I AM a blogaholic! :(

I couldn't! I simply could not wait till tomorrow. :'( I have no will power at all.

There are few things that hold my interest for longer than five minutes these days, but the MOMM class is becoming increasingly easier to listen to. Today, instead of colonial economy (Zzzzz!), she talked about the Nazi atrocities and the Nuremberg trials, in relation to how a scientific, rational state structure has no respect whatsoever for the human element.

She was obviously very passionate about the chilling possibilities that modern science could engender, and gave examples like The Matrix and Bladerunner to elucidate her point. In the matrix, apart from a handful of 'authentic' humans, everyone else is manufactured. They have all been created in human fields and programmed in a way that is most congenial to the machines controlling them. The protagonist himself has been created by the Matrix, but a glitch in his programming enables him to be the virus that causes it to crash. It is a ballad about control, on the largest scale possible. What is most chilling is that you might never know if you really are yourself as you envision your 'self' to be, whether you are a part of the matrix or separate from it. You could live your entire life as a pawn in someone's video game and now know it.

Through bladerunner, she explained that every science fiction movie essentially said the same thing- that however perfectly we design and create something, there is no guarantee that we will be able to control it always. Another thing that I realized was that the popular misconception that the Allies were more technologically advanced than the Germans, that they used their technology in the most advanced ways possible while the Germans used crude gassing methods to exterminate the jews, is the product of a narrow imagination. Nazi Germany was the classic example of the rational, scientific process. It was a structure that functioned so efficiently that it was almost invisible. The extermination was planned and executed like a well-thought out assemply-line production unit- the human remains from the gas chambers, processed into fertilizers, what to do with every part of the corpses, the calculation that shooting the jew in the nape of the neck so that he falls into the mass grave gace down was the cleanest method of elimination by shooting, the drilling into the army and the SS personnel that their consciences had nothing to feel guilty about, the organization and management of a society in which not one civilian knew about the existence of concentration camps- it is uncanny. It is perfect. They made their people think what they wanted them to think. It is real-life 1984 in cold, jew blood. This was the application of the scientific method to the elimination of an entire race as a step towards world domination. They were just starting out with the slave race that was in the nearest vicinity. They absorbed the western model of the rational state- and succeeded in propagating it. Japan proved a willing and precocious pupil. That, was Germany's victory.