What evil lurks in the heart of man? Maybe it doesn’t lurk, rather it dances, it teases, it flatters, it cajoles, it manipulates and end up getting its way. How? The dynamics must be complicated.Especially when evil gets under the skin in the guise of encouraging one to do good; the scam of doing good acts, for the sake of the individual doing them to feel better and fulfilled in his own well-being. Or better yet, the tricky vagaries of free-will, and the denial of its existence and the subsequent irresponsibility of moral relativism as a kind of rickety structure that can be labeldc as societal values and capriciously adjusted to suit new sets of circumstances.
—Anselm KIEFER, Deine goldenes haar Margarethe—click image for source…
( Joseph Conrad, heart of Darkness)…Mind, I am not trying to excuse or even explain–I am trying to account to myself for–for–Mr. Kurtz–for the shade of Mr. Kurtz. This initiated wraith from the back of Nowhere honoured me with its amazing confidence before it vanished altogether. This was because it could speak English to me. The original Kurtz had been educated partly in England, and–as he was good enough to say himself–his sympathies were in the right place. His mother was half-English, his father was half-French. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz; and by and by I learned that, most appropriately, the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had intrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance. And he had written it, too. I’ve seen it. I’ve read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, but too high-strung, I think. Seventeen pages of close writing he had found time for! But this must have been before his–let us say–nerves, went wrong, and caused him to preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites, which–as far as I reluctantly gathered from what I heard at various times–were offered up to him– do you understand?–to Mr. Kurtz himself. But it was a beautiful piece of writing. The opening paragraph, however, in the light of later information, strikes me now as ominous. He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, `must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings– we approach them with the might of a deity,’ and so on, and so on. `By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,’ etc., etc. From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence–of words–of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: `Exterminate all the brutes!’
—Source: The Guardian, December 28, 2012
A statue of Adolf Hitler praying on his knees has sparked controversy after going on display in the former Warsaw ghetto.
The artwork by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, titled Him, has been installed in the Polish capital where thousands of Jews were killed or sent to their deaths by the Nazi regime.
The statue has attracted large numbers of visitors since its installation last month, but some organisations have criticised the decision to erect it in such a sensitive area.
One Jewish advocacy group, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, described the statue’s placement as “a senseless provocation which insults the memory of the Nazis’ Jewish victims”.
“As far as the Jews were concerned, Hitler’s only ‘prayer’ was that they be wiped off the face of the earth,” the group’s Israel director, Efraim Zuroff, said in a statement.—click image for source…
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