the g. position.

The g.  is a stand-in for the word 'garbage'. In terms of a person's value to the world when s/he has fallen to unreachable depths, s/he has become garbage. H/e has become something to be carefully disposed of. Although a certain portion of garbage can become the nutrients for an always desired compost heap, the fact remains that until this transforming event takes place this small potent potentiality remains garbage: smelly, disgusting to handle, harmful to anyone who messes with it.

Of particular interest in the following quotation is the prisoners' human, and humane, question concerning their tormentors. They wonder what went so terribly wrong in their tormentors' past that they have been left entirely devoid of fellow feeling and capable of despicable, conscious and repeated actions. Everything but the need to endure has been stripped from the prisoners They are left physically and mentally naked; they have no reason to hope for any kindness other than death. Nevertheless, out their own extremity they look beyond to the human mystery of those whose cruel power is total.

"One way to survive in a labor camp was to determine what might elicit the commander's anger and to shape one's own behavior to avoid it. But Kozma's triggers were delicate and mysterious, his moods volatile, the roots of his neuroses hidden in darkness. What made him so cruel to Lieutenant Horvath? What made him kick his gray wolfhound? Where and how had he gotten the scar that bisected his face? No one knew, not even the guards. Kozma's anger, once evoked, could not be turned aside. Nor was it reserved for men like Andras and Mendel who received special privileges. Any form of weakness drew his attention. A man who showed signs of fatigue might be beaten or tortured: made to stand at attention with full buckets of water in his outstretched arms, or perform calisthenics after the workday was finished, or sleep outside in the rain. By mid-September the men began to die, despite the still-mild weather and the attentions of Tolnay, the company medic."

"At two o'clock in the morning Kozma might wake all the men and command them to stand at attention until dawn; the guards would beat them if they fell asleep or dropped to their knees. Other nights, when Kozma and Horvath drank with fellow officers in their quarters, four of the labor servicemen might be called to come before them and play a horrible game: two of the men would have to sit on the other's shoulders and try to wrestle each other to the ground. Kozma would beat them with his riding crop if the fighting wasn't fierce enough. The game ended only when one of the men had been knocked unconscious."

"The Invisible Bridge" by Julie Orringer (Vintage Books; A Division of Random House, Inc. New York; 2011; page 622)

What has to happen to produce such indulgence in cruelty?  Is cruelty only revenge for wrongs received as a child? Can jealous envy, born of deprivation, account for such savagery? Or can it be learned, the way games today encourage players to try on different identities, identities where you, as student, do as you please: run people over in your virtual car, stab, strangle virtual individuals, a rogue form of student, a rogue teacher? And while the Tilt effect is always at hand, offering choices of less hurt, not more, there are always individuals drawn to the lowest of atavistic opportunities. If the opportunity today is "only a game", "tomorrow maybe it will be real, tomorrow, with luck, with  Hitler's help, we hope it will be real."

Taking first prize in architecture in Paris how could Andras possibly have known where the forces unleashed by Adolf Hitler would take him? And if it was already too late, what could he have done about it?.

•    •    •

Humans seem to mark off  stages as we lapse from an equobenity into its impoverished mode:

            • from skepticism to doubt to disillusion to cynicism,

and then, with luck, with smarts, we start off from the impoverished mode and leap diagonally up from u. to q., or from o. to e.. Or perhaps we go straight up from cynicism to reluctant surprise, to hope, to openness, to possibility, to trust and belief, and from one side of the equobenity to the other.

           Are there stages from e. to q. as well? From q. to e.? How often is that movement a leap, a surprise?

• from skepticism and doubt to being willing to defer judgment, to reluctant agreement, to

enthusiastic agreement and certainty

The above scenarios are, of course, different for different people, different circumstances. These possibilities for movement are merely possibilities. Also, all the stages on the way to someplace else can be, under the right circumstances, equobenities or impoverished modes. Doubt, skepticism, disillusion, can be the very thing a situation requires. And as for the e.s and the q.s, regard the leap taken by "old Scrooge."

The Impoverished Modes

garbage, the g. position

The g. position

in the structure of equobenity

of the two triangles below, the bottom is the one to avoid

This describes the depths of evil to which m/an is able to descend. Its purpose is not to document the many kinds and styles of slaughter, the way slaughter has been with us since the beginning, and that there is no group of individuals exempt from its profound temptation, children, women and men of every race and nationality. This is merely some of the actions in the life of one man.

Overwhelmed by the world's wealth of evidence, this one long quotation is presented as sufficient.

From Jill Tweedie, "In The Name Of Love"

"Fritz Stangl was an ordinary Austrian cop when he met and married Teresa, his wife. He loved her and she loved im and they continued to love each other for thirty-five years until they were parted by his death. A-AH. How romantic. Mind you, Teresa Stangl admits she was terribly angry when her husband volunteered to join the Austrian Nazi Party:

'I just knew that one day he wasn't telling me the truth. And the thought that he had lied to all this time, he whom I had believed incapable of lying, was terrible for me. And to think --oh it was a terrible blow, just a terrible blow. My man --a Nazi-- It was our first real conflict --more than a fight. It went deep. I couldn't --you know-- be near him, for weeks, and we had always been so close; this had always so important between us. Life became very difficult.'

