained intact with their Bible, which was still living, and still thriving, and had expanded to include Gentiles through Jesus, and to include Arabians through Muhammad.

The most ancient Jewish history was alive and well, thank you very much -- while the German (allegedly Aryan) history was dead and gone.

Clearly the Nazi advocates of a Master Race were motivated by jealously.  Now the obsession of Adolf Hitler over the works of Nietzsche become clearer.  Nietzsche's Antichrist (1888) complained that Christians had brought Jewish culture to Europe -- and that it must be extricated root and branch!

It is rarely noted that Hitler said during his Table Talks, that he passionately intended to "replace the Cross by the Swastika."  Here is one tangible example:

"The reason why the ancient world was so pure, 

light and serene was that it knew nothing of the

two great scourges: smallpox and Christianity." 

(Adolf Hitler, TABLE TALK, October 19, 1941)

You are quite right, Mary, to notice that both Jews and Nazi's saw themselves as "set apart."  Through Jesus Christ, however, the Jews were able to include all people -- even the stubborn Gentiles, through Noah and Abraham. 

The Germans had nothing on their side to offer.  They dug and dug their ancient runes, and posed science fiction fantasies about them.  They were clearly desperate to find a history for the German people that was now totally lost.

So -- they turned to theosophy and Madame Blavatsky -- whose science fiction fantasies said that the Aryans were a great race 100,000 years old, while the Jews were a "small sub-race, no more than 3,000 years old."  Yes, and her Temple Orders spread all over Germany.   Here was a fantasy for the Aryan mind.  

It was an envy of HISTORY itself.  It is not merely race on the Jewish side -- it is HISTORY itself that separates the Jews from all other peoples.

This is precisely what the Nazi mythology hoped to obscure -- by accusing the Jews of Racism, with their Chosen People routine!

AntiSemitism in Germany in the 1920's and 1930's had gone completely insane.  Jews were blamed for Capitalism and Jews were blamed for Communism.   Jews were blamed for Modernism, and Jews were blamed for the Antiquarian.

It was insanity -- and it infected people like Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Göbbels, Hermann Göring and Rudolf Hess.   And because of the terror of rising Communism, the German people elected these madmen to power.

What is rational in this reality?  What of Hegel's doppelsatz?  It must be grasped in a context of our Real Reality, which is a world in which everyone must die, and millions will contract diseases, and millions will die of starvation every year, and brutal war is one of the most common facts of human history.  We often measure our calendars by dates of wars. 

Within a world of war -- the so-called Aryan people -- whom the Bible simply calls, Gentiles, awoke one day to realize that their entire past had been erased by Christianity.   Nietzsche was among the first to call attention to it with disdain.

It is absolutely true that the Nazi openly demanded, Mary, what you called, "the impossibility of inclusion and reconciliation."  It was "us or them."  The Nazi Party decided that it must be the "Chosen People" no matter the moral cost.  They were now the Master Race -- to embody the "Master Morality" of Nietzsche. 

The Nazi Party hoped to soon produce the "Superman" promised by Nietzsche -- on the basis of Aryan blood alone -- nothing else -- just the blood.

These racist politicians accused the Jews of being racist.   Yet it was not a matter of race with the Jews, but a matter of HISTORY.  And in fact, everybody knows that.  And even the Nazis knew it -- but they tried to hide the fact.

They accused Jews of racism.

Certainly Jewish people today must remember the Holocaust -- and it must make them huddle together for safety from Gentiles who could become insane to the point of Auschwitz.   By their huddling together for safety, however, some racists today will still call them racist.

I say, on the contrary, that the Jewish HISTORY includes all nations -- even the Gentiles.  When we read the Bible, we read about the history of the Jews -- but more than that, we all read about the history of our own nations.

Every nation began with naked people walking through the forest, eating from trees.

Every nation began with august tribal leaders, wealthy and strong, gathering many tribal chiefs under his tent.

Every nation began with a momentous decision to elect a king -- to lead the nation in battles of self defense against invaders of every sort, from east, west, north and south.

Every nation began with victories and defeats in war.  Every nation knew Slavery -- both of others when victorious, and of themselves when defeated.

The HISTORY of the Jews is really the history of all Humanity.  That is why their record is beloved in the West.  There is nothing like it.

If the earliest Germans had anything like it, they would have discovered it with their ceaseless excavations of German soil.   They found runes, runes and more runes.

The Nazi hoped to be "set apart" as you said Mary.  The Jewish people interpreted their historical journey as "chosen by God," and in this way, they preserved their history from the prehistoric days of naked ancestors in forests -- through the days of the Persian Empire making a treaty with them, and rebuilding their Temple. 

I say that the history of the Jews is the written history of Humanity.

To compete with this TRUTH, the Nazi Party chose to move to the Far East, to Buddhism (from which the Nazi symbol sprang) and to Hinduism  (which is the oldest preservation of the word, "Aryan."  

The German intellectuals hoped then, to appropriate the Rig Veda as a German possession.   Their science fiction portrayed the Aryan leaving Germany to travel East, and deposit their ancient culture, and then to return to Europe -- where pitiful Christianity had overrun everything German -- everything Aryan.

