Reality Check, Please.

Democracy dies to the sound of our cheers

African Independent

There is no freedom people are more willing to give up than somebody else’s.

The Black Box Factory stories are intended to be an exploration of my own impressions of what freedom actually is and how the majority are always willing to condemn the minority in the name of their own self-interest.

Researches.

The Warsaw Ghetto.

The first book in my researches is Yisrael Gutman´s excellent, perhaps even definitive work, The Jews of Warsaw.

My notes on it can be found here.

The Internment of Japanese Americans.

Richard Reeves cannot be said, I think, to have overplayed his obvious revulsion and abhorrence of the history he relates in Infamy. It should be totally unthinkable that it could ever happen in the United States, but it did. My notes will be found here as soon as I can get around to collating them. I was sure I already had…

Ordinary Men – Reserve Police Battalion 101.

Mr. Christopher R. Browning deals with the history of the Reserve Police Battalion 101, made up mostly of older men from Hamburg, perhaps the least Nazified city in the Third Reich. These men were by and large too young to serve in World War One and had grown up before National Socialism took hold. The fundamental question that Mr. Browning tries to grapple with, is how and why do these ordinary working class and otherwise decent men become involved in the mass murder of innocent Jews.

It’s a disturbing investigation that tries to break down the idea that these men were any different than the rest of humanity – they weren’t, and that’s a frightening thought.

My notes, a collection of the raw markings and notations I made during my reading, can be found here.

Decade of Betrayal – Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s.

Mr. Balderrama and Mr. Rodriguez detail the history of the Mexican Repatriation both before and during the Great Depression. There was a lot of resentment of the Mexican population living and working in the United States, along with a lot of oppression and dehumanizing.

Having read details of slaughter under similar arrangements, it seems that it would not have taken much of a sea-change in public and official attitude to have taken the Mexican Repatriation more into the guise of the Holocaust. After all, the goals weren’t dissimilar – hold an innocent demographic responsible for generally poor conditions, then remove them in order for those conditions to improve.

My notes can be found here.