The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by Jonathan Freedland was published by Harper in 2022. It is 376 pages and it includes twelve pages of black-and-white photographs and maps, as well as an index, end notes, and a bibliography.
In The Escape Artist, Jonathan Freedland, a British journalist, tells the story of Rudolf Vrba (1924-2006), who, the book claims, was “the first Jew ever known to break out of Auschwitz and make his way to freedom – one of only four who pulled off that near-impossible feat.”
The Escape Artist is one of the very best books I’ve ever read on any topic, and I recommend it without reservation to any reader with a high school or above reading level. The subject matter is, of course, important, but in lesser hands Vrba’s tale would be an overwhelmingly agonizing read. Freedland’s masterful skill performs the minor miracle of crafting a graphic record of the Holocaust that is also a page-turner. Freedland pulls no punches. He informs the reader of the exact nature of the hell the Nazis operated. But Freedland moves quickly, and brings the reader with him on a breathtaking ride. In any case, only a portion of the book takes place in Auschwitz. The rest records Vrba’s childhood, his heroic efforts to alert the world to the Nazi genocide of Jews, and his final days in Canada and the United States.
Freedland is a thriller author as well as a journalist, and Vrba’s story is over-the-top exciting, full of close calls, superhuman feats, matchless courage and not one but three star-crossed romances. Freedland loves Rudi Vrba, a complicated and at times difficult hero. The author’s affection for his protagonist propels the reader forward. The title of the book promises something of a happy ending – we know that Vrba will successfully escape hell and expose to the world the Nazis’ diabolical crimes.
Vrba’s name is not as familiar as that of Anne Frank, Primo Levi, or Elie Wiesel. Freedland guesses that that is because Vrba could never be what the world, or his fellow Jews, wanted in a concentration camp survivor; more on that, below. Freedland writes, “Maybe, through this book, Rudolf Vrba might perform one last act of escape: perhaps he might escape our forgetfulness and be remembered.”
“Rudolf Vrba” was a nomme de guerre underground resisters would eventually assign to the man born Walter Rosenberg. Like many folklore heroes, little Walter Rosenberg was the apple of his mother’s eye. She was a stepmother to her husband’s other children, but for ten years she had tried to have a child of her own. Finally she was blessed with a son. Vrba’s father owned a sawmill in Slovakia. His father died when he was four, and his mother went to work as a saleswoman. Vrba’s grandfather raised him in Orthodox Judaism. Vrba visited a restaurant and sampled pork. When God did not strike him dead, he broke with Jewish faith. On identity papers, rather than identifying as “Jewish,” he identified as “Czechoslovak.”
Czechoslovakia was a new nation that had come into existence after World War I, in 1918. The territory had previously been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was a small, landlocked state in central Europe, with a population of 14.8 million people. Most industry was in the western, Czech part of the country, but much of that industry was controlled by ethnic Germans. Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, Czechoslovakia’s first president, was born to a poor family. His father was a carter and his mother was a cook. Edvard Benes, the second president, was the tenth child of a peasant family.
Slovaks, in the mountainous east, were majority agriculturalists. Slovaks owned a tiny percent of the nation’s industry. Wealthy aristocratic families, often German or Germanized Slavs, owned a disproportionate percentage of the land. Hungarians had suppressed education in Slovakia. “Although in 1937 Slovakia’s population, including its minorities, amounted to 24 percent of the republic’s total, its share of the country’s industrial production was only about 8 percent. The contribution of Slovak agriculture was only slightly more favorable.” Even after the creation of Czechoslovakia, Slovaks felt themselves to be the poor relations of the Czechs.
Jews occupied a middleman minority position. They were often merchants, shopkeepers, and tavern owners, and often differed linguistically and culturally from the surrounding population. They were more likely to be literate, urban, and white collar, and to speak German or Yiddish.
After having been dominated by Germans and Hungarians, some Czechs and Slovaks chose ethno-nationalism as the path to their desired future. Ethno-nationalists were often anti-Semites, as well as being opposed to Gypsies, aka Rom, and Hungarians. Anti-Jewish riots broke out in Czechoslovakia in the interwar period. Even so, Gerta Sidonova, the woman who would become Rudolf Vrba’s first wife, could report that, “Her early years were happy and peaceful. It was in 1939 that things changed, following the Nazi invasion.”
On September 30, 1938, Germany, Italy, France and the United Kingdom signed the Munich Agreement. This agreement took territory away from Czechoslovakia and gave it to Germany. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain called the Munich Agreement “Peace for our time.” The British and French hoped that by appeasing Hitler’s territorial demands in Czechoslovakia, war with Germany could be averted.
Hitler was lying when he said that the land he took from Czechoslovakia was “the last territorial demand I have to make in Europe.” Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939. Paris fell to Nazi Germany on June 14, 1940. The Battle of Britain began in July, 1940. As Churchill put it, “England has been offered a choice between war and shame. She has chosen shame, and will get war.”
Historian William L. Shirer argued in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich that Nazi Germany could have been defeated in 1938. “Inspecting Czech fortifications, Hitler tells Goebbels, ‘we would have shed a lot of blood,'” reports the International Churchill Society.
After the Munich agreement, a rump portion of Slovakia, after territorial losses to Hungary and Nazi Germany, became the Slovak Republic, a client state of the Third Reich. This was a tiny state of only 2.6 million people. Slovakia had never been an independent state, and, thanks partially to Hungarian suppression and also simply to poverty and Slovakia’s agricultural profile, there was only a small Slovak intelligentsia. Father Jozef Tiso, a Vienna-educated Catholic priest, served as president of the Slovak Republic.
Before the war, Tiso had been active in fighting alcoholism and poverty. He associated those problems with Jewish tavernkeepers and merchants. Tiso’s Slovak Republic persecuted Jews, expelling Jewish students from schools, and confiscating Jewish property and businesses. Slovak gendarmes went so far as to enter Jewish homes and farms and loot them in full view of helpless property owners. The Slovak Republic bragged that it enacted draconian anti-Jewish legislation more extreme than Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws. Jews “were banned from owning cars, radios, or even sports equipment.” And Tiso’s Slovakia collaborated in the Holocaust, actually paying the Third Reich a fee for “resettlement” of Jews who were, in fact, sent to death camps in Poland. The Slovak Republic had a pre-war Jewish population of 88,951; approximately 60,000 were murdered. The 1944 Slovak National Uprising attempted to overthrow Tiso. It was suppressed by Nazis. Tiso was finally executed by hanging in a reconstituted, post-war Czechoslovakia in 1947.
In short, the odds that a Slovak Jew like Rudolf Vrba would survive to age 81 and would someday frolic with his grandchild were slim to none.
Teenage Vrba, in spite of the Slovak Republic’s anti-Semitism, insisted on identifying as a Slovak. He wanted to travel to England to fight with the Czechoslovak army in exile. Instead he was transported to Majdanek, a concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Freedland describes in graphic detail the horrors of train transports of unsuspecting Jews, packed into cattle cars with no free space, no water, and just one bucket for waste. Similarly graphic descriptions create nightmarish images of concentration camps. This reader will not soon forget the brief description of Nazis torturing and then shooting dead a Slovak rabbi named Eckstein. After Majdanek, Vrba was transported to Auschwitz. From his first sight of the camp, Vrba, who was highly intelligent, began to commit every detail to memory.
Vrba filled various jobs at Auschwitz. He worked construction, on almost no food, surrounded by SS guards whipping him and kicking his fellow Jewish slave laborers to death. IG Farben engineers and managers, well-dressed and looking professional, visited the construction sight and paid no heed to the hideous conditions under which enslaved Jews labored. After a month, out of a hundred workers, Vrba was one of two to survive.
Vrba was reassigned to Kanada, the Auschwitz storehouse of goods stolen from the arriving Jews who were immediately gassed. Nazis ordered their Jewish slaves to find every hidden valuable. Prisoners squeezed toothpaste tubes in search of diamonds. A Jew who tried to keep an apple was immediately flogged to death. “In one month alone, some 824 freight containers were transported by rail from Auschwitz” to Germany. Worn clothing was distributed to Germans through the Winterhilfswerk, or winter relief fund. “Between 1942 and 1944, an estimated six tons of dental gold were deposited in the vaults of the Reichsbank.” Those gold teeth were often ripped from the still foaming mouths of gassing victims.
No one explained to Vrba that Auschwitz-Birkenau was a death camp. He slowly came to that conclusion while working in Kanada. He noted that he was sorting through baby clothes and canes for the elderly and he never saw children or the elderly in the part of the camp he occupied. Slowly but surely he realized that Jews were arriving and, unlike him and other strong young men like him, these newly arrived Jews were not being slowly worked, beaten, and starved to death, but instead were immediately murdered. “The thought did not form immediately. It took time, perhaps because it was too enormous, too at odds with everything Walter had learned, and wanted to believe, about science and progress and civilization.”
Later, Vrba was assigned to the unloading platform. He worked about three hundred transports that carried, in total, three hundred thousand people. Vrba was determined to memorize every detail, hoping someday to report to the world exactly what was transpiring at Auschwitz.
