“Feeding on the carrion of a Dead Culture” – <\/p>\n\n\n\n
– When double checking on the English version of below Entry 71 of Minima Moralia by Adorno, 1945, I found the English version quoted about a bit over a decade ago on a site with above title and subtitle, which can be found telling in it’s own right…..:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
APRIL 13, 2011<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cTo see what is in front of one\u2019s nose needs a constant struggle\u201d<\/em> \u2014 George Orwell<\/p>\n\n\n\n The magnetic power which ideologies exert over human beings, while they have become entirely threadbare, is to be explained beyond psychology, in the objectively determined decay of logical evidence as such. It has come to the point that lies sound like truth, and truth like lies. Every statement, every news report, every thought is preformed by the centers of the culture-industry. What does not bear the trusted mark of such preformation lacks credibility in advance, all the more so that the institutions of public opinion garnish what they send out with a thousand factual proofs and all the power of conviction which the total [corporate] apparatus can bring to bear. The truth which would like to do something against this, bears not merely the character of something improbable, but is moreover too poor to break through in direct competition with the highly concentrated apparatus of dissemination. The German extreme sheds light on the entire mechanism. When the Nazis began to torture, they did not merely terrorize people both inside and outside the country, but were at the same time the more secure against exposure, the more savage the atrocities became. Its sheer unbelievability made it easy to disbelieve what, for the sake of peace, no-one wanted to believe, while simultaneously capitulating before it. Those who trembled in fear told themselves that things were much exaggerated: well into the war, the details of the concentration camps were unwelcome in the English press. Every horror in the enlightened world turns necessarily into a horror story [Greuelm\u00e4rchen]. For the untruth of the truth has a kernel, to which the unconscious eagerly [begierig anspricht] turns. It does not only wish for horror. Rather Fascism is in fact less \u201cideological\u201d, to the extent it immediately proclaimed the principle of domination, which was elsewhere hidden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whatever humane principles the democracies marshaled to oppose it, were effortlessly rebutted by pointing out that these do not concern all of humanity, but merely its false image, which Fascism is man enough to divest itself of. So desperate however have human beings become in their culture, that they are ready to cast off the frail signs of a better state of affairs, if only the world does their worse side the favor of confessing how evil it is. The political forces of opposition however are compelled to make use of the lie, if they do not wish to be completely extinguished as completely destructive. The deeper their difference from the existent, which nevertheless grants them shelter from a still worse future, the easier it is for the Fascists to nail them down as untruths. Only the absolute lie still has the freedom to say anything of the truth. The confusion of truth with lies, which makes it nearly impossible to maintain the difference between the two, and which makes holding on to the simplest cognition a labor of Sisyphus, announces the victory of the principle in logical organization<\/em><\/strong>, even though its military basis has been crushed. Lies have long legs: they are ahead of their time. The reconfiguration of all \u2014Minima Moralia<\/em>, Theodore Adorno<\/p>\n\n\n\n Theodor W. Adorno, 1945; Suhrkamp Frankfurt, 1951, p. 71f.:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pseudomenos. – Die magnetische Gewalt, welche die Ideologien \u00fcber die Menschen vorweg unglaubw\u00fcrdig, um so mehr, als die Institutionen der \u00f6ffentlichen Meinung <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “Feeding on the carrion of a Dead Culture” – – When double checking on the English version of below Entry 71 of Minima Moralia by Adorno, 1945, I found the English version quoted about a bit over a decade ago on a site with above title and subtitle, which can be found telling in it’s own right…..: Pseudomenos [Greek: liar]. APRIL 13, 2011 \u201cTo see what is in front of one\u2019s nose needs a constant struggle\u201d \u2014 George Orwell The magnetic power which ideologies exert over human beings, while they have become entirely threadbare, is to be explained beyond psychology, in Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,221,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-human-rights-civil-disobedience-courage-honesty","category-objective-thought","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=515"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":519,"href":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515\/revisions\/519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spblinux.de\/Staying-the-Course\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
