Source: http://alethonews.wordpress.com/2009/12/18/being-human/
By Ortrud Gessler-Gudnason
December 18, 2009
I have many fathers
I have many mothers
I have many brothers
I have many sisters
I have many children
My fathers live in all different nations
My mothers speak all different languages
My brothers pray in all different manners
My sisters cook all different kinds of food
My children like to laugh and sing and play
all over the world in the very same way,
Mein Name ist Mensch
(My name is Man)
The above was a song by a 1970s German political pop-band, which performed under the name “Ton, Steine, Erde”. I adapted the lyrics slightly to our times (the original one talked about different skin-colors.) This song about the human family has a very personal meaning for me. Although I have lived most of my adult life in Iceland, I have grown up in south-western Germany. In 1993, after the fall of the Berlin wall, I went from Iceland to Germany to live in Berlin for a while, coming back to Iceland in 1999.
When I was still a teenager in Germany, someone told me: “If you are poor and uneducated, you are nothing, absolutely nothing. Only a university education can make something out of you.”
I answered: “I´m not nothing. I will be never be nothing, whatever job or education I´ll have.
Ich bin immer noch ein Mensch (I´m still a human being)”
“Ein Mensch”, the person sneered, “ein Mensch, was ist das schon? (of what value is a human being really?)”
I was too young then to explain it or express myself, but I was old enough to know it deep down in my heart, a knowledge, which never left me all my life:
Ein Mensch, a human being, is everything. Nothing is of more value than a human being. This value can´t be enhanced, nor can it be taken. It is mine forever, but not mine alone. I share it with every other human being on earth.
To be sure we live in an age, where human beings are often regarded as “nothing”, as not worthwhile at all.
We live in age where Malthusian ideology has returned with a vengeance, where indeed human beings are considered useless eaters, a “danger to the planet”.
We live in an age where the value of human life is considered to be negligible by those would-be rulers of the world, the “elites” the “global players”, the “philosopher kings”. And when the ends justify the means, hundreds or thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands or even millions of human beings can be sacrificed to further the political aim of more power and control for those elites. Torture and any form of humiliation is justified to further those aims, where human dignity is of no concern for those who see themselves as superior, as elites – the ultra-rich, the intellectuals or the scientific geniuses.
They search for ever more “perfect” methods to kill human beings or produce agonizing pain to terrorize them into compliance, physically or psychologically.
A human being is indeed nothing for them, since they have brain-washed themselves into an anti-human belief-system.
They alternately believe that the human race destroys the planet or that humanity is a deficient, chaotic life-form which is out of control and needs to be brought under control somehow and by any means, or possibly even genetically altered.
Well, I believe that this elitist belief system is “mad”, insane or just plain false. And I believe that the falsehood of these elitist beliefs can be proven empirically.
Of course, since those elites are “true believers”, the likes of David Rockefeller or Henry Kissinger won´t change their minds any time soon. However, in time many other believers will. Some of those converts to human values might even be the children and grandchildren of today´s “elites”, who presently see themselves as born to rule, control, subdue and dominate.
For better or worse change is inevitable. Being human means having to deal with change and adapting to it. Being human means having the potential for hope that the change we´ll see inevitably will be for the better.
I believe that those who are denying the value of most human beings, to enhance their own perceived value, are now fighting a losing battle against the inevitable loss of their power. They won´t win, but the longer they stay in positions of too much power, the more terrible suffering they will cause among the innocent.
Being human means to work together towards the aim of one day – as soon as possible – ending the power of the ruthless and mad “elites”, so they can do no further harm to humanity.
As for me, I’ve got no power to change the world, not on my own anyway. That´s probably a good thing too. Who knows what the world would look like if I had. You wouldn´t like it, I´m sure. I never got the education, I was told was such a necessary precondition for becoming “something”, just stayed with my solid and basic German high-school education plus a couple of years community college for a nursery school educator.
Politically I was once member of the German Green Party (for exactly 3 weeks in 1995) and following that stand, I became a member of the German Socialist Party. How can a Catholic Christian become a member of a Marxist party, you might ask. Well, I´ve seen how the German ex-communists have been treated after the fall of the Berlin wall.
Western Capitalism had won, Eastern Communism had lost and was lying deadly wounded on the ground. I expected the winners to be gracious and forgiving. They weren´t.