Trains from western Europe brought victims “from Paris or Amsterdam, people raised to expect the best of the civilized Germans” who “were primed to believe that they were at long last in the hands of German officers who would, naturally, ensure that food and drink would be available, that their luggage would be looked after, and that order was about to be restored … SS men, their manners impeccable, might help the sick clamber aboard, offering a helping hand … ‘Good God,’ they might say ‘in what state did these horrible Slovaks transport you? This is inhuman.'”
“A well-dressed Czech mother” said to a German officer, “‘Thank God we’re here.’ She was one of those deportees who believed that the nation of Goethe and Kant would at least bring a measure of sanity to proceedings … The SS man, gloved, his uniform creased in all the right places, gave her his most benign and trustworthy smile … ‘My dear lady. We are civilized people.'”
Freedland describes how Nazis hid the truth of the death camps as long as possible. Even when discussing their actions with fellow Nazis who knew exactly what the Final Solution entailed, they used euphemistic vocabulary. Nazis hid death camps in remote regions in occupied territory. Victims were assured that they were merely being “relocated.” “It is much easier to slaughter lambs than to hunt deer.” Those prisoners, like the Sonderkommando, who handled corpses, and who knew exactly what was going on, were isolated from other prisoners and eventually killed. Prisoners were also hostages to each other. They knew if one escaped or rebelled, other prisoners in the escapee’s block would be tortured and killed. Vrba, though a good worker, was once himself slated for elimination. In one of many random acts that prolonged his life, a nameless Polish prisoner, “in a gesture of generosity that made no rational sense,” removed Vrba’s name from a list of those to be killed.
Vrba witnessed the creation of the Theresienstadter Familienlager, or Theresienstadt family camp, 17,517 Jews from Czechoslovakia who were not immediately murdered. Nazis established this camp in September, 1943, and allowed Jews to live for several months before gassing them. Why? Possibly to fool Red Cross observers. If observers saw Jews living in Auschwitz for several months they might believe that the Final Solution really was all about “relocation,” not mass murder.
SS officers greeted new family camp arrivals. They “could not have been more solicitous, laughing and chatting, handing out fruit to the adults and sweets to the children, tousling the hair of those who held tight to their dolls and teddy bears.” The camp’s Jewish inmates were mass murdered in two actions, one in March and another in July, 1944. There were 1,294 survivors of the family camp, including Otto Dov Kulka, who would go on to become an Israeli scholar of anti-Semitism. He died at 88 in 2021.
Rudolf Vrba was surviving Auschwitz by telling himself that he must eventually serve as a witness. If Jews knew that the trains were taking them to their deaths, not to “relocation,” they would become more difficult to control. That was Vrba’s hope. The family camp “jolted” Vrba. Vrba was assigned by the Auschwitz underground resistance to see how many in the family camp would be willing to revolt. They had nothing to lose. “They could see the chimneys; they could smell the smoke.” “Too many of the Familienlager inmates could not accept that the SS would murder the very children they had played with, whose names they knew … These Jews had the information. The trouble was, they did not believe it.” A potential leader of a revolt, faced with impossible choices, poisoned himself. Alicia, the family camp girl with whom Vrba lost his virginity, took her place on a truck to the gas chamber. “It has been wonderful,” she said.
Vrba’s method of escape was ingenious, courageous, and makes for a breathless read. I’m not going to spoil the details of his epic escape here. After clearing Auschwitz and evading immediate capture, Vrba and his fellow escapee, Alfred “Fred” Wetzler, moved on foot toward Slovakia, the land of their birth. They had to cover fifty miles over increasingly mountainous terrain. Vrba and Wetzler knew that “any Pole found harboring, or even assisting, a Jew would be executed. Conversely, a Pole who found a Jew in hiding and gave them up would be rewarded.”
A peasant woman fed and sheltered the escapees. She warned them that because of local partisan activity, the many Germans in the area might shoot any strangers on sight. The woman knew that “many Poles had already been killed for making the mistake of giving food” to strangers. Why did the Polish peasant woman help? Perhaps because she had had two sons. One was already dead; the other was a prisoner in a concentration camp. When Vrba and Wetzler left, the poor woman insisted on giving the men money, though she seemed to subsist on not much more than potatoes. After they moved on, they noted that locals appeared afraid of them, but would “accidentally drop half a loaf of bread near their path.”
In another encounter, the two immediately identified themselves to a woman herding goats. “We’ve escaped from Auschwitz,” they said, knowing that that information would be enough to get them killed. The woman gestured toward a goat hut where she gave them bread and a blanket. She told them to wait there; later, a boy brought them potatoes and meat. An old man in “shabby clothes … carrying a gun” arrived. The gun frightened the escapees, but the man had merely brought them more food. The goat-herding woman cried as the old man took Vrba and Wetzler to another hideout, where they were able to sleep in real beds, and where their Polish host gave them new shoes.
The Pole further risked his life by guiding Vrba and Wetzler through territory regularly patrolled by Germans. The Pole said that the Germans stuck so closely to their schedules that they were easily evaded through careful timing. Finally, the old man pointed to a forest. “That’s Slovakia,” he said. Vrba asked the old man’s name, but the man wouldn’t give it. Vrba understood. If Nazis captured Vrba, he couldn’t gave away a name he didn’t know. The old man provided Vrba with an address in Slovakia. He instructed Vrba to tell the people at the address that “the living hillsman from Milowka” had sent them. The old man teared up as he sent Vrba and Wetzler on their way.
Once they arrived in Slovakia, using the old Pole’s nomme de guerre, Vrba and Wetzler were again helped by a local, who, again, living under a Nazi client state, was risking his own life by offering that help. This man gave the escapees peasant garb and assigned them to tending to his pigs. That way they would avoid detection.
For me, reading of these kindnesses was a whiplash experience after pages of brutality. I soldiered through the Auschwitz descriptions, stone-faced. When I read of the humanity exhibited by these nameless peasant heroes, I cried.
Vrba and Wetzler prepared a meticulous report documenting the Final Solution as it was being carried out in Auschwitz. The Escape Artist describes the many good people, Jewish and non-Jewish, in Nazi-occupied territory and in free lands, who worked hard to get the report in front of as many eyes as possible, from Jewish civilians in Hungary to world leaders. For example, Dr. Geza Soos, a Calvinist anti-Nazi resister, worked on distributing the report in Hungary.
Unfortunately, too many others wanted nothing to do with the realities exposed in the Vrba-Wetzler report. They buried it, slow-walked it through bureaucratic channels, or refused to believe it. World leaders, Freeman suggests, refused to take actions they could have taken to address the ongoing Holocaust. Perhaps most pertinently, Jews and others living under Nazi occupation had limited power to act.
American and British leaders believed that defeating Nazi Germany militarily should be their sole focus. Various government officials and press organs decided that putting too much emphasis on Jews might alienate the public. “Yank, a US Army journal” even after requesting details about Nazi war crimes, “declined to use the copy of the Auschwitz report … Yank found it ‘too Semitic’ and requested a ‘less Jewish’ account.” Some in American and British administrations wrote the report off as what they perceived as Jewish exaggeration of persecution. One member of the British Foreign Office wrote, “In my opinion, a disproportionate amount of the time of the office is wasted on dealing with these wailing Jews.” One Jew who read the report “seemed incredulous that ‘civilized Germany’ was executing people without due legal process.” Vrba was profoundly disappointed in what he assessed as his fellow Jews’ hesitancy and inaction. His attitude would contribute to his being persona non grata to various Jewish organizations in the years to come.
Some Jewish leaders begged the Allies to bomb the rail lines leading to Auschwitz. “The War Department did not undertake a study of whether bombing the railway lines was militarily feasible; no one looked for alternative means of halting, or even slowing, the transports … US reconnaissance planes flew over Auschwitz taking aerial photographs often in the spring and summer of 1944 … the images were detailed and revealing. They showed everything the Vrba Wetzler report described … No one ever examined those pictures.”
In Hungary, Rezso Kasztner, a Jewish leader, privately offered Adolf Eichmann a bribe to allow 1,684 Jews to escape. Freedman writes, “the Jewish rescue committee handed over $1,000 per head for every passenger on the Kasztner train, a total of $1,684,000 …and, more precious still, a Jewish community that would be sufficiently pliant and passive to enable the deportations to proceed smoothly … The Nazis wanted Kasztner’s silence. And they got it. Kasztner kept the Vrba-Wetzler Report to himself and the small leadership circle around him.” Kasztner did, though, “order the distribution of the notorious postcards which purported to offer greetings from those who had been ‘resettled’ in new homes.”
One can only imagine how crushed Vrba felt. He survived Auschwitz by telling himself that he would expose Nazi crimes to the world, and that doing so would save lives. It didn’t work out that way, but Vrba’s astounding resiliency would not allow him to sit back and wallow in despair. He joined the Slovak resistance, fought in at least nine battles against SS units and many raids against German artillery posts, and lived to relish the sounds of SS men’s death throes. After the war, Vrba was awarded the Czechoslovak Medal for Bravery, the Order of the Slovak National Insurrection, and the Medal of Honor of Czechoslovak Partisans.
