HUMANS : RISEN APES of PLANET EARTH

"But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses."
~ Robert Ardrey, African Genesis

I'd have to argue strongly with the last sentence of that otherwise insightful quotation. I'd say that the human species of planet Earth is known among the stars, if at all, by the insanity of its headlong rush towards its own destruction.

During the past week we've watched a 3-DVD set of Holocaust. This was a TV mini-series first aired in 1978, and has been, without doubt, the most painful to watch of any film I've seen in my entire life. I knew I couldn't, and shouldn't, "chicken out" part-way through, though.

Watching Holocaust has reminded me (if I needed to be reminded) that the human race is rotten at its core. Should we need even more evidence, we can look to news items from Sudan, Congo, Tibet, or a long, long list of historical instances of horrific dealings, human against human, throughout our relatively short tenancy of planet Earth. And if, at some point, a particular group or "tribe" appears to be on the side wearing the white hats and fighting evil - it's part of the pattern to see that same "tribe" slickly ducking into the black hats of oppressors and finding them a nice snug fit - in no time at all.

Because of our shared rotten core, over the centuries a few rare individuals, a scant few who must carry a mutant, sane and peaceful gene, have tried to point out a better way for humans to live. What happened? Their followers formed "tribes", the "tribes" killed one another.

Humans, in spite of their common species, tend always to gravitate into groups, "tribes". This has to be in our genes, our DNA. The "tribe" effect even happens in astrology. Sun sign astrology retains its hold on fans because so many wish to categorise themselves and others by "star signs", and find it hard to get out of that rut. When they widen their knowledge of the subject, a broadening of perspective and better understanding of themselves and others usually follows. The same broadening of perspective would surely be available in all areas where a "tribal" mentality persists?

"Our true nationality is mankind", wrote H.G. Wells, long ago. He was well ahead of the curve! I've often thought that we - we as in the human race - will not fully realise and embrace our common humanity until we are faced with "other" - living beings not of planet Earth. That could happen tomorrow - or never. I hope we shall not ever be visited by "other" though, because, if humans' past record is anything to go by, "other" would not be welcomed - they would be destroyed.

There isn't a solution, nothing to be done but to do our best with what nature has given us. There never will be a solution. Our particular mix of stardust ingredients have formed, and will continue to form, the complexities of our human nature and our, probably complex, destiny. Our species was an unfortunate accident of Nature.

“This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.”
~D.H. Lawrence

"Fateless" - A Boy and The Holocaust

Writing last week about Irma Grese, notorious for her horrendous cruelty in Nazi concentration camps, led to a bit of synchronicity. On Saturday we visited a couple of antique/junk shops across the border in Texas. I noticed, in one of them, among a pile of old VCR tapes a single DVD. I'd never heard of the movie "Fateless", but from the synopsis on the cover I decided that it was well worth the $2 asking price.

"Fateless" is a movie based on a Nobel Prize winning novel of the same name by Hungarian author Imre Kertesz. The harrowing but strangely beautiful story of a Jewish boy, György (George) Köves, aged 14 (played by Marcell Nagy),
arrested in Budapest in June 1944 and transported to Nazi concentration camps, Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Zeitz. He remained imprisoned, doing forced labour, enduring unimaginable hardships, starvation and abuse, until American forces liberated him and his companions after the end of the war. He escaped death only with the help of political prisoners who rescued him from a pile of corpses about to be disposed of. American liberation followed soon after, as he recovered, hidden in a hospital provided exclusively for political prisoners.

The movie, screenplay by Imre Kertesz, is said to be more closely autobiographical than the novel. There's a report of an interview with the author by Stefan Theil, at Holocaust Survivors' Network - "The Last Word: Voice of Conscience".


Imre Kertesz was born in Budapest, Hungary on 9 November 1929 (no time of birth known).



Sun, Mercury and Mars are in Scorpio, Moon in Aquarius (whatever time of birth). Scorpio and Aquarius are both Fixed signs, and probably endowed the author, as a boy, with a strong will and stubborn determination to survive. His Scorpio Sun trines Pluto (planet of death and transformation) in Cancer - I wonder whether, had that trine been a square or other challenging aspect, if he would have survived his ordeals to tell his story? Neptune (creativity) sextiles Mercury(communication) - a hint of the career in writing he would take up in later life. Saturn lay in late Sagittarius at his birth, and in June 1944, when he was arrested, Saturn in transit lay exactly opposite his natal Saturn - a dramatic Saturn half-return.

From "The Holocaust, From a Teenage View" by Alan Riding for the New York Times in 2006:

In a scene not included in the novel, an American army officer, himself Jewish, encourages Gyuri to migrate to the United States, but the boy wants to return to his family in Budapest.......... But home was not as Mr. Kertész - or Gyuri - imagined it: his father had died in Mathausen, a Nazi labor camp in Austria; his stepmother had remarried; his home had been occupied by another family. Even here, Gyuri cannot grasp that more than half a million Hungarian Jews have died in the Holocaust; when asked about the atrocities in the camps, he remembers his happiness.
"Yes," the novel concludes in Gyuri's voice, "the next time I am asked, I ought to speak about that, the happiness of the concentration camps. If indeed I am asked. And provided I myself don't forget.

If "happiness" in such circumstances still shocks, that was the author's intention. "I took the word out of its everyday context and made it seem scandalous," Mr. Kertész said. "It was an act of rebellion against the role of victim which society had assigned me. It was a way of assuming responsibility, of defining my own fate."

That last comment, about defining his own fate, I see as a reflection of his Moon in Aquarius.

The film's cinematographer/director, Lajos Koltai comments:

"What was most exciting is that many teenagers went to see the movie in Hungary," Mr. Koltai said of the film, the first feature he has directed. "They fall in love with the boy and realize that his fate could be their fate: just taken off a bus. It could happen to anyone anywhere in the world today."

A chilling thought indeed.