Ethnic oppression: it doesn't have to be like that

It’s a pity that, as Hegel pointed out, the only thing we learn from history is that no one learns anything from history.

If we did, there’d be an invaluable lesson some 75 years old to be learned from Denmark. A lesson that badly needs to be learned again today. A lesson that would save a lot of people, particularly Muslims, a lot of pain, and a lot of other people, especially non-Muslims, a lot of shame.

Denmark was occupied by Nazi German forces in 1940. But the occupation began to fall apart long before the Second World War ended. As Hannah Arendt explains in Eichmann in Berlin, ‘when the Germans approached [the Danes] rather cautiously about introducing the yellow badge [to be worn by all Jews, as in other Nazi controlled areas], they were simply told that the King would be the first to wear it…’.

The Danes hadn’t been especially kind to foreign Jews, many of them German, who sought refuge in their country. As elsewhere, the refugees weren’t granted work permits; they were tolerated but not necessarily helped. But when Nazi Germany began to ask for the German Jews to be deported to the Reich, the response was extraordinary. The Nazis had declared those Jews stateless, so ‘the Danes… explained to the German officials that because the stateless refugees were no longer German citizens, the Germans could not claim them without Danish assent. This was one of the few cases in which statelessness turned out to be an asset, although it was of course not the statelessness per se that saved the Jews but, on the contrary, the fact that the Danish government had decided to protect them’.

What was particularly strange was what happened in 1943. This was when the Nazis decided that the time had come to clear Denmark entirely of Jews, as they were attempting to clear country after county in their power. ‘What [Himmler, chief of the SS] did not reckon with was that – quite apart from Danish resistance – the German officials who had been living in the country for years were no longer the same’.

It was as though the spirit of resistance had rubbed off on the occupiers. ‘Not only did General von Hannecken, the military commander, refuse to put troops at the disposal of the Reich plenipotentiary, Dr Werner Best; the special S.S. units (Einsatzkommandos) employed in Denmark very frequently objected to “the measures they were ordered to carry out by the central agencies” – according to Best’s testimony at Nuremberg [the war crime trials after the fighting ended].’

Even Best became deeply unreliable, from the Nazi point of view. When police arrived from Germany to start rounding up the Jews for deportation, ‘Best told them that they were not permitted to break into apartments, because the Danish police might then interfere… Hence they could seize only those Jews who voluntarily opened their doors. They found exactly 477 people, out of a total of more than 7,800, at home and willing to let them in.”

Even these Jews were transferred to Theresienstadt, the concentration camp for privileged Jews where they received better treatment than most because the Danish government kept making a ‘fuss’ about them. Many of these Jews were elderly, so the fact that 48 of them died is probably not a particularly high proportion.

The fatal date for deportation was 1 October, but a few days earlier, the leaders of the Jewish community were told of the whole plan, probably on Best’s own orders. The community went into hiding, ‘which was very easy in Denmark, because… “all sections of the Danish people, from the King down to simple citizens,” stood ready to receive them.’

Danish Jews being taken to safety in Sweden

Sweden too, just 15 miles away, was prepared to take in the Jews and offer them asylum, ‘and this was done with the help of the Danish fishing fleet. The cost of transportation for people without means – about a hundred dollars per person – was paid largely by wealthy Danish citizens…’ About 50% of the costs were paid by the Jewish community, the other 50% out of contributions from non-Jews.

About half the Jewish population got safely to Sweden. The other half remained in hiding in Denmark and survived the war. Some 99% of Danish Jews made it.

What the Danes showed was an extraordinary – literally, it was strikingly out of the ordinary – willingness to resist injustice. By doing so, peacefully and without violence, they seem to have undermined the will even of some of their oppressors. What might have happened if Hitler hadn’t had his forces tied up fighting his losing war is hard to say: he might well have crushed the resistance. Even so, what matters is that the Danish government and people worked together to resist a terrible evil and, helped by circumstances, they succeeded.

Others outside Denmark also resisted. Bulgaria, for example, or many in France and Italy. But elsewhere the Nazis often found willing or even enthusiastic accomplices.

