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Do you feel like a concentration camp survivor?

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paolo
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13 Aug 2007, 2:27 pm

I have always felt like survivor. Perhaps my experience is extreme. But my interest for the infamous Bettelheim was motivated by the idea of having shared a common experience. After all my family had to hide during the war, something like Anne Frank. I was ten years old during the German occupation. But, apart from this, there is one thing to consider. At Auschwitz you stayed maximum one year, after which you were dead or liberated. For me the horror lasted, for various reasons, a period of decades and has left scars impossible to heal.


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Last edited by paolo on 13 Aug 2007, 2:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Aradford
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13 Aug 2007, 2:29 pm

You're all insane. You choose how you feel... You choose how you think... It is a task... you have to achieve personal choice...



Aradford
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13 Aug 2007, 2:35 pm

Remnant wrote:
Aradford wrote:
That was a terrible analogy. People walked around naked, were beaten, starved to death and killed in Concentration camps.

Sure, it sucks being a pariah and an oddity and there is that sense of social control with psychiatry and society. But we're not starving in Africa watching our parents die of aids in a straw hut forced to believe in God because there is nothing better for us.

There's nothing to complain about here (there is) but we have it so good. You sound like a white north american girl teenager who didn't get what she wanted for her sweet 16.


That last isn't called for. Aradford, you're treating Ana as if her feelings are somehow not real or are chosen by her.

Spaceplayer says that we can't compare and I say that we must. Emotional deprivation is worse than physical deprivation because emotional deprivation can be taken to the same extremes without so many marks that show. I don't weigh in very often against dialectical materialism but here it is. If you can't see it it isn't there according to some people. It's quite possible to abuse people to madness and death while they never miss a meal. Yet people who are close to starvation can be in good spirits.

It's really easy to make others feel helpless and trapped. That's all it takes. It's a lot like someone can make it so that another may be able to eat the food, and it's good food, but unable to digest it properly and then unable to assimilate it correctly into the body. It is comparable when they can force a person away from her own life and keep her there by emotionally binding her.

People who say that a person can just choose to be different have obviously never been through it. If a person is injured badly enough they just say that he's got toys in the attic instead of recognizing that the person has been injured and needs to heal. That's a convenient way to escape the obligation to at least recognize the humanity of the other person and the validity of her feelings.


You cannot compare because you have no idea what it is like to be a prisoner in a concentration camp... If it is really easy to make others feel helpless and trapped then it is just as easy and possible for the inverse; that is, to not feel helpless and trapped.

"you have nothing to lose but your chains"
-Hegel



Aradford
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13 Aug 2007, 2:37 pm

Seriously, its not like you're held down at gunpoint threatened to be shot in the head if you move an inch... you ARE free to choose



Stitch
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13 Aug 2007, 2:38 pm

"You're all insane. You choose how you feel... You choose how you think... It is a task... you have to achieve personal choice..."

That's the craziest thing I've seen here for a while...



Aradford
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13 Aug 2007, 2:44 pm

It is a radical possibility if you are up for the task.



Avian
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13 Aug 2007, 2:51 pm

Alicorn wrote:
Seriously, its not like you're held down at gunpoint threatened to be shot in the head if you move an inch... you ARE free to chooseSeriously, its not like you're held down at gunpoint threatened to be shot in the head if you move an inch... you ARE free to choose]
"there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so"

Denmark was only a prison because Hamlet chose to believe it was a prison, and he admit that to himeslf. That is true of all things as well: people, things, or events do not distrub us but rather our beliefs about these things are what disturb us. So yes, her feelings are chosen by her.

Victimhood ends when one accepts the power of choice that each of us has.

Do you realize what the ultimate implications of these statements are? Including for people who were in those Nazi death camps?

In any event, after forty-five years of this: I certainly look as though I just walked out of one of those places; I've been told more than once that my appearance is ghoulish and frightening.

Aradford wrote:
Seriously, its not like you're held down at gunpoint threatened to be shot in the head if you move an inch... you ARE free to choose

Well, you certainly had the freedom to choose not to move an inch, I suppose (by that reasoning).