Vrba reconnected with Gerta Sidinova, a girl he had known before the war, and they married. Because Vrba was a former partisan, he was able to receive an enviable apartment in the new, communist Czechoslovakia. The couple had two children, Helena and Zuza. Rudi and Gerta resumed their educations interrupted by war. He would get a PhD, and she an MD; both would become published scientists.
But all was not well. Rudi was a difficult husband. He was suspicious, verbally abusive, and given to drinking alone. He had multiple affairs. Some liaisons were conducted on the living room couch in the apartment he shared with his wife and daughters. Vrba even denounced his wife to the SNB, the Czech secret intelligence service.
Vrba became disillusioned by communist Czechoslovakia. He was followed. He would return home to find that unseen agents had interfered with objects in his home, a common communist tactic to unnerve victims. A professor, he was asked to remove “bourgeois” students from his classes. He was forced to resign when he refused to cooperate fully. He had a PhD, but had to take a night shift job on a technician’s salary. In 1952, Rudolf Slansky, a leading Czech communist, and fourteen other leading communists were subjected to a Stalinist show trial. Eleven, including Slansky, were hanged.
Vrba noticed that no one in the new Czechoslovakia wanted to talk about the Holocaust. Rather, the official line focused on the suffering of communists under Nazism. Vrba realized he had to escape again. Independently of Rudi, Gerta had made the same decision. They both, separately, escaped on the same day. She took a circuitous route to England.
Rudi went to Israel. He didn’t like the “clannishness.” He didn’t like the “romance of a perennially persecuted nation at last capable of defending itself. As far as he was concerned he had already defended himself.” Also, he still assessed Jewish leaders as having failed their own people. He didn’t want to be around Israeli survivors of Europe’s Jewish leadership.
Vrba joined his ex-wife and daughters in England. There, again, Vrba’s “paranoia” irked Gerta. She went to court and won total legal custody of their daughters. Vrba alienated his employers. He moved to Vancouver, where he became a professor of pharmacology. When he was almost fifty, he met a beautiful 24-year-old, Robin, whom he married. He began to “mellow,” but he still had a bad temper, and he was given to assessing strangers as to whether or not they could survive a concentration camp. He convinced his young wife never to have children, because, he said, having children makes you weak.
Decades after the war, people finally began to talk about the Holocaust. Vrba appeared on Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, but he never became a household name. “He would not serve up a morally comfortable narrative in which the only villains were the Nazis.” Vrba still blamed various Jews. “Handing a platform to Rudolf Vrba” came “to seem like a risk.” “Israel’s preeminent scholars … played a part in preventing him from entering the pantheon of revered survivors.”
Too, Vrba didn’t look like a victim. He had been a mere teen in Auschwitz and he still had a full head of dark hair. He was “tanned, fit, and vigorous … loud and confident … dapper in a leather coat and fedora, a feather in its band … He deploys sardonic, sarcastic humor … he would offer no uplifting aphorisms, reassuring his audience that, ultimately, human beings were good.”
In 1982, Dr. Helena Vrbova, just short of thirty years old, while researching malaria in New Guinea, died. She was in the midst of an unhappy relationship with a married man. Vrba said that losing his daughter to a suspected suicide was the worst event in his life, because he could not fight back. Vrba suddenly began speaking of God, a God he had rejected in his youth.
Vrba faced another shock in his old age. He discovered that the report he and Fred Wetzler had prepared was not the outside world’s first inkling of the Holocaust. Before Vrba and Wetzler, Polish resistance fighters Jan Karski, Stanislaw Jaster, and Witold Pilecki, at immense risk and with much suffering, had conveyed messages to the Allies. The Polish government in exile published “The Mass Extermination of Jews in German-occupied Poland,” a December, 1942, address to the United Nations.
In other words, the major premise of the book, that Rudolf Vrba, nee Walter Rosenberg, escaped from Auschwitz to warn the world, and save the lives of Jews, or at least turn them into “deer” Nazis would have to “hunt” rather than “sheep” they could systematically slaughter, is not accurate. Others had warned the world before Vrba. That makes this astounding life, which Freedland follows in vivid, compelling prose right up to his death at age 81 from bladder cancer, no less fascinating and, indeed, awe-inspiring.
Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.
(*)Kastner was later assassinated in Israel for only saving the 1600 or so he put on the ‘Kastner train’…while keeping secret what was about to happen to the other 400 plus thousand plus Jews Eichmann sent to Auschwitz…Kastner is a big part of the story in ‘The Devil’s Confession’ on Netflix and Perfidy by Scarface author Ben Hecht.
Thank you for publishing this review!
Absolutely! It’s taken me all morning to get through reading this fascinating review, getting lost in tangent internet searches of the different characters and events Ms. Goska points out.
I swear Danusha Goska is absolutely the best contributor at FPM!
Why would this comment get any down votes?
Because the comment is mine and since I’m an advocate of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism and Objectivism is atheistic and champions the moral code of rational selfishness there are religious conservatives here who will down vote any comment I post.
What they really want is to have me banned for promoting Objectivism. They want FPM to be a safe space and an echo chamber for Judeo-Christian conservatives only.
I’m okay with this being a chamber for Judeo-Christian conservatives only. That’s why I read this webpage. I sure don’t get this info from anywhere else.
And you have earned every bit of it.
I do agree with your high opinion of Danusha Goska, however.
Agree! I love reading Danusha Goska, and look forward to reading any and every thing she writes.
The story of Rudolf Vrba’s escape from Auschwitz is also told in the recent 2020 movie The Auschwitz Report on Netflix.
That movie was made from Alfred Wetzler’s fictionalized account of their escape in which he makes himself into the handsome hero and Vrba into a weakling follower. Nothing could be further from the truth. He embellished the story, admitted his book was “fiction,” and added details from the escape of Ceslav Mordowitz and Arnost Rosin, who escaped a month later. The movie is a complete mish mash.
For the real story, read Rudolf Vrba’s own book, co-authored by Alan Bestic, written in 1963. The most recent edition was reprinted in 2020 and is called, “I Escaped from Auschwitz.” It is riveting.
Agree.. looking forward to reading the book.
For the real story, read Rudolf Vrba’s own book, co-authored by Alan Bestic, written in 1963. The most recent edition was reprinted in 2020 and is called, “I Escaped from Auschwitz.” It is riveting. Freedland’s book is a mere retelling of what Vrba already wrote. Go to the original.
The Holocaust story must be told and re-told. And heard. And read. And heeded.
Indeed, many have told their stories. Recently I listened to a fascinating podcast by Ettie Zilber, who has told her family’s story in the book “A Holocaust Memoir of Love and Resilience..”
In my own state, Indiana, Eva Kor, Holocaust survivor who recently died, founded the CANDLES museum in Terre Haute documenting the twins experiments by Dr Mengele in Auschwitz.
Tom Stoppard has written a gripping new play, “Leopoldstadt,” that I hope to have the opportunity to see.
Thank you, Professor Goska, for this review.
It is told and retold — to no avail. The Holocaust needs to be UNDERSTOOD down to its philosophical roots. The Holocaust has happened again and again, it’s been repeated, and repeated again it will be, until it is understood.
What were Mao’s mass murders, Stalin’s mass murders, the infamous “Killing Fields” of Cambodia, the Rwandan Genocide, but holocausts? Holocausts they were. But are they understood as smaller manifestations of a holocaust? No, not really.
One can say that the German Nazis perfected the Holocaust on a scale and meticulous precision and detail never before seen in world history and that is true. Possibly only the Japanese have the cultural obsession with meticulous and precise detail to execute a holocaust like the German Nazi Holocaust. But that’s an issue of national culture. Other cultures’ holocausts have been sloppy but no less deadly in intention. They can learn from the Germans and the Japanese.
Genocide, mass murder on a holocaust scale, has happened again and again, retelling and retelling won’t do a thing to stop another one. The deepest, PHILOSOPHICAL, causes of the Holocaust need to be discovered and understood, and the philosophical antidote discovered and understood, if another repetition is to be avoided.
I”m beginning to believe we are experiencing another holocaust now, throughout the World. It’s called covid 19 and the vaccines.
That’s utter nonsense.
The Nazis and Communists operated similarly to what you advocate: declaring their self-anointed beliefs righteous in a paroxysm of tautological fever . Their insensate lust for supremacy being nothing more than sociopathic delusion. Once this delusional tautology is accepted in the mind of the power hungry, even God has no ontological status. This is a dangerous form of malignant narcissism and is certifiably insane.
Mao slaughtered 75 million of his own countrymen during his atheocratic nightmare, inspired by the corkscrew logic and untenable ideas of a man who starved his own children and never had an original idea, Mao butchered and starved 75 million fellow countrymen. Hitler and Mao both admired Marx for his spiritual nihilism. Both murdered tens of millions of people because they were drunk with the evil desire for a level of power which seems inexpressible by any other means than by committing mass murder, etc.. Be careful what you wish for.
Brevity and accuracy! Can’t beat that!
By not calling a holocaust it makes less horrifying.
The name makes it more allowable. Dictators are mass murderers.
