Education and Enlightenment

Education and Enlightenment, the cures that Adorno sought to prevent another holocaust, are precisely what is so rare in the US these days.

Isn't it ironic then that Lynndie England joined the reserves to get money for college?

Adorno: Education after Auschwitz

Walter Benjamin [1892-1940] once asked me in Paris, during the emigration when I still returned sporadically to Germany, whether there were still enough torturers in Germany to carry out what was commanded by the Nazis. There were. Notwithstanding, the question is profoundly justified. Benjamin sensed that, in contrast to the masterminds [Schreibtischmörder] and ideologues, people who do it are acting contrary to their own immediate interests and murder themselves when they murder others. I fear that enacting even such a widely encompassing education can hardly prevent the development of new generations of mastermind murderers [Schreibtischmörder: bureaucratic perpetrators]. However, that there are people who, at the bottom, precisely as slaves, do that whereby they eternalize their own slavery and degrade themselves and that there will continue to be Bogers and Kaduks [sadistic concentration camp guards who were convicted in the 1963-64 Frankfurt Auschwitz trial], a little can be undertaken by education and enlightenment against this.

Posted by mduvekot at May 7, 2004 09:44 PM