Education for Death

 

     A few years back, I watched an old World War 2 propaganda cartoon called "Education for Death." It was an anti-Nazi propaganda piece depicting the education and upbringing of a young German boy named Hans. Hans was a fairly normal German boy just born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

    In one of the scenes, a Nazi instructor drew a picture of a wolf and a rabbit on the chalkboard, and the animation of the film depicted the wolf eating the rabbit. The instructor asked the class what this lesson meant, and Hans, in his innocence, said "the poor rabbit."  The instructor got upset, and punished Hans for his response. He then asked the question to the rest of the class to get the proper response. 

 "The world belongs to the strong!" "and to the brutal!" said the rest of his classmates. "The rabbit is a coward and it deserves to die." and so on. 

    The reason I am writing this is because much of this mentality hasn't completely dissipated since the war. It is still present in some circles and in some groups. The Nazis were, by default, human predators. They saw weakness and sickness is inherent, condemnable, and uncorrectable. They saw people in these states, as well as groups they termed subhuman as needing to be eliminated from society. 

      As a result, things like mercy, compassion, and redemption became illusive and foreign concepts, and they still are to this day in the people who fall into the predatory patterns of thought that dominated Nazism. The social darwinistic mentality and predatory thinking that dominated this ideology is not only inherently flawed, it is extremely counterproductive for the progress and advancement of a society. 

Aside from the ethical concerns, which Nazis didn't really factor in to their calculations and methods that much, obviously, a predatory approach to social problems doesn't really advance your social systems, your ability to treat sickness, your ability to advance technology and quality of life. Learning to cure sickness, strengthen weakness, and inclusion of groups into the social fabric is far greater of a catalyst for the advancement and even evolution of humanity. 

 You see, compassion and ethics are not just redundant cliches of religions throughout the world. They are the primary catalysts for social, medical, and cultural advancement. You can't learn how to cure diseases if you keep killing the sick. You can't learn how to strengthen weakness if you keep killing the weak. That's [partially] the great flaw in the predatory thinking of Nazism and other ideologies that fall under that umbrella. 

     You see, preying on other organisms for food is not an evil thing, it is natural. Preying on other human beings is not natural. It is an unnatural evil. Oppression of any kind isn't natural and it is never ethical, as it violates the sanctity of the individual's natural predisposition to be free that exists externally of any particular religious justification, even though those justifications are often far from being illegitimate.  

 Humans have an intrinsic value that is not just self evident by their pure humanity, but also because of the depth, scope, and power of every human being's mind, and the potential creativity and productivity that every human being can demonstrate on some level regardless of race, sex, religion, weakness, or sickness. 

A human being's value isn't dictated by race or gender or any other trait, but by their sentience. Their ability to feel, think, create, and comprehend a vast existence to some degree. The ability to have a relationship with God. The ability to conceive of complex ideas and innovations of great utility that every human being has the potential to access and create.  

 The inherent flaw in the logic of a predator is that it sees human value as strictly utilitarian and strictly based on shallow, surfacy traits like race or disability that they deem to be a lesser or an inferiority. There is nothing sophisticated or deep about predatory thinking. They can only access the surface and the purely economic utility of a human being. Nothing deeper. They see things as simple as race or weakness or sickness as the definitive justification for oppression or elimination.

 They don't go any deeper into the realms of the abstract or spiritual. They see what they deem as inferior to be permanent and condemnable, and they prey on it like a wolf preys on a rabbit.

If you notice, weak people and sick people and the disadvantaged and oppressed can't put up much of a fight. As a result, it is not the weak that are the cowards like a Nazi would think. It is the predator. They never pick on someone their own size. Someone of equal or greater stature.  Oppression and subjugation are always acts of cowardice, regardless of who is doing it and who it is being done to. 

 

Predator ideas and predatory thinking is always an "education for death."