There are many insistent where mass murders occur but because it gets a pablum identification it goes unnoticed.
LBJ ordered the military to inflate the number of deaths in order to keep the US population support for the war. Many of the thousand were not the army. solders.
You ain’t gonna discover, understood or stop anything from your safe space Lotus Flower. You will simply tell us how horribly altruistic we are.
For the real story, read Rudolf Vrba’s own book, co-authored by Alan Bestic, written in 1963. The most recent edition was reprinted in 2020 and is called, “I Escaped from Auschwitz.” It is riveting. Freedland’s book is a mere retelling of what Vrba already wrote. Go to the original.
OK, Danusha Goska, when are you going to read “The Ominous Parallels: The End Of Freedom In America” by Leonard Peikoff?
Yeh, I know what it feels like to have people not believe the facts of reality. People will not believe that ALTRUISM and SELF-SACRIFICE are evil and RATIONAL EGOISM, i.e., RATIONAL SELFISHNESS is man’s highest and noblest virtue. The virtue that keeps us all alive, the virtue that produces human happiness, human flourishing.
People will not believe that it was the unreason and irrationality of Kantian-Hegelian altruism and self-sacrifice that created and motivated Marxism and Nazism. But it is a fact of reality.
Part 1
“OK, Danusha Goska, when are you going to read “The Ominous Parallels: The End Of Freedom In America” by Leonard Peikoff?”
I did. It was an interesting read and one place where Peikoff is not utterly out of his depth (as he is with pre-modern history). But on the grand scale of things Mark Steyn and many others do the territory far better.
It is also perversely ironic for me that Peikoff will simultaneously spin farcical myths about how Christmas is anti-Christian and needs to be more commercial while simultaneously putting out “Ominous Parallels” decrying the decline of the US, without ever thinking that maybe the processes he is cheerleading are leading to the results he dislikes.
“Yeh, I know what it feels like to have people not believe the facts of reality.”
You would know. You are one of those who doesn’t believe in the facts of reality.
As shown by your attempts to characterize the Greco-Romans pre-Christianity as “rationalsitic” when they were famously superstitious even in their own time, glossing over the Carolingian Renaissance of the 9th century and the “Great” one of the 13th, and other incoherence.
Part 2
” People will not believe that ALTRUISM and SELF-SACRIFICE are evil and RATIONAL EGOISM, i.e., RATIONAL SELFISHNESS is man’s highest and noblest virtue. ”
Because most people have dealt with people who are simultaneously utterly reprehensible and cruel, but also utterly rational in their own self-interest. Ted Bundy being a prime and radical example.
So most people are not stupid enough to believe that rational self-interest is not merely a useful tool but an outright virtue. Especially not when the study of psychopathy has made such inroads, especially in terms of high functioning psychopaths.
Of course, you don’t like to confront the fact that “rational self-interest” devoid of any greater moral meaning routinely leads to monstrosity, and even more frequently results in petty, cruel people. Which is why you will endlessly spin and redefine to try and explain how the likes of Ted Bundy’s high functioning, egotistical psychopathy and Reinhard Heydrich’s mostly apolitical hunger for power were not “Real” Rational Self-Interest.
In spite of the clear evidence to the contrary.
Well done. Methinks you have outed his lust for the talisman of power and desire to convince himself that he is beyond good and evil by dint of his endless praise of being rational, despite providing no evidence to prove his implied claim.
Most of us read fairy tales as kids that taught us lessons about evil and how clever or rational it can be. There is the story of Adam and Eve and their- man’s- fall to the serpent. Even cartoons had evil characters that were tricking others constantly.
When have I ever claimed that I am beyond god and evil? Your dishonest and cowardly smear of me is thoroughly reprehensible and deplorable.
Part 3
“The virtue that keeps us all alive,”
It keeps most of us alive, but it can just as easily lead to many people regarding others as impediments to be eliminated. This is one of the great, penetrating insights of the Prisoner’s Dilemma and why even most rational self-interest fails it because it does not look deeper into the second order of consequences (And how it is ultimately more likely to work out if people cooperate).
Of course, this doesn’t fit well with your egotistical dogma where “rational” selfishness is a virtue unto itself. So you ignore it.
“the virtue that produces human happiness, human flourishing.”
Yes, because that is totally what the high functioning psychopath produces. “Human Happiness” and “Human Flourishing.”
There’s a reason why even the great prophet of self-interest as a good, Adam Smith, coined the term “ENLIGHTENED Self-Interest”, not Rational. Because he knew better how rationality and self-interest without moderation would lead to horrors. His analysis of Slavery is a key tour de force in that.
Part 4
You, Rand, and Peikoff think that you can completely divorce reason from the very moral and ethnical enlightenment and even altruism and have no negative consequences. If you knew Aristotle or Socrates half as well as you pretend to you would know why that tends to work out badly as the Melian Dialogue and the Platonic “Republic” attest.
But that doesn’t fit well with your preconditioned bias in which you condemn everything that is bad to altruism and irrationally exalt pre-Christian antiquity. So you ignore it.
“People will not believe that it was the unreason and irrationality of Kantian-Hegelian altruism and self-sacrifice that created and motivated Marxism and Nazism. But it is a fact of reality.”
Mostly because people prefer to examine the more overwhelming and usually proximate causes, such as German Socialism, the rebellion against Judeo-Christian morality, and the fusion of cultures used to absolute power with philosophies and ideologies that claimed to be scientific and advocated utter centralization.
Part 5
And moreover, they point out that it wasn’t “Kantian-Hegelian altruism” that motivated Reinhard Heydrich (a man so ruthlessly unsentimental he mocked Schubert’s music for it) or Lavrentiy Beria (who was not so unsentimental but was ruthlessly practical and was in many ways the model of the “rational self-interested” hedonist you like, which is why he simultaneously murdered millions and engaged in rape-murder in his spare time but proposed the most radical reforms of any Soviet leader during his brief time in power, because an utterly amoral and thoroughly rational man would have scant attraction to Marxist ideology and would want to reform the state to make it better).
You have no explanation for Heydrich, Beria, Bundy, or Rodney Alcala, to name just a few. Which is why your conclusions shall always be incredibly shallow.
You are a dishonest individual, we’ve argued before. I told you in no uncertain terms that you are too dishonest to deal with. But once in a while if I see some dishonesty, smear, or misrepresentation of yours too blatant to let stand I will repudiate it. It is immoral to let thoroughly shameless and blatant dishonesties, smears, and misrepresentations of Ayn Rand and Objectivism to go unanswered.
Rational self-interest and hedonism are incompatible, they are opposites. Hedonism is an enemy of rational selfishness. Hedonism and reason are incompatible.
“I am profoundly opposed to the philosophy of hedonism. Hedonism is the doctrine which holds that the good is whatever gives you pleasure and, therefore, pleasure is the standard of morality. Objectivism holds that the good must be defined by a rational standard of value, that pleasure is not a first cause, but only a consequence, that only the pleasure which proceeds from a rational value judgment can be regarded as moral, that pleasure, as such, is not a guide to action nor a standard of morality….
To say that pleasure should be the standard of morality simply means that whichever values you happen to have chosen, consciously or subconsciously, rationally or irrationally, are right and moral. This means that you are to be guided by chance feelings, emotions and whims, not by your mind. My philosophy is the opposite of hedonism. I hold that one cannot achieve happiness by random, arbitrary or subjective means. One can achieve happiness only on the basis of rational values. By rational values, I do not mean anything that a man may arbitrarily or blindly declare to be rational. It is the province of morality, of the science of ethics, to define for men what is a rational standard and what are the rational values to pursue.” – Ayn Rand
“Hedonism” – The Ayn Rand Lexicon
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/hedonism.html
Another cut an paste up job from the person sitting on his Lotus Flower, passing judgment on us all.
Part 8
“To say that pleasure should be the standard of morality simply means that whichever values you happen to have chosen, consciously or subconsciously, rationally or irrationally, are right and moral. ”
This is an overwrought piece of word salad that ignores the fact that pain and pleasure are not merely “values you happen to have chosen” but also deeply wired biological reactions to the environment but great import (though nowhere near as much as Epicurus and his disciples claimed they were).
Well done. Imagine having a less rational and scientific understanding of pleasure than a Bronze Age Greek. And one who wasn’t even Aristotle. But that’s about par for the course with your actions.
“This means that you are to be guided by chance feelings, emotions and whims, not by your mind.”
And as we’ve pointed out ad infinitum, it turns out that it’s pretty damn useful and even rationally beneficial that you have immediate physical and emotional reactions to stimuli that aren’t entirely rational or considered. Because your rational brain will take a lot longer to calculate that a burning sensation is bad and thus you should stop than the animal brain will to the feeling of burning unpleasantness from touching a hot stove.
Part 9
“My philosophy is the opposite of hedonism.”
Of course it is Ayn. I’m sure you had a very, VERY rational reason for gaslighting your followers and emotionally manipulating Nathan Branden into an affair with you that was TOTALLY rationally conceived of and entirely divorced from the obvious desire for pleasure.
