The Angel of Death

History is full of enigmatic, information-bearing events.
To the uninitiated, these may seem like events that replay themselves over and over in some insane regression. In fact, I think this is one of the reasons so many people find the study of history 'tedious' and boring; or even 'horrible'.
But as a farmer or hunter loves his bloody work, so do I love mine.
For me as a young man, history was a passion. The older and more remote: The better.
Prehistory fascinated me.
I loved the tales of the most ancient order.
I can remember being a boy of eight, and listening to my dad read The Odyssey – chapter by chapter, night after night one summer.
He had suggested I read it one day, as I seemed to love all things Roman and Greek. Legions in Africa and Gaul, the Spartans at Thermopylae were standard fare in 'boys books' and comics when I was a lad, and I loved those sword and sandals style stories, the stories of the medieval period, and those of the great periods of exploration.
Our passion for the Classical period was an overlap of mine and my father's tastes. I found Homer's book on his shelves and tried. It was too much for my eight year old mind to grasp. I read the words but they confronted me with strange realities. How to even pronounce the names?
What is a boy to do? I asked him if he would see fit to read it to me.
I can remember him saying he would try, but would stop the very moment he saw me lose interest. It was not to happen. Once I had the characters fairly clear in my minds eye, the story had me hooked. Not only me, but Grandad – who we were living with at the time – also kept popping his head in our den, ostensibly to bring tea and such, but eventually to sit and listen with me.
I was hooked. Two degrees and years of post grad later, I am still an avid student more than instructor of history. I am still learning, although I try to share what I have learned.
Some of these lessons are enlightening and happy. Others are dark, mysterious, and even evil.
One of the most commonly understood lessons that posterity teaches is the simple: History that is forgotten or wilfully ignored will repeat itself. There are many colourful versions of this thought throughout the history of Christian (IE Western) culture.
The lesson here is of The Angel of Death.
Not the Biblical Angel called forth by Moses the final plagues on the house of Egypt, but a man who lived within the memory of those alive today.
The Angel of Death that is referred to herein, is a certain 'Doctor' Josef Mengele.
I have use the inverted commas on the term Doctor, as he was such in Degree/Title only.
The Oath of Hippocrates was not his creed. The Schultz Staffel was.
But our little journey through the darkness does not begin with Hauptsturmführer Mengele, and his stain on infamy. It began centuries before. In the dawn of the modern age.
During the High Medieval and Renaissance period human cruelty reached long lost technical heights. Methods imported from around the world and studied with sadistic efficiency combined with new and potent psychological concepts came into play.
The method of delivery for these first sick experiments in pain threshold, living biology, and mental endurance/tolerance was improved and pushed into new levels; but the ideas were ancient. People had been doing horrible things to animals in the name of religion, diet, and sheer curiosity for as long as can be remembered. Extending this to other men and women? Just a matter of when this sadism shows it's face, and what pretence it will use to justify it's existence.
In the high medieval, it was morality and religion.
Gone were the days of the Reconquest and the justifiable Crusades in defence of the holy land and home.
Now all was about conquest.
That was not ideologically pure, and for that reason there had to be a work around.
Some reason to allow themselves to do what they knew was selfish and barbaric. They used the medium of the time. Religion. Religion and it's close cousin: philosophy. This was a slippery slope and we are still sliding down it.
While I will grant the overall outcome of the conquest of the New World has been beneficial (it certainly has for my people and family) the initial justifications introduced had a lot of very nasty side effects. Ideas that had been considered reprehensible were reasoned into morality by weighing options.
This same relativism can and will be applied to other areas. It will spread, like all ideas do; even if resisted.
I will use analogy to speed up the explanation. I will use the 'Conquest' as an example.
Moral Problem:The desperate needs of the many subjects of Imperial Spain (example) outweigh the needs of the fewer Caribbean Natives. Their resources must be annexed, but to kill people and steal their belongings is against all the moral teachings of the European Nations.
Justification: The Caribbean Natives are of a 'lower order of men' due to their lack of knowledge, morality, and religion. They must be converted and/or enslaved (for private venture, but taxed), or killed. Rules to be determined later. The native lands and property shall be annexed by the the regional or military powers.
