The pyramid of guilt
Contemplating the nature of guilt and responsibility
I don’t know what American jails are like, I have not been locked up in one yet. I spent 5 months and 20 days in a maximum-security prison (exclusively for political prisoners) in communist Hungary when I was 20 years old. If you want know why, you can read about it here.
This story is about two of my cell-mates. I spent three and a half months with them.
They were both called József (Joseph); Koronics and Apaceller. Koronics was about thirty years old with a ten-year sentence, Apaceller was about fifty-five with a thirteen-year sentence. Koronics was one of the most decent people I ever met in my life; Apaceller was the worst scumbag I ever met. I mentioned him in an earlier post already:
Apaceller was an internment camp capo during the war, doing anything he was asked to do. He escaped detection after the war, turned coat and became the bloodiest communist.
He ended up as the head of an agricultural cooperative. Being a very committed communist was a prerequisite for such a position. At some point he must have rubbed someone who knew about his past the wrong way, he was renounced and tried for his war-crimes, ended up with a 13-year sentence, no parole. He was fifty something at the time and into the eight year of his sentence when I shared a cell with him. He was still a bloody communist. He did anything he could to serve his new masters. Not to gain favours, but from his genuine desire to serve whoever the master with power happened to be. He took his punishment in stride, trying to prove himself to his new masters, licking their boots even more ferociously. No punishment would have worked on this guy with unquestioning servitude to anyone with power. He had no conviction, no personality, no opinion on his own. The ultimate henchman. He was the most disgusting snitch costing the parole to many, including one of my case-mates.Koronics had impeccable communist credentials. He was a poster-boy of the promise of communism. He came from a 100% working class district, third generation of an industrial working-class dynasty. He was accepted to a university to study law. He was a teenager in 1956, old enough to understand that it was a proletarian revolt, a response to the perceived betrayal of the working class by the ruling communist party. There was a lot of bitterness and resentment after the revolution, especially from people of his background. With a few friends, they decided to organize. Not for another revolution, but to be ready to support – with weapons, if necessary – a leadership that may be better aligned with their democratic socialist ideals. He, the only one who made it to a university from his environment, became the natural leader of the group. They didn’t really DO anything; they were just talking about their aspirations. The group was infiltrated, then arrested, he got ten years. He understood that he was just excessively naïve.
Apaceller was a different story. We had some conversations and he kept shocking me with his blind commitment to the cause. When he was confronted with some contradiction in his propaganda tirade, he ended the conversation with saying: “It may be this way, it may be that way”, the ultimate expression of the belief that reality is a choice of perception.
He was a convicted war criminal. I don’t know what he did exactly, but to get thirteen years, he had to do more than just watching the gates of the camp. The question than is, what is the exact degree of responsibility he had for the atrocities committed with his help? I am sure he invoked the classic defense of ‘acting on orders’, just as I am sure that he was doing it by choice. Working at a camp watching over unarmed prisoners was much safer than being a soldier on the Eastern front. He was clearly a bad person, but still, I had to ask myself where and how does he fit into the bigger picture. He did not see himself as a bad person. He wasn’t simply obedient; he was a devoted servant. A devoted servant does not ask questions, he does what he is told. I don’t think that he felt guilt. He said that he was guilty because he was told that he was guilty. History just changed his masters and he devotedly served the new ones.
Apaceller was clearly a guilty scumbag, he continued committing crimes right in front of my eyes.
Koronics, in that screwed up world was a hero simply by being ready to stand up.
Where was I in that picture? After the first-degree sentencing, most of us were let go awaiting the second-degree trial. As we were leaving the courthouse, a relative of one of my ‘co-conspirators’ approached me to congratulate me for my ‘brave’ behaviour. He made me feel very uncomfortable. I was NOT behaving bravely, I was just not as cowed and submissive as the rest of the accused. Bravery would have been standing up and calling the lying witnesses liars. The trial and the law illegitimate. The procedure a sham.
But I did not do any of that. If I did, I would have ended up with a MUCH harsher sentence. With my cowardly behaviour, I legitimized the system, the law, the procedure, the sentence.
All that leads to further questions: How does guilt work? What is the extent and degree of guilt and responsibility? Is there collective guilt?
I know Jews who would never buy anything made in Germany. Yet I also know, that the Germans do feel collective guilt for their Nazi past from a distance of three generations. How far does collective guilt have to go? What is needed for its recognition? How much retribution and heeling does a society need?
Can a whole society be guilty? Aren’t some people a little more responsible than others? How can we divide the guilt? …and the responsibility? Can the Germans ever redeem themselves?
