Banality of evil

[BarryW]

You can find atrocity almost anywhere - and committed by almost anybody.In the Black Country we have a proud industrial heritage which is highly celebrated. We even have a living museum dedicated to it. Much of this local industry involved chainmaking in small, local workshops. Many of these provided the only work available in some areas and whole families, including the elder children would work there.

Few stop and think however that the chainmakers derived a significant proportion of their income from making and selling slave chains. Everybody knew how awful life was for slaves, yet ordinary folk such as you'll meet every day made a living from it without sparing a thought for the misery and death they were contributing to.

You don't have to be a monster to act like one.

Terry Pratchett says it much better than I can:

"And it all meant this: that there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do."

Gern

An interesting point but, of course, the British Empire banned the slave trade well over 200 years ago and quite rightly devoted huge resources to stopping it which would have caused hardship to those even indirectly involved such as making chains. It is very easy to condemn people based on modern values and with all the information sources available. Those making chains had no real way to grasp the full horror of what their use entailed given the limited information sources available to them. It is also true to say that, from our modern perspective, the contrast between our lives and how the slaves were treated is far more pronounced than between the lives or ordinary 'free' people and the slaves of the time. For those people in the picture though there are no such excuses as for those making the chains, they knew what they were doing and truly were evil personified.

[BarryW]

Do you know what amazes me ? The fact they managed to hide the worst of the atrocities from their own peopleEven alied commanders were shocked when they found these camps it truely is the worst that humans can do to people

I knew an old chap who was among the British troops to liberate Belsen Belsen. He could barely speak about it and the anger he felt towards the guards and contempt for the local people who he said turned a blind eye. He died a year or so ago, a couple of years after I accompanied him and other vets to Arnhem and a ceremony when they 'laid up' their standards in a Dutch museum.

[Guest]

An interesting point but, of course, the British Empire banned the slave trade well over 200 years ago

An interesting fact is that it wasn't till 2010 that you could be actually charged with 'slavery' as a crime, before that you would have to be charged with other offences amounting to the fact.

2010 also saw legislation to create an 'anti slavery day' if memory serves.

[stona]

Britain banned and attempted to interdict the slave trade in the British Empire. The institution of slavery was not banned as such a bill would probably not have passed through parliament for reasons familiar today. The eventual bill, passed into law as "The Slave Trade Act" of 1807, was as good a compromise as could be got. The great slave owning companies and institutions (including almost incredibly the Church of England) must have known that the writing was on the wall.

The French had already banned slavery, in theory at least, at the time of the revolution some years previously. Britain abolished slavery in 1833 throughout most of the Empire. It was finally abolished completely, including the earlier exemptions, in 1843 which is much later than many imagine.

Richard raises a good point about the honesty of the Germans. German people today do not shy away from what happened in the past (with the exception of a lunatic fringe which all democracies allow) and deserve tremendous respect for that. Not all nations are so honest about the darker periods of their pasts.

We are not always so honest in this country about many unsavoury episodes. The devastating effects of the slave trade, not only on the human beings who suffered almost inconceivable horrors as a result but also the wider ramifications for the development of an entire continent are not always properly acknowledged.

Dave's (Gern) example of the slave chains is another example of the banality of evil. The chain makers were not "bad" people. They were merely cogs in a larger system that led to the chains they bashed being locked around the necks and limbs of people living thousands of miles away.

Is a man manufacturing crematoria ovens at Topf and Sohne in Erfurt or H.Kori or Didier Werk in Berlin any different? I think not.

Men like Goldenhagen have argued that the holocaust was much more widely known and understood in Germany during the war than that wartime generation admitted and I think that he is probably correct. I doubt that those oven makers knew where their product was going to end up any more than Dave's metal bashers knew to what use their chains would be put.

There is indeed no comparison between the working people above and the men in that picture. As Barry says, the men in that picture knew exactly what they were doing. The thing that so worried Arendt is that they are just ordinary men. Looking along the rows of men in the dock at Nuremberg you see the same thing. With a few exceptions not particularly bright or talented men but opportunists and over promoted thugs.

Cheers

Steve

[flyjoe180]

I knew an old chap who was among the British troops to liberate Belsen Belsen. He could barely speak about it and the anger he felt towards the guards and contempt for the local people who he said turned a blind eye. He died a year or so ago, a couple of years after I accompanied him and other vets to Arnhem and a ceremony when they 'laid up' their standards in a Dutch museum.

