The Ripples in Amon Göth’s Pond: The Power of Self-Restraint

Ben Debney || If you’re as old as I am you would remember Amon Göth from Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, the psycho camp ubergruppenfuhrer or what the living fuck ever at Płaszów. He who enjoyed a nice clipping of one of teh JeWZ with his sniper rifle from his balcony of a grim Tuesday morning with his coffee and cigarette.

I was sitting around contemplating what to do about the unintentional art piece that calls itself my subjectivity, thinking maybe I should reflect on and resolve my conflicts into improved understanding and insight moving forward. For whatever reason I thought of this.

What I found most memorable about Schindler’s List personally was the dialogue between the emponymous protagonist and Amon Göth the raging ethical abortion. At one point later in the piece, once Schindler has thrown in his lot with the rebel scum who had been scheming against the empire all through WII in fact, he starts messing with him.

Is this not the best? I think it quite safely is.

The monkeywrench Oskar Schindler tosses is shaped, “true power is not the power to dominate, but the power to pardon, like an Emperor.” In making appeals to Göth’s vanity and paranoia, to my reading, Schindler also manages to remind him about the power of self-restraint. Granted, the power to pardon is an exercise in dominance in reinforcing the power to not pardon. Göth the psychopath said, this knowledge may be of instrumental value to making my quest to dominate all life more sustainable. But Göth’s shadow also said to Göth: you are utterly helpless in all the ways that count. Your utopia is desolate, sterile and waking nightmare. You rattle like an empty tin can blowing around in the breeze when you speak. If this is the rub then it’s also a gnarly throw with the antifascist monkeywrench Spielberg’s Oskar Schindler, have to give you props for that one.

As old people will recall, Göth gets all bent out of shape because of all the ripples in his pond and tries to pardon himself for all his warcrimes in the mirror in between summary executions. It doesn’t work, nor does appointing himself his own personal Napoleon in adjudicating problems in the camp. Göth gets bent out of shape again and decides apparently he’s in his happy place being bent out of shape for the fatherland, and the last we see is of him swinging from a rope. It was either that or freezing to death in a Russian winter while the glorious Furher was copping 12-hourly Pervitin speedballs from his quack personal physician I guess. Oof.

Something about taking the rough edges off genocidal totalitarianism, in the spirit of a nascent postwar German neoliberalism maybe.

Now I’m not saying I know, but it’s better to have the right questions than all the answers, because we can have all of the answers–all of them, ideological nonconformists and dabblers in heterodoxy–but yet nary a clue as to the question. Questions drive reflection and inquiry, answers fuel dogma and paranoia about people who ask too many fucking questions. Is the basic problem of authoritarian codependency on power that power is that, the bribes of power are a devil’s bargain, that we’re not sitting astride power like we have the penthouse suite so much as addictions eat us up from the inside and there’s very little ‘us’ left to feel and hence enjoy anything? Does dumping ethical core to gain power mean we’re strangers to ourselves exercising it, assuming we weren’t already?

This seems to have been Amon Göth’s genocidal totalitarian malfunction. Schindler’s List left no old people with any doubt that Oskar Schindler, now on board with the widespread resistance to jumped-up, knuckledragging troglodytes united by the second womb of their collective paranoia*, that he knew not of the power of self-restraint. Like Ozymandias, his confusion about the source of a flex was his undoing. Teenagers know respecting yourself and others is more important than outside approval from codependent social cliques, religious cults or movement microcults. As Schindler and his nice big spanner remind us, it’s the winners of the rat race who need reminding of the ethical core that is abandoned to bribes.

Is the power of self-restraint in the face of clique-slave bandwagons to dominate all life true power because it’s based on knowledge of a choice and the difference between the approval of other clique-slaves who can’t think for themselves either, and our own self-respect? Is knowledge power? Amon Göth and Ozymandias alike reflect the consequences of the failure to understand the difference between power over others and being in touch with ourselves as self-actualised, mature adult individuals. What if self-restraint is the first exercise of true power? What if this is what we somehow manage to forget in amidst history wars spanning millennia, and it shows?

*while throwing a mass tantrum over the wheels falling off the bandwagon of psycho selfish individualism and upward class mobility, requiring endless planet for the endless-growth economy to expand into to expedite it. Boomers spat the dummy because there was no endless planet for them to exploit and made that everyone else’s problem before exiting the stage of history, the end.