Repercussions:Aside from the horrible suffering, a vast increase in the use of slavery and indentured labour created a market for more slaves than the island populations could supply, thereby increasing trade with the Arab West African (mortal enemy at the time) slavers, but also creating and entirely new market for the capture and sale of 'Indian' slaves in South and Central America. The evil grew and metastasized.
So what the F does this have to do with a Nazi guy or cutting people up in experiments?
Good question.
Here's the parallel, you see: Just as the slavery infected and corrupted the ventures of the Crowns and Churches of Europe, so did this other form of evil.
Just as the Natives of the 'New World' and West Africa had been dehumanized for sale and exploitation, so had an old favourite: The Heretic.
In reality these people usually had enemies in high places, or were the mob picked hapless victims of the the notorious blood circuses of the auto-da-fé and other such displays of barbarism. Not many were actually heretics of any sort. The real Heretics were usually quite good at hiding, especially in the areas that bordered or where formerly Moorish.
During these horrible periods of disemboweling and decapitations, the scientific minds took note.
I mean that literally. They took notes. An information source for anatomy was discovered. There was benefits to being able to see living things ripped apart, and now there was an excuse to do it to humans! Religion was used as a tool to achieve the justification, reason and sophistry to apply it selectively, and science to observe the results. Well, it was a new excuse, anyway.
Even after the Churches, Academia, and even some of the most powerful Crowns of Europe cast off these evils, and returned to a more morally guided path, the demand for the labour of slaves and the information (often called intelligence in my circles) gleaned from carnage still existed.
A quite vacuum, in constant balance with laws designed to keep those cruel markets closed.
Reasons, economic and social, were found to force people to work in far off lands and march boys into coal mines. Slavery's demand was met with criminals and 'Negroes', who were now scientifically being argued as 'racially'sub-human.
Brutal torture and vivisection was no longer religiously justified.
Those damn priests always go back to their book, and it says 'NO” to such bloody sport.
There needed to be a more EARTHLY and less far less limited justification!
No now Evil was politically endorsed. The Church had been taught it's place by the Crowns and State Houses of Europe, and now they would control that avenue. There was a new upsurging class; The Bourgeois. A new demand for medicine and doctors, and more demand for cadavers and the gory rites of vivisection. The new scapegoat, in human terms, was the 'traitor', or any capitol offence deemed nasty enough. But newly popular was the scientific justification for the animal cruelty that goes under this name. There had been no acceptable reasoning for the live butchery of animals since Constantine banned it.
All excuses had seemed savage by comparison to the sage and humane laws of the First Holy Emperors of Rome. But Rome was a long way back in the 18th and 19th century, and Science was a damn good excuse. A new word began to make the rounds: progress!
New heights were reached during this period. Not just of means to deliver pain, and prolong suffering; but also of anatomy performed on the still warm and even living bodies of the 'prisoners'. These observations did not result in great leaps in proximate medicines and in understanding of the function of our organs, as one might suspect. While the use of cadavers became popular for anatomists centuries ago, the gains have all been far more recent.
While vivisection of beasts has been used since at least Bronze age Greece, it also has only seen very recent and limited uses. An ultrasound or MRI of the interior of a man or pig is not only of more use that a dying organism, but also recordable and replayable – unlike the man or pig.
The most recent upsurge in this horrible trend has been during the 20th Century and into the Early 21st.
In this age of Racialism, Multiculturalism, Objectivism, and Communism; of polar ideological 'styles' and never ending political excuses we have seen a forceful return of these evils.
We have seen the rise of The Third Reich within living memory, for example.
That brings us back to Herr 'Doktor' Mengele.
The man held the rank of Captain in Himmler's SS, and was in charge of medical experiments at Auschwitz concentration camp. He had proved his ability as a surgeon serving with an SS Pnzer (tank) division on the 'Eastern Front' against the Soviets. He had apparently saved the lives of several colleagues and been wounded in the process.
As a 'reward' for his service he was given the horrible task of camp doctor at one of history's most notorious concentration / death camps. He experimented on men, women, and children. He injected dies and even isotopes into the eyes of his victims ('subjects' to him).
