“And he will destroy on this mountain the face of the covering that is wrapped over the people, the web that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death in victory, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces and the rebuke of his people he shall take away from off all the earth: for the Lord hath spoken it. And it shall be said in that day, ‘Behold, our God, this, we have waited for him, and he will save us, this YHWH, we have waited for him and we will be and rejoice in his salvation.’” (Isaiah 25:7-8)
And so we see in this chapter, literally headed up by the faith of God and his “enfaithment” (see 25:1 Hebrew) that the human form, figure and face is far more important than perhaps us sinners have ever imagined. We see here that the erasure of the human walks hand in hand with Death, death as a force, Death as an entity that has a life force of its own. This entity covers us in a mask, a webbing.
When Lincoln Kirstein returned from the war, returned from work as as a “Monument Man,” he wrote to his sister of the local Germans: “Hitler was what they wanted, they made him, and everything else is simply eye-wash. The voted openly for him in 1933 and all things being equal they would vote for him tomorrow morning at 8 o’clock.” (from Jennifer Homans book Mr B: George Balanchine and the 20th Century, full footnote forthcoming) When Lincoln returned to New York his desire was to try and restore the human figure. And how could it not be so? The Bible speaks of “sorrows too big for words,” sorrows that are so big that they can’t get out of one’s mouth. What did Lincoln see over there? It was the inhuman. What our soldiers saw when they opened up those camps was a glimpse of what things would be like without the Lord Jesus. When Martin Niemoller came to New York after the war he said this in my father’s hearing: “There is nothing good in all of Western Civilization that does not come from Jesus.” And he was in a position to know. He had been in a concentration camp for eight years.
The killing of the Jews was different than all the killings that Stalin and Russians perpetrated. In Siberia if one did not gather so much wood, one did not receive one’s food allotment. The result was death or execution. Prisoners knew that in the main, the situation was not personal. The guards bore no grudge, no special purpose. Things were different in the camps of the Nazis. What was being done there was a special project, it was the project to save the world. It was an effort to save the world and mankind by killing off the virus-carriers, the Jews, the bringers of evil and disease. This project though was but a small step away from suicide. It was a crime against humanity; the killings of the Jews, were simply another way of killing off the human.Were the suicides and murder-suicides after Hitler's defeat really any surprise? (Think of Magda Goebbels killing off her children and her eldest daughter knowing somehow that her mother was up to no good and being very resentful of her mother as she and her siblings went up the stairs to their bedrooms that night) These killings of children and wives and husbands should come as no surprise because the entire project was really a project for murder-suicide. It would never have stopped with the Jews and indeed, it did not. Thus, we begin to understand how it was that when Lincoln Kirstein returned to New York his project was the restoration of the human and the human figure.
In 2020, the human race succumbed to yet another attempt at murder-suicide. What is it to impose masks on one’s fellow man but an attempt to distort the human figure, the human face? What is the oppression of masks but an attempt to off humanity and expression of the delusion that humans are disease-vectors that must be punished and then destroyed in order to “save the world”? Masks and the concentration camps are not the same thing, but as Dr. Mark Changizi points out, they are "in the same section of the library." Perhaps God is reminding us of our situation, namely that we are still in the grip of Death and its delusions. Perhaps as the last survivors of the concentration camps pass away, God, seeing the lack, is reminding us himself. We are no better than the Germans of whom Lincoln wrote.
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