Kristallnacht

For me, Alfred Korzybski was a noble Pole not solely because of his aristocratic ancestry. For one reason, he hated and spoke publicly against the Nazi regime in the first phases of its ascent to power, when it was not particularly popular to do so--even in the United States. He called himself a Zionist and respected Jewish culture. He struggled against the pathology of antisemitism and fought totalitarianism for years. So on this anniversary of Kristallnacht, the 1938 State Sponsored pogram against the Jews in Germany seventy-one years ago, it seems appropriate to me to recall that event here on the Korzybski Files

During World War Two and afterwards, Korzybski told many of his Jewish friends and students and also close friends like Cassius Keyser, that he sincerely believed that “world problems can not be solved without solving the Jewish problem,…” And as he wrote in 1944 to a German Jewish émigré psychiatrist Richard D. Loewenberg—“…the Jewish problem can not be solved on racial or territorial grounds alone.”

…I a ‘pure Pole’ but an engineer much interested in mathematical physics, of course am non-aristotelian, and therefore if you wish to say so, my orientation is scientific and therefore Jewish. It is a silly way of putting it this way, but privately I can tell you that. The Jews themselves do not realize that, and so they themselves can not clean up their own house. Those pangs of passing from aristotelian to non-aristotelian orientations are very genuine ones. But there is nothing else for us to do than to put every kind of international problems on a strictly non-racial neutral impersonal scientific basis, and that’s what we are trying to do.

[A.K. to Richard D. Loewenberg, Feb. 3, 1944. IGS Archives]

Kristallnacht showed people who could see, what the Nazis were up to in relation to the Jews, as well as other 'inferior' peoples like the Poles, Gypsies, etc. But many people, unlike Korzybski, could not see the signs. The U.S. Holocaust Museum has a page and links here on: kristallnacht

And here you can listen to the Jewish rapper Remedy, one of the Wu-Tang Clan's extended musical family performing "Never Again":


Never Again? What does that require?