I wish  the same spirit of resistance was flourishing in Britain today, where Islamophobia seems to be still growing, and parties even feel the need to compromise with it, for electoral reasons. I wish we could find it in France where harsh Islamophobic laws have been adopted. I wish we could find it in some of Europe’s new ‘democracies’ in the centre and east of the continent, where brutally anti-immigrant forces seem to be in control, notably in Hungary. I wish it was burning as strongly even in Denmark and Sweden were xenophobic parties wield far more influence than is healthy.

Whenever we hear someone denouncing immigrants, such as refugees from Libya or Syria or other Middle Eastern and African countries, let’s remember the case of Denmark in World War 2. Let’s remember how shameful the collaborators in many countries seem today. Let’s recall how admirable the resisting Danes.

Then maybe we’ll find the will to resist the xenophobes of our times and stand, as the Danes then did, shoulder to shoulder with the vulnerable and the persecuted.

Still, if we did that, we’d be in danger of learning a lesson from history.

In praise of a great woman: people aren't dispensable

Time for a tribute to an exceptional mind. She left us extraordinary insights into the behaviour of man, particularly in extreme circumstances. Not just what we do but why we do it.

Two of her insights strike me as particularly important.

The first is the notion of the ‘banality of evil’. Hannah Arendt covered the trial in Jerusalem of former SS Officer and logistics coordinator for the final solution to the ‘Jewish Question’, Adolf Eichmann – he organised the transport of Jews to the extermination centres.

Hannah Arendt: a voice to listen to all the more today

What struck her most about Eichmann was his deep ordinariness. Many described him as a monster. What she saw was someone who could only speak in the clichés of officialise because he had no other vocabulary; in her world view, the inability to speak with clarity revealed an inability to think clearly; that made Eichmann literally thoughtless and unable to see the moral consequences of what he was doing.

She saw in Eichmann a man with little or nothing to distinguish him, a middle-class figure who had struggled to build a career or even make a living, and whose only talent turned out to be for the administration of transport for colossal numbers of people – no small task in war time with huge pressure on the railways.

Eichmann knew what would happen to the Jews once he got them to Auschwitz. But that wasn’t his problem. His task was just to get them there and he set about it with all the dogmatic persistence of a dedicated minor functionary. An accomplice in mass murder on a historically unprecedented scale was just the kind of man any of us might meet behind a counter or in a nondescript office somewhere. Indeed, we might him anywhere because he could be any of us.

That’s what makes evil banal: it can appear in the most everyday of people.

That’s the chilling conclusion of the notion of the banality of evil: any one of us could be capable of it. It is not the exclusive preserve of a particular type of person, a monster born.

The second of Arendt’s idea that particularly strikes me here is that western societies have, over the centuries, moved towards considering humans as dispensable. Arendt was Jewish and brought up in Königsberg. It’s a neat reflection of the terrible impact of the first half of the twentieth century that her city, the home of the great German philosopher Kant, is no longer in the far east of Germany but now belongs to a small exclave of Russia, beyond the Baltic states. Even its name has been expunged from the record. It is now called Kaliningrad, named for one of Stalin’s henchmen.

Germany eventually became a dangerous place for her to live. She was fortunate enough to get out (in 1933, when Hitler came to power), and eventually reached the US, with plenty of pain on the way, including internment in a camp in France. Over the next few years, it became increasingly clear that what the Nazis were working to achieve was the entire extermination of a group of people – several groups – simply for who or what they were, with no consideration of their guilt or innocence of any offence, indeed of anything they might have done. 

That led Arendt to the principles on which she based her colossal work, The Origins of Totalitarianism. In the totalitarian view, the human being counts for nothing. People can be wiped out, even tortured to death, because they have no importance in themselves compared to such notions as historical inevitability or the emergence of a race of supermen.

Why do I mention all this now?

Two reasons.

The first is that 4 December 2017 is the 42nd anniversary of the death of Arendt. She deserves to be far better known. Whatever I can do to help that, I do.

The second is that the concepts I’ve been describing seem horribly relevant again today. Around us we see people of complete banality playing with great evil backed by great power – not least the occupant of the White House who could, still, plunge the world into a most terrible war in Korea.

What’s more, Trump recently retweeted violently Islamophobic videos by an extreme right-wing group from Britain. Some Muslims have behaved outrageously badly – maybe one in three million Muslims, but in the Eichmann approach to humans, we don’t take the time to think things through, to distinguish between the tiny numbers of the guilty and the huge numbers of the innocent, to reject the simple approach to write off all Muslims en masse.

