It has become my life's main goal to never ever have to confess to some court of my tribunal and with the black sludge of shame and self-hatred having replaced my intestines that―"I was just following orders".
Yes, it has become my life's main goal to never fall victim to the destructive wave of the many, for my legs shall be steadfast in the morass it leaves when its waters retract with the tide of the black moon! Yes, it has become the purpose of my life to show myself―and the world―that it is indeed possible to do so. Yes, I repeat: If I ever have to confess to some court of my tribunal, with the black sludge of shame and self-hatred having replaced my intestines a long time ago, that "I was just following orders", then my worth as a human being has been irrevocably expended, and I shall be fated to a remorseless gallows... and the thought of this possibility, of becoming possessed by the many, is real to me and to everyone else, for it is a human possibility, and whatever is human in us is hard to scrape off with the blunt side of a knife―your knife, blade of impotency!
Humanity is not just a dog-shit smeared on the sole of our shoe, however much we may wish for that, and to admit defeat to the ugliest demons of this humanity is to admit defeat as a human being, and it is to become oneself a mere dog-shit on the sole of something greater; something sardonic, and something incomprehensibly Godlike...
Yes, I think to lose oneself is to become the many, and this has become, over the lapse of years, the most trepidating and anxious nightmare-prospect of my life, and indeed, it is the only existential prospect from which I feel tremendous horror... yes, that, and to die in a clumsy, accidental and humiliating way in front of people I loathe... thence, I shall do everything in my power to make sure that, if this day of somber reckoning really comes my path, if I truly find myself amongst the Echelon of the accursed and the weak, and if the judges and attorneys then smite me with the questions and inquiries whose responses I cannot formulate with a straight spine, then I shall recognize that I have failed catastrophically in my life. And then, hopefully, I shall surely have the power to kill myself out of pure and simple self-revulsion from uttering these words with a conscientious heart, "I was just following orders"!
For this reason, I absolutely hate parts of what I am and what I am capable of. I am disgusted – sometimes in a very total way – by myself and my own capabilities. I would want to commit suicide out of shame – but maybe things have amounted, by then, to such a pathetic summit that I require fucking orders for that as well?
Who am I, even, to have the luxury of killing myself in my own debasement and self-hatred? Cattle are herded to the abattoir, and many people are killed or dead from forces and accidents beyond the scope of their control – and what can I say by this? Not all pigs cannot choose the glamour of suicide as their final statement to the world! It is a privilege to be equipped with the necessary faculties to commit the act of suicide. Tthe dark tide of history tells us this, and maybe that option will be depleted for me as well! For by this day, when it comes, if it comes, and afore the tribunal of my damnation, I have surely erased the lines I have focused a whole life to draw, the lines between the one and the many – and cowards do not deserve suicide! I am coward! Suicide as an existential option will not even occur in the mind of a coward, for cowardice is to be a single drop of water in the roaring flux of the waterfall, merely moving along, thundering down with a million others into the great and clamant noise of the river below...
But there is, though, hope – for it has become the goal of my whole project of self-improvement, indeed the focal purpose of my very life, to be able to, when the hearse comes my path, the phantom carriage of death, to be able to say, that in all my life, I never followed an order or a motivation I knew I ought not to follow.
Rudolf Höss could not redeem himself from his personal history of grotesque and repugnant atrocities by recognizing his submission to hierarchy and his indoctrination into a system of radical authoritarian collectivism, he tried that even as the pyres of his victim's ashes were still smoldering as he regretted and tried to repent himself before a world watching!
What a fool. But he was an interesting fool worthy of study. He was indeed a slave, but a willful one, because a slave of totalitarianism is one insofar as he is, by the same measuring rod, the slave of his own responsibilities. Remember: the perpetrators of the most barbaric and heinous cruelties more often than not evoke authority as the mechanism of their personal corruption – because they do not have in themselves the shame to recognize the true and premier of corrupting mechanisms, which is conformity – and not authority! Top-down authoritarian coercion is not a sufficient model for explaining the sickening crimes of the past and of the present... rather, it is my stern opinion that it should be explained fundamentally either by motivations of sheer psychopathic and/or sadistic malevolence, or by the socio-psychological mechanism of conformity; yes, I acknowledge, that sheer authoritarian pressure accounts for a great minority of the acts of malevolence, but it is hardly a foremost and sufficient model of analysis and intepretation in itself.
For example, I can tell you that there is not one single documented case of any German military or SS personnel during the Final Solution who faced brutalizing and grievous penance for refusing to execute whomever regarded subhuman. Even more abrasively – an astounding number of these perpetrators were voluntary in their participation of the systemic and industrial extermination of European Jewry. If that does not scare you, you are either totally stupid, ignorant by temperament, willfully blind, emotionally crippled, or – worst-case scenario – a vicious combination of all four of them.
