A Defense of Reality

[darkphantomime]

This is not meant to be a debate topic... but I'd like to know what you think of this essay I wrote a while back... It might be long winded for some people though.

And, umm... any swear words that you notice, like the h-word, I'm sorry, but it would sorta mess up the meaning of what I'm trying to say, and how I'm trying to say it... so PLEASE forgive any incidince of swear words, I mean no one any offense.  ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;)

I wrote this after reading Elie Weisel's Night. As you can see, it's affected me in a deep way...

   If I were to illustrate what we call as nameless, because of this severity of our ignorance, then would we be able to fully comprehend it? I must say this as my first question, because of how we much we are truly ignorant of the bad things out there. We cannot believe that people would kill viciously; we deny it, because it is often that we as people feign ignorance when something relatively remote happens. To many of you, the Holocaust, while not affecting you directly, still has at least some impact on you. In our perceptions of being safe in our homes, almost safe, and clearly ignorant of the world's affairs, we often don't truly acknowledge what is happening on the other side of the world. While this general rule may have changed recently, at least to a minor extent, there is still a level at which we claim ignorance of pain and suffering.

   Imagine if everything that you believed in, every faith and purpose that you held yourself too were, under a great catastrophe shattered. Imagine this for a moment. Are you able to see just how it is? It seems to me, that we often distance ourselves for our own security. I wonder why some people, out of a proof of ignorance, are unwilling to acknowledge that the Holocaust actually happened. Do they do this out of simple ignorance, or do they do this because they have some belief, political, or otherwise, that they must set out to prove that the death of millions of people was nothing more than a hoax? We can say this a thousand times over, but no matter what people may think or say, there is nothing that can equate with the disillusionment of the void.

   Elie Wiesel is a Transylvanian Jew, 16 years old when the Germans come to his village. He practices and studies the Cabbala texts in the hope of becoming closer to God. We think, but we don't know until we actual experience it. It's not about survival, it's not about living. When they send you to the concentration camps, then you are already dead, if not physically, then spiritually. "We ask God questions, but we cannot understand his answers. So we look into ourselves and reread the same text over and over again to comprehend ourselves, and come closer to God." So says Moshe the Beadle. Moshe is a very wise, but a very poor person. He is a role model for Eliezer when it comes to studying the texts of the Cabbala. There is a level of uncertainty before the Germans come. Moshe goes from the village to other villages, but when he returns and tells the people of the village what is happening elsewhere to the Jews, the people are ignorant, and go on with their daily lives. We begin to see now, just how bad things become. The Germans move in, at first under a trustworthy guise. The idea, may itself be parodic, but soon we begin to see just what kind of things the Germans do, starting with the Jews locked into 2 ghettos, and then, with the moving of the entire village into a concentration camp. The rumors behind the concentration camps are that they are places at which Jews can work. That is the view on those who deny the actual events of the Holocaust. Why would they move people to camps to work, when they were perfectly fine at their own homes and villages? If only to justify, and only to kill secretly and efficiently.

   On the train that the Jews of Sighet are on when they travel to Auschwitz, they are crammed for several days and very little food. The people try to ease themselves, telling themselves that they will live and things will be fine. Through this atmosphere, there is only one woman who can see the truth, and screams out in hysterics that she sees burning, giant fires everywhere. The people don't believe her, and until they arrive and truly see, does the revelation become true, of their fates, and all that lies in ignorance, and a false hope. We think it is a disease when someone acts crazily, claiming to see or feel certain horrible images. We are blind; we are fools, for as much as we try to be optimistic about what's going to happen. Are we so blind that we cannot recognize horror, true horror that destroys all that is human and spiritual of us, until our fates, too late become fully realized?