"But not, of course, too difficult. Love surmounts such obstacles, this is what love is for. Frau Stangl, a devout Catholic herself, managed to surmount the next obstacle, too, though with misgivings. Fritz signed the Party's form renouncing his allegiance to the Catholic Church. 'That was the second awful blow for me: finally we couldn’t talk about it any more.'

"To test her love further, Fritz Stangl was sent as police superintendent to a pleasant, well-to-do suburb of Berlin, to the General Foundation for Institutional Care. There he was told his future duties. He reported to Schloss Hartheim, pleased still to be in Austria and close to his beloved wife. His duties were to supervise the gassing of 'patients' --the first stage of Hitler's euthanasia programs. For years, while countless thousands of  'patients' were killed at Hartheim, Fritz Stangl saw his wife frequently. She asked him what he was doing but only casually, since she was used to her Fritz being unable to discuss service matters. Frau Stangl was, on her own admission, aware of the existence of the euthanasia programme, but says she did not know Schloss Hartheim 'was one of those places' till after the war.

"Fritz Stangl's second promotion made him Kommandant of Sobibor. 'I can't describe to you what it was like,' said Stangl to Gitta Sereny who interviewed him in prison after the war:

'The smell. Oh God, the smell. It was everywhere. Wirth wasn't in his office. I remember, they took me to him --he was standing on a hill, next to the pits --the pits--they were full  --full-- I can't tell you; not hundreds, thousands thousands of corpses --oh God. That's where Wirth told me --he said that was what Sobibor was for. And that he was putting me officially in charge.'

"Now Frau Stangl was married to a man whose work was supervising the mass murder of a race, a promotion from merely gassing those considered 'unworthy to live', the criminally insane, the mentally deficient, the tubercular and, of course, the odd gypsy, homosexual, and political hostage. Under Stangl, about 100,000 men, women and children were gassed. Herr Stangl ordered specially tailored riding-boots, white jodhpurs and jacket. Staying at a nearby house on one of her visits to her husband, Frau Stangl was told by a drunken officer exactly what was happening at Sobibor. She was horrified.

'When he rode up and saw me from afar, his face lit up --I could see it. It always did --his face always showed his joy the moment he saw me. He jumped off his horse and stepped over --I suppose to put his arm round me. But then he aw at once how distraught aI was. "What's happened?" he asked. "The children?" I said, "I know what you are doing in Sobibor. MY God how can they? What are you doing in there? What is our part in it?" '

Fritz Stangl eventually calmed his wife, telling her he was only in charge of construction work. She says she cried and sobbed and couldn't bear him to touch her.

'He just kept stroking me softly and trying to calm me. Even so, it was several days before I --let him again. I can't quite remember the sequence of events, but I know I wouldn't have parted from him in anger.'

"Not long afterward came the final promotion. Herr Stangl was made Kommandant of Treblinka, the largest of the five death camps in a two-hundred-mile circle  around Warsaw. He described his arrival there:

'I drove there, with an SS driver. We could smell it kilometers away. When we were about fifteen, twenty minute’s drive from Treblinka, we began to see corpses by the railway line, first just two or three, then more, and as we drove into Treblinka station, there were what looked like hundreds of them --just lying there-- they'd obviously been there for days, in the heat. In the station was a train full of Jews, some dead, some still alive. Treblinka that day was the most awful thing I saw during all of the Third Reich, it was Dante's Inferno. It was Dante come to life. When I entered the camp and got out of the car on the square I stepped knee-deep into money: I didn't know which way to turn, where to go. I waded in notes, currency, precious stones, jewelry, clothes. They were everywhere, strewn all over the square. The smell was indescribable: the hundreds,  no thousands of bodies everywhere, decomposing, putrefying. Across the square, in the woods, just a few hundred yards away on the other side of the barbed wire fence and all around the perimeter of the camp, there were tents and open fires with groups of Ukrainian guards and girls --whores, I found out later, from all over the countryside-- weaving drunk, dancing, singing, playing music.'

"But efficient Stangl took over, cleared up the mess, planted flowers on the station banks and began to welcome the transport trains from Warsaw. Five or six thousand Jews were gassed daily before lunch under his aegis, then he ate his meal and had a little nap. There he ruled, there men were hanged upside-down, there dogs were trained to attack the genitals. The official figure given for the deaths Stangl supervised is 900,000. A polish underground worker, a station supervisor at Treblinka from the day the death camp went into action to the day it was razed, counted every truck that passed, the figures of its contents written clearly on its sides by the ever-efficient Germans.

" 'I have added them up over and over and over,' he says. 'The number of killed at Treblinka was 1, 200,000 and there is no doubt about it whatever.'

