It’s All Sh.., Isn’t It?

Helmut Schelsky wrote in the 1970s:[1]

“The new devil is especially the incomprehensible language destroyer, which dominates by making the people ‘speechless.’ To this phenomenon of group forming and group separating by words belong other linguistic branches of the modern political discourse, like the ‘fecal language,’ as [Kurt] Scheuch called the use of vulgar sexual, pornographic and simply obscene dirty words, especially by young academics. In fact the word ‘shit’ is during the last years among workers not by far as frequently used as in sociological or psychological faculty lectures or seminars. […] The uneducated man, who felt that the literary high German was superior, and especially felt that the knowledge of the political-social scientific language as arrogant and burdensome, could in earlier times withdraw into the lower levels of the language; he said ‘kiss my ass’ or ‘shit.’ But today this way out into the linguistic bluntness is blocked off to him, because his very own language, his ‘down to earth,’ is not only imitated by the arrogant and dominating young academics, it is especially now also officially allowed to be used by teachers for protection and administration.”

Some of the arrogant young academics of that time are now already retired, others, academics or former stone- and tomato throwers, sit at the levers of power. Maybe one remembers, that today’s German foreign minister, when he introduced sneakers and blue jeans into the parliament, told once the president of parliament: “Herr President, you are an asshole!” A vulgar language, which before 1968 at best belonged to the gutter, attained now university acceptance. Thus Ernst Schumacher, professor at the Humboldt University Berlin, writes about the failure of the socialism in the program booklet of the Berlin Volksbühne at the Luxemburgplatz on the occasion of a production of Brecht’s piece Der gute Mensch von Sezuan:[2]

“Shit, that we failed, but we have to attempt, to make something new out of this shit.”

Evidently no one objects today to such expressions. But it is still interesting to observe these expressions when the left deals with their own teachers.

Karl Marx thus wrote for example:[3]

“I am finished with the whole economic shit in five weeks.”

He called the German people “more or less a pile of shit”[4]

On March 31, 1851 Marx wrote to Engels:[5]

“You have to admit, that this whole shit is reasonably pleasant and that I am stuck up to the top of my head in petty bourgeois dirt.”

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), whose real name was Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitski, a promoter of cubism and surrealism, made in France the term of defecation presentable in the literature, at a time when it was still disapproved of in Germany:[6]

“Sh … (merde) … to the critics, educators, professors… sh… to the historians …Venetia …Toledo…Benares… the defenders of landscapes … the philologists … sh… Bayreuth …Florence …the spiritualists … Dante …Shakespeare … Goethe … Aeschylos … Fiesole … Wagner … Beethoven.”

For the followers of the Frankfurt school early childhood traumas, especially in connection with the education of cleanliness, played an important role, where they could refer to Sigmund Freud. Freud occupied himself intensively with a sort of “Cultural History” of excrement, urine etc. of the Englishman Bourke, to which he contributed a preface. In it he wrote:[7]

“The information that physical cleanliness relates much more to sin than with virtue occupied me often later, when I gained an insight through my psychoanalytic work into the way how today’s civilized people cope with the problem of their physical needs.”

Louis Althusser, who for decades introduced whole generations of French students to socialism or communism, admitted in his justifying report after he strangled his wife:[8]

“I do not know whether mankind will ever become acquainted with communism, that theological vision of Marx. But what I know is, that socialism, this inevitable transitional stage Marx talked about, is ‘shit,’ as I announced in 1978 in Italy and Spain before an audience, which was confused about the vehemence of my pronouncements. There I also dished up a ‘story.’ Socialism can be compared to a very large river which is very difficult to cross. Soon we will have a powerful ferry, which all people can enter: the political and unionized organizations. But to travel through maelstroms, a ‘helmsman’ is necessary, the power of the state in the hands of the revolutionaries, and in the great ship of the state the class domination of the proletarians over all the hired hands must be secured (the salary still exists and the private interest), else it capsizes! – the domination by the proletariat. The big ship is launched and the rowers have to be guarded during the whole journey by requiring from them strict obedience, they have to be removed from their posts in case they commit offences, they have to be replaced in time, yes, even punished. But after this huge shit river is finally crossed, then in the infinite appear the beach, the sun and the wind of a new spring. Everybody leaves the ship, there is no more fight among the people and the interest groups, because there are no more relations to goods, but flowers and fruits in abundance, which everybody can pick to his enjoyment.”