My Granddad was in a British Pioneer unit that helped to liberate and then bury bodies at Bergen Belsen and had similar sentiments to your friend. After serving throughout the war it was his experience of Bergen Belsen that haunted him until he died. My Great Uncle who I have mentioned here before was captured after HMS Saracen was sunk in the Mediterranean Sea and was subsequently sent to a German concentration camp after being caught in a sabotage plot on a railway line that went wrong. He was released to a POW camp later but he described his experiences of that camp in a biography of his life. The treatment of the Russians and Jews he saw was of the lowest level of humanity. He had nothing but contempt for the SS guards and their commanders. Lastly the man I was named after was captured by the Japanese in Burma and survived a Japanese POW camp where he was starved and mistreated. He too survived the war but he would never have bought a Japanese made product I would wager.

If you haven't already, have a read of the book about American olympic runner Louis Zamperini ("UNBROKEN" by Laura Hillenbrand). It gives a great insight into the brutal mentality of some of the Japanese guards, in particular one sergeant, Matsuhiro Watanabe (known to the Australian POWs as Watabastard) who was so brutal he made MacArthur's top 100 most wanted criminals. Watanabe was allowed to go free after the USA made an agreement with Japan to let the remaining criminals go in return for military favours to oppose the Soviet Union.

[BarryW]

If you don't mind I have a follow-up and a change of direction back to my post about the old chap who helped liberate Belsen Belsen that might be of interest. It is linked in the sense that it relates to the sacrifices of those who helped defeat that evil.

This chap, Bill, was a gunner and soon after the Arnhem campaign he was having a cuppa standing chatting to his gun crew. A German mortar shell landed in among them, Bill was blown back and down some steps. He was bruised but otherwise unhurt, got back up the steps and found his mates all dead. He was one lucky man but was always haunted by what happened that day.

On that trip we went to a British War Grave Cemetery in a wood just over the border in Germany (sorry I forget the name) and I have a picture (below) of him standing among the four graves of his mates. Also below is a picture from the laying up of the standards at Oosterbeck (I think).

RIP Bill - you are back no doubt finishing that chat with your mates.

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[Guest]

Having a mother of Kingston upon Hull visits to Hull were always dominated by the statute of William Wilberforce who orginated the plan to do away with slavery. While acts were agreed for this & notably thro most of the colonies as usual many “masters” found ways around this despicable human imprisonment of peoples.

Not to downgrade it as acceptable the atrocities which have & are being entertained in the world are not the same thing.

The past is the past & in peoples of morality there is little to be learned from this past. The morality comes from the up bringing of children in a world where all are equal & each treats the other as one would expect to be treated by another human being. Simple but in reality it is a slow process. The family & education.

The important matter at the moment is the terror on a scale which is every bit as horrendous as Hitler’s Germany. Syria is intent on every type of cide that it is known. Afganistan Pakistan Afganistan Iracq. Atrocities on the Hitler Scale of inhumantity.

It does not help that we have at Guantanamo Bay detention camp atrocities. I cringe when I see manacled people transported on trolleys across the campus as they can not walk. Why ! Water boarding ! Transporting prisoners in the air to be able to torture them. And this is a democratic god fearing nation ???????? How can we influence other nations when this is going on ?

Britain. What goes on here ! Are we just better ay hiding things.

In my mind it is the future we should be attending to not the past. You cannot undo the past. The future has yet to happen.

Laurie

Shall now go for a lie down in the world that I hope for all others. Very selfish of me as talk is so easy. It needs some William Wilberforce characters.

[flyjoe180]

It is scary to see throughout history what people, who are otherwise rational, civilised and decent folk, are in fact capable of when the right atmosphere is created.

Civilization is but a thin veneer over barbarianism (John M. Shanahan)

[Guest]

Read 1984 & the fictional predictions are so accurate.

Read about a Hitler exploit. In his retreat Berchess????---- Garden & his phoen was out of order. So he trecked down the hill & made a call from this persons house. He went without any lolly. Next day he trecked down there again & paid the lady owner of the house & phone. As you say Joe rational civilised etc. in one way.

Laurie

[flyjoe180]

That could have been the Berghof in Berchtesgaden. Steve will know for sure. Interesting story Laurie.

One of yesteryear's evil meets one of today's evil:

[Guest]

My daughter married a German and they have two sons, one 8 2/3 and the other 14 2/3. We visit them and they visit us. The boys speak perfect English because my daughter speaks 90% English to them and they all know a lot about the UK and its history. When my daughter married, no-one was alive on either side of the family, German and British, who had had a role in the war. The war has almost never been mentioned, and when it is, it is as a historical subject separate from all of us. As far as all of us are concerned it is as though the war had never happened (despite the fact that a Dornier 17 missed me in 1943 by about 200 yards when Aberdeen was heavily bombed, and which I once mentioned, jokingly.)

