https://www.activistpost.com/2024/05/ruling-class-advances-its-plan-to-produce-4-8-million-bird-flu-vaccines.html
Primo Levi, who described the “Musulmen” as “an anonymous mass, continuously renewed and always identical, of no-men who march[ed] and labor[ed] in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty really to suffer… the weak, the infirm, those who were doomed to be singled out [for the gas chambers],” added that the reasons for this usage were unknown to him.
Sofsky thought the association of apathetic concentration camp victims with Muslims came from their uncontrolled body movements; their “swaying motions” reminded onlookers of “Islamic rituals.” Two Polish scholars of the Holocaust, Zdzislaw Ryn and Stanislaw Kodzinski, second this explanation. The “Muselmen,” they say in an article on Auschwitz, “became indifferent to everything happening around them. They excluded themselves from all relations to their environment. If they could still move around, they did so in slow motion, without bending their knees. They shivered, since their body temperature usually fell below 98.7 degrees.
Giorgio Agamben has theorized that “the most likely explanation of the term can be found in the literal meaning of the Arabic word muslim: the one who submits unconditionally to the will of God.” It was “Islam’s supposed fatalism,” Agamben writes, that led concentration camp inmates to turn it into a metaphor for the utter resignation that the “Musulman” exhibited.
Holocaust survivor and French philosopher Jean Amery, in his “At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities,” explained the word differently. It came, he thought, from the dismissive attitude of Europeans toward Muslims, since “the so-called Mussulman, as the camp language termed the prisoner who was giving up and was given up by his comrades, no longer had room in his consciousness for the contrasts of good or bad, noble or base, intellectual or unintellectual. He was a staggering corpse, a bundle of physical functions in its last convulsions.DISCLAIMER: The Journal of Lingering Sanity is a reader-supported publication. Eeking life out on a thin dime each day the Journal seeks to move you brightly with inspiration, originality, and wit.
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