“I hold that one cannot achieve happiness by random, arbitrary or subjective means.”
Which ignores the fact that as Epicurus proved earlier, the pursuit of pleasure is rarely purely random, arbitrary, or subjective. Which is why dismissing hedonism as a moral system cannot be limited by such, as Aristotle (you know Ayn, the guy you claim to idealize, the guy supposedly responsible for everything good in the modern world) did not limit their indictment of it to that.
Part 10
In any case, Rand’s hypocrisy and extremely shallow, dishonest engagement with hedonism ,pleasure, and pain is one of several reasons why she and Peikoff are regarded as fundamentally shallow and non-holistic thinkers.
” One can achieve happiness only on the basis of rational values. ”
Riiiiight. Because that’s why a baby is happy. Rational values.
Rand wants to play Humpty Dumpty with words, as do you. It is one of the more tedious and obscurantist parts of your philosophical family tree and something even your fellow rational anti-theist Voltaire would have recognized the issue with.
Part 11
“By rational values, I do not mean anything that a man may arbitrarily or blindly declare to be rational.”
Which is why many people – probably most – don’t “arbitrarily” or “blindly” declare things to be rational, though they will often freight the deck and use motivated reasoning. Like you did when justifying pushing Mr. Branden into an affair with you, Ayn.
Which you and your followers then justify under the technically-true justification that it was consenting and freely chosen while ignoring the fundamentally irrational basis for it, the exploitative nature of how you manipulated your authority and trust, and so forth.
” It is the province of morality, of the science of ethics, to define for men what is a rational standard and what are the rational values to pursue.” – Ayn Rand”
Which brings us to the question of how one should pursue the science of ethics, and particularly evaluate its findings. Rand has little in the way of an answer, and especially in the way of rebutting Heydrich or Beria’s pursuit of power beyond sloppily (and inaccurately) declaring it “hedonism.” While ignoring the fact that from a philosophical point of view, Heydrich in particular was not a hedonist since he pointedly rejected the avoidance of pain and danger.
Part 1 “You’re a dishonest, evasive, sophist.”
No THX. You, Peikoff, and Rand are.
Your lie here shows that.
” There is no arguing with dishonest sophistry. ”
Manifestly untrue. Indeed, this WAS one of the key gifts Aristotle’s school actually DID provide (and one of the reasons why Sophist comes down to us as a form of insult “IN SPITE OF HOW Aristotle and his kin were ones by the old definition).
They didn’t give us modern physics or fluid dynamics contra Rand, but they did show how to engage irrational bad faith and rationalistically take it apart bit by bit.
But once again wee see you do not bother understanding Aristotle or even trying to. He is a talisman for you, an article of faith rather than a philosopher to be rationally considered and critiqued.
Part 2
“I defeated you in a very long, days long, argument about the role of Thomas Aquinas and the Renaissance. When I defeated you, you disappeared for about a month. T”
This is fucking hilarious precisely because it’s the opposite of reality.
You claimed that the loss of Aristotle caused the “Christian Dark Ages” and that Thomas of Aquinas reintroduced him.
I pointed out this was ahistorical stupidity on multiple levels, *starting with the fact that Aristotle was never “lost” in any way in the Eastern Roman, Greek Speaking world* (which nevertheless remained an absolute monarchy).
Moreover, excerpts of Aristotle never stopped being copied down in the Latin-speaking West.
Finally, I pointed out that new translations of Aristotle from Latin writers working from Greek sources appeared two generations before Thomas Aquinas’s time and indeed he was mentored by some.
The best you could come up with was incoherently sputtering in an analogy about how just because a rocket was in a garage didn’t mean one had the knowledge to make use of it or something like that.
Which of course did nothing to refute my points, and which I came back at you immediately showing.
As several others here noted.
You lost. Big time. Because you really have no understanding of history, philosophy, or theology beyond what you’ve been spoon fed. And I showed that.
“I defeated you in a very long, days long, argument about the role of Thomas Aquinas and the Renaissance. When I defeated you, you disappeared for about a month. T”
This is hilarious precisely because it’s the opposite of reality.
You claimed that the loss of Aristotle caused the “Christian Dark Ages” and that Thomas of Aquinas reintroduced him.
I pointed out this was ahistorical stupidity on multiple levels, *starting with the fact that Aristotle was never “lost” in any way in the Eastern Roman, Greek Speaking world* (which nevertheless remained an absolute monarchy).
Moreover, excerpts of Aristotle never stopped being copied down in the Latin-speaking West.
Oh, and the Florentine Renaissance stared when – at the latest – Aquinas was a grown man and before he had begun his translations.
Finally, I pointed out that new translations of Aristotle from Latin writers working from Greek sources appeared two generations before Thomas Aquinas’s time and indeed he was mentored by some.
The best you could come up with was incoherently sputtering in an analogy about how just because a rocket was in a garage didn’t mean one had the knowledge to make use of it or something like that. Which as I noted did nothing to rebutt or even address my points. You lost. And now you’re projecting.
Part 3
Which of course did nothing to refute my points, and which I came back at you immediately showing.
As several others here noted.
You lost. Big time. Because you really have no understanding of history, philosophy, or theology beyond what you’ve been spoon fed. And I showed that. And I’ve reiterated it many times. This is you projecting in an attempt to salve your ego. and salvage your pathetic, superstitious, egotistical world view.
Because if the “Great Mind” Rand could be wrong on such a fundamental point about Aristotle’s importance to the modern world and the role Aquinas played, then it stands to reason every one of her “rational” arguments dependent on that falsehood is also wrong, and that she could be wrong on other things.
While You and Peikoff were left twisting in the wind reiterating an obvious lie.
Part 4
” I will never again engage in a protracted argument with a dishonest charlatan like you. My time is too important to waste with the likes of a dishonest, lying, evader, and sophist, like you.”
The fact that you spend several hours of your life regurgitating Rand and Peikoff- who have been proven to be far more dishonest, evasive of contrary evidence, and sophistic than I have – disproves this claim.
Also: the fact that you resort to an ad hominem while ignoring the evidence and sources I cited -including by people who actually know when the Tuscan Renaissance started and the flaws with Aristotle’s works – underlines how for all the posturing about “rationality” and “honesty” you are a dishonest, self-deluded, irrational, emotional wreck who cannot argue coherently.
But I think most people who have read my posts and your drivel knows full well why you have no intention of debating or addressing me again.
You would lose. Badly. AGAIN.
Like you are now.
Part 3
“Then you came back with the lie that you had defeated me.”
Stop lying. I kept responding to you in that debate until the end, and eventually you were the one that cut out.
Moreover, anybody who reads your incoherent prattle about antiquity and the medieval era would understand how utterly shallow and false your grasp of either is. And in the end you were the one who conceded that no, Aquinas was not the first “new” Latin translator of Aristotle. Thus destroying the centerpiece of your argument.
And also that the Renaissance started when -at the latest – Aquinas was a young adult and before his main translation work.
” I will never again engage in a protracted argument with…. you.”
Because you’ll be defeated. Badly. Again.
Like I’m defeating you badly now.
Oh and PS: If you were half as rational as you claim, you’d recognize that I didn’t just rely on my own argumentation. I used sources and citations from others. So calling me a charlatan does nothing to refute them, or my logical points.
So thanks for proving what you are. A shallow, emotional, bigoted wreck.
” My time is too important to waste with the likes of a dishonest, lying, evader, and sophist, like you.”
And yet you spend hours of your life writing paens – if not outright copypastes – of Rand and Peikoff, who are far more dishonest, sophsitic, evasive, and out of date than what I have written.
Yeah, REALLY convincing claim there bruv.
” My philosophy is the opposite of hedonism. I hold that one cannot achieve happiness by random, arbitrary or subjective means. One can achieve happiness only on the basis of rational values. By rational values, I do not mean anything that a man may arbitrarily or blindly declare to be rational. ”
Is that so? Well then, where does Rand’s blatantly lascivious, serial adultery with a variety of men, blatantly in front of her husband, fit with her grandiloquent “moral” pronouncement?
She writes like an outboard motor running full throttle through a manure pit.
“Is that so? Well then, where does Rand’s blatantly lascivious, serial adultery with a variety of men, blatantly in front of her husband, fit with her grandiloquent “moral” pronouncement?
She writes like an outboard motor running full throttle through a manure pit.”
There is no evidence whatsoever the Rand had as you claim “serial adultery with a variety of men”. The established facts point to Rand having been a virgin on her wedding night. and her husband Frank O’Connnor her only lover. The only evidence we have that Rand had an affair with Nathaniel Branden are the words of Nathaniel and his wife Barbara Branden. If the affair that they claim happened did happen they both also clearly admit that the affair was discussed among the four spouses in several private meetings between the four spouses and that Rand and Nathaniel declared that the affair could not begin without the consent of Frank and Barbara. According to the Brandens’ words no one was forced, coerced, or threatened in any way to agree to the affair. If the affair did happen it was stupid and foolish but not immoral.
……too blatant to let stand I will repudiate it.
So what are you going to do about it. Lecture us some more?
OMG somebody smeared Ayn and your religion. This must not stand! No one knows you are REPUDIATING anything.