I’ve argued before that the Muslims are the Jews of today. By writing off an entire faith group in this way, the far right takes us further down that road. And Trump has endorsed it.

For the moment, Trump threatens merely a travel ban. But where will he take things? Especially if the target becomes North Koreans rather than Muslim? 

We’ve seen where that kind of thinking has gone before. Which is why, on the 42nd anniversary of her death, we need Hannah Arendt as much as ever. And need to listen carefully to what she taught us about human behaviour.

Who wants politicians deciding who deserves to die?

Earlier this week, the British government announced it had used a drone attack to kill two young British men, Reyaad Khan and Rahul Amin, who’d joined ISIS and were fighting alongside it in Syria.

It was interesting to hear a Steven Marvin, a childhood friend of Amin’s, point out that he was sorry for the family but as for Amin himself, joining ISIS had been “his own decision and he knew what was going to happen eventually… He chose to go over there and, if these things happen, then he’s asked for it, basically… He knew what he was getting into.” Essentially, the young men had it coming to them.

Instrument of execution: In the hands of government?

To be honest, I rather sympathised. ISIS is a particularly obnoxious organisation, cruel, brutal, bigoted and apparently irredeemable. In her comments on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt wrote that she wished the judges had told him:

… just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations – as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world - we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.

Though I’m firmly opposed to the death penalty, I can understand this reasoning: if you break all bonds to other human beings, and therefore feel you can snuff them out at will, as the Nazis did and ISIS does, you forfeit the expectation that anyone else will respect your right to life. The Royal Air Force destroys you in a drone attack? As your friend said, you brought in on yourself.

So far then I find nothing to disagree with in the killings the government carried out.

But then come the second thoughts. And it’s that word ‘government’ that focuses them for me. It was government, and government alone, that took the decision to kill those men. “Government”, like it or not, sounds like some kind of superior abstraction; reducing it to something more concrete, however, it is a collection of politicians and party politicians at that.

The government has made it clear it has no intention of publishing the legal advice it was given, and which it felt justified its action. Nor is it ever likely that we shall see the intelligence information on which it based its judgement that these young men posed an imminent danger to the UK itself, and therefore military action against them was legitimate under UN rules: intelligence stays hidden on the grounds that publishing it would put sources at risk.

So what we’re saying is that a government that has no intention of being held to account, took a decision on its own authority, to kill two men whom it had deemed criminal enough, on evidence it won’t publish, to merit death, though the death penalty is banned in Britain.

That two terrorists, fighting in support of a terrorising code, are dead? I have to admit I’m glad that they’re gone. That government, without so much as a judge’s intervention, can decide who is or isn’t a terrorist? That gives me serious concern. That this same government can then decide to kill the person it has identified as a terrorist, without allowing a challenge to its decision? That makes my blood run cold.

What’s ironic is that Conservatives always claim to be the party of small government. But in reality they’re the party of money, and their commitment to small government is only a commitment to spending less.

Assigning itself the right to kill citizens may not sound objectionable, as long as they’re terrorists. But when it decides that it alone will choose who is or isn’t a terrorist, doesn’t that become more worrying? Certainly, it feels to me like big government. And not particularly good government, at that.

JIhadi John and breaking the human bond

It seems that Westerners have flocked to Syria to fight with ISIS – maybe as many as 3500. But the saddest spectacle of all, certainly for anyone in Britain, was the three girls, a sixteen-year old and two of fifteen, who travelled out there last week. Bright, well-adjusted, educated girls, who have left loving and now distraught families behind them.

Voluntarily travelling towards a miserable –
and probably short – life with ISIS

And now the real identify of Jihadi John has been revealed. He’s Mohammed Emwazi from West London, educated, with a promising future, now turned into someone who likes to behead innocents with a knife. In fact, his victims aren’t merely innocent: in many cases, they fell into ISIS hands because they had travelled to Syria to bring aid and comfort to the victims of the conflict there. They put their comfort and their ease at risk; he made sure they paid with their lives.

The organisation Cage speaks out for radicalised Islamic extremists from Britain. It spoke out for Emwazi, claiming it was his bad treatment at the hands of the authorities that made him what he has become.

Now I can understand that many have been mishandled by the security services, and might well be deeply bitter as a result. But to claim that this somehow justifies taking someone who has done him no harm, cutting his throating and then keeping on cutting till his head comes off, strikes me as pushing the argument just a tad too far. Like the three girls, something in him, and something in ISIS must have seemed attractive enough to make the trip and accept the harsh conditions that awaited them out there.

