I know there have been some horrid ages in the history of humanity.
But I can’t help but wonder if this is the absolute most death-glorifying culture and immoral of all the ages.
Not so much for the numbers and degrees of murders (such as the 110 million committed during the 20th century to try to make Marxism work) but the purely evil propaganda that those in the state-run media push in order to try to make the murderous State appear benevolent.
“But I can’t help but wonder if this is the absolute most death-glorifying culture and immoral of all the ages.”
Not even close.
Lots of societies in history much worse than ours.
Why do so many people on FR like to pile on when it comes to cultural issues? As if making it sound worse than it really is will make it bette?
But I can’t help but wonder if this is the absolute most death-glorifying culture and immoral of all the ages.
You may be onto something.
There have been other, older, more overtly violent cultures--the Romans, for whom the most grisly executions and disembowellings were set up as crowd-pleasing public attractions--and certain other cultures for which war in itself, not so much for whatever supposed good was to be achieved by it, was the end.
But the "attraction" of death (so to speak)came precisely from its being horrific and (in a sense) a novelty. It was outrageous and bloody and disgusting, of course--but that was why people went to see it, for the same reason that any fifth-rate movie studio can be sure of at least a meager income by releasing a slasher or splatter film to draw in the sorts of people who are amused by the artificial massacre of teenaged fornicators and jerks ("Hah! They deserved it! So that makes my enjoyment of it okay! I am justified in my contempt of them and their spurious values! Punish 'em some more!"--and so forth). This is (to put it mildly) both aesthetically and ethically repugnant--but it derives its visceral appeal from the fact that we do indeed find the things we see horrific. This is not exactly an appeal to the noblest elements of human nature, but it has its roots in the natural repugnance we have for violence, blood-letting and death. It is an abuse of a healthier element of human psychology.
But the kind of thing presented in the above-mentioned film is a new, and more contemptible, variety of horror. It is, in a sense, an execution upon a public altar, a sacrifice performed to a sociological doctrine, the obvious horror washed away by the morally-deficient prat who has to try to convince us that this is a "beautiful" thing--and to no effect, as anybody with a healthy set of human emotional reactions can see for himself that what he has just witnessed is essentially the state-sponsored suicide of a man whose choice has earned him agony, excused by the idea that the man chose it himself, "choice" now having become the all-excusing and validating (and sanctifying) principle of any and all actions (so long as they are state-approved and validated, and can save a few bucks in its health-"care" system--you know, "the triumph of the will."
What was (from the point of view of Hell) wrong with the Nazis was the fact that they were so over-the-top obviously evil--all that lock-step goose-step jack-bootery, and the evil-looking uniforms, and the death-processing centers, and the world-domination rhetoric worthy of a comic-book villain: any quasi-enlightened nation with even a vague memory of Judaeo-Christian (or, shoot, even the nobler elements of pagan) virtue would recognize it for what it was: it looked and smelled evil, and of course had to be resisted and destroyed.
The real triumph of Hell will come when it can convince its victims that the deaths and indignities and personal violations it has planned for them are actually their "rights," and watch with delight as their victims march proudly to the gas-chambers and the scaffolds and firing squads set up for them, having been taught to choose these horrors for themselves, and to become willing participants in their own slaughter, which is the final indignity, the cherry on top of the repugnant dessert that Hell will consume happily, the little aftertaste of a despair that came too late which adds to the tang of the dish--though they will, of course, have a maitre d', snappily dressed in the deepest black, and with only the barest suggestion of horns under the hair, standing nearby to tell the dessert, as if goes down the gullet, what a happy dining experience it has provided for its consumers.
Like the other poster said, we're not even close to the top of the list. Let's leave aside the Aztecs who sacrificed as many as 10,000 prisoners a year in ritualized public ceremonies, and consider at our immediate predecessors, the Victorians. It's been often noted that as much as our society glorifies sex, the Victorians glorified death. Look at their dark poetry, their elaborate mourning customs, and their almost comically dramatic graveyard monuments as just a few examples of what I mean.
Powerful statement, well said.