questions of truth into those of power, which truth itself cannot evade, if it does not wish to be annihilated by power, does not merely suppress the truth, as in earlier despotisms, but has reached into the innermost core of the disjunction of true and false, whose abolition the hired mercenaries of logic are anyway feverishly working towards. Thus Hitler, who no-one can say if he died or escaped, lives on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n71 Pseudomenos<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
aus\u00fcben, w\u00e4hrend sie ihnen bereits ganz fadenscheinig geworden sind, erkl\u00e4rt sich
jenseits der Psychologie aus dem objektiv bestimmten Verfall der logischen Evidenz
als solcher. Es ist dahin gekommen, da\u00df L\u00fcge wie Wahrheit klingt, Wahrheit wie
L\u00fcge. Jede Aussage, jede Nachricht, jeder Gedanke ist pr\u00e4formiert durch die Zentren
der Kulturindustrie. Was nicht die vertraute Spur solcher Pr\u00e4formation tr\u00e4gt, ist <\/p>\n\n\n\n
dem, was sie aus sich entlassen, tausend faktische Belege und alle Beweiskraft
mitgeben, deren die totale Verf\u00fcgung habhaft werden kann. Die Wahrheit, die
dagegen anm\u00f6chte, tr\u00e4gt nicht blo\u00df den Charakter des Unwahrscheinlichen, sondern
ist \u00fcberdies zu arm, um in Konkurrenz mit dem hochkonzentrierten
Verbreitungsapparat durchzudringen. \u00dcber den gesamten Mechanismus belehrt das
deutsche Extrem. Als die Nationalsozialisten zu foltern begannen, terrorisierten sie
damit nicht nur die V\u00f6lker drinnen und drau\u00dfen, sondern waren zugleich vor der
Enth\u00fcllung um so sicherer, je wilder das Grauen anstieg. Dessen Unglaubw\u00fcrdigkeit
machte es leicht, nicht zu glauben, was man um des lieben Friedens willen nicht
glauben wollte, w\u00e4hrend man zugleich davor kapitulierte. Die Zitternden reden sich
darauf hinaus, es werde doch viel \u00fcbertrieben: bis in den Krieg hinein waren in der
englischen Presse Einzelheiten \u00fcber die Konzentrationslager unerw\u00fcnscht. Jedes
Greuel in der aufgekl\u00e4rten Welt wird notwendig zum Greuelm\u00e4rchen. Denn die
Unwahrheit der Wahrheit hat einen Kern, auf den das Unbewu\u00dfte begierig anspricht.
Nicht nur w\u00fcnscht es die Greuel herbei. Sondern der Faschismus ist in der Tat
weniger \u00bbideologisch\u00ab, insoweit er das Prinzip der Herrschaft unmittelbar
proklamiert, das anderswo sich versteckt. Was immer die Demokratien an Humanem
ihm entgegenzustellen haben, kann er spielend widerlegen mit dem Hinweis darauf,
da\u00df es ja doch nicht die ganze Humanit\u00e4t, sondern blo\u00df ihr Trugbild sei, dessen er
mannhaft sich ent\u00e4u\u00dferte. So desperat aber sind die Menschen in der Kultur
geworden, da\u00df sie auf Abruf das hinf\u00e4llige Bessere fortwerfen, wenn nur die Welt
ihrer Bosheit den Gefallen tut zu bekennen, wie b\u00f6se sie ist. Die politischen
Gegenkr\u00e4fte jedoch sind gezwungen, selbst immer wieder der L\u00fcge sich zu bedienen,
wenn nicht gerade sie als destruktiv v\u00f6llig ausgel\u00f6scht werden wollen. Je tiefer ihre
Differenz vom Bestehenden, das ihnen doch Zuflucht gew\u00e4hrt vor der \u00e4rgeren
Zukunft, um so leichter f\u00e4llt es den Faschisten, sie auf Unwahrheiten festzunageln.
Nur die absolute L\u00fcge hat noch die Freiheit, irgend die Wahrheit zu sagen. In der
Vertauschung von Wahrheit und L\u00fcge, die es fast ausschlie\u00dft, die Differenz zu
bewahren, und die das Festhalten der einfachsten Erkenntnis zur Sisyphusarbeit
macht, k\u00fcndet der Sieg des Prinzips in der logischen Organisation sich an, das
milit\u00e4risch am Boden liegt. L\u00fcgen haben lange Beine: sie sind der Zeit voraus. Die
Umsetzung aller Fragen der Wahrheit in solche der Macht, der Wahrheit selber nicht
sich entziehen kann, wenn sie nicht von der Macht vernichtet werden will,
unterdr\u00fcckt sie nicht blo\u00df, wie in fr\u00fcheren Despotien, sondern hat bis ins Innerste die
Disjunktion von Wahr und Falsch ergriffen, an deren Abschaffung die S\u00f6ldlinge der
Logik ohnehin emsig mitwirken. So \u00fcberlebt Hitler, von dem keiner sagen kann, ob er
starb oder entkam.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n