Primo Levi, a Jewish Italian chemist and writer, served part of World War II in Auschwitz. When he arrived at the camp, starving and thirsty, he snatched an icicle from one of the eaves above a window of his barracks. A German guard knocked the icicle from his hands. When Levi asked “Warum?” (“Why?”), the guard replied: “Hier ist kein warum” (“Here there is no why.”)
Like Levi, many of us today find ourselves looking at our government and our politicians, and asking “Why?”
Like Levi, many of us today find ourselves looking at our government and our politicians, and asking “Why?”
Why, for example, when our nation year after year sinks into debt, do our politicians and bureaucrats continue to push for more expenditures? Why do we go on tossing money to the wind and thereby condemning our children and grandchildren into a graveyard of debt?
Hier ist kein warum.
A banker I know tells me of the clients who claim disability. In one case, a couple applying for a mortgage loan were on disability. After making out the necessary paperwork, the banker wished the clients a good day. “It will be good,” the husband said. “We’re going for a hike in the mountains.”
From NPR, Chana Joffe-Walt reports that federal spending on disabilities is greater than food stamps and welfare combined. (See: http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/) Why is that? Why do we allow able-bodied people to eat up our social welfare system?
Hier ist kein warum.
Why have we established a health-care program that hovers on the verge of failure and bankruptcy? Why have we allowed government to drive up the average health care costs of the American citizen?
Hier ist kein warum.
In 2014 alone, federal regulators issued 2,400 new regulations. 77 of these were deemed major changes. (See http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2015/05/red-tape-rising-six-years-of-escalating-regulation-under-obama). Spurred on by the president and Congress, federal agencies are in many ways now our governing body. They cost the American people billions of dollars annually. Why?
Hier ist kein warum.
Why is it that last month the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) caused nearly 7,000 passengers to miss their flights because of lengthy airport security checks while at the same time thousands of undocumented migrants streamed across America’s unprotected southern borders? In an era of terrorism, why has our current administration softened control of our borders and made deportation of illegal immigrants, including many criminals, so difficult?
Hier ist kein warum.
For two hundred years, our universities functioned as bastions for the exchange of ideas. After graduation, it was assumed, students would enter the work force prepared to handle the rough and tumble of everyday life. Today, however, some of our most prestigious universities with their “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” seem more like kindergartens than institutions of higher learning. Why?
Hier ist kein warum.
The men who devised our Constitution distrusted both powerful governments and the mob. They recognized that either could be oppressive. They wanted a government made to serve the people, not to rule them with intimidation. Democracy they also regarded as a potential tyrant, a majority “mob” ruling over a minority.
Today the government has combined with certain mobs to become a master rather than a servant. Those of us who pay taxes and those of us receive benefits from our masters share one thing in common. We are serfs. If you’re paying taxes for a quarter of the year or more, you’re a serf. If you’re taking money from the government, especially when you could be working, you are a serf. You may not realize it, but you are.
In addition, many of those in government, the media, and the universities have learned that they no longer need concentration camps or gulags to handle dissidents.
Instead, they have taken a lesson from Vladimir Lenin. Once Lenin received a letter from a certain Kautski. Here is Lenin’s response:
“Why should we bother to reply to Kautski? He would reply to us, and we would have to reply to his reply. There’s no end to that. It will be enough for us to announce that Kautski is a traitor to the working class, and everyone will understand everything.”
Everyone will understand everything. The government, the media, and the fringe elements of both the right and the left have learned that lesson. They don’t need to shoot their enemies in the back of the head anymore, however much they might wish to do so. Instead, they sling mud. They shout down those with whom they disagree, they besmirch with every known rhetorical fallacy anyone who questions them or disagrees with their ideas, they grow a thicket of laws to persecute their opponents. They stake their claim in righteousness and free speech, but mock those citizens who disagree with them.
Are we still living in America?
Perhaps.
But it seems to me that Primo Levi’s guard is standing watch now. He’s discarded the uniform, he speaks English, and he claims to “want the best for us,” the implication being that we are too stupid for freedom, that we as adults need a nanny to protect us from others and from ourselves.
But reach for that icicle, and the guard will knock it from your hand.
Hier ist kein warum.
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