What is it they find attractive?

It certainly isn’t Islam. There are 44 million Muslims in Europe. 3000 have chosen to fight for ISIS. Only a tiny proportion sees anything in their faith to justify that cause.

Nor is it personal hopes of a better life. Women under ISIS, even the supporters, suffer a life of crushing oppression. Even the (male) fighters are locked into the fate they chose: there’s no way back from Syria for them. Indeed, the most likely outcome they face is death though some may in time be captured and face life imprisonment – genuine life imprisonment, without parole – as the reward for their sacrifices.

So what’s the draw?

It seems to me that it’s only the sense that cruelty represents some kind of strength. The man, or the movement, that is prepared to behead an adversary has shown a commitment to a cause and a determination to pursue it which suggests courage and strength of resolution.

In people who stop far short of these acts of brutality, we admire those qualities: Churchill standing firm in the face of Hitler, though he knew it would require huge sacrifice of life, even among his own people let alone among the enemy; George Washington freezing in Valley Forge with his men dying around him, in order to resist British rule; Chinese nationalists and communists killing and dying in a savage war against Japanese occupation.

It doesn’t take much to extend such admiration further, and find merit in brutality, by thinking only of the resolution it expresses.

Sadly, that isn’t a simple extension. It isn’t just more of the same. Take your admiration of strength that far and you step over a line into savagery. And forfeit the right to be indulged and accepted back.

For the girls, it may not be too late. For Emwazi, there is no hope of return. The families of his victims have called for him to be arrested alive and face trial then imprisonment. It’s not going to happen. He doubtless seeks a martyr’s death; I suspect he’ll find a sordid one – the reality of death in war being that it is far more likely to be sordid than heroic.

And my view of that? The same, whatever Cage may believe, as Hannah Arendt’s, about another man who broke the human bond and ultimately died for it. She believed his judges should have told SS bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann:

…just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations… we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.

Holiday destination, Walhalla

Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, I’m told by my brother who tends to know about these things, was perhaps not really as mad as his reputation suggests.

Ludwig II of Bavaria
Not mad I'm assured. Despite the eyes

This is good news, if only because one feels such a man deserves to be more kindly remembered. Without him, millions of children, and one key man, Walt Disney, would have been deprived of a most enchanting dream. It was Ludwig who built Neuschwanstein, beating Disney to the idea of the perfect fairytale castle, by well over a century.

Neuschwanstein. Looking particularly magical

But I’ve decided where I’m going if I ever I return to Bavaria. 

I’m going to Walhalla. Not the fabled banqueting hall of the Gods and dead heroes of Norse myth. To be frank, I have over the years developed a certain cynicism concerning the existence of mythical places, and growing suspicions that I might in any case not be regarded as entirely fitting the hero mould (I don’t have long blonde whiskers, and I can’t find a horned helmet that goes with my complexion).

No, this is the really existing building called after the Norse original, built by King Ludwig, to honour the most outstanding figures of Germany. I’d never heard of it until I listened to a podcast in the Germany: memories of a nation series made for the BBC by Neil McGregor, curator of the British museum. Now I want to see it.

It seems Ludwig made his wishes entirely clear:

“No condition, not even the female sex, is excluded. Equality exists in Walhalla. There are the busts only of illustrious Germans, executed by German artists or, if there are no contemporary likenesses, their names in bronze on plaques.”

Inside the real Walhalla.
Less carousing than in the mythical one

Ludwig applied a definition of “German” that can only be regarded as generous. As well as quite a few Dutch and Swiss figures, we have the Russian Tsarina Catherine, the English King Egbert of Wessex and even Charlemagne, which must be a delight to French visitors. Still, I suppose it’s enough to extend the definition of “German” a bit, to make it non-exclusive of people who have a link to the German world even if it’s a bit tenuous (Charlemagne, by the way, probably isn’t one of them: it’s likely that he spoke a Germanic language).

In any case, if not even being a member of the female persuasion is enough to bar one, this must be a pretty remarkable place. However, there aren’t many women among those honoured. And there are other gaps.

