"Can You Learn Anything From a Void?" Creative Response

Kate Gorman

February 9, 2012

“Can You Learn Anything From a Void?”

Witnessing a crime and not turning the person in is considered a crime in and of itself.  This basically is the same idea portrayed when Nazi soldiers were not physically killing millions of Jews but carrying out specific orders for their extermination.  I don’t believe that there is any legitimate excuse for a murder, and the people involved include more than just the murderer himself.  The article states that, “In order to be willing to send human beings to their deaths, it would seem necessary first to dehumanize them, to see them as enemies or as statistics—or as a problem requiring a final solution.” People who believe that they have the power and authority to dehumanize God’s creation and target humans as enemies or statistics are very wrong.  Even in Shakespeare’s story of MacBeth we see a power-hungry man and woman who think it’s realistic to kill the king in order to replace his spot as king and queen.  I think this feeling of power roots from our ignorance and helplessness.  If we were constantly compassionate and worried about others before ourselves, this type of genocide and regicide would not occur.  In both the story of the Nazi solider and MacBeth, the people that they were murdering were people that they knew and had personal relationships with.  MacBeth has invited King Duncan to stay at his palace and engaged in very deep, personal talks.  The Nazi solider was a pharmacist and neighbor to many of the Jewish people that were being brought to the concentration camps.  It seems impossible for me to fathom what was going on in their minds and the remorse they felt afterwards.  Macbeth obviously felt that feeling of guilt when he was haunted by the ghost of Banquo, the second person he plotted to kill.  There is no difference between Duncan’s murder and Banquo’s murder in my eyes despite the fact that MacBeth was holding the knife in one and not in the other.  This opinion also relates to the Nazi soldiers physically killing and torturing innocent Jews and Russians and those who just merely ordered the killings.  The fact of the matter is that whether it is one person or a total wipeout of a race, murder is never justified unless it is in self-defense.  These murders lead only to lies and more lies, which cause problems upon problems.  People lose grasp of their conscience in times of self-interest in genocide, and that is not the reason that we are put on this earth.