Although brought up in a rationalist rather than a religious
household, as a child fascinated with
mythology and
folk stories I'd read about a supernatural being called the
Golem, supposedly created by the legendary
Rabbi Lowe
(Lion) of Prague back in the
16th Century; and said to have been the inspiration forthe
"Frankenstein" tale.
Although there were various versions with differing details, simply put the story went like this: As was the
practice
in Christendom in those
days, whenever the Rulers felt the need to divert public attention from famines, epidemics,
catastrophes or other disturbances, the cry would go out that "The Jews are responsible," and soldiers
would be
sent to the Ghetto to rape,
pillage and burn. In response to pleas for help from the members of his congregation,
eventhough he knew that such things had been forbidden by the Council of Rabbis, Rabbi Lowe decided to
utilize
his knowledge of Kabbalistic
(magical) principles to create a giant figure out of clay. Once the clay being, or Golem,
was completed, the Rabbi inscribed certain Hebraic characters on its forehead; causing it to
spring to life. The Rabbi
then taught the Golem such things as how to fetch water, chop wood, and perform other utilitarian tasks. The next time
that the soldiers came to attack the Ghetto, the
Rabbi told the Golem to fight them; and it killed a soldier. The other
soldiers, seeing that the Golem was invulnerable to their swords and arrows, panicked and fled in disarray. Believing
that,
at last, there was someone who
could protect them, the Jews hailed the Golem as their hero. But the Golem, now having
learned how to kill, proceeded to kill a Jew - one of the very people the Rabbi had created it to protect.
Realizing that
he'd unleashed something terrible, Rabbi Lowe searched the
Ghetto until he found the Golem, which
was in hiding
because it had by then acquired enough of a conscience to realize that it had done something wrong.
When the Rabbi
changed the Hebraic character which stands for "Life"
on the Golem's forehead to that which stands for
"Death," the
creature was transformed back into inanimate clay.
It wasn't until I'd completed the
public education system, earned a couple of college degrees, done my
time in the US Army, and was engaged in post-graduate studies
in Social Psychology that I began to understand what the Golem legend
really was: an allegory which cautions us about the
pitfalls which we must strive to avoid when we use our knowledge of the
world around us to develop constructs and systems
which, while intended to serve us, may wind up doing the opposite. Just
as we've learned how to shape clay into ceramics, weave
things out of fibres, sharpen wood and stones, or mine, smelt, and form
metals into such useful things as containers, clothing,
knives, spears, automobiles, spaceships, computers, etc., so we also
invent procedures, organizations, etc. which we believe are necessary
to make our lives better. We pride ourselves on thusly being able to
use our intelligence to provide ourselves with more certain and
satisfactory supplies of food, shield ourselves from the extremes of
heat or cold by making clothing and building houses, protect
ourselves from predatory animals, and defend ourselves against attacks
by other human beings. But just as the Golem, having been
taught how to kill in order to defend the Ghetto, then killed one of
the very people it had been created to protect, so we must always
be on guard that the very systems we invent to enhance our security
don't endanger it themselves.
There is nothing mysterious about
understanding the dangers of the Golem Principle - for every day we try
to anticipate and avoid being injured by the very things we
create to assist us - making traffic laws, signals, crosswalks, etc. to
keep from being injured by our motor vehicles, etc. The first steam
engines tended to explode when the pressure grew too great for their
boiler walls to contain. This problem was solved by designing
safety valves which cut down the fuel supply or otherwise reduced the
pressure when it approached the danger point. Our
nation's Founding Fathers, anticipating the danger of the concentration
of power into the hands of an individual or small partisan
group, established our system of checks and balances. Congress was
supposed to have the sole power of drafting legislation. The
Administration was authorized to carry out those laws. And the Courts
were the only body which could rule as to the conformity of said laws to
the national Constitution - which is essentially our code of ethics.
However, just as Doctor Frankenstein
unwittingly implanted the brain of an executed criminal in his
creature, so we all-too-frequently discover that our security
organizations themselves have been taken over by corrupt if not
outright criminal opportunists, such as was recently the case with Ames in the
CIA and Hansen in the FBI; an organization whose founding Director,
J.Edgar Hoover, himself is reputed to have amassed secret
scandal files which he used to blackmail leading politicians in order
to stay in power. The USA is not alone in this regard. Practically
every nation's security organizations have had their high-level
traitors and perverters: Philby, head of British Counter-Intelligence, was a
Soviet agent; Penkovsky, Soviet Premier Brezhnev's son-in-law, was
executed for spying for the West; and Beria, head of the KGB, was
a rapist and mass murderer. Is it that such people tend to gravitate to
such positions, or is it by their very nature that
such organizations, which in the name of secrecy are often closed to
all oversight and criticism, provide a fertile environment for such
persons?