Do you realize how bizarrely self-important and clownish you are becoming.
It seems like everything is incompatible in your rationally selfish world.
A little hedonism now and then is fun. you do what fun is, or are you that hung up, always question what you do. You are a bore.
Part 1
“You are a dishonest individual,”
Not in comparison to you, Peikoff, or Rand.
As we’ve established.
What’s more remarkable is the depths of the dishonesty and irrationality you get the further you look. In particular Peikoff’s dishonesty, such as maliciously cherrypicking quotes from Kant and smearing his philosophical rivals such as Cassirer and Santanaya.
And that’s before I get into how wretchedly incompetent he is as a classicist, medievalist, and in assessing theology.
” we’ve argued before.”
And you got shown up by someone who actually knows a scintilla of history and philosophy and who can argue a point without being reliant on a handful of citations from the Holy Prophets of Rand and Peikoff.
Which is why you were comprehensively defeated in said arguments and are now trying to ignore others like the plague.
Part 2
” I told you in no uncertain terms that you are too dishonest to deal with. ”
Which is both untrue and manifestly irrational, as Aristotle pointed out. Dishonesty is something that can be confronted and debunked logically. As I have done repeatedly with you.
You accused me of dishonesty and smearing in no uncertain terms – including thoroughly irrational, deranged ad hominem – but what you really said is that you are thoroughly incapable of the kind of reasoned debate and thought you claim to cherish. Which is why your response to things as far afield as the authoritarian culture of the Dominate era Roman Empire, the nature of Classical Greek Philosophy, the anti-Christian and materialist origins of modern totalitarianism, and so forth has been to evade, lie, and ignore.
“But once in a while if I see some dishonesty, smear, or misrepresentation of yours too blatant to let stand I will repudiate it.”
I pity anybody who takes such an accusation seriously coming from a dishonest dumbfuck who still blathers about a “Thousand year Christian Dark Ages” or who claims that altruism is a vice while “rational self interest” is a virtue unto itself.
Part 2
” I told you in no uncertain terms that you are too dishonest to deal with. ”
Which is both untrue and manifestly irrational, as Aristotle pointed out. Dishonesty is something that can be confronted and debunked logically. As I have done repeatedly with you.
You accused me of dishonesty and smearing in no uncertain terms – including thoroughly irrational, deranged ad hominem – but what you really said is that you are thoroughly incapable of the kind of reasoned debate and thought you claim to cherish. Which is why your response to things as far afield as the authoritarian culture of the Dominate era Roman Empire, the nature of Classical Greek Philosophy, the anti-Christian and materialist origins of modern totalitarianism, and so forth has been to evade, lie, and ignore.
“But once in a while if I see some dishonesty, smear, or misrepresentation of yours too blatant to let stand I will repudiate it.”
I pity anybody who takes such an accusation seriously coming from a dishonest fool who still blathers about a “Thousand year Christian Dark Ages” or who claims that altruism is a vice while “rational self interest” is a virtue unto itself.
Part 3
You and your idols are far more guilty of dishonesty, smearing (there’s something rich at Peikoff accusing Kant and Cassirer of being the philosophical frontrunners of Nazism), and misrepresentation than I am. As I managed to establish by pointing out how Rand and Peikoff routinely misrepresented history, biology, and philosophy to prove a point, and how claims of theirs such as that all good things in the modern world originate with Aristotle cannot *POSSIBLY* have been true *even within the framework of their own arguments* due to the wonder of Basic. Timeline. Reading.
“Rational self-interest and hedonism are incompatible, they are opposites.”
Ah yes, and here we go into the classic.
That’s not REAL Socialism!
That’s not REAL Rational Self-Interest.
You should be ashamed of yourself for putting this incoherent gibberish together.
Part 4
“Hedonism is an enemy of rational selfishness.”
Then prove it.
Rationally.
And not by citations to the Holy Books of Rand and Peikoff.
“Hedonism and reason are incompatible.”
This is manifestly untrue, as the Epicureans pointed out. And while I disagree with many (indeed, MOST) of their claims and arguments, they were more than capable of demonstrating how thoroughly rational the pursuit of pleasure and self-indulgence were. Things that have been further hammered out by the rational research of biology and behavioralism which pointed out how important the pursuit of pleasure or at least avoidance of pain are to us on a biological level as well as a rational one.
Part 5
PS: This is also why Aristotle couldn’t refute that avoidance of pain was not a good on a personal level, his argument (correctly I think) was that it could not be THE Good. Though I don’t think you will like many of the examples he used such as service to the state in bureaucracy or as a militia.
““I am profoundly opposed to the philosophy of hedonism. Hedonism is the doctrine which holds that the good is whatever gives you pleasure and, therefore, pleasure is the standard of morality. ”
Except Heydrich and Beria didn’t believe that pleasure was the standard of morality either. They certainly indulged in it from time to time, but to the extent they believed there was any standard of morality outside themselves they believed the pursuit and exercise of power and the ability to impose one’s own philosophical and moral beliefs using it was it. That’s a VERY important distinction from hedonism as you define it.
And one you have no idea how to address let alone think about. Because you’ve never seriously considered how to contend with the likes of the rational psychopath or people who are truly, rationally amoral.
Part 6
“Objectivism holds that the good must be defined by a rational standard of value, ”
Firstly: As the behaviorists have pointed out, pleasure IS a rational standard of value, because there is little more objective than blinding agony and we have indeed taken steps towards measuring both pain and physical pleasure.
Secondly: Who is to evaluate what is and isn’t a “rational standard of value”? What you deem a rational standard of value is obviously very different from my own or most peoples’. Let alone from that of Beria or Heydrich.
Who could eloquently and rationally argue their points of views very convincingly, indeed often more rationally than true ideological believers could.
Which brings us back to the limitations of reason that were pointed out even before Aristotle’s time and pop up again and again in things such as the Melian Dialogue and the Prisoners’ Dilemma. That exulting reason as not merely a tool or one end among many but The end all to be all paves the way for the most calculatingly cruel. People whose very existence you prefer to ignore precisely because your world view is so shallow you cannot argue coherently against the actions of a Heydrich on their own terms in the realm of *rationality.*
You’re a dishonest, evasive, sophist. There is no arguing with dishonest sophistry. I defeated you in a very long, days long, argument about the role of Thomas Aquinas and the Renaissance. When I defeated you, you disappeared for about a month. Then you came back with the lie that you had defeated me. I will never again engage in a protracted argument with a dishonest charlatan like you. My time is too important to waste with the likes of a dishonest, lying, evader, and sophist, like you.
Part 7
“that pleasure is not a first cause, but only a consequence,”
Which is something people as diverse as Rand, myself, and Heydrich all agreed on.
” that only the pleasure which proceeds from a rational value judgment can be regarded as moral, ”
So in other words, God- by which I mean Rand- forbid if someone derives pleasure from having their children hugging them, precisely because that does not proceed from a rational value judgement, at least directly, and almost certainly not from a purely individually rationalistic value judgement. Because that pleasure must be immoral or at least amoral.
Epicurus would have eaten you posturing blowhards for lunch and taken great pleasure in doing so. And Epicurus was hardly a supremely gifted or correct philosopher.
“that pleasure, as such, is not a guide to action nor a standard of morality….”
The problem is that this falls apart when you understand that yes, it very much is a guide to action even if it is not a standard of morality. As we have ironed out in great detail from the research into pain and pleasure and how the drives regarding them are often perverse and lead to bad things.
Especially when you remember Epicurus’s definition of pleasure, and especially the most important one being *the avoidance of pain.*
Part 2 “I defeated you in a very long, days long, argument about the role of Thomas Aquinas and the Renaissance. When I defeated you, you disappeared for about a month.”
Now this is projecting your own defeat onto me.
You claimed that the loss of Aristotle caused the “Christian Dark Ages” and that Thomas of Aquinas reintroduced him.
I pointed out this was ahistorical on multiple levels, *starting with the fact that Aristotle was never “lost” in any way in the Eastern Roman, Greek Speaking world, which nevertheless did not “continue” turning into the kind of rational, scientific, free society you believe Greco-Roman society was on the path to.
Moreover, excerpts of Aristotle never stopped being copied down in the Latin-speaking West.
Finally, I pointed out that new translations of Aristotle from Latin writers working from Greek sources appeared two generations before Thomas Aquinas’s time and indeed he was mentored by some.
The best you could come up with was word salad and a rockheaded analogy about how just because a tool was in the garage didn’t mean one had the knowledge to make use of it or something like that.
Which of course did nothing to refute my points, and which I came back at you immediately showing.
As several others here noted.
You lost. Big time. Because you really have no understanding of history, philosophy, or theology beyond what you’ve been spoon fed. And I showed that.
In the words of my junior school teacher “Silence was the stern reply”
Great posts.
Oh Danusha, me love you long time. Please like me.
Hey T., I don’t think she will be reading that drivel anytime soon. But if you need a girlfriend just go to the personals in one of those cheap weekly newspapers
Wow. Is that supposed to be funny? Making fun of the way Asians, or more precisely, Vietnamese speak? Talk about racist.