Not even Luther got in at the start: the super-Catholic Bavarians didn’t want to honour the founding figure of the Reformation. Even if he more or less created the German language single-handed. Eventually, they added him in 1848, just six years after the place opened, and right next to Goethe, so they made amends.

There’s still no one with a Turkish name. And I doubt very much that if we had photographs alongside the busts, we’d see many dark complexions. Ah well, you have to be dead twenty years before you can get in, so maybe in a while the inhabitants will start to be a little more ethnically diverse.

The process may already be under way. One rather important community in German history was excluded from Walhalla for nearly 150 years. The first Jew, Einstein, only appeared among its residents in 1990. Even more amazing is that there was controversy over the inclusion of the next Jew. Most Germans can quote the first few lines of what has practically the status of a folk poem, the Lorelei. Its author, Heinrich Heine even converted to Christianity but, even so, getting him into Walhalla was a matter of anguished debate.

There’s one Jewish woman, Edith Stein, though she’s there as a Catholic martyr and Saint: she was another convert, but that didn’t stop the Nazis killing her. A German Jewish woman who had rather more impact on the world, Hannah Arendt, isn’t there. Nor are quite few Jewish men we might consider reasonably significant, such as Kafka or Freud.

So it must be a curious place. I can’t wait to get there. That old Ludwig: he’s certainly left us a lot to wonder at.

Mad or not.

Quinquiremes and Coasters, Accountants and Officials, Riches and Horrors

There’s something haunting about John Masefield’s poem Cargoes.

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amethysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

A galley, like the quinquireme: elegant, graceful
Just don't think about the slaves who drove the oars

The contrast between the grubby coaster and the graceful quinquireme and galleon is particularly keen, because the coaster was involved in a trade worth many hundreds, or thousands, of times more than either of the other two. And that trade even brought comfort into the homes of modest people, for whom a cheap tin tray would have been a great deal more useful, and affordable, than amethysts or ivory (God knows what they’d have done with apes or peacocks.) 

Spanish Galleon
Stately, majestic, and temptingly full of treasure

But there’s something else in the poem: its movement. 

The quinquireme is carrying sweet-smelling woods, wine, ivory. Precious things.

The galleon is carrying goods of colossal worth. Treasure.

And the coaster is carrying goods that earn a lot. Commodities.

Dirty British Coaster
A romance of its own despite its grubbiness

In 1494, something rather crucial happened in the Italian city of Florence. Luca Pacioli wrote a manual for double-entry bookkeeping. The system had been around a while, but his book is still regarded by many as the true starting point of modern accounting. 

What’s special about double entry?

It reduces commerce, one of the main areas of human endeavour, to nothing more than numbers. Indeed, and this is the special genius of double entry, it reduces it to a single number: zero. If the books have been correctly kept (or alternatively, skilfully cooked), all the sums come to zero: all the credits cancel all the debits, leaving nothing.

In other words, double-entry pierces the magic of commerce – apes and ivory – or even its mysterious riches – topazes and amethysts – and makes it a simple matter of balancing income against expenditure – cheap tin trays.

This evolution took place in parallel with another summed up by the history of the state of Prussia. It has been described as a “state of raw reason”. Why?

Because it had none of the things that your basic patriot seems to feel are crucial for building a nation: no single language, though German dominated; no single religion, with Lutherans and Calvinists alongside Catholics and a good sprinkling of Jews; not even territorial integrity, with bits of land added in scattered, separated places, depending on who the ruler married or inherited from.

What could hold such an artificial nation together?

The two things in which Prussia had mastery: a powerful army and a huge, underpaid, utterly incorruptible and highly effective civil service. They, through pure reason, bound the unseen sinews and bones of the state together and turned it into one of the most powerful in Europe.

Eventually it built, and took the leading role in, the Empire of Germany. And just to underline the weirdness of that event, the Empire wasn’t proclaimed in Germany, as anyone would expect, but in France – in humiliated, defeated France. Not just anywhere in France, either: it was in the Hall of Mirrors at the former Royal Palace at Versailles.

William I of Prussia proclaimed Emperor of Germany at Versailles
With the help of the Prussian Army and the government of Bismarck

A competent and painfully honest civil service has to be a huge advantage for a nation. But it has its downside too. It’s impersonal. It’s cold. It’s passionless. 

It also has no moral judgement. Set it to do a job, and it does it without asking what the job is for. It turns out, ultimately, men like Adolf Eichmann. During World War 2, he was the SS functionary who was responsible for organising the trains to take Jews to the extermination camps.