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Malachi_Rothschild
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13 Aug 2007, 2:51 pm

Quote:
You choose how you feel... You choose how you think... It is a task... you have to achieve personal choice...


Aye. We're all filtering objective reality through a subjective lens or put differently projecting our own subjective experience onto the world around us. And for many people the glasses don't seem to be rose-colored.



Aradford
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13 Aug 2007, 3:03 pm

Avian wrote:
Alicorn wrote:
Seriously, its not like you're held down at gunpoint threatened to be shot in the head if you move an inch... you ARE free to chooseSeriously, its not like you're held down at gunpoint threatened to be shot in the head if you move an inch... you ARE free to choose]
"there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so"

Denmark was only a prison because Hamlet chose to believe it was a prison, and he admit that to himeslf. That is true of all things as well: people, things, or events do not distrub us but rather our beliefs about these things are what disturb us. So yes, her feelings are chosen by her.

Victimhood ends when one accepts the power of choice that each of us has.

Do you realize what the ultimate implications of these statements are? Including for people who were in those Nazi death camps?

In any event, after forty-five years of this: I certainly look as though I just walked out of one of those places; I've been told more than once that my appearance is ghoulish and frightening.

Aradford wrote:
Seriously, its not like you're held down at gunpoint threatened to be shot in the head if you move an inch... you ARE free to choose

Well, you certainly had the freedom to choose not to move an inch, I suppose (by that reasoning).


Yes you have the freedom to choose not to move an inch, but once you've reached the point to realize this (and some haven't, fear does cloud the mind) you're a coward who is afraid to die a heroic, honourable death.

Honestly, would life be worth living after 4 years starving in a camp getting beaten to death while watching your family and friends die?

So you're saying that you lost half your body weight, you're hair is thinned out and your muscles became all degenerated?



fresco
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13 Aug 2007, 3:04 pm

I think the experience of a concentration camp is far worse than anything I have ever been through. I understand what you are getting at, I can empathise with the range of emotions and trauma of being incarcerated. A couple of years ago I read a book about one mans time as a Japanese POW. I will find out the name of the book, people thought I was mad reading it I loved it. I cannot align myself with any protaganist in a romantic novel or some other fiction, this man's chronicle of his time in the camp was so extreme I found it accesible and meaningful. His bravery was trully inspirational.
I always find I get along better with people who have had traumatic experiences they are not like other NT's they understand whats important in life and don't get entrenched in all the bullsheetto.



Apatura
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13 Aug 2007, 3:05 pm

My experiences with being viciously and systematically bullied in school did lead me to identify with holocaust victims and prisoners in general. I was obsessed with the holocaust for a long time. I was also obsessed with the Vietnam War because the PTSD symptoms Vietnam Vets experienced were something I could so easily identify with.



Remnant
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13 Aug 2007, 3:10 pm

Aradford wrote:
Seriously, its not like you're held down at gunpoint threatened to be shot in the head if you move an inch... you ARE free to choose


Accept the fact that there is a lot that you don't know about this.



Aradford
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13 Aug 2007, 3:10 pm

I understand the whole "social control" analogy, it is just a little too extreme.. And books WILL NOT help you understand what its like to be in a camp like that.... they will dimly light up your ability to feel empathy with the victims.. dimly...

The control we confront today is with the mind and it only happens if you let it.



Aradford
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13 Aug 2007, 3:11 pm

Remnant wrote:
Aradford wrote:
Seriously, its not like you're held down at gunpoint threatened to be shot in the head if you move an inch... you ARE free to choose


Accept the fact that there is a lot that you don't know about this.



Remnant
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13 Aug 2007, 3:14 pm

Aradford wrote:
Remnant wrote:
Aradford wrote:
Seriously, its not like you're held down at gunpoint threatened to be shot in the head if you move an inch... you ARE free to choose


Accept the fact that there is a lot that you don't know about this.


Any content to add?



Aradford
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13 Aug 2007, 3:15 pm

Remnant wrote:
Aradford wrote:
Remnant wrote:
Aradford wrote:
Seriously, its not like you're held down at gunpoint threatened to be shot in the head if you move an inch... you ARE free to choose


Accept the fact that there is a lot that you don't know about this.


Any content to add?