“A brilliant and heart-wrenching book, with universal and timely lessons about the power of information — and misinformation. Is it possible to stop mass murder by telling the truth?” — Yuval Noah Harari
“The warnings of an escapee from Auschwitz go unheeded” – Amazon reviewer
Objectivist philosopher Leonard Peikoff’s book, “The Ominous Parallels”, has been warning America since 1982 that America is on course to collapsing into a racist and race-based totalitarian state parallel in essence to Weimar Germany’s collapse into Nazi Germany but no one is listening, hardly any one reads the book, hardly any one has even heard of the book. And if they read it will they even believe it? That the Kantian-Hegelian moral code of altruism and self-sacrifice is the moral basis of Nazism?…
Instead what do we hear? Just read the Bible and the Torah, a return to Judaism and Christianity will save us. Will save the American way of life which is not Judeo-Christianity, but individualism and capitalism. Yeh, talk about misinformation. The Lutherans were staunch supporters of Hitler and Nazism! Martin Luther, the rabid anti-semite and anti-peasant, anti-comman man, zealot was a major hero of Hitler and the Nazis because he was a staunch advocate of obedience to God’s representatives on earth, the Almighty Church-State-Theocracy! Luther was not fighting for the freedom, liberty, and dignity of the individual and destroy Christian theocracy but to renovate a perfected Christian theocracy over the peasants. Father Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest, did Christianity stop him from his evil?
Here we go, I can see the rebuttal now, REAL CHRISTIANITY IS A RELIGION OF PEACE. It just keeps getting hijacked and corrupted, like Islam and Marxism. Men are just not good enough for it because they were born of Original Sin. Men are just not good enough for altruism and self-sacrifice, they corrupt it into SELFISHNESS.
Just like the selfishness of Pfizer wanting to hide the truth that their profits from the injections forced on millions causes death and suffering. That’s rational reasoning for them.
Moral compasses provided by Christian values.
You’re willfully, maliciously, misconstruing what rational selfishness means or you truly simply don’t have the intelligence to understand what rational egoism, i.e., rational self-interest, i.e., rational selfishness means.
I’ve explained to you many times what rational selfishness means and why it does NOT mean robbing, stealing, theft, or fraud. Rational selfishness does NOT mean sacrificing others. Rationality does NOT mean doing whatever you damn please to others.
Maybe you should take your own advice and quit hectoring everyone about your beliefs. At some point it becomes……………………irrational and boring.
Part 7
“You’re willfully, maliciously, misconstruing what rational selfishness means or you truly simply don’t have the intelligence to understand what rational egoism, i.e., rational self-interest, i.e., rational selfishness means.”
And THX is certainly not going to use any of that rationalism or superior knowledge to explain. Much like True Socialists will rarely deign to explain True Socialism.
The problem with this balderdash is simple. Rationality is something people can choose to use *to the limits of their ability.* The dumb punk in the Prisoner’s Dilemma who thinks through the first order of consequences and sees that if he rats on his partner he might skate is pursuing that punk’s rational self-interest. Even if it isn’t the most strictly rational or correct solution.
Of course this is where the hypocrisy is remarkable. You blather on ENDLESSLY about how people should have the freedom to determine their own values, but then you balk and recoil from the prospect that people will adopt YOUR stated value of Rational Self-Interest but interpret it differently than you do.
Part 8
“I’ve explained to you many times what rational selfishness means and why it does NOT mean robbing, stealing, theft, or fraud.”
It doesn’t mean those things, but it can encompass them.
Because while Rand adopted the non-aggression principle from her values and rational determination, it does not take a genius to recognize that many people would rationally reject it for various reasons. As indeed most did throughout history. This is why the Melian Dialogue is so devastating even thousands of years on.
And “rational self-interest’ really has no good RATIONAL rebuttal of someone else deciding their own rational self-interest is to rob, pillage, or devastate. It does have a rational response, namely that one should arm up and cooperate to protect oneself against the looters, the wreckers, and those who would rob and kill. But it can’t invalidate the rational conclusions reached by a rational psychopath or hypothetical purely rational warlord or robber.
Part 9
” Rational selfishness does NOT mean sacrificing others. ”
Of course not, but it does not forbid one practicing it from considering doing so. And we know this in part because Rand was willing to sacrifice the ease and well being of her husband and the Brandens to gratify her interests (intellectual, carnal, emotional, rational, and otherwise), and she and her disciples were willing to sacrifice the resources and effort they poured in to the Brandens and their work when they “went off the reservation.”
“Rationality does NOT mean doing whatever you damn please to others.”
Of course not. But it does mean that if you can rationally justify doing so to others, you are rationally justified in doing that or leaving it.
Which is the crux of the problem. You so badly want to believe that reason can provide not just the means of illuminating our thought and the world at large but making the amoral or immoral behave morally. You cannot address why just because YOU do not rationally accept aggression, robbery, theft, or killing in pursuit of your rational self-interest that others will. Already have in fact.
I think the Lutherans are doing better than you these days. But hey keep trying. I think I see an indentation in the brick wall where you keep pounding your head.
Part 1
“Instead what do we hear? Just read the Bible and the Torah, a return to Judaism and Christianity will save us. Will save the American way of life which is not Judeo-Christianity, but individualism and capitalism.”
Ironic given how if you told the likes of Washington and Franklin or even Jefferson that the “American way of life was not Judeo-Christianity” but “individualism and capitalism” they would have been at best puzzled.
‘Yeh, talk about misinformation. ”
This is rich coming from someone who still blathers about a Thousand Year Christian Dark Age and who cites an intellectual charlatan like Peikoff.
“The Lutherans were staunch supporters of Hitler and Nazism!”
No, they weren’t. Some Lutherans were, indeed many were, but the likes of the Confessing Church existed for a reason. Ever hear of Dietrich Bonhoeffer? Probably not.
Part 2
“Martin Luther, the rabid anti-semite and anti-peasant, anti-comman man, zealot was a major hero of Hitler and the Nazis ”
This is incoherent gibberish at its finest.
Firstly, let’s get one thing out of the way. Martin Luther was a rabid anti-semite, which was unfortunately anything but rare in the 15th/16th century world. He was also a zealot.
But secondly “anti-peasant”? “Anti-comman (SIC) man”? This pretty much all comes down to his condemnation of the rebels in what is called the “Great Peasants’ War” (a war where the rebels were not all peasants and which indeed started out with minor nobility such as Goetz von Berlichingen of the Iron Hand, who I might note the Nazis so idealized they named the 17th SS Panzer Division after him). Suffice it to say Martin Luther was not particularly anti-peasant or anti-common man, he did however oppose apocalyptic military rebellion against the social system (especially when done under the banner of messianic proto-Communism like what happened at Munster). Partially out of genuine belief and partially to avoid losing his head.
Thirdly: The Nazis IDEALIZED the common man and peasantry, as shown by Hitler’s proud identification of his movement as a workers’ party and the elevation of populist heroes like Goetz of the Iron Hand. Meaning your claims don’t make sense on a surface level.
Part 3
Part 4 Oh yeah, and Hitler and many of the other National Socialist leadership were nominally CATHOLIC rather than Lutheran or some other Protestant. In reality many of them were not even that, with Goebbels’s diary speaking of their shared anti-Christian animus and intent to gradually replace it. There were devout Lutherans among the Nazi leadership (such as the monstrous Erich Koch, Gauleiter of East Prussia and Reich Commissar of Ukraine), but they were hardly uniform.
“because he was a staunch advocate of obedience to God’s representatives on earth,”
Only within limits, as Bonhoffer pointed out. His opposition to the Great Rebellions of 1522-1525 had more to do with a mixture of their often apocalyptic and heterodox (if not outright heretical) demands and pragmatically wishing to keep his patronage and his own head than because he believed “God’s representative on Earth” should be obeyed at all times. Especially since he had publicly repudiated the Papacy and even challenged the Holy Roman Emperor.
“the Almighty Church-State-Theocracy!”
Do you know literally anything about Martin Luther? Like literally anything? Or why he needed to shelter in Saxony under the House of Wettin’s protection in order to avoid being killed by said Church-State Theocracy?
Part 4
“Luther was not fighting for the freedom, liberty, and dignity of the individual and destroy Christian theocracy”
Largely agreed, though he was fighting for the freedom and liberty of people to read the Bible in their mother tongue according to their own conscience, which was important.
” but to renovate a perfected Christian theocracy over the peasants.”
Which isn’t surprising because almost everybody in Europe and the Near to Middle East was fighting for the “right” mixture of perfected Theocratic-Secular marriage.
” Father Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest, did Christianity stop him from his evil?”
Obviously not, though Dietrich Bonhoffer’s Christianity didn’t stop him from opposing the Nazism.
Which goes back to the point others have. Of your staggering ignorance and how you and your idols ignore that which does not comport with your narrative. You very obviously know little about Martin Luther beyond what you were spoonfed. You know even less about National Socialism and what heroes it held, which makes your literally thoughtless prattle about Kantian Imperatives being a philosophical root of Nazism laughable when you realize the Nazis loved Kant much less than they did Goetz.
