The book is a detailed and well researched history of enormous loss. This caste system, which was admired and emulated by the Nazis, has done as much and probably more to destroy human life and dignity than the Third Reich. Germany responded appropriately in the wake of WW II, America did not after the Civil War and the passing of the 13th Amendment.
The following passage captures something of the whole and something to be considered deeply about all of us alive on this good earth today. “We look to the night sky and see the planets and stars, the distant lights as specks of salt, single grains of sand, and are reminded of how small we are, how insignificant our worries of the moment, how brief our time on this planet, and we wish to be part of something bigger than ourselves, to magnify our significance, to matter somehow as more than the dust that we are.
Even the longest lived of our species spends but a blink of time in the span of human history. How dare anyone cause harm to another soul, curtail their life or life’s potential, when our lives are so short to begin with?
The species has suffered incomprehensible loss over the false divisions of caste: the 11 million people killed by the Nazis; the three- quarters of a million Americans killed in the Civil War over the right to enslave human beings; the slow, living death and unfulfilled gifts of millions more on the plantations in India and in the American South.
Whatever creativity or brilliance they had has been lost for all time. Where would we be as a species had the millions of targets of these caste systems been permitted to live out their dreams or live at all? Where would the planet be had the putative beneficiaries been freed of the illusions that imprisoned them, too, had they directed their energies toward solutions for all of humanity, cures for cancer and hunger and the existential threat of climate change, rather than division?”