Dennis K. Chong and Jennifer K. Smith Chong^©

 Anyone of us can append our preferred values to anything. Thus, in the case of the Holocaust, we can say of it that it was an unspeakably evil event in the history of man or a monstrous act or a vile deed or a infamous action, an utter abomination, an unbelievable atrocity et alia. In the et alia is the one fantastic value that it did not happen!

 Essays have been written about the Holocaust. Some of these have been extraordinary in their fine use of the English language. In the most elegant of ways these essayists have savaged the Holocaust for what it is. However, we take the view that no matter what is the value and the style to append to the Holocaust, no one is any nearer to understanding what the basis for it and how it came about. To know what was the basis for it and how it came to be is to know its epistemology. This is what is critical!

 In our view, unless one knows the epistemology for it, there is no hope to ever spike it if it were to happen again. In such an eventuality, we shall again see its manifestation in another unique variant form. We, as a species are at risk to endure it in some way or other from one epoch of our history to another. For the Jewish people this is an intolerable and impossible condition.

 The epistemology for the Holocaust is something that is universal. In recent history, the Turks took to the Armenians and massacred them in an incredible manner and they did it in the millions. In even more recent history, under the direction of a coterie of Hutus, 800,000 Tutsis were massacred. Now₁₉₉₉ we have ethnic cleansing (what an oxymoron) in the Balkans.

 If what we say is true, then as we noted above, for the Jewish people, it is wretched and insupportable beyond belief.

 To explore the issues of the epistemology of the Holocaust, we have to look for the differences between us and the perpetrators.

 In doing so, what immediately stands out is that we, as unique individuals, know in ourselves that we cannot do what the active on site agents¹ of the Holocaust were able do! This knowing that we cannot is comparable to my knowing that I cannot commit incest with my mother or my sister. Just to think it is a horror. To think of doing it would leave me on the floor with nausea and vomiting. We are sure that you too will feel the same way if you were to do what is suggested here.

 However, what you and I cannot do, is not true for EVERYONE. In the days of Pharaoh, the heir sometimes married his mother and sometimes his sister. And Pharaoh would have children by them. In our clinical work we have only met one case where the mother sexually wanted the son. Our body of clinical files have many cases of incest between fathers and daughters, of uncles and nieces and grandfathers and their granddaughters.

 We would ask:

What has a person got in him by which he is able to commit incest with his daughter, but I do not have², I cannot.

 Given this difference that I cannot be an active perpetrator of the Holocaust process and someone else can, then the question that one has to ask is:

What has he got in him, to be able to do so and which because I do not have, I, therefore, cannot.

 When you think on this, one thing stands out. It is that a Holocaust perpetrator can stand to witness the suffering of another human being. If he cannot stand to do so, he will have to disengage himself from such a process. If he can stand it, then, he can be.

 The next question is, "Can he stand to co-participate in such an activity³?" If he cannot, he will clearly have to dissociate himself from the process. If he can co-participate in the process of inflicting pain and suffering on another human being, he would have to decide to do so. It is not logical to suppose that a person can be coerced or forced to torture another or be there to see it hour after hour and day after day.

 If a person decides to do such a thing, the question is "Does he enjoy doing it?" It is also about this question, "Is he interested⁴ in doing it." If someone is bored by doing something, they will stop doing it.

 I remember years ago when I was a little boy in Malaysia, someone had caught a scorpion. He put a match to it by first passing the flame about an inch under the scorpion. I was in part horrified by the act but I was utterly spell bound to see the poor scorpion in its painful struggles. I did not shout and scream in protest for the life of the scorpion. I did not push into the crowd of boys, head for the torturer and strike him, retrieve the scorpion and set it free either.

 As I now remember it, the life of the scorpion was not something of any value to me. It was just a living entity that was without question far inferior, far less than me. It was as if, its life was of no matter and of no consequence to me.

 Then later in Mexico, I went to see a bull fight. I was fascinated to see the passes by the matador. I was somewhat repelled by the torture inflicted upon the bull. However, I did not stand up to shout a protest at the pain and suffering inflicted upon the bull because to me it was a permissible act. The bull was so much more inferior to me and my kind. This undoubted inferiority of the bull was the Imprimatur for us to dispose of the beast according to our whim and fancy.

