It was called the Holocaust. It involved killing millions of people because they were different. It was designed to re-engineer a whole society. It succeeded in turning a world upside down.
Now this is not the Holocaust and it won’t involve killing millions of people. We have – hopefully – progressed somewhat since then. But, after some of the reading I’ve been doing of late, I do feel rather obliged to make some of the following comparisons.
So four passages today to remind us of what exactly is going on in my head. And if it’s not going on in yours, you’re quite welcome to disagree.
First, from this synopsis of an academically minded book on the matter:
[...] They quickly took steps against those whom they wanted to isolate, deport, or destroy. In these essays informed by the latest research, leading scholars offer rich histories of the people branded as “social outsiders” in Nazi Germany: Communists, Jews, “Gypsies,” foreign workers, prostitutes, criminals, homosexuals, and the homeless, unemployed, and chronically ill. Although many works have concentrated exclusively on the relationship between Jews and the Third Reich, this collection also includes often-overlooked victims of Nazism while reintegrating the Holocaust into its wider social context.The Nazis knew what attitudes and values they shared with many other Germans, and most of their targets were individuals and groups long regarded as outsiders, nuisances, or “problem cases.” The identification, the treatment, and even the pace of their persecution of political opponents and social outsiders illustrated that the Nazis attuned their law-and-order policies to German society, history, and traditions. Hitler’s personal convictions, Nazi ideology, and what he deemed to be the wishes and hopes of many people, came together in deciding where it would be politically most advantageous to begin.
The first essay explores the political strategies used by the Third Reich to gain support for its ideologies and programs, and each following essay concentrates on one group of outsiders. Together the contributions debate the motivations behind the purges. For example, was the persecution of Jews the direct result of intense, widespread anti-Semitism, or was it part of a more encompassing and arbitrary persecution of “unwanted populations” that intensified with the war? The collection overall offers a nuanced portrayal of German citizens, showing that many supported the Third Reich while some tried to resist, and that the war radicalized social thinking on nearly everyone’s part.
Now a little substitution exercise designed to illuminate our current state of mind:
[...] They quickly took steps against those whom they wanted to isolate, deport, or destroy. In these essays informed by the latest research, leading scholars offer rich histories of the people branded as “social outsiders” in Coalition Britain: Communists, benefit claimants (or “scroungers” as they were termed), “Gypsies,” foreign workers, prostitutes, criminals, homosexuals, and the homeless, unemployed, and chronically ill. Although many works have concentrated exclusively on the relationship between benefit claimants and the Coalition regime, this collection also includes often-overlooked victims of Osbornomics while reintegrating the policy into its wider social context.The Coalition knew what attitudes and values they shared with many other Britains, and most of their targets were individuals and groups long regarded as outsiders, nuisances, or “problem cases.” The identification, the treatment, and even the pace of their persecution of political opponents and social outsiders illustrated that the Coalition government attuned their law-and-order policies to British society, history, and traditions. Cameron’s personal convictions, Tory ideology, and what he deemed to be the wishes and hopes of many people, came together in deciding where it would be politically most advantageous to begin.
The first essay explores the political strategies used by the Coalition to gain support for its ideologies and programs, and each following essay concentrates on one group of outsiders. Together the contributions debate the motivations behind the purges. For example, was the persecution of benefit claimants the direct result of intense, widespread prejudice, or was it part of a more encompassing and arbitrary persecution of “unwanted populations” that intensified with the economic crisis? The collection overall offers a nuanced portrayal of British citizens, showing that many supported the Coalition while some tried to resist, and that the double-dip recession radicalized social thinking on nearly everyone’s part.
Meanwhile, if all the above seems exaggerated on my part, just try reading this story from the Guardian newspaper this evening:
The government’s focus on alleged fraud and overclaiming to justify cuts in disability benefits has caused an increase in resentment and abuse directed at disabled people, as they find themselves being labelled as scroungers, six of the country’s biggest disability groups have warned.Some of the charities say they are now regularly contacted by people who have been taunted on the street about supposedly faking their disability and are concerned the climate of suspicion could spill over into violence or other hate crimes.
While the charities speaking out – Scope, Mencap, Leonard Cheshire Disability, the National Autistic Society, Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB), and Disability Alliance – say inflammatory media coverage has played a role in this, they primarily blame ministers and civil servants for repeatedly highlighting the supposed mass abuse of the disability benefits system, much of which is unfounded.
At the same time, they say, the focus on “fairness for taxpayers” has fostered the notion that disabled people are a separate group who don’t contribute.
So what do you say to that now? Am I really conflating two totally separate issues? And doesn’t the latter bear at least some similarities to how the former started out on its very merry way?
As Norman made perfectly clear this afternoon:
[...] There is no limit to the inventiveness of the human capacity for cruelty, and in that sense evil is bottomless. This doesn’t mean either that everyone will do evil or that humans are more evil than good. It only means that people’s creative talents are boundless and when they apply themselves to cruelty no moral or other barrier will restrict them from horrors or from ghastly ingenuities. This is a conclusion written not only, everywhere, in the history of the Holocaust but also in a thousand and more other episodes of moral criminality.It is also why so many well-meaning sociologies and psychologies of extreme human wrong-doing miss a certain mark. Endeavouring to find preceding causes influencing individuals to behave badly – something one can always do because no human action comes out of a causal vacuum – they have a tendency then to downplay the gravity of the evil committed, as if it proceeded by an unbroken chain from its putative causes. But what the example Howard was given here shows is that such evils always ‘exceed’ their causes, real or supposed. As depressing as it is to have to acknowledge this, they reflect those human sources of all that is also admirable about our species – the freedom to choose and the fertility of the human imagination.
Cruelty, then, of the kind we see displayed in these four passages, is not a question of people who are so very different from you or me. Neither should we make the same mistake they do as they attempt to separate society into groups of the deserving and non-deserving. The “bottomless evil” Norman describes, and which I am inclined in its very casual nature to attribute to the ideologues in our current government, can only ever be sustainably dealt with, therefore, if we are able to honestly recognise our very own ability to commit the very same evil.
If the Coalition government refuses to understand that what it is doing is generating such cruelties, then perhaps it is even more evil than the above evidence would initially suggest.
But if, at some time, a moment of healthy reflection can engender – amongst at least some of its members – a desire to repair what is being done in its name, then maybe we will yet manage to attain a society where we refuse to deliberately blame and prejudice others for the mistakes we ourselves are making.
For to be cruel out of ignorance of the reach of one’s actions is a state of mind we can easily rectify through education.
Whilst to be cruel in full knowledge of the reach of one’s actions is a state of mind which can lead to only one response: that of despair.
Déjà vu, anyone?