The war is just not an issue, or even a topic of conversation. As someone above mentioned, "The sins of the fathers etc."

My parents had to flee the Japanese in Burma in 1942, just in time to escape the notorious Changi jail, my father walking from Burma into India over several ranges of mountains. They could easily have been killed. But all my TVs and recorders have been Japanese! (However, if they had been killed, I wonder what my own reaction to the Japanese would be today.)

[stona]

I have worked quite a bit in Germany and with German people over the years. I have many German colleagues and a couple of good friends there. We do discuss history and the war sometimes but usually more about the awful experiences of families on both sides. We can even have a laugh about some aspects (there goes another stereotype). I have never heard anyone attempt to justify what happened nor have I had the finger pointed at me for some of our more morally dubious actions. Germans are far too polite to do that.

They deserve a lot of credit. From the ashes of Weimar and then Nazism they have constructed one of the strongest and most successful democracies in the world. It's a great country to visit although they do eat some odd stuff, have a poor taste in summer footwear, and some of their much revered beers are horrible

I had a soldier uncle who was involved in all sorts of shenanigans in post war Berlin. He was finally busted dealing in the black market. He "took up" as my grandmother used to say, with a German woman. They waited seven years (I think) to be allowed to marry, as her husband had been sent to Stalingrad and simply disappeared. I remember my aunt Elsa very well, she never lost a very strong German accent and was my second favourite aunt after my mum's identical twin sister!

1984 should be obligatory reading for everyone! Totalitarianism summed up in one, chilling, sentence.

"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."

In 2013 there are a lot of boots stamping on a lot of faces around the world.

Cheers

Steve

[Guest]

Although I read 1984 as youngster I re read it again only a year or two ago. This time I found it quite disturbing, not only from the aspect of how depressing it is but also just how some of the less obvious aspects of it are actually becoming reality. There is nothing you can do on the Internet, with your smart phone, smart TV or whatever connected device you think of that isn't being monitored, and in many cases recorded.

[stona]

It is a fairly grim vision of the future, as seen from the 1940s. Orwell's future was definitely a dystopia rather than a eutopia. This was a common trend in post war fiction and science fiction

Some of Orwell's technological predictions were remarkably prescient, Big Brother is indeed watching you on almost every street in every city in Britain. On the other hand we can still say two plus two equals four, a freedom from which Orwell himself said all others follow. When our political leaders try to convince us that two plus two actually equals three, or five, as they seem to do one way or another almost every day, they are met with a healthy level of scepticism and disbelief.

One of my favourite Orwell observations was about "goose step" marching. He said that an army could only march the goose step in countries where the people were afraid to laugh at it. Very true, ask John Cleese!

Cheers

Steve

[Guest]

The question of why normally sane civilian people do terrible things is interesting. As a result of my interest in modelling WWII propeller aircraft I have clarified my mind on this issue a bit, partly through some fairly recent programmes on TV, and during talks given by an excellent history teacher.

The TV programmes (and other sources) said that the German people, having gone through the horrors of inflation etc. in the 1930s, welcomed relief. Hitler, a great orator, offered them a new life. In doing so he taught the people that they were above others, a master race, hijacking Nietzsche's Ubermench,. (Being German, they did and believed what they were told.) This led to them supporting Hitler when he should have been seen even by Germans as a tyrant, especially after the deportation and mass killing of Jews. This would partly explain the conundrum which has puzzled me as to why the German people supported the war right up to the Russians reaching Hitler's bunker, when it was very clear that the war was lost. Even Hariss's carpet bombing had little practical effect: raids with 1,000 bombers, each bomber with ten bombs. (Part of the reason of course was the rifles of the Gestapo pointing at anyone who objected). This support for Hitler seems to have a parallel in the British who enthusiastically supported the Empire and all its suppressive activities right up to the 1950s, e.g. the earlier Indian Mutiny, and in the case of the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s it should have been clear that withdrawal was both the honourable and practical thing to do.

The history talks centred on the nature of Fascism, Communism, Conservatism and Liberalism. We were told that Communism has at least an intellectual basis: the people ruling themselves under a benign people-oriented government. But Fascism lacks any such basis, being tyrant-based: "I hoodwink the people about what is best for them and they will obey me or else."

I'm not a historian. I just pick up stuff here and there.

PS: Can it really have been 1,000 bombers per raid?