To protect ourselves from the former
in the past we've tried to make certain that no one in a position of
authority, and this includes the Chief of State, is above the law - as
was borne out in the Watergate Affair and the subsequent resignations
of Vice-President Agnew and President Nixon.
I fear that, panicked by such things
as the horror of the attacks on the World trade Center and the
Pentagon, the mailing of anthrax-laden letters, and the possibility of even
worse assaults by religiously-inspired "Martyrs" armed with weapons of
mass destruction, we are creating our own, 100% American, Golem. The
events of September 11, 2001 have caused a blind stampede on the part
of our Congress to hand over their law-making power to the
Administration and, in the name of national defense, George W. Bush has
enthusiastically authorized his minions to violate almost every
protection guranteed by our Bill of Rights. His appointee, Governor
Ridge, whose face (coincidently?) resembles that of a blocky chunk of
stone, is answerable to no one but Mr. Bush, who is pressuring Congress
to okay Ridge's spending of thirty eight billion dollars of the
taxpayers money without any oversight whatsoever.
The Germans fell victim to their own
Golem back in 1933. First there was their defeat at the hands of the
Allies in World War One, then came the collapse of the imperial
system and the flight of the Kaiser, then the severe reparations
insisted upon by France's Clemenceau, and the breakdown of the economy and
runaway inflation, all of which led to increasing hardship and
desperation. Hitler and his National Socialists (Nazis) declared that only
they could save the German nation from being taken over by Thalmann and
the Communists. Then someone, it has been charged that
the Nazis did it themselves via a tunnel from the offices of Minister
of Justice Hermann Goering, set fire to the Reichstag (German Parliament).
Panicked, the members of Parliament, including the Social Democrats,
who had previously been opposed to the Nazis, joined in the
stampede to "Save The Nation" by giving Hitler the right to make all
laws on his own. Hitler's well- known policies then led to the
destruction of much of Europe and the murder of tens of millions,
including the deaths of approximately eight million Germans themselves. In
the name of "National Defense" Germany destroyed both its neighbors and
itself.
After the end of World War Two,
having learned from the tragic mistakes of others, the US leadership
tried to avoid such errors. Back during the Korean Conflict we, as a
nation, were faced with the possibility of being sucked into a war
against China when General MacArthur took it upon himself to
order our advance units to cross over to the north side of the Chosin
Reservoir and enter Chinese territory. When his actions resulted in the
Chinese, whose Communist leadership had come to power only the year
before in 1949, entering the conflict in large numbers and hurling our
forces into a costly retreat, General MacArthur wanted to use atomic
weapons. Despite the fact that MacArthur had powerful financial and
political supporters and was a popular hero here at home, faced with
the
possibility of his actions igniting World War III, Truman was
forced to fire him.
Now, a half-century after Truman
fired MacArthur, we are told that, to defend ourselves against what Mr.
Bush tells us is an "Axis of Evil" which includes Iran, Iraq & North
Korea, our military appears to be preparing to attack Iraq and
overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein. But this time the danger isn't some
professional militarist who only knows how to make war, our nation
finds itself under the control of a man who behaves as if he is
answerable to no one. When our Supreme Court itself acts to stop the
counting of disputed ballots, effectively appointing someone President who
failed to gain the majority of the popular vote, and that person then
exploits the present emergency to cut funds from social programs in
order to give billions of dollars in tax cuts and defense contracts to
his backers, who has the power to intervene?
The present situation makes it
imperative that we insist upon there being some sort of non-partisan
body which can stop our vast military and security systems from being
unleashed without careful consideration as to the consequences. This is
especially the case when those responsible for the 9-11 attacks are
not the leaders of a specific nation, but of an international movement
whose elusive membership is worldwide. There's no question but
that we must defend ourselves, the question is by what means? Secret
arrests and imprisonments where revealing the identities of
those arrested itself can be considered a crime, warrantless searches
and seizures, military tribunals where the rules of evidence and the
right to appeal do not exist, electronic surveillance of everyone,
especially those who dare to question the powerful.
Are these the only means by which we
can save the nation? Are we so frightened that we are ready to be ruled
by the Golem itself? Any construct which is not
constrained by a paradigm involving a basic ethic can all too easily
injure those it was intended to protect. Let us demand that our elected
representatives stop catering to the tiny minority of avaricious
nihilists, corporate cannibalizers and other special interests whose
"campaign contributions" have corrupted them, and reassert themselves
as representatives of all of "We The People" so that the US is not
conned into a war for control of the world's oil supply or becomes a
repressive police state ruled by those whose sole ethic is
the insatiable drive for power and profit, and the suppression of all
who dare to oppose them.