   Everything becomes one long night, even the future, we sympathize with our captors, our killers. One night, under which our entire existence becomes meaningless, and if we saw ourselves as what we would be when we become deprived, then that is not just horror, it is the death of everything and everyone that we know and have claimed to have bonds to. During the Holocaust, even in the concentration camps, the Germans put the Jews in charge of their own. The enforcers who are forced to do what the Germans tell them, out of fear for their own lives. The police, in an attempt to keep order among their own, even to go far as to kill others and act greedily for corruption's sake. What the Germans have done, it is not torture in the simple meaning of the word. It is the Void, the ceaseless, insane void among man's souls, become void so as not to remember anything as their life before. There are some who keep that little bit of hope, so they can simply survive. But is insanity when everything that we define, proudly, as human, is erased when put to the comedy of beasts. We become beasts, and what do we do? We kill, we fight, and we steal, just for that tiny crumb of bread or extra drop of soup. The Germans, especially at the end of the novel, take pleasure in this. The Germans see the Jews as inferior in every definable way, and when the Germans see them as raving wild dogs, when the former civilized people fight and steal and kill without thinking. That is the true horror, even beyond all the death, all the burning. The Germans didn't just want to wipe all Jewish people from the face of the planet, but under this type of psychological torture, with the feelings of humanity, every ounce of spirituality and closeness with God, when all of this is erased and everything becomes as of an insane mockery, then that is the death of everything that we know we are. We become less than animals, less than beings, we become absolute chaos, and the thing that so distinctly defined the Jewish people, their belief and closeness with God, becomes absolutely destroyed. Even beyond the countless deaths, even beyond the attempts to wipe out an entire people. That is the true and absolute crime of what the Germans have done.

   We don't listen to the voice that tells of the darkness. The voice that tells the tale of what actually, and in many dimensions, describes the absolute hell with such detail. We ignore, because we cannot believe that such things could've happened, that this narrative is nothing more than the result of a very diseased mind. That is the saddest case of ignorance. Instead of trying to conquer or learn from our demons, we lock those we call insane, because we would rather think happy and positive thoughts. We ignore the evil, and we curse the messenger who has seen and who has known these things. I ask why, but all they do is silence me. The greatest and most deadly force of the human psyche is not the need for the insane to kill. It is apathy, it is ignorance, and above all, it is our unwillingness to simply listen. That is why we should listen, and why we should say to ourselves, that this must never happen again, and we must never forget the horror, the absolute horror of hell from those who have gone through hell, they are the ones who we should listen to. It is in our attempt to truly become human that we begin to see just how far we have to go. But though it is a scar on this earth that may never heal, we should not let the memory of it ever fade away, because in the most insane and void of all chaos, there lays even the smallest, but deepest ray of hope that we may ever see. And it is in this light that we must take knowledge of this, and make actions so that the Holocaust of any people will never, on the face of this earth, happen again.

   I say these things with the memory and the utilization of the cold and darkest of atmospheres because we must acknowledge the darkest and chaotic of truths, that we, as humans must not ignore our of simple respite against those we think as insane. Because they aren't, the only insane person is the one who would blatantly deny the suffering in our world for his own pleasures. Elie Weisel closes with a scene of him in a hospital, after he has been rescued from the concentration camp at Buchenwald. He stands up and goes to the mirror, and he sees a corpse. "From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine has never left me."


This is a thing that has haunted me for a while, people tell me I should write things that are more 'happy', more 'upbeat', but with me, those kinds of things seem forced, fake...

Again, please forgive any incidence in swear words, I haven't reread my work in a while, so I'm not sure if it has any... except the h-word. In which case, I'm refering to how bad everything is...

again, apologies... ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;)

[Zelda Veteran]

I didnt read it, because im lazy, but why did you type all of that? :o

[darkphantomime]

Because conveying what happened is difficult when things are so short, so I wanted to draw from specific scenes that really got to me, because those scenes show you just how bad it was. I wanted to give a full meaning to the whole thing, rather than just skim across the surface. I got in depth...

When I read that aloud to a class last year, I said "You all deserve to be shocked", and they thought I said "Shot" instead of "Shocked". I was making a point that we can't protect ourselves from reality, because if we try do that, we make ourselves into a blissful ignorance, not feeling anything, just completely losing our humanity because we no longer felt fear or sorrow.

The whole novel is only about 100 pages, pretty short. But it will definitely make you think, sometimes even get to you in a way you hadn't thought about before.

[Mysterious F.]

That's the longest post EVER!!!!!

[Zelda Veteran]

There have been some LONG posts at Hyrule Adventures 2!

[Mysterious F.]

At this site, then!!!!!!!111oneoneoneoneexclamationpoint

[darkphantomime]

Actually, I think a lot of Ladynintendo's posts would qualify for 'longest'...

AND CAN WE PLEASE START talking about this??