![]() “Like Rumkowski, we too are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our essential fragility,” Levi adds. “His fever is ours, the fever of our Western civilization which ‘descends to hell with trumpets and drums,’ and its miserable adornments are the distorting image of our symbols of social prestige.” “We are all mirrored in Rumkowski, his ambiguity is ours, it is our second nature, we hybrids molded from clay and spirit,” Levi wrote in The Drowned and the Saved. And, for Levi, he was an example of what too many of us under similar circumstances can become. He raped and molested young girls and women. He deported his opponents to the death camps. Rumkowski, referred to as “King Chaim,” turned the Lodz ghetto into a slave labor camp that enriched the Nazis and himself. Primo Levi, who was in the Nazi death camp, Auschwitz, writes about Chaim Rumkowski, a Jewish collaborator who ruled the Lodz ghetto as a petty tyrant on behalf of the Nazis. Killing and a-slashing and singing this song Another Marine Corps cadence revels in the power to kill children: Lined a hundred women up against the wallį***ed ninety-eight till his balls turned blueĪnd with this unchecked sexual debauchery comes unchecked murder. Marine Corps marching cadences-officially approved or not-capture these perversions: It is hard, especially for young men yearning for power and meaning, to resist. From the moment one enters the killer fraternity, the basest, most degenerate lusts are celebrated. ![]() They lacked the supreme strength to stand up as a moral individual. They were not about to sacrifice “comradeship” for life as a pariah. Those disgusted by what took place around them usually remained silent. I often saw physical courage on a battlefield. ![]() To question the mass, to challenge in any way the brutality and inhumanity of the armed unit, is to be instantly cast out of the magic circle and transformed into an object of hatred yourself. The sublimation of the self into the crowd, where power is amplified and projected outwards, creates feelings of omnipotence. Sex is transformed in wartime into an act of bestiality, one that in the slang of the military is equated with defecation. It denigrates tenderness, compassion, nurturing, and love. It elevates the callous, the numb, the hard, and the strong. Choices of language, how you describe your adversary, rob the enemy of humanity, a process that leads to them being beaten, abused, tortured, and murdered. The vulnerable-women, children, the infirm, and the elderly-are cast aside or pushed around like pawns on a chessboard. They exist to serve the whims of the heavily armed warriors. War has an undeniable eroticism for those who wield the weapons. This vast divide, one I witnessed in the wars I covered in Central America and later the Middle East and the former Yugoslavia, creates a demented world where the forces of death reign supreme. In wartime there are the all-powerful and the all-powerless. It hands to killers the god-like ability to strut and posture as titans, able to force others to cater to perverse and degenerate whims, able to instill fear, even terror, in those around them. The power to indiscriminately snuff out human lives is seductive and intoxicating, especially to those who came from positions of powerlessness. Blinded by hate and ideology, handed unlimited power to use lethal force, absolved of moral choice by the state or dominant authority, wrapped in the absolutism of nationalism or of religious or ethnic chauvinism, numb to emotion, human beings need little to turn into monsters. War exposes a disturbing truth: there is little separating the oppressor from the oppressed.
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