Adolf Eichmann,the thorough civil servant
At his trial in Israel; inset, in his SS uniform

He did the job with complete dedication. And it wasn’t easy: organising train transport in wartime for up to 12 million people? No simple matter.

What he didn’t do, and this came out at his trial in Tel Aviv, was think about what he was doing. He didn’t ask himself “is it right to send all these people to their deaths?” He did the job, in an entirely dispassionate and efficient way, without wondering about the consequences.

Which is rather like double-entry book-keeping. Brilliant. Simple. Effective.

Soulless.

We have built machines that have turned magic into mechanics, and Masefield’s poem charts that progress. We’ve reaped the benefits. But we’ve also suffered the devastation.

Fascinating ideas, aren’t they? I wish I’d had them. I’ve just embroidered on some thoughts of Max Weber’s, built on with characteristic genius by Hannah Arendt.

See? I’ve stood on the shoulders of giants, like Newton, proving that even ordinary people can do it and not just extraordinary men like him. And it still helps you see a lot further.

Crime and Vice, Tragedy and Farce, Privilege and Rights

My sermon today draws on two readings. 

The first is from an outstanding figure of British, indeed World, Conservatism, Benjamin Disraeli. In his novel Tancred he wrote “what is a crime among the multitude is only a vice among the few.”

By way of contrast, the second reading is from one the founding fathers of modern Communism, Karl Marx. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, he pointed out that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

I found the Disraeli quotation in Hannah Arendt’s excellent The Origins of Totalitarianism. She uses it to illustrate the curious phenomenon of the acceptance of certain, exceptional Jews in aristocratic and wealthy nineteenth-century circles. In such an anti-Semitic environment, being Jewish was a ‘crime’ in the masses, but in rare, privileged individuals such as Disraeli, it was merely a vice – something that added piquancy, a touch of the exotic, and was consequently more to be indulged than reproved.

Benjamin Disraeli: made his way into society
by stressing his status as an outsider

Disraeli seems to have understood this phenomenon, and although baptised, he affected an appearance to emphasise his Jewish origins, his status as an outsider, not least in his style of hair and beard. 

It worked. Doors opened to him which would have been closed to most people, let alone Jews. He became an MP, the power behind one figurehead Prime Minister, and then Prime Minister himself. And he was the friend of the Queen, his fairytale princess to whom he offered the fantasy title of “Empress of India.”

In passing, he became one of the dominant figures of world politics of his period. Not always for good, it has to be said: he was a key figure in what became the scramble for Africa, which did little for the wellbeing of the inhabitants of that stricken continent.

Now roll forward a century and more. It may not be as serious a crime as Jewishness among anti-Semites, but it’s still reprehensible to smash a shop window deliberately. The law rightly takes a dim view of such criminal damage, as a great many young people in England discovered after the riots of August 2011. 

A slightly different attitude was taken towards similar antics one Oxford night quarter of a century earlier. A flowerpot was flung though the window of a restaurant in the city. However, the young men responsible were not poor, unemployed or coloured. They were members of the famous – or notorious – Bullingdon Club, an organisation that brings together the wealthiest students of the university so that they can enjoy glorious evenings of drunkenness, sometimes capped by trashing the restaurant where they take place.

Who was in the group that particular night? One was Boris Johnson, now Mayor of London. Another, though it’s possible he went home before the restaurant window was smashed, was David Cameron, now Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

But these are members of the few. The happy few. What’s a crime among the masses is but a vice for them. Youthful indiscretion that shouldn’t lead to long-term consequences. As it clearly hasn’t for Cameron, current leader of the Conservative Party, or Johnson, his leading rival, or indeed George Osborne, another former member of the Club, current Chancellor of the Exchequer and also a contender for Cameron’s crown.

Which brings me to Marx. 

With Disraeli, the crime to be converted into mere vice, was Jewishness. And the man whose privileges allowed him to do it was a political giant.

Sadly, as Arendt points out, making Jewishness a vice rather than a crime has its dangers, however well it worked for Disraeli. A crime is an action requiring punishment, but vice is inherent in personality and, when it loses its charm, it can only be eradicated. The sense that Jewishness is innate was the grounds for the Nazi programme of extermination in the century following Disraeli’s.

