However, the fact that penchant for stupid brutal violence is socially constructed, so to speak, should not be construed that it can be deconstructed or unlearned at will. Humans are not a tabula rasa - the development of their brains, especially in the early childhood and early adolescence, is profoundly shaped by their life experiences. So once they become socialized into stupid brutal violence, undoing that process may be rather difficult.
This is yet another reason why both living conditions and cultural and psychological adaptations to those conditions that form the so-called lumpen-proletariat should be eradicated like a disease.
PS. I wonder whether the image of "cultured" German officers presiding over stupid brutal slaughter in EE is a myth. The message from the film _The Pianist_ , which is based on a true life story of Wladyslaw Szpilman is that the mindless violence was committed by rednecks, while a "cultured" officer actually saved Szpilman's life. A similar story surrounds the life and death of one of the best, imho Polish writers Bruno Schulz, who was murdered by a Nazi redneck as an act of revenge against another more "cultured" Nazi who protected Schulz because he liked his art http://www.brunoschulz.org/xiega.html. Not to mention, of course, my grandma war story of being 'saved' by a group of Wehrmacht officers who took exception to lower ranking SS-men brutalizing a bunch of innocent civilians for no apparent reason.
I am not trying to exonerate the Nazis - I am sure that there were some psychopaths among the "cultured" ones, but I find it hard to believe that most of them were "Hitler's willing executioners." It is one thing to "go with the flow" or "follow orders" but it is a very different thing to undo years of socialization into "high culture" that fundamentally renounces physical violence. Violence is a part of a peasant's everyday life - it is not that big of a jump from slaughtering a pig or a cow to slaughtering a person - but it is a different story for someone who did not kill a mouse in his previous life. Or so I imagine - but then I strongly abhor all acts of violence.
Wojtek
> --- Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
> > Chris quoted Dostoyevsky:
> >
> > > "Have you ever seen how a peasant beats his wife?
> > I
> > > have. He begins with a rope or a strap. Peasant
> > life
> > > is devoid of aesthetic pleasures -- music,
> > theatres,
> > > magazines; naturally this gap has to be filled
> >
> > Jerzy Kosinski paints a similar picture in his
> > _Painted Bird_ ( I do not
> > have a copy on me to quote some of the more juicy
> > descriptions, e.g. that of
> > a peasant gouging out the eyes of a guy who had hots
> > for his wife and then
> > methodically beating crap out of her). Kosinski has
> > been accused of
> > plagiarism, allright, but he plagiarized it from the
> > Polish literature that
> > provides many description of peasant violence (esp.
> > the novel _Peasants_ by
> > Wladyslaw Reymont) . Another example, Isaak
> > Bashevis Singer (_The Magician
> > of Lublin_) writes about peasants boiling alive a
> > thief they caught, and his
> > other novel _The Satan of Goray_ also contains many
> > gory details (no pun
> > intended, Goray is a Podunk in SE Poland) . The
> > images of the 1840 revolt
> > in which peasants cut their victims with saws are
> > still alive in the
> > literature and folklore.
> >
> > An then, there is the Jedwabne pogrom, described in
> > gory details by Jan
> > Gross in the New Yorker ....
> >
> > Perhaps some of it is exaggerated - but the peasant
> > penchant for brutality
> > and violence is well known and hardly contested.
> >
> > Wojtek
> >
> >
> >
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> >
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