Part 5
“Here we go, I can see the rebuttal now,”
That would be a welcome rarity..
“REAL CHRISTIANITY IS A RELIGION OF PEACE.”
This is rich coming from the person who made a centerpiece of their argument that “Hedonism isn’t Real Rational Selfishness!”
“It just keeps getting hijacked and corrupted, like Islam and Marxism.”
Says the person who can’t even know basics of any of the aforementioned, which is why they
“Men are just not good enough for it because they were born of Original Sin. ”
That’s… not what original sin means, or the Great Commission is.
But expecting you to honestly understand what you are critiquing on its own terms and to use that knowledge with any degree of rationality is a fool’s game.
Part 6
“Men are just not good enough for altruism and self-sacrifice, they corrupt it into SELFISHNESS.”
Ironic given how you keep insisting how most people are not good enough for the “right” kind of rational selfishness, they just keep being corrupted into altruism and self-sacrifice.
No one cares about Lenny Peekaboo.
Part 1
“Objectivist philosopher Leonard Peikoff’s book, “The Ominous Parallels”, has been warning America since 1982 that America is on course to collapsing into a racist and race-based totalitarian state parallel in essence to Weimar Germany’s collapse into Nazi Germany but no one is listening,”
People have been listening, it’s just that those who bother reading Peikoff’s work have largely (and correctly) been unimpressed.
But that’s what you get when you go out of your way to lie about Kant and smear anti-Nazis as ideological forerunners of Nazism.
“hardly any one reads the book, hardly any one has even heard of the book. ”
And many of those who have are unimpressed.
“And if they read it will they even believe it? That the Kantian-Hegelian moral code of altruism and self-sacrifice is the moral basis of Nazism?…”
If they do it would be unfortunate. Because Hegel was a follower of the Nazis rather than one of their inspirations, and National Socialism and other totalitarian ideologies clearly rejected Kant.
But while we’re on the subject of quote mining reviews…
“But while we’re on the subject of quote mining from reviews….
“You might think that, to the extent that (Ed: German Jewish philosopher Ernst) Cassirer is relevant to Leonard Peikoff’s discussion of the intellectual origins of Nazism, that his anti-Nazi views would be worthy of note. However, Cassirer was a Kantian and, in case you didn’t know, Leonard Peikoff, like his mentor Ayn Rand, has a bee in his bonnet when it comes to the mild mannered sage of Konigsberg….. Of course, no mention is made of Cassirer’s anti-Nazi views or his anti-state book, The Myth of the State.
This is part of a larger problem in Peikoff’s book: he conveniently ignores anything that doesn’t suit his purposes. For example, he discusses Kant’s ethics and the “categorical imperative,” which he believe laid the foundation for the Nazi’s teaching of blind submission to the state, but never tells his readers what the second formulation of the imperative is: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end.”
These are only a couple of the problems with this book…. ” – Neil Parelle, Rando Reviewer on Amazon.
“Peikoff’s selective and misleading use of facts is even more problematic…. problem here is what Peikoff leaves out…… When the facts don’t fit Peikoff’s interpretation he leaves them out. Reading his discussion of Augustine (a frequent whipping boy of Objectivists) you wouldn’t have a clue that Augustine planned on compiling a multi-volume work collecting the ancient world’s learning on such subjects as geometry.
Apart from these larger methodological concerns, there is also the issue of Peikoff’s interpretation of Kant. While Kant’s thought is subject to various interpretations, it’s safe to say that Peikoff’s reading of Kant’s epistemology is seriously skewed. Even worse, Peikoff’s interpretation of Kant’s ethics is a complete farrago and a transparent attempt to justify Rand’s interpretation of Kant through the use of selective quotations. And if Kant’s philosophy was so clearly congenial to the Nazi point of view, why can’t Peikoff find more than one or two Nazis actually praising Kant?
As others have mentioned, Peikoff is not to be trusted as an intellectual historian….Thomas Aquinas wasn’t responsible for the reintroduction of Aristotle in the Middle Ages. Aquinas’ teacher Albertus Magnus, among others, was an Aristotelian.” – Steve Jackson, Rando Amazon Reviewer.
having known dr. vrba quite well, to the point of being close friends, and having interviewed him for publication (in canada’s vancouver-based southam newspaper the province in the early 1980s, in canada’s edmonton-based southam newspaper the edmonton journal in the late 1980s, in then-czechoslovakia’s mlady svet magazine after the so-called velvet revolution of 1989, and for the jerusalem post in the 1980s), i found the review linked to above interesting but lacking in some detail …
one of the real issues: the review fails to mention dr. vrba’s own testimony in book form (published in several versions, first in great britain, later, in the u.s. as i cannot forgive) …
also: part of the argument about the allies NOT bombing either the railroad approaches to auschwitz or the dead camp itself was included in sir martin gilbert’s monumental work, auschwitz and the allies … sir martin DOES mention dr. vrba’s views in the chapters dealing with the allies’ decision not to proceed with the bombing … dr. vrba was openly upset, nay, angry, about that decision … sir martin defended it on pure military grounds, which was to be expected – he would become sir winston churchill’s official and authorised biographer soon afterwards …
whether it was the author, jonathan freedman, or the reviewer, danusha goska, who had missed those points is not too relevant now … it IS relevant for history, however …
Will they make movie of this?
The Jews who worked with the Nazis in Auschwitz remind me of today’s Jews who follow the democrats and think they are righteous.
Sad!
What a horrendous calumny against Jews or any prisoner in Aushwitz. Obviously you’ve never been kidnapped, abducted, held in captivity, terrorized, and tortured in a Nazi concentration camp. It’s beyond your imagination, comprehension, and experience. And that’s precisely the theme of the book.
“Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.” – Ayn Rand.
There is no way to be moral in a Nazi concentration camp. You may be able to bootleg, sneak, moral action now and then but there is no way to truly be moral. Morality depends on free will and being able to act on your free will, a Nazi concentration camp effectively destroys your free will.
To be moral in a Nazi concentration camp would be too become a dead martyr in an instant, the Nazis would not allow you to be moral, that’s the whole point of a Nazi concentration camp, there is no rational morality possible there. Martyrdom in a Nazi concentration camp isn’t moral or immoral, it is the consequence of being unable to live a moral life.
Hey man, tell us about your kidnapping and abduction experience. Must have been tough sitting on that Lotus Flower.
Tell us about your experience in a concentration camp. Did you gain all of that knowledge reading Viktor Frankle’s Man’s Search for Meaning?
I always love lectures from people who live vicariously through others experiences.
An inbred is a worthless venomous reptile who has done nothing but destroy everything that was free on this planet and needed a low IQ to manage effectively…
Danusha Goska is the only contributor to FPM who understands the situation facing Europe’s Jews.
Father Tiso, a Roman Catholic priest and wartime Slovakian ruler was an active Nazi collaborator and murderer of Jews. It puts to rest the lie the Vatican was the Jew’s special friend.
Special friend? No. But a friend all the less, albeit one riven by collaborators and conflicting interests. There’s a reason why Hitler set out operational plans for the abduction and murder of Pope Pius (the very same person communist disinformation claims was “Hitler’s Pope”) and Cardinal von Galen.
The Catholic Church was far from blameless and many Catholics like Tiso and the far more monstrous Ustasha were happily representative among Hitler’s minions (while Hitler himself was nominally Catholic, even as he loathed Christianity as a whole). But the idea that he Church walked hand in glove with the Third Reich is laughable.
Oh and PS: while we are on the subject of Tiso, why don’t we talk about how he got power?
He had already been a Slovak separatist with Fascist leanings, but when Czechoslovakia collapsed after Hitler betrayed Munich, Hitler messaged Tiso and told him that he had a choice. Either declare an “independent” Slovakia under Nazi “protection”, or be invaded and Re annexed by Hungary.
(As it turned out the latter happened to a small degree anyway, but Hitler found out mid treaty signing and forced the two sides to compromise.)
Why don’t you mention that?
Tiso was an evil, monstrous criminal who richly deserved death, but he was never anything like a prime mover of the Holocaust or other major Axis crimes.
Yeh, Christianity is really a religion of peace and brotherly love, it just keeps getting hijacked and corrupted by a few evil terrorists, just like Islam and Marxism.
LOL, Stefan Bandera is long gone and the current president of of Ukraine is a Jew.
Rudolf Vrba was NOT the first Jew to break out of Auschwitz. Freedland did not do his research properly, or if he did, he chose to ignore it. Two days before Vrba and Wetzler escaped together, a man called Seigfried Lederer escaped. He dressed himself as an SS Officer, and he and a German soldier rode out of the camp on bicycles. Astonishing but true.
Lederer reported to the Red Cross and to Jewish authorities in regard to the horror of Auschwitz but he was not believed. He died “bitter and forgotten” in 1972.
Read it all here. https://rudolfvrba.com/lederer-was-first/
Further, one should read the source material, not this book. Rudolf Vrba’s own book, “I Escaped from Auschwitz,” originally titled, “I Cannot Forgive,” was republished in 2020 and is riveting and first hand. I could not put it down.