Arbeit Macht Frei was a maxim spelled out in wrought iron letters at the entrance of Nazi concentration and extermination camps. The words, which translate as “work makes free” or “work will set you free”, stayed with me alongside a number of horrors following visits to Sachsenhausen and Dachau. It felt as if the adage, which offered inmates an illusory path to liberation, also carried within it the truth of the camps, encapsulated by the central word, Macht. Used as a noun, Macht means Power or Might. The deceptively well-meaning Arbeit Macht Frei disguised, but unintentionally revealed, the only thing that really mattered in the context of the camps, Might.
The concentration camp slogan has become in my mind an emblem of sophisticated theorising serving the interest of brute power. Hitler’s party rarely hid its belief that might is right: the Arbeit Macht Frei signs are outliers rather than representatives of Nazi practice. However, most regimes, especially democratic ones, feel obliged to locate their actions in a moral framework, and the media, courts, citizens and allies of these nations often provide high-minded justifications for exercises of naked power.
While the camp gates represent an extreme form of the logic commonly used by formally democratic countries, nothing that follows in this article...
from Scroll.in https://ift.tt/2O3Pt7h
No comments:
Post a Comment