The torts are now visible
In a capitalist society the mediating force that controls almost every action is money. Think upon those SS troops that hour after hour put guns to the heads of innocent Jewish men, women and children. They were involved in the unmediated execution of their societies’ will as formulated and promulgated in the Führer principle.
The leader wanted the Jews exterminated.
His minions carried out his wishes in manner that will always make anyone of sound mind ill when they head a clear description of the actions (in Littell’s The Kindly Ones for instance).
Round them up, march them into the forest, have them dig trenches, line them up in rows, shoot them in the head, push them into the trench [optional: douse them with gasoline and burn] cover the bodies with soil.
Thousands of operations of this type were carried out by men with families until a combination of what we would now call post traumatic stress and the German natural inclination towards ordnung lead to small moveable truck mounted gas chambers and then the real thing.
Think of a cattle round-up that went on for about three years – boxcars carrying the condemned to their rendering into nothingness. Gassed and poof-up the chimney and then out into the air whose stink, downwind ca. 65 years from history I can still smell.
Sensitive: perhaps, but listen to Montaigne: “I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead, more barbarity in tearing apart by rack and torture a body still sentient, in roasting him little by little and having him bruised and bitten by pigs and dogs tan in roasting him and eating him after his death.”
Capital kills more slowly, of the death, that we are all trapped in is a mediated one. It is hidden by money which rules the game. Marx saw it so clearly. His description of the way that capital functions is of unequalled clarity, for he saw its power to melt all existing relationships in its unrelenting drive to increase capital which is called profit and call more.
A more which in the present stage of late capitalism has been gathered in fewer and fewer hands. A rising tide that carried a few boats higher and let the rest founder.
National socialism, in spite of a symbolic resonance that lives on in tons of books and thousands of movies, is gone. Communism, the hope of so much progressive thought, has left behind shattered hope and a reflexive cynicism and nihilism that is akin to an invisible undercurrent of dark energy/matter that is conclusive drag on human possibility.
Capitalism, the default setting, has created a society that cannot survive, for all sense of justice has evaporated in the relentless drive for more without rhyme or reason.
Greed has triumphed, its manipulative instruments have ruined the lives of millions of innocent people whose tax money has gone to rescue those whose actions destroyed their lives.
The response of these, mainly men, who buried due diligence and fiduciary responsibility and turned an economy into a casino has been simple: they have not said thank you, they have said fuck you.