 We, therefore, derive from this that:

Unless one respects another entity as equal to him, then the suffering and the death of the other will not matter to him at all, other than, at the least, it amuses him.

 Therefore, a Holocaust perpetrator is one who holds the position that those who suffer and who die by his participation are inferior and beneath him as living sentient entities⁵. They are deemed by him as inferior, less than he. And we infer that the ‘less than’ has, relatively, to be at a threshold that is comparable to how I felt for that scorpion.

 In the field of Psychotherapy, this disposition in which you deem others inferior to you is known as ‘self-importance⁶.’

The third disease⁷ is importance, and self-importance is the worst of all. As soon as one thing is "important" then other things aren’t. Importance is a great way to justify being mean and destructive, or doing anything else that’s unpleasant enough to need justification.

 Richard Bandler: Using Your Brains - for a CHANGE Real People Press 1985 page 97

 In appending to self-importance the value that it is "the worst of all" disease, Bandler was truly singular in his insight. When you are that important and all else is far beneath you, then they live to serve and to be used in any form and manner to satisfy your whim and desire. The process of their dying will only be an amusement for you. Their death will mean nothing to you. At best it could be an annoyance that they are not there anymore to further amuse you. However, there are others.

 There are, thus, two minimum elements that are required to be a Holocaust perpetrator:

1. you are to be absolutely sure you are exceedingly important and that the other is infinitely less than you
   

2. you have to have the ability and capacity to delight in the suffering of a human being and you can enjoy to see his death process and then exult in his final demise.

With this way of thinking and being, you too can be a Genghis Khan. You too can be a Caesar. Or . . .

With this in mind, we believe that this man whose picture we show below, would fit structurally into our propositions to be a Holocaust perpetrator:

He is the Rev. Jim Jones of Jonestown, Guyana. It was he who determined a terrible consequence upon his followers as shown below:

 On his orders, they all drank a drink laced with cyanide. Indeed, you might ask? What was it about him and in him to be able to do such a thing. Could you give such an order and survey them as they died before you?

 I am not a brilliant mathematician. However, I would put forward this calculation. If 100 men were killed per day in the arena of the Colosseum, then in a 300 day year of celebration in the Colosseum, 30,000 would have died. Let us most conservatively say that this activity only went on in the Colosseum for 500 years of Pax Romana (and that is also an oxymoron). Then the total number killed would have been 150,000,000 men!

 The Imperium of the Pax Romana gave the Imprimatur and the Nihil Obstat to the above activity – throughout the Empire! What then was the real number of those who were sacrificed to delight others?

 When Genghis Khan swept out of Ulan Bator and finally came to Budapest, does anyone have any idea how many were put to the sword. With it, ancient and beautiful Samarkand was put to ruin.

 It is known that when he returned to Mongolia in his coffin, it was a matter of Mongol policy to execute all who encountered the funeral cortege. And Genghis Khan died in Europe. How many then were killed?

 We still moan about but also glorify World War I. What and where is the glory when in one morning 50,000 young men were killed in a farmer’s field in Europe. Was there ever a record that General Haigh or Marshall Foche tore their uniform and put on a sackcloth and ashes to bereave and moan the death of just one of the soldiers let alone 50,000.

 Now we read:

The empty plate that Chacmool held across his stomach had once served as a receptacle for the freshly extracted heart: ‘If the victims heart was to be taken out’ reported one Spanish observer in the sixteenth century,

they conducted him with great display . . . and placed him on the sacrificial stone. Four of them hold his arms and legs, spreading them out. Then the executioner came, with a flint knife in his hand, and with great skill made an incision between the ribs on the left, below the nipple, then he plunged in his hand and like a ravenous tiger tore out the living heart, which he laid on the plate . . . ³

 Graham Handcock: Finger Prints of the Gods Double Day Ltd. 1995 page 96-97

And further on in this work:

It is recorded, for example, that Ahuitzotl, the eight and most powerful emperor of the Aztecs royal dynasty, ‘celebrated the dedication of the temple of Huitzilopochtli in Tenochitlan by marshaling four lines of prisoners past teams of priests who worked four days to dispatch them. On this occasion as many as 80,000 were slain during a single ceremony.