"And what of the loving wife during this time, the wife married to the man name in an official commendation as 'the best camp commander in Poland'? Why, she was busy with women's work. On one of his brief visits to her 'we started our youngest, Isolde.'

"Can we excuse Frau Stangl, say she was a victim of events she never understood, believe she was bewildered and confused, afraid for her children, caught up in the general chaos of the holocaust? Surely we can say, at the very least, what could she have done? How could she, a mere woman and loving wife, possibly have attempted to change the inevitable?

"Gitta Sereny put a question to her after husband's death in 1971:

'Would you tell me what you think would have happened if at any time you had faced your husband with an absolute choice; if you had said to him: "Here it is; I know it's terribly dangerous, but either you get out of this terrible thing, or else the children and I will leave you." If you had confronted him with these alternatives, which do you think he would have chosen?"

"Frau Stangl took more than an hour to answer that question. She lay on her bed and she cried and then she composed herself and answered:
 

'I have thought very hard, I know what you want know. I know what I am doing when I answer your question. I am answering it because I think I owe it to you, to others, to myself: I believe that if I had ever confronted Paul (her pet name for Stangl) with the alternatives: Treblinka or me; he would --yes, he would, in the final analysis, have chosen me."

"Teresa Stangl, a small pretty woman from Linz, could have persuaded one of the nine camp commandants of Nazi Germany to leave his post and flee. It is impossible to tell what repercussions this might have had, how many others might have been given a flash of humanity, a burgeoning resistance, through this event. But though she loved her husband deeply --because she loved him deeply-- she did nothing. No one had ever suggested to her that love has some morality, that to be 'in love' did not excuse horror outside the cozy family circle, that responsibility to the outer world must intrude. Blinkered, devoted, worried but faithful, whenever she had the opportunity she received her man into her bed. fresh from the naked shit-stained Jews, clutching their babies, whipped into the chambers. And in so doing, she lived out to the extreme the article of our faith: love conquers all."

Jill Tweedie, "In the Name of Love" (Pantheon Books: New York, 1979, pages 50-54)

Impoverished Mode

Collective Evil

What follows is a fictional description, spoken in 1516. A thoughtful person describes how one, nearly innocent form of evil ratchets up to the next, and worse, evil.

The fact that it is a fictional voice does not make it less true; the fact that everything the speaker foresees is set in fiction, the novelist looking backwards to history, does not make what the speaker says any less powerful.

            " 'This ghetto has engendered in me visions that turn my blood to water,' he confided, as we drifted away from the forbidding facade with its patchwork of blind windows.

            " 'But surely the Senate will relent in time.' I could not bear to think that others less fortunate might be immured there for all of their lives.

            " 'I wish I could share your optimism,' he replied. 'But I fear my vision of the future is much more bleak than yours. In my prospect, this ghetto in Venezia is only the first. Soon another will spring up in some other city -Parma perhaps or Trento- then another and yet another until finally there will be a ghetto in every city. At this moment Venezia is no longer a place where Jews can live freely. Soon Italy itself will not be a fit country. And not long after, other nations will follow suit and there will be no place for us in all of Christendom.'

            " 'Oh, that could never happen!'

            "'Oh yes it could,' he corrected me. 'And my bones tell me it will. Today the Venetians say the sight of Jews is an offense to God. But I say that the sight of many people is an offense to men and once you begin to enclose the outcasts in some place set aside, there is no end. For, even as a Jew is an offense to God, a poor man is an offense to one with a full belly and a madman is an offense to one who has all his wits about him.

            " 'Here in this cursed year of 1516 the Venetians have put their Jews aside out of sight in an enclosure where they cannot offend the pious eyes of Christians. But Jews are not the only pariahs. Mark me, we will be followed by other despised groups. Would it not improve the landscape of the city if the citizens were not forced to smell the filth of the poor or to expose themselves to the anguish of the mad? Why not enclosures for them?'

            "There was a terrifying logic behind his argument that drove me to follow him down a dark path where I had no wish to go. I placed my hand on his arm in a pathetic attempt to stem the flow of his imaginings. But he was not yet done.

            " 'I predict that as certainly as the night follows the day it will not be long before these pariahs -the sequestered ones- are seen to be the authors of their own misfortunes. That will be the means of perpetuating the enclosures. Mark me'- he was thundering  now like an Old Testament prophet- 'it will not be long before the victims of these sequesterments will be blamed for the crime of having brought misfortune upon themselves. They will be accused, jailed, whipped, like common criminals. After many decades -or centuries- they will be gathered up like a crop of rank weeds and burned.'

            "From where, I wondered, did such thoughts come to him, thoughts so morbid, so fantastic? It was too bleak a vision of the future for me. But that night I fell asleep wondering. Supposing what he foretells comes to pass? Who will want to live in such a world?"

The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi, Jacqueline Park (Scribner Paperback Fiction, published by Simon & Schuster Inc., 1998; page 434 and 435)