Part of Asher’s perspective is shaped by the absurdity of living among perpetrators of holocausts who are also holocaust deniers, dismissers, and downplayers who make moral judgments about others without acknowledging their own culpability. It’s much like living in the US in the 1850′s, and being opposed to slavery while, all around you, were slave owners, slave traders, or those who benefited from the slave trade, if only from the silver they used and the cotton they wore. Do you pretend? Do you keep silent? Or do you refuse and resist, and become something of a social pariah except among other resisters? The modern world has greatly refined its capacity for human destruction, far from the common lie that modernity has brought a reduction of it. These are not viewpoints, perspectives, or opinions – they are simply the condition in which we live, and it contributes to Asher’s disdain for ideological and cultural pretenses, and his rejection of kinship, fealty, or cultural attachment to most of his peers in the society in which he lives. Asher wrote the following:

Hitler gets called a ‘monster’, by which people mean that he cannot be understood, effectively enshrining his actions and motivations in the misty stuff of legend, and making it all the more distant from our feelings and present reality. This almost mystical devotion to the special villainy of Hitler and the Nazis, succeeds mainly as an aid in glossing over even more devastating holocausts which, if we understood as such might fundamentally alter our conception of the world in which we live and the meaning of its national structures, political alliances, and cultural realities.

Even despite the fact that the crimes of the Nazis are regarded with staggering ignorance of what was done by their Eastern European counterparts – e.g. in Byelorussia (crimes to great as to inspire the gas chambers as more ‘humane’ solutions to the Jewish problem), or that it wasn’t just Jews but also socialists, the handicapped, trade unionists, Poles, and others who were the targets. Hitler killed more non-Jews than Jews, but this is ignored even by those who actually know it. There’s a certain dishonesty, a kind of heightened preference for simplifying and seeing the holocaust in just one way, a conveniently distant way – certainly in a way that immunizes us from responsibility for our own holocausts. Hitler killed 6 million Jews and 20 million Russians but, relatively speaking, lots of people make Hitler look like a choir boy.

The Soviets under Stalin killed 50 million Russians – countless more under other socialist leaders. Socialists in the West and in Russia still call for a return to the days of Stalin, while textbooks in both cultures make no significant reference to these realities – instead making statements like “Stalin was a practical statesman who reformed the economy and instituted a new police force” (a textbook used in college classes in Tulsa, OK). Communism has been a human killing machine in every instance where it has been attempted, and yet it’s popular among quasi-educated progressives in the West where Nazism is simultaneously condemned. Little quotations from Mao (who killed 49-78 million people) are available in incense stores and progressive book shops, where Mein Kampf is nowhere to be found.

The Japanese killed 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Koreans, Indonesians, and Burmese, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese – Nanking being the most notorious example. The Japanese used human exeprimentation, chemical and biological warfare, and systematic rape on a mass scale and sexual slavery, torture, and cannibalism. The class A war criminals are still celebrated with memorials in Japan – like that at the Yasukuni Shinto shrine in Tokyo, its prime ministers continue to deny the holocaust their people perpetrated, the textbooks gloss over it, the war museums glorify kamikazes but apply revisionism to dismiss national crimes, and the country is treated as squeaky clean by Western allies and almost universally in Western culture. In the West, Shinto, the religion of divine right of the emperor that was the basis of these acts, equivalent to the theosophical underpinnings of the Nazis, is treated like a cool cultural tradition by yuppies and other ignorant consumers of culture.

The US used nuclear weapons, torture, and committed atrocities on civilians – an extension of the tactics used against native Americans and that would be used again in Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Laos, Reagan’s “secret wars”, and later in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet it continues to lecture the world about atrocities. Turkey, one of the US’s closest allies, still commits holocaust denial concerning the genocide against 1.5 million Armenians, which is studied by scholars as the most organized holocaust since that of Nazi Germany.

This is not even to mention Pol Pot, whose people killed 21% of the Cambodian population, or Brezhnev in Afghanistan, or Kim Il Sung in North Korea, and Saddam Hussein killed 600,000 in Iran and and Kurdistan. But they’re pikers compared to the Soviets, Maoists, Japanese, and the US. It is the economic and political superpowers that have committed the most large scale destruction of human life and inflicted the greatest spread of agony.

It’s popular to puss out in the West and say the numbers dont’ matter. But then why the constant mantra of 6 million Jews? Or are Jews special in some way that Asians and East Europeans are not? Perhaps a racism of silence is in play. Be that as it may, to say the numbers don’t matter is to render all conversation about atrocities, genocide, war crimes, and holocausts incoherent. It isn’t a corrective of the conversation, but a dismissal of conversation. Such gibberish is usually followed with “I don’t approve of killing or hurting anyone, and I make no distinction whether it’s one person or one hundred thousand…” – effectively reducing the conversation to one of personal preference and personal morality, like items chosen from a menu in an online ethics store. These people, practically, have nothing to say except the tacit “I am not to blame” and are holocaust deniers of their own sort. Saying that it’s the same when anyone is killed as when any million are killed is effectively denying the significance of individual human beings, which is itself a kind of philosophical genocide. Such an error renders all human destruction unimportant, except as it affects one individual’s sense of himself. Such solipsism is the ultimate holocaust.

“I can’t live always having that stuff in the back of my mind.” It isn’t stuff, it’s people. We have blood on our hands no less and often more in significance than that of the Nazis, and it doesn’t matter whether we can live with that knowledge. The alternative is lying. So don’t live, if you can’t live. But that’s a cop out, too. The victims have lived with watching their whole family raped, tortured, suffering, and killed painfully before their eyes in countless cases. It’s such a clean, whitebread thing to say that one can’t live contemplating the enormity and significance of culpability, and so to either deny it (a kind of holocaust denial by denying culpability – no different really than what Japan is doing), or self-destruct.

“I’m not guilty – I wasn’t there – I didn’t do it,” we say. But that isn’t really so. Each generation says that. We are not just the sons and daughters of mass murderers – we go on doing these things at a societal level. The West has just succeeded in replacing an Iraqi dictator’s secret prisons with ones far more extensive, his torture with our torture, his war on civilians with our own and, if you say “I’m not personally responsible” it means you don’t consider yourself a member of the society in which you live. Are you or aren’t you? That’s really the question – whether to break away by telling the truth, including the truth of being a member of the society at the time – or whether to be self-satisfying in one’s moral denials.

And that is the situation in which Asher finds himself. Guilty, acknowledging his responsibility, among people who deny either the events, or their significance, or responsibility for the events. It quickly makes you a person of little bullshit when it comes to ethics and to shiny ideologies that immunize us from ethics. Without pretense, an ideologue can’t survive the mirror. Asher prefers the mirror, because in it he finds the truth about himself. And he prefers companions who likewise choose the mirror and, having taken stock of what is in it, turn it back on the world to reflect the more complete truth.