A vision of the primeval past wandering out of an imaginary forest of pre-historic times, lost in quirk of time. Yes, its the same notorious auroch found in the cave of Lascaux in southern France. The ferocious wild ancestor of today’s cattle. Sort of. Its the seduction of science with the ostensible goal of improving the lot of humanity.In a certain sense, its difficult to contradict Michel Foucault’s assertion that human capacities and relations are inescapably technologized, or they are at least object and materially defined. Is this the price for civilization? One of civilization’s most quoted ideological underpinnings is Hobbes’ characterization of the pre-civilized state of nature as “nasty, brutish, and short.” Freud concurred, as well as the Frankfurt school’s Adorno and Horkheimer. Our domination, -specifically man’s- of the nature that has been suppressed into the collective unconscious has been considered by many, such as Adorno to be the congenital defect, the fatal flaw of the same industrialized Western Civilization.
Is The death of the spirit ,the price of progress.”( vogelin ) But if the progress of nihilism is identical to the nihilism of progress, whence comes the rupture? How does one pose radical break from the totality of progress, technology, modernity? Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s “Dialectic of Enlightenment is the theory of an irredeemably darkened modernity. This perspective, almost continually reaffirmed by the connection between progess, consumption and profit is so confirming data, tends as to render irrelevant both sources of theory and the logic of progress. Is there is no escape from a condition we can understand all too well,? Paul Theroux’s Mosquito Coast showed that escape is easier to theorize than apply.
…But this herd of thirteen bulls, cows and calves known as Heck cattle is the product of Nazi genetic engineering, an attempt to reintroduce the extinct aurochs, the last of which died of old age in a Polish forest nearly four centuries ago….The herd has Herman Goering, the head of Hitler’s Luftwaffe, to thank for its existence. Goering hoped to recreate a primeval Aryan wilderness in the conquered territories of Eastern Europe….
Two zoologist brothers, Lutz and Heinz Heck, took on the task of scouring Europe for the most primitive breeds of cattle they could find in the belief that by “back breeding” they could resurrect the extinct species….Most geneticists now believe that it is impossible to recover a lost species by back breeding, but few dispute that Heck cattle resemble the ancient aurochs, at least superficially. The biggest difference is size. Bos primigenius stood two metres tall at the shoulder, taller than a grown man. The Heck cows are similar in size to modern domestic cattle….Read More:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article6143767.ece
—As nationalist and reactionary that Spengler was, The Decline of the West is the great masterwork of world history, and his grasp of Western civilization’s inner logic is uncanny in its prescience. Especially relevant here are Spengler’s judgments, so many decades ago, concerning technological development and its social, cultural, and environmental impacts. He saw that the dynamic, promethean (“Faustian”) nature of global civilization becomes fully realized as self-destructive mass society and equally calamitous modern technology. The subjugation of nature leads ineluctably to its destruction, and to the destruction of civilization. “An artificial world is permeating and poisoning the natural. The Civilization itself has become a machine that does, or tries to do everything in mechanical terms.” Civilized man is a “petty creator against Nature.” “…This revolutionary in the world of life…has become the slave of his creature. The Culture, the aggregate of artificial, personal, self-made life-forms, develops into a close-barred cage … ”
Whereas Marx viewed industrial civilization as both reason incarnate and a permanent achievement, Spengler saw it as ultimately incompatible with its physical environment, and therefore suicidally transitory. “Higher Man is a tragedy. With his graves he leaves behind the earth a battlefield and a wasteland. He has drawn plant and animal, the sea and mountain into his decline. He has painted the face of the world with blood, deformed and mutilated it.” Spengler understood that “the history of this technics is fast drawing to its inevitable close.” Read More:http://www.johnzerzan.net/articles/why-primitivism.html
Nature as commodity.But ultimately, authority is almost always invested in those who can shill in the most compelling manner. As a good bourgeois, Freud came to a justification of civilization on the grounds that work and culture are necessary and that civilization enables humans to survive on a hostile planet.This of course, justified the entire doctrine of the fear and paranoia culture and the reactionary tendencies of religious and political institutions to keep the flock together and circle the wagons. “The principal task of civilization, its actual raison d’etre, is to defend us against nature.” ( Freud ) And … “But how ungrateful, how short-sighted after all to strive for the abolition of civilization! Wha
