When we deny others their humanity, we run the risk of losing our own
Last night I watched Downfall — a few years ago, there was a documentary interview with a woman who had been a secretary for Hitler for the last 3 years, and was in the bunker with him right to the end. This inspired some filmmakers to make a drama version of it — that is Downfall.
The movie stars Bruno Ganz as Hitler. He was the lead angel in city of angels. Can you imagine him as Hitler? He was good though — astonishingly good. Easily the best Hitler I have ever seen.
I stopped reading the subtitles when he was on screen. I just had to watch him with his movements, his looks — he was great.
But while I was watching it, I became aware of how this war was truly a new stage in war at least in european history (I’m sure it already happened in China thousands of years ago, when everything happened of one kind or another).
In Europe’s past, in war, one nation sees it is going to lose, and it negotiates peace terms with the winner. Maybe money is paid, or territory is lost, or new treaties are signed to the advantage of the winner. The leaders go on ruling their countries.
WW2 was the first ‘total war’ as they call it. Even though in Europe WW2 was fought over economic and territorial disputes, the Nazi leaders saw it as ideological, ‘proof’ that they were superior, when they won. In the end in the bunker (according to Downfall), Hitler couldn’t fathom that he had lost, he kept expecting some miracle to save him from the russians, who were all round berlin and closing in. And Hitler was adamant: No surrender! He killed himself, lots of them killed themselves. The survivors tried to negotiate terms, but (again according to the movie) the Russians insisted on total surrender, even as the US insisted from Japan.
After the war we had the show trials, with new laws invented just to be able to claim it was legitimate to execute or imprison the former leaders.
But what is truly sad is that in the eyes of the US at least, Hitler, the Japanese leaders, all the top Nazis, were no longer human. They were subhuman, monsters, devils.
This way of thinking leads to two results. The first, immediate result, is to remove any scruple in killing the enemy leaders — something that had not been done in European warfare, was indeed equated in Europe with barbarism, something ‘Christians’ were too ‘civilized’ ever to contemplate. Ethically, it was still uncomfortable to simply invent new laws and then hang people because you say they violated laws that didn’t even exist when they did those things; but if those people were inhuman monsters, then there was no ethical objection.
Another immediate result was suspicion of German and Japanese people. What had gone wrong with them, why did they just go along with those monsters, there must be something inhuman about all Germans and Japanese. This, of course is only to repeat the racism that the western powers accused the Nazis and Japanese of.
It would be something else to say, ‘I am so pissed and dismayed that you guys destroyed my country, I am going to go crazy and kill you all!’ That must have been in the hearts of most Russians, after the dreadful losses they had sustained. That is not totally ‘civilized’ but it is human. There is something calculated and hypocritical and wrong about saying, ‘No hard feelings, we are just following the law here, we are all perfectly civilized, and now we will kill you all... Except some we will just put in prison for 20 years... We’ll let you know which is which, soon, just after we go through these circus acts we are calling trials.’
The long-term, second result of calling the Nazis and Japanese militarists ‘monsters’ is that ‘we’ are therefore ‘different’ from ‘them.’ This leaves us in an even worse position: We are unable to imagine that we could ever do anything like that. We are then blind to even the possibility.
So when we get a would-be dictator, and a regime comes into power run by men who have published a manifesto aiming at world domination by us for a century and more, we can’t even see how close this is to our cartoon version of Hitler’s ‘Today Poland, tomorrow, the world!’
We can’t imagine that our troops could commit war crimes like the Japanese and Nazis did.
We can’t imagine that our leaders could commit war crimes like the German and Japanese leaders did.
(And of course we should know all about those war crimes now, since we invented them 60 years ago, and they have been our law ever since! This is totally different from a war victor telling the defeated, ‘Oh by the way, what you did in the war was against these laws that I just made up, so I’m afraid I am going to have to punish you for that.’)
‘We’ are not Nazis. ‘We’ are ‘different.’ ‘We’ would never do any such thing.
This leaves us completely defenseless to guard against it happening to us. So we get our would-be dictator, and we support him just as the Germans supported Hitler.
If only we had acknowledged that the Nazis were human, and that there was nothing so unusual about what they did, and that under the right circumstances we too could follow the very same path... Then we might have wondered, ‘How does anybody end up going down that path, and what keeps one person from going down it when so many others follow it?’
And then we might have been able to teach our children in school, not ‘Germans and Japanese were monsters’ but rather, ‘Beware of thinking you are different, and beware of every leader who would take you into war, and always look on your enemy as a brother-man.’
So when you meet the devil, be on guard against him! — but once you have assured your own safety, look him in the eye, and recognize that he is, after all, your brother. And that in someone else’s eye, you might yourself look a bit satanic…
(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, June 25, 2008)
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