Can Canadians be forgiven for the residential schools? How can we make a first-generation Chinese immigrant in America financially responsible for what happened in his new country a 150 years before he was born? All the while we are doing nothing with the mass murderers who are committing crimes against humanity RIGHT NOW? Shouldn’t we sort this out somehow?
We could start by looking at the structure of:
Responsibility
What does it mean? Who is responsible and to what extent? I see guilt and responsibility as a pyramid. Each level has the same amount of guilt, but as you go down, it is divided between an ever-increasing number of individuals. On the top are:
The dictators. Look at the five men on the top. All five died as a free man. None were punished. Come to think of it, only three ever were: Benito Mussolini, Hideki Tojo and Nicolae Ceaușescu.
The dictators are ideology driven psychopaths, they cannot be helped or argued with. They have absolutely no respect for human lives.
The henchmen are on the layer just below them. Some were punished, but most were not. One of the better renditions of this second layer of criminality is Conspiracy, the 2001 movie about the Wannsee conference in 1942, where the final solution was planned.
The henchman are opportunistic sociopaths, who are also beyond the possibility of redemption. If that is possible, they have even less respect for human lives than the dictators.
While the above two types are the most obviously responsible, at least I can understand them. Beyond the ideology, they do it for power, wealth and status.
The executors are the ones herding the Jews into the gas chambers; leading the class enemies to their executions and shooting whatever enemies into rivers and mass graves. Best pictured in the 1992 movie The Checkist. It is a very dark movie, but everybody should see it. (Can be found on Youtube)
That is the layer that we think of when we talk about war criminals. That is where Apaceller belonged. The executors I simply cannot understand. The job requires a kind of moral vacuity that is beyond my comprehension. What sort of personality can enable someone to do that?
If you can, explain them to me.
The administrators make it all practically possible. They are the ones who compile the lists, issue the arrest warrants, schedule and drive the trains. The judges who ignore the laws, and the opportunists who profit from the situation.
The propagandists justify the atrocities and hypnotize the masses into a deeply psychological overreaction. They are the professional liars, brain-washers and mob creators.
The censors contain and supress opposition to it. They are the algorithm creators, ‘fact checkers’ and lately, with the LLMs, the ‘prompt engineers’
I consider the administrators, the propagandists and the censors even more guilty than the first three as they are the ones who turn ideology and the nefarious goals of dictators into a social reality. At the same time, they are the least likely to feel guilt. They always see themselves as acting for the greater good and understand that you cannot make an omelette without breaking some eggs.
The brainwashed masses are the active enablers of the atrocities through mass formation psychosis.
They buy into the propaganda and see the victims as enemies. They do not care about the lives of the ‘others’
The brainless masses are enabling atrocities through their passive acquiescence. By sticking their heads in the sand; by refusing to see and hear the unacceptable.
The resistors (people like me – and hopefully you) are at the bottom of the pyramid.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
As I was writing the above, I pictured nazis, communists and world wars. Now I want you to think about two of latest atrocities: the covid/vaccine mass murders and the globalist’s war on Ukraine. The structure, the players, the guilt distribution and the denial are the same. The pyramid of shame is the same, with one small exception: we do not have a dictator, a personal embodiment of the dictatorial ideology.
Every person in the groups on the pyramid bears some degree of responsibility and we should be able to determine what that degree is.
What is the degree of responsibility of a concentration camp guard or a fact checker paid by the propagandists?
A paid drug pusher masquerading as a medical expert or a shrill ‘Karen’ demanding that I do something for her to make her feel safe?
A politician deciding to spend my money on killing people on the other side of the planet or my brainwashed relative cheering for it?
The deliberately and knowingly lying media or the hypnotized masses believing and acting on the lies?
I could go on contrasting the actively and the passively guilty to expose how the later enables and validates the former, but I’m sure you see my point. The ultimate questions are what is true and right, because as we all know, the truth is out there. Not looking for it is inexcusable.
What angers me most is watching the brainwashed masses with their mass formation psychosis. Their irrational fears and hysterical reactions. Their uncritical thinking and blind compliance with even the most ridiculous edicts of the authorities they place their trust in. It is their number that makes them so dangerous. Without them, the edifice of consensus would collapse.
When I started writing this post, I had something quite different in mind, but is it often happens, the writing took its own course and I ended up with something not only quite different, but also much longer than I planned. I had to cut the task into four pieces. The one I meant to write, will be the fourth. The next two will be the autopsies of the Scamdemic and the proxy war. This post is just the setup.
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