How Pen & Paper Became Our Hammer & Nails

If one thinks about the lists that were given by people like Adolph Eichmann, of the millions of Jews that would be transported and exterminated in concentration camps around Europe during World War II by the Nazis, one may think of the cross upon which Christ was said to hang for "the sins of the world."  But there is more than one way to think about those lists, upon which hung the names of those sentenced to die, no less than Christ himself was said to hang upon a cross. 

What is a cross? It is a piece of wood, set at right angles which are so typical of the logic that humans rely on and practically worship, in their reasoning and philosophy, in their mathematics and their architecture, in their laws and their scientific theories, in their concepts of beauty and proportion, and even in their temples and their religions, but there is almost nothing "natural" or "beautiful" about this configuration, except in the mind of man alone. 

Like the cross, so the pages of the Bible, and the lists issued by Eichmann, are made from a dead tree. And upon that dead tree, no less than in Rome when it was used to execute criminals, so often hang the names of those to be rounded up, imprisoned, tortured, and even executed, even today, just like Jesus, and the sacred texts or theories that are everywhere used to justify it all. 

In the same way that our weapons of warfare have progressed from the sword to the spear to the bullet to the bomb to the drone, each step along the evolution distancing us from our victim in ways that increasingly allows us to wash our hands of the execution via ever more efficient means, so the cross can be thought to have followed the same evolution of the microprocessor in a computer, with each iteration of that instrument of torture and death, being refined along the way. 

Where at first the instrument, like weapons of old, required a person to get their hands dirty with the blood of the victim, the brutality of the violence that is carried out today now always begins with all of the civility and eloquence of a butterfly flapping its wings, and the ease of putting a signature on a piece of paper. It just never occurs to the person doing this, who so often retires after an honest days work to have dinner with friends and family, that their pen and paper are actually the hammer and nails that crucify humanity, over and over again.