Ibidem page 97

 The question is whether Ahuitzotl was a demonic Hitler or given the metaphysics of the man, he was one of those who had the capacity to accept, and perhaps, even enjoy the death of others and who knew that those who were to die were nothing to him.

All in all it has been estimated that the number of sacrificial victims in the Aztec empire as a whole had risen to around 200,000 year by the beginning of the sixteenth century.

Ibidem page98

 If we were to average it to 100,000 per year, it will not take much to arrive at the total killed in just the span of one hundred years of Aztec supremacy in Mexico, The figure comes to 10,000,000. Now, how many centuries were the Aztecs in power before Hernan Cortes ended their supremacy? What was the total killed?

 How then can one change such a compelling epistemology? Such a change has to be a structural one.

 To begin with we have to become aware that we are trapped in the metaphysics that automatically determines the conclusion in us that we are superior and better than others. Take this as an example of self-importance. The evidence of the Piri Reis map shows accurately the coastline of the Antarctic continent, now under a one mile ice cap. Logically, there would have to be a civilization of very high order to underpin the cartography of the Piri Reis map. However, current scholars will not accept the possibility of this higher civilization. For them, before now₁₉₉₉, everyone was too primitive to do such a thing. This conclusion is nothing but a metaphor for their self-importance. And this is how self-importance seeps and oozes its way everywhere in the business of being human. It does so to the point that people do not even notice it.

 From other scientific disciplines, the age of the Sphinx is determined to be at least 15,000 years old and not 3000 years. The 15,000 years is determined by the weathering that the Sphinx has sustained. It is clear that the weathering has been by rain. Yet Egyptologists will not accept this! For them to do so would mean they would have to accept that the Sphinx was carved by people 15,000 years before the common era. However, for them, this cannot be, because they have concluded that the dynastic period of ancient Egypt began with Pharaoh Menes at 3000 BC. And they cannot be wrong about.

 It is difficult to give up one’s self-importance and that delicious knowing and conviction that you are right⁹ even before the face of contrary evidence. This is the way of self-importance.

 The first thing to do is to STOP the insane and stupid drive for self-importance, a.k.a. self-esteem. It is time to end the business of setting high values upon one’s ego. Humility is the preferred ancient virtue. Level the playing field and teach our young and everyone else that what is far more important is self-worth.

 Self-worth, we all instinctively know is something that we have to earn. Self-esteem is something, we all know, we can preen ourselves with and sometimes so exaggeratedly and excessively that if it now sustains the slightest scratch the individual goes either berserk or lapses into a distraught pose of a devastated victim.

 If we keep pushing to do everything to support the primacy of self-importance, i.e. EGO, then as Bandler has indexed, we are supporting the promotion and spread of "the worst disease" that our species can ever suffer from. It is this disease of mind and of being that is a substantial underpinning of the Holocaust.

 In Part II we will examine other critical component to be a Holocaust perpetrator. It is about the epistemology of how a person comes to delight in the suffering of another and to finally exult in his death.

 The Holocaust is a terrible stain to the human race.

 We can only be free of this stain when we have that inner assured knowing that we, as a race, are finally free of the levers that we use for our thinking, dispositions, sentiments and behaviours towards our kind. In this way we track ourselves into the insanity that is the Holocaust.

 This essay and its companion, identifies and delineates what these operators are and how we may deal with them.

 We invite the you to share this paper with your friends, associates, colleagues, friends and relatives. To do this will increase the field of consciousness and expand the level of awareness in them and in the general community.

 In the end, it only took one man to cull the evil insanity of the Holocaust upon a nation of undoubted high civilization. Their thinking slipped into concordance with his. This happened because they were already contaminated with the insanity of Causality a.k.a. the Aristotelian system. Our freedom is only possible when we clear our thinking structures for this kind of diabolic insanity.

 In one sense, a holocaust is the provision of human fodder for human opinions be they religious, political, cultural, linguistic or personal and idiosyncratic.

 In this freedom is the final acknowledgment that those who died did not do so in vain.

 If we fail in this, then, truly their lives and tragic deaths was in the end for nothing.

