#rob jacobs

Rob Jacobs, 'Separation', 2018 Source The current moment in history, particularly the treatment of refugees and immigrants in the United States (my country of origin) has reminded me of a book written by Richard Rubenstein called ‘The Cunning of History.’ (You can read it here). To give you an idea of what the book is about and why I think it’s relevant to what I am witnessing, I’m going to quote a Kirkus review of the book from 1975: “Rubenstein, leaning heavily on Hannah Arendt and Max Weber, argues that the "final solution" represented the triumph of bureaucratic organization applied to the problem of surplus or redundant populations; his fear is that overpopulation and shrinking world resources are likely to make "administrative massacre" a commonplace in the years to come. The first step toward death, he contends, comes when a group of people is bureaucratically "redefined" to exclude it from citizenship--as the Germans did with the Jews. Stateless or denaturalized people are most likely to become nonpersons. Rubenstein argues cogently that this phenomenon develops hand in hand with the march of civilization toward greater rationalization.” (Source) While the comparison between modern concentration camps in the U.S. to the “extermination camps” of the Nazi’s feels, on its face, to be hyperbolic, the overall point remains valid. The etiology of Auschwitz is embedded in the very process of classifying entire categories of people as “illegal”, as “other.” It might seem alarmist to some to decry what’s happening on America’s southern border by making such comparison’s. The Holocaust has become mythologized and seems like something so monstrous that we forget that this process was the result of an accumulation of smaller policy acts made by a government that offered justifications to its citizens for their implementation. The same basic logic is being applied here. If we are not willing to face the possibility that the moral violations we are witnessing in the here and now are pregnant with future escalations, then we become complicit when those violations give birth to the monstrous reality we denied could exist because such realities were considered dark chapters in human history. 

Rob Jacobs

Separation by Rob Jacobs

By Rob Jacobs

Love Will Keep Us Alive - Eagles cover by Bobby T Moore https://ift.tt/2NXRoHj