uld then remain would be a state of nature, and that would be far harder to bear.”So, the destruction of nature and violence between individuals are not only a challenge of the political process, but crucial subjects for the
social sciences. However, the question whether both problems could conceivably be interconnected is generally obvious but rarely given even a precursory gaze. Does perhaps domination of nature cause unrecognized resultant costs in social relations? to Adorno, the domination of man’s environment made possible by controlling man’s inner nature was a slow progress toward a limitation of the human horizon to self-preservation and power. In addition, the justifying idea of a divine commandment to subdue the earth and to have dominion over all creatures, however misinterpreted, reduces the sensitivity of civilized humansindividuals for the conditions of their violent domination of nature organized in and by society. Importantly, the internalized violent domination of nature alsocan be seen to facilitates the use of force in social life. Adorno’s hypothesis with regard to a psychology of civilization means that man’s brute force against nature encourages him to use violence against other human beings as well.”Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.” (Theodor Adorno)
ADDENDUM:
Allan Hall ( 2006 ):Children born on Nazi baby farms who were intended to be the germseed for Hitler’s Ayran master race are meeting in public to break a taboo that has lasted more than 60 years. They are the product of the Lebensborn programme of the S.S., the ‘Fountain of Life’ scheme that turned racially and idealogically pure S.S. men into studs and blonde, blue-eyed single girls into child-rearing machines for the Fuehrer….
…Thousands of such children were born in Lebensborn camps across Europe. They were immediately seperated from their mothers to be brought up in homes where the only religion was Nazism and qualities like mercy and kindness were frowned upon. Hitler and his S.S. chief Heinrich Himmler believed they were creating a superrace: instead the lack of affection and poor education besides Nazi indoctrination led many to be educationally backward and emotionally crippled….The Lebensborn programme became known in England during the 1980’s when it was revealed that Princess Michael of Kent’s father was an S.S. officer involved in the planning of the project. Read More:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-414385/Secret-Nazi-baby-farm-children-meet.html
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In reality though, if these films were guilty of anything, it was of grossly over-rating the Nazis themselves. “The Boys From Brazil” portrayed Mengele as a genetic engineering genius, whereas the “experiments” he conducted in real life were little more than aimlessly sadistic exercises in morbid curiosity. Similarly, the purported ODESSA organisation, far from being a sophisticated underground network dedicated to National Socialist renewal, was in actuality little more than a series of impromptu and disorganised rat runs.
And this helps to give another explanation as to why international governments where so disinclined to pursue the escaped Nazis – the fugitives themselves were no longer the men they had once been. Once the spell of Der Führer had been broken, these formerly aristocratic and ruthless arbiters of life and death, reverted, like princes who turn back into frogs at midnight, to the harmless minor industrialists, back-scratching businessmen, and clubbable bourgeois shopkeepers that Nature had probably always intended them to be. Read More:http://andwhatwillbeleftofthem.blogspot.com/2010/10/nazi-operations.html
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Genetic engineering and imminent human cloning are just the most current manifestations of a dynamic of control and domination of nature that humans set in motion 10,000 years ago, when our ancestors began to domesticate animals and plants. In the 400 generations of human existence since then, all of natural life has been penetrated and colonized at the deepest levels, paralleling the controls that have been ever more thoroughly engineered at the social level. Now we can see this trajectory for what it really is: a transformation that inevitably brought all-enveloping destruction, that was in no way necessary. Significantly, the worldwide archaeological record demonstrates that many human groups tried agriculture and/or pastoralism and later gave them up, falling back on more reliable foraging and hunting strategies. Others refused for generations to adopt the domestication practices of close neighbors.
It is here that a primitivist alternative has begun to emerge, in theory and in practice.37 To the question of technology must be added that of civilization itself. Ever-growing documentation of human prehistory as a very long period of largely non-alienated human life stands in stark contrast to the increasingly stark failures of untenable modernity.
In the context of his discussion of the limitations of Habermas, Joel Whitebook wrote, “It may be that the scope of and depth of the social and ecological crisis are so great that nothing short of an epochal transformation of world views will be commensurate with them.Read More:http://www.johnzerzan.net/articles/why-primitivism.html