Silent complicity corrodes us all

.

I was motivated to study German in large part by a desire to understand how an entire society could have become part of a project as manifestly evil as Nazism. In 1993, aged 19 and then an exchange student at the University of Hamburg, I met and became close friends with an 80-year-old man who had been an enthusiastic supporter of that project, at least initially. Hans had canvassed for Nazi candidates in the early 1930s in rural Schleswig-Holstein. He believed Hitler’s promise to restore order and lead Germany to greatness. I understood that part. But what about the criminality of the Nazis – their cruelty, injustice, and willingness to crush anyone they perceived as being in their way – which were evident well before they came to power? Hans didn’t have an answer to that question. He had put it out of his mind.

When I asked him specifically about the Nazi genocide against the European Jews, he had no answer and for the first and only time, I saw him cry. He had put that question out of his mind in 1933 but here it was emerging through his tears sixty years later. There weren’t many Jews in rural Schleswig-Holstein in the 1930s, so he wasn’t often confronted with the consequences of Nazi racial policies. But the tears told me that he had known, even then, that he was part of something unholy.

Another time he described the feeling of the air vibrating around him as squadrons of British bombers flew overhead on their way to Hamburg, Dresden and Berlin. He knew better than to complain at the injustice of incinerating German children to punish leaders who were all safe in bunkers and most of whom would later lead comfortable lives in West Germany. He, like millions of his compatriots, had invited evil into his land and that evil would now take its course.

Today, many (most? Ed.) Western citizens are putting the cruelty and injustice of Israel’s assault on Gaza out of their mind. [with a lot of help from the political and media class – Ed.]

The weapons used to kill, maim and terrorise Palestinian civilians are mostly made in Germany, the UK and the U.S. We should all take to the streets to demand that our governments stop supporting genocide and vote out those politicians who take Israeli bribes, but many won’t, preferring instead to simply put it out of their minds. But the human mind is not built that way, that moral failure will be stored, and future anguished tears will be shed.

Complicity in genocide will maim our collective humanity, deform our children and turn our nations into the kind of spiritual wasteland Germany became when it recovered its material prosperity but without any sense of moral purpose. The people of Palestine are suffering unspeakable horrors as we go on with our pursuit of bread and circuses. But they have not lost their humanity.

The first thing that came to mind when I saw the image atop this article was Michelangelo’s La Pietà. But it is the collective West that is ultimately to be pitied. These four women may not survive the vengeful carnage wrought by a society every bit as unhinged from its humanity as Nazi Germany, but even if the next Israeli bomb, drone or sniper bullet should take them, they will have lived more profoundly than those who simply try to put this image out of their minds.

Palestinian innocents may lose their lives but they will pass to their survivors a will to live, fight injustice and speak the truth that will eventually wash away our sandcastles of distractions. What do those who tolerate such things so as not to jeopardise their privilege have to pass on to their children?