Informant38

{There are truths that are literally unspeakable, though the word currently means things that can't be spoken of without diminishing the power of their awfulness. It's not so much that they can't be named but that naming them belittles the grief and the horror. But that's not what I mean. I mean literally unspeakable. Unable to be named. And therefore invisible. It's the task of poets ultimately, the work of poetry to name things, especially the unspeakable. Not in the trite way of maps and signs, but to leave them inescapably named, held to account, accused. Some of the work is to name the things that are damaged, that's what makes evil what it is, what it hurts, what it destroys. And some of the work is to draw the circle, to fix each point in the circumference, inside which evil rests.
There's a lot that isn't said about the Holocaust. In America presently there's a tacit assumption that all that was figured out and judged and moved on from, but there's nothing in the historical record to prove it. Spiegelman's Maus, Gunther Grasse, KurtVonnegut, Martin Amis, Thomas Keneally, Anne Frank in a way, all point toward it, but nothing in popular culture explains it, nothing provides the resolution that makes it possible to move on. Witnesses and their testimony, it's mostly the circumference, vessels of grief and remembrance. But what was that, at it's core what was it? That's the assumption, as though we all know what it was, but we don't.
To say that there is or was something in the German character that caused it is to say that there was something in the Jewish character that caused it. If there's truth in either of those statements there is also a great lie. And to say that there's something in the human character that caused it is merely to say it happened. Why?
I don't have the academic ground of historical studies to begin to describe the events and conditions that led up to the rise of European fascism, but the little I know is scarily similar to the world we're moving into. Scarce resources, plummeting economy, corruption so flagrant it's a taunting insult, and hedonistic vice celebrated in the twilit murk of a seemingly pointless future.
The impulse toward health, cleanliness, virtue, the human spirit, the human will goes rigid and fierce and starts a chain reaction of purification. The Holocaust. They removed Down's Syndrome kids, all kinds of handicapped, the insane, homosexuals, communists, drug addicts, all the 'bad' people. The gypsies may have suffered greater losses proportionately than the Jews did.
Selfishly, my heart is most taken by the uncategorized, the true freaks, individuals who didn't have a persecuted group to call their own.
What I want to emphasize here is that there's a sense now, an underground, untalked of sense of 'getting it right'. Instead of the nonsense of racial bigotry, now we'll concentrate the unfit, the socially maladjusted, the congenitally criminal, the 'bad' people, all in one easily identifiable category, and regretfully, but firmly, remove them. Because there just isn't enough to go around anymore.
Social Darwinism is the parlor-chat version of the Holocaust.}