When I joined the Green Party, I knew nothing about politics and very little about the world outside my own short horizon. I thought the Greens were the “good guys” I had been told so. Then I saw them doing what the rest of the western political class was doing to everyone who once was loyal to the now defunct East-German regime.
These people were being trampled upon while lying on the ground (figuratively). And I don´t like people being trampled upon, since I have experiences of being trampled upon myself – (a few times literally) and I´ve seen it being done to people I care about (also literally).
When I watched the Greens trampling others, I ripped up my Green party book and joined those on the ground.
Modern psychology calls that kind of behavior masochism. In better times, you´d have called it solidarity. It´s what the Danish and their king did, when the Nazis invaded Denmark and demanded that all Jews should wear the yellow star to mark them for a possible later deportation. So the Danish and their king all wore the yellow star, and no Jews were deported from Denmark.
I´m German by birth and I´ve got a partly Jewish background. My mother was one of those children, who had to live with false documents, and was being sent from one foster home to the next to cover up her background during the German Nazi rule. This is in and of itself irrelevant. I just mention it, to make the point, that an ethnic background should not determine any absolute loyalties. I believe that as a human being, one´s first loyalty must be to ethics and not to ethnicity.
Sure I can be loyal to the country of my birth, which in my case is Germany, or to the country I have immigrated to, in my case Iceland, or to my religion, in my case Catholic Christianity, but this loyalty may never ever become absolute beyond the loyalty I have to the human race as a whole and to my fellow human beings walking on this planet at this moment of time.
I believe that a Jewish background does not give anyone the moral permission to justify the crimes of the criminal state of Israel against the Palestinian people and against it´s other neighbors, crimes which, via Mossad interference into their internal affairs, reach into many developing countries.
What I have read about Zionism and Palestine caused me to question the holocaust narrative. I found that I had been taught so many lies about the founding of Israel that this central matter should also be examined. I had always thought that revisionists were just hate filled racists, but then that’s what the Zionists are. I was impressed by the works of Jurgen Graf and Germar Rudolf.
For me being skeptical of certain parts of today´s official Holocaust narrative seems important. Public Holocaust skepticism should at least be considered by all decent people of Jewish background, in order to break the power that Zionism has over the Jewish people.
The Holocaust narrative of today reinforces the Jewish “eternal myth”. This myth states, that Jewish people cannot live securely within non-Jewish communities, since the Gentiles have supposedly some kind of automatic Jew-hatred built into their genes.
Jewish historians of the 19th and early 20th century have acknowledged that the “eternal Jewish victim-hood” was indeed a propaganda myth the Jewish elites used to keep control of the rest of the Jewish population. Anti-Jewish persecution in the past had always been caused by the anti-Gentile actions of the Jewish elites towards the surrounding non-Jewish community.
The realization that persecution was brought on by bad behavior of at least some within the community, was a liberating knowledge for ordinary Jewish people. It meant, that persecution against Jews could be stopped by the Jewish people collectively by treating non-Jews as equals and with respect and by distancing themselves as individuals and as communities from all those Jewish individuals who don´t.
The current Holocaust narrative, which also excludes reasons why some part of the German people suddenly became violent Jew-haters, enables Israeli crimes since it furthers the Zionist propaganda myths, that Israel needs to “defend” itself at all costs, and that the Jewish state needs to have absolute and uncontested superiority in the region.
When I was a teenager in Germany I told myself that I did not only belong to the people who were the perpetrators of the atrocities, but also to the victims. Feeling comfortable about this background once, makes me now morally responsible to speak out against the crimes Israel commits to supposedly “protect” the Jewish people from harm.
This is the reason I´m open about being a Holocaust “skeptic” now. With my background this is a matter of ethics.
So who am I? I´m a woman, 49 years old. I´m a wife and a mother of grown children. I´m a Catholic. I´m definitely working class, doing a low paid service job. I´m a non-intellectual. I´m an immigrant in the country I live in. I´m an ex-socialist. I´m not Silvia Night, my real name is Ortrud Gessler-Gudnason. I´m not much different from all the other working class average people around me. I´m no one special.
And still – I am very, very, very special indeed.
I belong to the most special species, which ever lived on this planet. The only one that is self-aware, with knowledge of the past and a hope for the future, able to ask the most important question of all: Why?
I am a human being. Ég er manneskja. Ich bin ein Mensch.
keep the good work