The myth of Aryan Supremacy begins with these science fiction fantasies about Hindu writings and the Theosophy of writers like Helena Blavatsky (1880).

All right -- I'm repeating myself.   Back to Hegel. I note that Hegel saw only two possibilities for the "homeland" of Germany.  Either Athens, or Jerusalem.   Everything else had been lost to the dust.

Warm regards,

--Paul

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On Saturday, August 3, 2019, 11:41:28 AM CDT, Mary Malo reading_for_meaning@... [hegel] <hegel@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

Hi João and Paul,

What's also of interest to me is that both manifest the idea of a people set apart but that only one of these asymmetrical opposites can sublate the other. (Zizek) 

One side exhibits possibility and necessity, e.g. a separate people meant to include all peoples according to Abrahamic promise. 

As a unity, the other side ― evil with its sheer power to end possibility ― 

contains its opposite, good (Idea) that a people set apart is rational. 

However the idea of a people set apart seems irrational to me if it includes neither possibility nor necessity. 

Therefore what 'disappears' as an unreal moment of this concept is the irrational, the impossibility of inclusion and reconciliation. 

The assymmetrical opposite which sublates is the one that maintains separation and reconciliation. 

The idea (a people set apart) remains with its eventual determinations. (Me)

Regards,

Mary

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On Saturday, August 3, 2019, 12:47:19 AM CDT, vascojoao2003@... [hegel] <hegel@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

Hi Paul,

Yes. Nonetheless I was putting more focus in the side of the Jewish people, who were convicted to death for being Jewish. 

It is an immediate conviction as it gives its subject absolutely no concept of the possibility, even in principle, of negating such determinateness. 

The irrationality is this perspective, of reducing a rational form - a people - to an impossible form. 

Of course that on the other end, as you well point out, the Nazis made the same reduction towards themselves as this was the frame under which they set their principles, the principles from which they conceived the form of self-consciousness, individually or as a people, which is also to say, the form of reason.

Regards,

João.

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---In hegel@yahoogroups.com, <petrejo@...> wrote

Hi João,

All right, this is interesting.  Let's take it sentence by sentence:

> Reason, of necessity, presupposes reflective self-determination, 

> which implies the infrastructural form of self-diremption as a means 

> to have itself as its own object, we could say, of being subject and 

> substance, for itself. 

Yes, João, I agree that Reason does -- among other things -- exhibit a Self-diremptive structure.  With this, I agree, Reason makes itself its own object -- Subject and Object.

> A self-consciousness, a people, insofar as they actualize this same 

> form, for the same purpose, of explicit self-determination, are rational 

> forms. 

Well, João, this seems to identify only those people who have enjoyed the Light of Logic from Aristotle.   Granted, today that amounts to more than a billion people -- yet the world will soon have 8 billion people.  What about them?   Are they, as Kant averred, "potentially rational" because they are human beings?  Let us stipulate with Kant.

> The reduction, therefore, of a self-consciousness or a people to its 

> genes, to its race, to a purely organic determinateness, from which 

> the people or self-consciousness cannot separate itself at all, is the 

> reduction of the form of reason to a shape where it cannot [be read] 

> at all, where its infrastructural form - aforementioned - is impossible; 

> in fact more than reduction we should say destruction of the form of 

> reason. 

That is a complex idea, João.   Let me try to unpack it.  It seems to me that you are speaking about something like the Third Reich, like the Nazi era, and a doctrine of a Master Race.

If so, then you're making a distinction between a Master Race and Reason itself -- since Reason requires Reflection -- a Self-Othering -- while a Master Race will brook no Other..

This is what makes a Third Reich "irrational" in your idea.   Did I get it?

> The active destruction of the form of reason leads to the 

> destruction of its subjects, because they are the same.

> 

> Regards,

> João. 

Thus, João, if a society succumbs to a Master Race paradigm, and so loses its claim to Reason, then it cannot long maintain its existence in Reality -- because Reality is Rational.

Did I get your meaning?

All best,

--Paul

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On Thursday, August 1, 2019, 10:23:30 PM CDT, vascojoao2003@... [hegel] <hegel@yahoogroups.com> wrote: 

"PAUL:   It seems to me, João, that the Holocaust is irrational because it exhibits human beings going completely berserk -- in yet one more instance of a horror which occurs with some regularity.  War; genocide; violent destruction on massive scales -- these are the context." 

Hi Paul, 

This is the natural way of seeing it, and, natural as it is, it has a reason to be. We should abhor these behaviors without having to need speculative justification. Having said this, I submit a line of thought aiming at the logic of the irrational. 

Reason, of necessity, presupposes reflective self-determination, which implies the infrastructural form of self-diremption as a mean to have itself as its own object, we could say, of being subject and substance, for itself. 

A self-consciousness, a people, insofar as they actualize this same form, for the same purpose, of explicit self-determination, are rational forms. 

The reduction, therefore, of a self-consciousness or a people to its genes, to its race, to a purely organic determinateness, from which the people or self-consciousness cannot separate itself at all, is the reduction of the form of reason to a shape where it cannot bread at all, where its infrastructural form - aforementioned - is impossible; i