Back in September I posted on the German movie Downfall, about Hitler's last days. (Also here.) There's a fascinating article about it by William Boyd in Saturday's Guardian Review. I strongly recommend this. See, too, the discussion in yesterday's Observer.
From the latter I take the following statement by the producer of Downfall, Bernd Eichinger:
[M]any people advised me not to [make the film]. There was a big, big chance audiences might turn away or people might say, "How could you do a movie like this?" But these events only happened 60 years ago and we forget them at our peril. Look at the world today... if you read what happened in those Iraqi prisons, you see normal people within two or three weeks starting to torture other human beings. They are told someone is a bad guy and they do it, even though no one's going to shoot them if they don't. You can see how fast what happened under Hitler can happen. It's not so far away.I highlight this statement in order to pose the following question, which it prompts for me: why is it that so many people of broadly progressive outlook in the West, when they want an analogy or comparison with, an illustration of, the sort of thing that happened in Hitler's time, immediately reach for an Iraq-war-related or war-on-terrorism-related example? To be clear here: I am not now talking about the merely crude and ignorant Bush=Hitler type of sloganeering. I'm talking about precisely the kind of statement quoted above. For the past two years such statements have been abundant. Eichinger could just as easily have taken his example from pre-war Iraq, which had more similarities with the Nazi regime than the US occupation has. He could, indeed, have cited Abu Ghraib in Saddam's time rather than since. But no, he found it more apt to use what on any well-balanced reckoning was the more distant rather than the closer example (I mean in scale of moral gravity).
OK, before recording its limitations, let's give what Eichinger says here its due. It is true that, when the limits come down, it can happen fast. We know this not only from Hitler's Europe but from many other experiences before and since. In no time at all, many - not all - can become torturers and killers. Others who don't become torturers and killers turn away or look on indifferently. There are always bystanders, supportive, unconcerned, or merely frightened, to the evils that are perpetrated. Relatedly: the liberties and protections we have are therefore precious, not to be taken for granted; and so it is right to highlight and try to reverse any erosion of them, to condemn the abuses and the tortures, at Abu Ghraib or wherever, including the practice of so-called 'rendition' which sends people to be tortured somewhere else.
At the same time, if one wants to talk realistically about the danger of fascism or fascist-type developments and the horrors that accompany these, from endemic torture to genocide, it does not suffice merely to invoke psychological generalizations about the propensities of human beings or the growth of smaller things into larger things. When the subject is the danger of Nazi-style barbarities, there are plenty of better examples of them in the world, today or just yesterday, than those for which the US (or other of the Western democracies) is responsible. Unless, perhaps, one thinks that the US (or other of the Western democracies) is on the threshold of a fascist coup or counter-revolution or of some gradual and insidious transformation towards the same end-state. But to maintain this you need to show that the social and political preconditions are accumulating which make it likely or, at the very least, a threat to worry about. Is that scenario remotely plausible at present? Are, for example, the inner forces of the societies in question here, the numbers of people committed to democracy and pluralism and diversity and human rights, so enfeebled, so reduced, that we are in danger of being overwhelmed without a fight by a movement that would wipe out all those institutions and values? I'm not in general given to wild optimism politically, but I would say not.
And yet it is almost de rigeur amongst people of liberal and left outlook, today, to use as representative of what we should fear in the way of a possible return of the horrors of Nazism, not the many actual ruthless and life-devouring regimes we have known in recent decades, but... George Bush, or America, or some other Western instance or combination. Why? One answer I would give to this is that I don't know. I've been trying to understand it since September 11 2001 and on some level failing. Yes, you can say knee-jerk this, that and the other, and in its own way it is right to say so. But, more deeply, the failure involved in these de rigeur responses, the failure to give due weight and proportion to moral and political realities which matter more than just about anything else matters, is hard to comprehend.
All one can say - again - is that it's a mindset more interested in, and more agitated by, an internal difference within the democracies than in, and by, brutalities happening elsewhere in the world, and the international rules and institutions which accommodate them. Genocide in Darfur; starvation in Zimbabwe; until recently a virtual assembly line of torture and murder in Baathist Iraq (from a list that could be much and easily extended) - of course, they are all bad things. But they seem not to arouse the same passion or the same knowing collusion of the right-minded as does the endless repetition of the favoured, Bush-flavoured, examples.