Mengele's real obsession was with twins. He felt the secret to breeding super human, disease and pain resistant Aryan soldiers was to be found in the relationship between twins. The depravities this man committed against children in the guise of research is nightmarish. He was an instrument of unspeakable, directed evil.
Mengele's justification was one of science and was based on the premises of 'Social Darwinism', as preached in the works of Ernst Haeckel. He like his Nazi colleagues, was an utterly modern man.
He was no black robed Inquisitor, no painted Pagan priestess, no Imam demanding conversion at the curve of his sword – he was a perfectly modern, civilized, normal looking man with a degrees in Medicine.
Mengele could vanish in a crowd.
In fact, that is what exactly what the 'angel of death' did.
For years the Israelis hunted him, but he evaded and was protected. Mengele died an old man of a heart failure, while swimming in his favourite lake near his family's ranch in South America in 1979.
The Escape of the 'Angel of Death' was made much of in film and media. Books, movies, and mystery shows are dedicated to the subject. It fascinates.
I feel there is a lesson here, or perhaps even a warning.
Mengele's trial would have exposed this particular evil in a light that it has never been in living memory. Such evils could have been set much further back, but justice failed. Corruption won.
The tumour that was Mengele's ideas continues to fester and grow.
The Eugenics in the West, Russia, and China of the past and present are mentioned only in hushed tones, or are even touted as 'progressive'.
Examples? Organ harvesting from near dead (vivisection) / executed criminals  , 'euthanasia' of depressed and the physically /mentally disabled (also a 'resource' for organ harvesting/Vivisection), abortion-on-demand (IE non medical / for profit / Mills), stem cell harvesting from the before mentioned aborted young, and the needless vivisection and repetitive experiments performed on 'lab' animals. All these evils self perpetuate. They will give rise to their own market and forces of demand and grow.  They fester.
I am not suggesting Religion, Politics, Science, or philosophy is at fault. I am saying they have been the paths by which we reached this crossroads, and they are same paths used by this evil - time and again.
I am suggesting that when we see men of standing suggesting that we should just kill off old people because they are depressed (no wonder!) and they cost too much, or when we hear people suggest criminals should be killed in order to sell kidneys to rich bankers, or when 'doctors' have full time for profit practices designed to END life and the potential for life and to make further profit from the very carrion they create; we should think about where this Evil ended last time. It ended in TOTAL WAR. The womb of Evil.
Perhaps it seeks to release, or be born anew?
But these are metaphysical questions (a bell tolls outside as I write o.0) and may be considered endlessly.
We should confront this legion of amorality for what they are, and we must do so intuitively.
We should not allow reason or dogma to cloud our perceptions, and be USED against us. We must hold fast to our faith, morality, reason, and understanding. The philosophies, including science, are OUR tools.
This tendril of Evil must be felt , it must be understood as a cyclical eventuality and be expected.
We must recognize it when it attempts to wrestle away one of our foundations.
That presents a further problem. While most politicians, soldiers, labourers, salesmen, priests, philosophers, poets, workmen, and artists all believe in Evil - the academe (researchers, journals etc - regent priests) , in our current age, does not.
It is distinctly materialist. The non existence of evil is a corner stone (moral subjectivity etc) of materialist ideas. Evolutionary psychology is probably the most extreme example of this (mind=brain). No Evil means there is no Good, and no culpability (guilt or punishment) beyond this life.
All morality becomes a luxury and survival becomes central. The EXTENSION of life (primarily one's own and those of immediate importance) becomes all that matters.
No evil means no limits. .
This is how Mengele's are made.This is why this type of evil thrives in the Academe.
Like Faust, the Academe gladly sells it's soul, which it has forgotten or does not believe in to a Devil it does not believe exists; ALL in the name of the PROMISE of  progress, which is termed broadly as 'science'.
It is an abuse of the word.

Mengele, left  Some of his 'subjects', right

I suggest this:
Not only did Josef Mengele escape the gallows at Nuremberg, but so did the ideals he represented.
In the early days of the 21st century A.D.,
the Angel of Death flies free.