Yes, until we are there, we have to make something out of the shit, as Prof. Schumacher thinks. The Italian Piero Manzoni (1933-1963) was the first to make art out of it “merda d’artista,” or shit of an artist, by filling a couple of cans each with 30 grams of his own excrement and sending this to an exhibition, “a statement about the personality cult of the Western art market, how it could not have been more to the point,” as Robert Hughes interpreted it.[9] But the topic is of course already ancient: It says in the Babylonic Talmud, or the Jewish-rabbinic interpretation of the Thora:[10]

“Onkelos, son of Kalonikos, a nephew of Titus, wanted to convert to Jewism.”

Through necromancy he let appear first Titus, then Bileam, in order to interrogate them.

“Then he let appear Jesus through necromancy and asked him, who in that world is the most respected. He answered: Jisraél. – Should we join them? He answered: Look for their best and not their evil; who touches it, touches his eye ball. Then he asked him: How will you be punished? He answered: With boiling excrement. The master said: He who makes fun of the words of the wise will be punished with boiling excrement. Come and see the difference between the defectors of Jisraél and the prophets of the worldly nations.”

“The defecation in front of the Baal Peor is a worship of the same.”[11]

But the vulgar language was not alien to the Lord Zebaoth:[12]

“Look, I will scold you together with your seed and throw the excrement of your sacrificial victims in your face, and it shall stick at you.”

In the 2. Book of the Kings, Chapter 18,27 is reported about men, “who sit on the wall, to eat together with you their own dung and drink their urine.” The same text can be found in Jesaja 36,12.

It says in Prophet Hesekiel (4,12):

“You shall eat cake of barley, which you shall bake on human dung before their eyes.”

And Verse 15 says:

“I shall allow you cow dung instead of human dung.”

Voltaire remarks about this:[13]

“Concerning only the dirt I would like to ask, what could be more disgusting than 2. Kings 18,27, Jesaja 36,12 and Hesekiel 4,12-15 (where the Lord changes human dung into cow dung)?”

Günter Grass called in his novel Der Butt Calcutta a “pile of shit which God dropped and called Calcutta”[14]

The compulsive uttering of obscenities (coprolalia), often in connection with nervous behavior anomalies (twitches, ritualized behavior, phobias, sexual aggressiveness etc), was first described by the neurologist and Charcot’s disciple at the Parisian Salpêtrière, Georges Gilles de la Tourette and was called after him Tourette-Syndrome. It usually occurs first during childhood and seems to be hereditary.[15]

Allegedly there are conspiracy theorists, who maintain that the development of a vulgar language, obscenities etc is on purpose introduced to us, in order to facilitate the integration of the immigrating “new Russians.” The Talmudic prophecy that shamelessness will increase during the messianic time is on the other hand not a conspiracy theory.[16]

“Characteristic for the Jewish Messianism is the dissatisfaction with the presence and the Jewish hope for a future, which brings redemption from all past injustices and sufferings. […] The Jewish messianism went through a process of secularization and found an entrance into the character of socialism.”[17]

Wilhelm von Humboldt thought:

“Language is practically the external appearance of the spirit of the people.”

He would probably immediately withdraw the teaching credentials from the above mentioned “Professor” Schumacher at the university called after him, and assign him instead to cleaning toilets.

Josef Weinheber concludes further:

“A people does not perish because of lost wars, but because, weakened from the inside, it abandons its language, the high language of its poets and thinkers, therefore commits high treason to itself.”

Are those contemporaries, who put into their mouth at all occasions the fecal products in an almost convulsive way, aware, that they express thus the Jewish-messianic contempt of the presence and the living reality of all of us?

Notes