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In the Zen

by Kerilie McDowall

“World peace through nonviolent means is neither absurd nor unattainable. All other methods have failed. Thus we must begin anew… Those of us who believe in this method can be voices of reason, sanity, and understanding amid the voices of violence, hatred and emotion. We can very well set a mood of peace out of which a system of peace can be built.”
– Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dreams of Brighter Tomorrows in Ebony Magazine, March 1965.

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Nazi Holocaust's Saul: Recognizing Fascism, New "Peacestory"

When I was a young teen at about age 17/18 I ended up with a huge crush on a wonderful male student at my university. He resembled a well-known movie star, had an immense intellect, and possessed a profoundly intellectual curiosity sparked off by the wonderful encouragement of his brilliant family. We went out as a couple for quite some time, and I really cared for him.

When we started dating, I was so in awe of his mother and father. They seemed like some of the most intelligent and curious/inquisitive people that I had ever met. I so admired his mother because she had such emotional strength, and she taught me and encouraged me to assimilate into my life the meaning of “hutzpah.”

My boyfriend’s parents were so encouraging of my varied creative activities. They welcomed me into their home without any of the usual criticism that society often lobbed onto creatives.

I felt at home.

This family encouraged my goals and dreams and my fascination with music, and despite my Anglican background upbringing, they were never once critical.

My boyfriend came from a lovely Jewish family, and I had the immense pleasure of learning from both him and his family about life. We often debated heavily about politics and philosophy. And yes, we also discussed the horrific and traumatic history of the Jewish people and the other groups of people affected by the Holocaust.

I wanted today to tell you about what I had learned as an older teen from Saul, my university boyfriend’s Catholic stepdad. He had escaped Hungary from a Nazi concentration death camp just barely hanging on and clinging to life due to starvation.

He told me that it was important to tell and share his story with me so that nobody would ever forget the holocaust had happened. He was so pained when he told me that there were people who had recently questioned if the holocaust had ever happened. I just wanted to cry about it. My family as Ukrainians had escaped Russia about 100 years ago, so I related well to inter-generational tales of trauma.

Saul one evening told me he wanted to talk to me about something important and gestured for me to sit down. He rolled up his long cream-colored dress shirt sleeve to reveal a wrist and arm Nazi death camp tattoo number that the Nazis had branded him with. He held back tears as he told me the torture story of getting branded, and I am getting very emotional now writing about this. I loved and so respected this family. And especially Saul. I just want to cry about this as I write this story here, now.

It is painful and traumatic to bring up this story again now, it feels so hurtful, but with the freedoms that humanity has lost since 2020, I felt that Saul would want me now as a writer with my In the Zen blog, to tell the point of the story, his story, what he had meant to emphasize to me about his experiences.

Global Village, Friend or Foe?

First of all, I have to tell you about how Saul loved to discuss the deep wisdom behind philosophy, and he knew it deeply, too. Marshall McLuhan had fascinated Saul. Many questions arise now reflecting on Marshall McLuhan’s past work.

Who was McLuhan?

In the dawn of the 1960s, the prescient Canadian media sage, Marshall McLuhan, unfurled a tapestry of foresight. His vision, like an oracle, foretold of a worrisome transformation. The dominion of visual, solitary print culture, he proclaimed, would yield to an epoch of “electronic interdependence.”

In this nascent age, the electronic medium would ascend, supplanting the visual lexicon, and bestowing upon us an aural/oral symphony.

Humanity, once ensnared in the labyrinth of individualism and fractured narratives, would pivot felt McLuhan.

A collective consciousness would emerge—a “global village,” as McLuhan so aptly christened it. Within this interconnected expanse, a cadence of voices would harmonize, weaving a shared narrative across continents and bytes. The pulse of electrons would bind global culture, transcending borders, and rendering geography obsolete.

I believe this concept, this, is what had motivated Saul in the 1980s to educate me; his concern for the future and the potential for a re-emerging of fascist horrors. He had even said it already in 1984 and foretold it due to his study of McLuhan he felt he could even prove it to me.

I quote McLuhan from his book The Gutenberg Galaxy:

“Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library, the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.…”

What did McLuhan mean by terror as normalcy?

Is that too literal? (Saul’s story soon follows.)

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