¹active on site agents, by this term, we refer to the camp commander who ran the camp, the German soldier who stood there to direct the prisoners into the death chamber, the cook who prepared the filth for the internees to eat and all the other support personnel who worked to ensure the ‘smooth’ operation of the death camp.

². . . because I do not have . . . pre-supposes that if you did then you too would be able to do the same. This is comparable to this. If you have a yacht you can sail from Miami to the Bahamas. If you do not then you cannot. If have the money, you can fly from Toronto to Paris. If you do not then you cannot.

³. . . such an activity refers to the daily inflicting of humiliation, abuse, pain suffering, starvation and killing of the Holocaust victims. It is like that process in which I watched the writhing of the scorpion as the flame was passed beneath it (see below). But this would be doing so one scorpion after and another and another . . .

⁴. . . remains interested . . .:
In this domain, sometimes a person can be fascinated, spellbound by the pain and suffering of another human being. In this context, we note that there can be issues of secondary gain in the actions people take.

⁵". . . one who does holds the position that those who suffer and who die by his participation are inferior and beneath him as living sentient entities." What is the epistemology of this will be considered in Part II.

⁶Self-importance:
In the field of General Semantics, Alfred Korzybski has designated it as ‘exaggerated self-esteem.’

But, in his self-love, exaggerated self-esteem (our bold)., he overlooks his own shortcoming, and blames everybody and everything but himself.

Alfred Korzybski: Science and Sanity An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics The International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company 1980 6^th Reprint.

⁷disease:
Aids is not a disease. It is an execution. However, syphilis is a disease and so is tuberculosis, To this, will now have to rank, self importance, as the worst of all. Therefore, self important people are diseased people. Of course, when you read this you are horrified because our culture places such a high premium on it. However, if Bandler is correct, we shall all have to rethink our positions, hopefully and helpfully under the crucial impulse of this article.

⁸Richard Bandler is the co-creator of the field study known as Neuro-Linguistic Programming. His contributions to the field of human ontology has been singular. He is a remarkably creative and productive thinker and a prolific writer.

⁹Right is one element of what Alfred Korzybski called "the two valued system." This is the system by which the whole world operates and lives by. We agree with Korzybski that in a world of absolute individuals and other entities we are actually in a system of infinite values. To think and live our lives through a two valued prism is an insane anomaly. Worse, we know from epoch to epoch, there emerges the person who secures the power to impose only one value one everyone. This one value is, of course, his. The most recent example was the late Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. He set upon the people of Iran one right and wrong was put out. The right he raised above his people was according to the strictest interpretation of the Islamic Law, the Sharia.

References:

The American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Third Edition - Revised) 1987

Alfred Korzybski: Science and Sanity The International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Co. 1980

David G. Mandelbaum(Editor): Selected writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture, Personality University of California Press 1949

Dennis K. Chong & Jennifer K. Smith Chong: Power and Elegance in Communication C-Jade Publications Inc. 1993

Dennis K. Chong an Jennifer K. Smith Chong: Don’t Ask WHY?! C-Jade Publications Inc. 1991

Dennis K. Chong & Jennifer K. Smith Chong: HYPNOSIS, The Science and The Art, Volume 1 (manuscript in preparation)

Dennis K. Chong & Jennifer K. Smith Chong: The Knife Without Pain C-Jade Publications Inc. 1994

Dennis K. Chong & Jennifer K. Smith Chong: THE METALANGUAGE of Paul Watzlawick, John Weakland and Richard Fisch, THE META MODEL of John Grinder and Richard Bandler "The NLP Connection" Volume XI No 1

Dennis K. Chong an Jennifer K. Smith Chong: THE METAPROGRAMS and THE EMPs "ANCHOR POINT" Vol. XI No. 11 page 41 -44

Elliot Slater & Martin Roth: Clinical Psychiatry Bailliere, Tindall & Cassell Ltd. 1970

Graham Handcock: Finger Prints of the Gods Double Day Ltd. 1995 page 96-97

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R. Jacobs & P Resenbaum: English Transformational Grammar John Wiley and Sons 1968

Richard Bandler & John Grinder: The Hypnotic Patterns of Milton H. Erickson M.D. Vol. 1 Meta Publications 1987

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Ronald Langacker: Language and its Structure Harcourt, Brace and World Inc. 1968