In an extreme case, the mass murder of the Jews throughout Europe during WWII has served as a singular focusing point in the Western intellect, in which an endless analysis of every single pertinent detail has been carried out. And layer after layer, generation after generation of scholarly study has obsessively mapped out the deep flaws in modern Western societies, and the modern human character, for that matter. A much welcome obsession! As long as its lessons are actively applied to daily life and society.
Or else of course the lessons of history are forgotten, and historical events are studied as isolated and alien constellations of suspended events. Like one glances into an ant farm, trying to understand, yet separated by glass and given the benefit of ultimate disinterest.
Or else of course the lessons of history are forgotten, and historical events are studied as isolated and alien constellations of suspended events. Like one glances into an ant farm, trying to understand, yet separated by glass and given the benefit of ultimate disinterest.
Great wars, civil wars, and instances of genocide provide further examples in which various irreconcilable political, economic, and social problems erupt into explosive catastrophes. However, despite the explosive quality of these catastrophic events, they can also be viewed as periods of contraction.
War, civil strife, and revolution are partially manifestations of a forceful purging and reconciliation of internal and external contradictions within and without a society's structure. This is not, as the reactionaries imagine, a clean purge or reconciliation that we can crudely conceive of, such as when one vomits or sweats out toxins, washes one's hands, or heals a relationship. No, these catastrophic sequences of events only generate a multitude of fresh trauma, expanding in every direction, which sets the shape of reproduced structural contradiction when the cooling begins. And where these fault lines develop, they mark the sites where trauma cycles are to begin anew, seemingly until structural violence and repression exhausts itself, though given the history of civilizations, these destructive forces scatter out, their germseed buried and set to take root in time.
War and strife appear to be self-accelerating until they burn themselves out. But there are cases in which these contractionary forces are expressed over a greater time frame. The devastation happens slowly, and a society is gradually transformed over a protracted period of a thousand cuts.
Our national conversation busies itself with discussions about brutal dictators and calamitous wars across history, and the grim lessons posed by those events are passed by in silence, or obscured by some new distraction. More specifically, the privileged obsess over distilled images of the horrible, or anticipations of the horrible, while growing numbers of the marginalized experience the horrible itself in greater intensity through everyday events.
We need not rub our knuckles over burning foreign lands - though we certainly should - when great misery smolders among us. Whether various communities struggle to survive in sacrifice zones, prisoners die of overcrowding, bacteria-resistant staph, and abuse, immigrants die attempting to cross various borders, under-served communities waste away without health care, or any other slow-burning atrocity carries on, the soul of this nation, or at least the collective conception of what is possible or permissible, is permanently altered.
Through contraction, a society's overextension is pared down, through the sacrifice of marginalized peoples, whose consent in regard to the arrangement is not bothered with, needless to say. And in turn, why should the consent of the governed be extended in reciprocation?
One needn't look under the bed for Nazis. When officials in Flint can poison an entire population, citing concerns about "cost," and then turn their backs against cries of pain and despair, or when prison complex administrators speak of mass execution, citing concerns about the cost of expiring drugs, we can only wonder how long ago it was that some essential component to our national character was lost, if it did indeed exist at some point.
One fears the tiger emerging from the bushes, as multitudes of poisonous snakes gather around one's ankles. Fine. The question now is whether the society combusts into flames once again, gradually unravels over a period of time, or else finds the courage within itself to radically transform into something worth going on.
War, civil strife, and revolution are partially manifestations of a forceful purging and reconciliation of internal and external contradictions within and without a society's structure. This is not, as the reactionaries imagine, a clean purge or reconciliation that we can crudely conceive of, such as when one vomits or sweats out toxins, washes one's hands, or heals a relationship. No, these catastrophic sequences of events only generate a multitude of fresh trauma, expanding in every direction, which sets the shape of reproduced structural contradiction when the cooling begins. And where these fault lines develop, they mark the sites where trauma cycles are to begin anew, seemingly until structural violence and repression exhausts itself, though given the history of civilizations, these destructive forces scatter out, their germseed buried and set to take root in time.
War and strife appear to be self-accelerating until they burn themselves out. But there are cases in which these contractionary forces are expressed over a greater time frame. The devastation happens slowly, and a society is gradually transformed over a protracted period of a thousand cuts.
Our national conversation busies itself with discussions about brutal dictators and calamitous wars across history, and the grim lessons posed by those events are passed by in silence, or obscured by some new distraction. More specifically, the privileged obsess over distilled images of the horrible, or anticipations of the horrible, while growing numbers of the marginalized experience the horrible itself in greater intensity through everyday events.
We need not rub our knuckles over burning foreign lands - though we certainly should - when great misery smolders among us. Whether various communities struggle to survive in sacrifice zones, prisoners die of overcrowding, bacteria-resistant staph, and abuse, immigrants die attempting to cross various borders, under-served communities waste away without health care, or any other slow-burning atrocity carries on, the soul of this nation, or at least the collective conception of what is possible or permissible, is permanently altered.
Through contraction, a society's overextension is pared down, through the sacrifice of marginalized peoples, whose consent in regard to the arrangement is not bothered with, needless to say. And in turn, why should the consent of the governed be extended in reciprocation?
One needn't look under the bed for Nazis. When officials in Flint can poison an entire population, citing concerns about "cost," and then turn their backs against cries of pain and despair, or when prison complex administrators speak of mass execution, citing concerns about the cost of expiring drugs, we can only wonder how long ago it was that some essential component to our national character was lost, if it did indeed exist at some point.
One fears the tiger emerging from the bushes, as multitudes of poisonous snakes gather around one's ankles. Fine. The question now is whether the society combusts into flames once again, gradually unravels over a period of time, or else finds the courage within itself to radically transform into something worth going on.
