Over my lifetime I have heard
many explanations of why so many Germans were complicit in the
atrocities committed during World War II. None of them is credible.
Early accounts, during my youth, asserted that the Germans were either
duped or unaware of what was happening, and that all the atrocities
were committed by a small group of psychopathic leaders. This theory is
absurd -- no leaders could possibly pull off such a deception of their
own people. More recent accounts would have us believe
that Germans had been systematically indoctrinated for decades with
anti-Semitism and xenophobia, to the point that, like North American
slave owners a century earlier, and male patriarchs in most of the
Western world a century before that, they couldn't conceive of these
'others' being 'real' people at all, entitled to treatment as civilized
humans, as peers. Or they would have us believe
that the German people, reeling under the collective shame of military
failure twenty years earlier and suffering from the terrifying,
seemingly endless poverty and misery of the Great Depression, were so
overcome with Nazism's generous sharing of the plunders of foreign
imperialism and war, and so terrified by a world seemingly coming
apart, that they willingly, gleefully accepted the genocidal
consequences of this liberation from poverty, hopelessness, shame and
fear.
In the last century we saw atrocities committed in even greater numbers
by Stalin and Mao in their own countries, resulting in the murder,
often under unimaginably cruel circumstances, of 60 million and 80
million people respectively. Go back earlier in history and such
atrocities will be found everywhere on the planet. Go forward and the
two most extreme examples of the past decade -- in the Balkan states of
the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda -- make clear that this is not
something that civilized societies outgrow.
In every case there either was obviously (as in Rwanda) or must have been
extremely broad acceptance of and complicity in systematic mass murder or genocide, in the
ruthless killing of 'other' people to the point of extermination. In
almost every case mass murder seems to be the product of desperation,
of a mass psychosis brought about by the stress of fear, shame,
suffering and poverty, sufficient to drive most people to overcome the
universal human instinct not to kill a fellow human, to accept any vaguely plausible rationale to turn on each other and shed blood.
Once this desperation starts to set in, other psychotic behaviours follow. The first and most obvious of these is denial
-- which comes in two 'flavours': (a) it's not really that bad, and (b)
there is no choice, they're only doing what's necessary. Once the
psychotic begins to understand that his fellow citizens, and his
'leaders', are engaging in immoral and illegal behaviour, denial in one
or both of these forms is almost inevitable: it is the only way that
the actions can be 'justified', rationalized, made sense of.
The second of these subsequent psychotic behaviours is willing
helplessness and ignorance, which again comes in two 'flavours': (a) I
don't know about that (code for I don't want to know about that), and (b) there's nothing we can do about that (it's not our fault/responsibility/within our control).
Most of us really know, though we don't really want
to know and don't want to admit it, that much of the food we eat today
comes at a cost of almost unbearable, lifelong confinement and
suffering of the animals whose 'products' we eat. When animal rights
groups point that out, a howling and predictable chorus of It's not
really that bad, There is no other (economic) choice, I don't know
about that and There's nothing we can do about that immediately ensues.
When mounting, nearly-unanimous and compelling evidence is presented by
hundreds of Nobel Prize-winning scientists that human activity is
altering our climate and producing potentially cataclysmic
consequences, the well-paid Lomborgs and other corporatist shills
encourage us with their fake science that It's not really that bad,
There is no other (economic) choice, We don't know about that and
There's nothing we can do about that.
When the US president suspends human liberties for Arab minorities and
the politically tolerant and progressive elements of US society,
destroys and occupies a defenceless country and kills tens of thousands
of its citizens on a trumped-up charge against its former dictator, and
illegally wiretaps the conversations of ordinary Americans, the chorus
goes up again: It's not really that bad (or even 'mission
accomplished'), There is no other choice, We don't
know about that (plausible deniability, now a high art among
politicians) and There's nothing we (mere citizens, Democrats,
law-abiding, freedom-loving people) can do about that.
None of this would occur in a healthy world. All that is needed,
however, is a widespread sense of fear, shame, suffering and poverty to
induce the mass psychosis. Fear comes about when sudden and
unappreciated change is foisted upon us: When our daughter comes home
hand in hand with someone from another culture, race, or gender than
the one we are comfortable with. When we realize that information and
technology are so accessible that anyone could kill us or ruin our
lives with a gun, a suicide bomb, a disease of overcrowded poultry, a
drug, a penis, a home invasion (by legal authorities or strangers),
tainted food or water, a nuclear or chemical or biological weapon
cooked up in their basement. Or when a small group of spoiled rich
lunatics brings down a couple of buildings by crashing airplanes into
them.
Shame is also in no short supply in our civilization. Ask any German. Ask Romeo Dallaire.
Ask yourself, when you cringe and change the station when the
commercials and documentaries about the state of the world just outside
your door come on, begging you, daring you to look and learn. I can
almost hear you, whispering: It's not really that bad, There is no other (economic) choice, I don't
know about that, There's nothing we can do about that.
As for suffering and poverty, you don't need to go to Darfur to find
it. Many of your neighbours are undoubtedly suffering the trauma of
spousal or child abuse, or poverty they are ashamed to admit to
(because in its self-deceit our society would have us believe poverty
is our own fault), or otherwise in endless physical, emotional or psychological anguish. It's not really that bad, not in my neighbourhood.
Like rats in a cruel experiment of forced overcrowding and scarcity, we
are perpetually ripe for the mass psychosis that is the very hallmark
of our beloved civilization. And as long as we remain in denial, as
long as we keep telling ourselves the madman's mantra -- It's not really that bad, There is no other choice, I don't
know about that, There's nothing we can do about that. -- it will only get worse.
Wait until the End of Oil, when the ability to endlessly steal our
children's legacy of resources runs out and industrial and agricultural
production grinds to a halt. Wait until the Mideast suddenly has no
revenue to provide even the necessities of life to its quarter of a
billion people living on devastated land that can, without oil, support
no one. Wait until China runs out of food (its breadbasket is rapidly
turning to desert) and water (its water table is dropping by eight feet
a year and most of its 'fresh' water is poisoned by chemicals,
fertilizers and waste), and a bankrupt US can no longer afford to buy
its pathetic products. Wait until its one and a half billion people,
with nuclear and biological weapons, become as desperate as Germany was
in the 1930s. Ladies and gentlemen, you thought the 20th century was bad for mass atrocities, you ain't seen nothing yet. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
