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"He shows you how to become as gods. Then he laughs
and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets
his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his."
J.H.Newman, The Times of Antichrist
People do not wake up one day and suddenly decide to
become monsters, giving birth to unspeakable horrors.
And yet throughout history, different peoples have done
truly monstrous things. The Americans were pioneers in forced
sterilization and state propaganda. The British invented concentration
camps, and were masters of predatory colonization. They even turned a
large portion of the capital of their Empire into a festering ghetto through
the Darwinian economics of neglect.
None have clean hands. No one is
exceptional.
What do they have in common? They all take a walk
down a long and twisted path, one cold-hearted and 'expedient'
decision at a time, shifting responsibility by deflecting the
choice for their actions on their leaders.
There is always some crackpot theory. some law of
nature, from scientists or economists to support it.
What else could they do? It is always difficult, but necessary.
They cope with their actions by making their victims the
other, objectified, different, marginalized. And what they marginalize
they cannot see. What they cannot see, by choice, is easily ignored.
And so they destroy and they kill, first by neglect and
then by more efficient and decisive actions.
They walk slowly, but almost determinedly, into an abyss
of their own creation.
First they come for the weak.
"There is one beautiful sight in the East End, and
only one, and it is the children dancing in the street when the organ-grinder
goes his round. It is fascinating to watch them, the new-born, the next
generation, swaying and stepping, with pretty little mimicries and graceful
inventions all their own, with muscles that move swiftly and easily, and
bodies that leap airily, weaving rhythms never taught in dancing school.
I have talked with these children, here, there, and
everywhere, and they struck me as being bright as other children, and in many
ways even brighter. They have most active little imaginations. Their capacity
for projecting themselves into the realm of romance and fantasy is
remarkable. A joyous life is romping in their blood. They delight in music,
and motion, and colour, and very often they betray a startling beauty of face
and form under their filth and rags.
But there is a Pied Piper of London Town who steals them
all away. They disappear. One never sees them again, or anything that
suggests them. You may look for them in vain amongst the generation of
grown-ups. Here you will find stunted forms, ugly faces, and blunt and stolid
minds. Grace, beauty, imagination, all the resiliency of mind and muscle, are
gone. Sometimes, however, you may see a woman, not necessarily old, but
twisted and deformed out of all womanhood, bloated and drunken, lift her
draggled skirts and execute a few grotesque and lumbering steps upon the
pavement. It is a hint that she was once one of those children who danced to
the organ-grinder. Those grotesque and lumbering steps are all that is left of
the promise of childhood. In the befogged recesses of her brain has arisen a
fleeting memory that she was once a girl. The crowd closes in. Little girls
are dancing beside her, about her, with all the pretty graces she dimly
recollects, but can no more than parody with her body. Then she pants for
breath, exhausted, and stumbles out through the circle. But the little girls
dance on.
The children of the Ghetto possess all the qualities which
make for noble manhood and womanhood; but the Ghetto itself, like an
infuriated tigress turning on its young, turns upon and destroys all these
qualities, blots out the light and laughter, and moulds those it does not
kill into sodden and forlorn creatures, uncouth, degraded, and wretched below
the beasts of the field.
As to the manner in which this is done, I have in previous
chapters described it at length; here let Professor Huxley describe it in
brief:-
"Any one who is acquainted with the state of the
population of all great industrial centres, whether in this or other
countries, is aware that amidst a large and increasing body of that
population there reigns supreme . . . that condition which the French call la misere, a word for which I do not think there is any exact
English equivalent. It is a condition in which the food, warmth, and clothing
which are necessary for the mere maintenance of the functions of the body in
their normal state cannot be obtained; in which men, women, and children are
forced to crowd into dens wherein decency is abolished, and the most ordinary
conditions of healthful existence are impossible of attainment; in which the
pleasures within reach are reduced to brutality and drunkenness; in which the
pains accumulate at compound interest in the shape of starvation, disease,
stunted development, and moral degradation; in which the prospect of even
steady and honest industry is a life of unsuccessful battling with hunger,
rounded by a pauper's grave."
In such conditions, the outlook for children is hopeless.
They die like flies, and those that survive, survive because they possess
excessive vitality and a capacity of adaptation to the degradation with which
they are surrounded. They have no home life. In the dens and lairs in which
they live they are exposed to all that is obscene and indecent. And as their
minds are made rotten, so are their bodies made rotten by bad sanitation,
overcrowding, and underfeeding. When a father and mother live with three or
four children in a room where the children take turn about in sitting up to
drive the rats away from the sleepers, when those children never have enough
to eat and are preyed upon and made miserable and weak by swarming vermin,
the sort of men and women the survivors will make can readily be
imagined."
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