Reflections on the Georgia Guidestones

Georgia Guidestones 

Photo by Gina Eric (2014)

I.

The Georgia Guidestones is, arguably, the world's ugliest monument.

Erected in 1980 in Elbert County, Georgia, it is best described as stupidity in stone, with prehistoric pretensions of grandeur and intellectual pretensions of philosophical profundity. It's the sort of thing that only idiots would find impressive. Yoko Ono, for example, praised it as a stirring call to rational thinking.

The monument consists of a central slab with four others arranged around it in, apparently, astronomical alignment and a capstone to top things off. A set of guidelines is inscribed on the structure in eight different languages, including English, Spanish, Swahili, and Chinese. There's also a brief message inscribed at the top of the structure in more ancient scripts, including Classical Greek and Sanskrit.     

The anonymity of those responsible for the Guidestones - as well as the content of their message for mankind - has ensured the monument attracts controversy and gives rise to all kinds of crazy conspiracy theory (I want the Guidestones smashed, but not because I believe them to be of a deep Satanic origin).

In the summer of 1979, an individual using the pseudonym of Robert C. Christian commissioned the work on behalf of a small group of loyal Americans. Serving as a compass, calendar and clock, the monument is intended to withstand even catastrophic future events. But I'm hopeful that it will one day simply be bulldozed or blown up - much like the Buddhas of Bamiyan - without any undue fuss.

It's already been defaced with paint and had various pieces of graffiti written over it. Whether this was by art critics, iconoclasts, or individuals objecting to the New World Order, I don't know.         

II.

So what, then, are the ten great politico-moral principles of the Georgia Guidestones ...

Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.

Guide reproduction wisely - improving fitness and diversity.

Unite humanity with a living new language.

Rule passion - faith - tradition - and all things with tempered reason.

Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.

Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.

Avoid petty laws and useless officials.

Balance personal rights with social duties.

Prize truth - beauty - love - seeking harmony with the infinite.

Be not a cancer on the earth - leave room for nature.

Without wanting to sound too much like PC Plod, what is there to say other than move along - nothing to see here. For it's essentially the same old utopian bullshit, combining ideas of population control, eugenics, eco-fascism, world government, and Platonic Ideals of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. We've been experimenting along these same lines - with mixed results at best - for the past 250 years or so.

And so we really don't need the explanatory tablet (complete with punctuation errors and spelling mistakes) set alongside the stones to tell us what's being affirmed here: an Age of Reason founded upon genocide; for in order to maintain humanity under 500,000,000 we would need to first exterminate around seven billion people presently living.

The only real mystery here is this: why do so many idealists - acting in the name of Love, Nature and Reason - always fantasise about killing people?*

* To be fair, many commentators argue that the Guidestones are intended as a blue-print for a post-apocalyptic world and that they envision the best way to rebuild a devastated civilization. In other words, the suggestion to keep humanity's number below half-a-billion was made on the assumption that a nuclear war had already reduced mankind below this figure.

Jüdische Insekten or Himmler's Lice

Antisemitic poster from 1942 used in German occupied Poland to warn against the 

supposed connection between Jews, lice and typhus; for the Nazis, Jews infected 

with the disease were metaphysically indistinguishable from its insect carriers.  

To paraphrase Shakespeare, if I may: Some are born insects, some wish to become-insect, and some have insecthood thrust upon 'em. 

Take the Jews, for example, in Hitler's Germany. When not being described as a cancer to be cut out of the body politic, or portrayed as a plague of sewer rats, they were obscenely characterised as parasitic lice or giant cockroaches in need of extermination. For racism loves to dehumanise and to operate in terms of pest control and personal hygiene.

In a speech to his fellow officers in April 1943, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler openly declared:

"Antisemitism is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness. In just the same way, antisemitism, for us, has not been a question of ideology, but a matter of cleanliness ..."

To be judenfrei was, in Himmler's mind, to be deloused - i.e. free of blood-sucking, disease-carrying insects that infest individuals and threaten to spread throughout the entire population; creatures that cause feelings of revulsion and which deserve to be eradicated. 

Of course, Jews are not actually insects; they're human beings. And there are moral and legal prohibitions on the premeditated killing of human beings; we even have a special term for it - murder. And it's difficult to persuade people to commit murder. Thus the Nazis had a problem ...

The solution, as the quotation from Himmler demonstrates, involves pushing a metaphor - the Jews are inhuman vermin; the Jews are disgusting insects - beyond its own limit, transforming it into a pseudo-scientific fact and a deadly piece of doxa. Genocide ends with a pile of corpses, but it always begins with an abuse of language that allows us to kill in good conscience. As Hugh Raffles writes:

"There is no doubt that this happened in the Holocaust. ... Explaining it is at the heart of understanding the fate of the Jews, who, after all, would be killed like insects - like lice, in fact. Literally like lice. Like Himmler's lice. With the same routinized indifference and, in vast numbers, with the same techologies."

Raffles also suggests - and one suspects this might very well be the case - that Himmler in his speech was "indulging in an intimate irony with his men"; making a little joke at the expense of those murdered in the gas chambers:

"As is well known, prisoners at Auschwitz were treated to an elaborate charade. Those selected for death were directed to 'delousing facilities' equipped with false-headed showers. They were moved through changing rooms, allocated soap and towels. They were told they would be rewarded for disinfection with hot soup. ... The prisoners massed uncertainly in the shower room. Overhead, unseen, the disinfectors waited in their gas masks for the warmth of the naked bodies to bring the ambient temperature to the optimal 78 degrees Fahrenheit. They then poured crystals from the cans of Zyklon B - a hydrogen cyanide insecticide developed for delousing buildings and clothes - through the ceiling hatches. Finally, the bodies, contorted by the pain caused by the warning agent ... were removed to the crematoria.
      In this grotesque pantomime, the victims ... move from objects of care to objects of annihilation. To diseased humans, delousing promises remediation, a return to community, a return to life; to lice, it offers only extermination. Too late, the prisoners discover they are merely lice."

One of the reasons that the language of National Socialism continues to fascinate (and to appal) is because of the way it conflates and confuses metaphor, euphemism and a brutal literalism into a witches' brew that is vague and void of meaning on the one hand, whilst paradoxically transparent and full of deadly intent on the other.    


Afterword

There are, thankfully, far happier and more positive associations between Jews and insects. In fact, several species of the latter have been named after celebrated Jewish figures; there is, for example, the Karl Marx wasp and the Sigmund Freud beetle - not to mention the Harry Houdini moth, the Lou Reed spider, and the Carole King stonefly.   

See: Hugh Raffles, Insectopedia, (Vintage Books, 2010); particularly the chapter entitled 'Jews', pp. 141-61, from where all of the lines quoted - including those from Heinrich Himmler - were taken. 

Those interested in knowing more about the insects (and other organisms) named after famous Jewish figures, should click here.