A harrowing tragedy.

Boris Johnson, George Osborne and David Cameron also enjoyed the privilege of having a crime treated as a vice. They’ve inflicted terrible suffering on the most vulnerable among the masses. But not one of them has yet achieved anything more memorable than their buffoonery in the Bullingdon Club.

A grim farce.

The common thread is privilege. Privilege is a gift to the few which, as Arendt explains, denies the rights of the many.

Which makes me wonder why those of us who lack privilege and depend on rights, persist in voting for any of the farcical lot of them.

Denounced by Churchmen, is the latest assault on the poor just another case of the banality of evil?

Soon to be a Cardinal of the Catholic Church, the Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols, has denounced the British government’s policy towards benefits as a ‘disgrace’. He warned that they will leave the poorest and most vulnerable in society facing ‘hunger and destitution.’

Vincent Nichols outside the Catholic Cathedral in Westminster 

Like a great many people, I am deeply distrustful of organised religion. Its leaders, it seems to me, are often on precisely the wrong side of debates, even on the moral questions which should be their principal domain of expertise.

My suspicion is all the deeper because they tend to reason in terms of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, categories that I distrust. After all, no one thinks what they’re doing is evil, however monstrous the act may be: they’re generally convinced that the intention behind the act makes it good. 

So, for instance, no one likes being threatened by foreigners with weapons, as the West’s response to terrorism shows. And yet if Britain manages to avoid being sucked into another adventure in the next few months or so, we may be about to enter the first full year we have enjoyed without military action since the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. In all that time, Britain has fought to defend its own borders only once, in 1940.

How many people, in how many countries, must have felt that Britain’s behaviour was evil? And yet in this country, we’re convinced that British soldiers are heroes and their behaviour exemplary.

However, my uncertainty about the concept of ‘evil’ was shaken when I came across the work of Hannah Arendt. She is one of my favourite thinkers of the twentieth century. I’ve been dipping into her work again since yesterday evening, when I watched the excellent film Hannah Arendt, directed by Margarethe von Trotta with Barbara Sukowa in the title role.

Hannah Arendt: acute insight into the nature of evil

Arendt was the writer who coined the expression ‘banality of evil’, from watching the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Eichmann had been in the SS during the Second World War, and his task had been organising the transports to carry Jews to ghettos, to concentration camps and ultimately to extermination camps.

What appalled Arendt, herself a Jew, was the staggering mediocrity of the man.

“The deeds were monstrous, but the doer ... was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.”

He was a minor cog in a massive bureaucracy, merely doing a difficult job as competently as he could. He didn’t think what he was doing was evil. In fact, Arendt realised, he didn’t think at all.

“... the only specific characteristic one could detect in his past as well as in his behavior during the trial and the preceding police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think.”

That’s a particularly powerful statement if you share Arendt’s world view. For her, man is essentially a thinking being. Stop thinking and you deny your very personhood. Deny yours and how can you recognise anyone else’s?

But Arendt’s key thought comes as a question:

“Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining and reflecting upon whatever happens to come to pass, regardless of specific content and quite independent of results, could this activity be of such a nature that it ‘conditions’ men against evildoing?”

An acute insight into the true nature of evil. And if there’s any characteristic that particularly strikes me in the behaviour of the present British government, it’s precisely thoughtlessness. Apparently unable to imagine the suffering they’re inflicting on others, they impose it with the same indifference to the people affected as Eichmann showed.

So perhaps it’s not inappropriate that a Prince of the Church has denounced the government’s attitude. Good and evil are concepts that he works with daily. And what he has denounced seems precisely to fit the Arendt concept of evil in its harrowing banality.

In addition, we read today that a group of charities have found that there is a ‘culture of fear’ in the benefits world these days.

Hunger. Destitution. Fear. Yep, that sounds like the handiwork of evil. The banality and mediocrity of men like David Cameron, George Osborne or Ian Duncan Smith (the benefits minister) shouldn’t delude us into thinking it’s anything else.

After all, Eichmann was just as banal and mediocre.

Who're you calling crazy?

Adolf Eichmann in all probability never directly did any harm to anyone in his life. An inoffensive middle-ranking bureaucrat, he took on a challenging task in logistics, arranging the transport of up to 12 million people over long distances in wartime. His testimony at his trial in Jerusalem in 1961 suggests that it was a challenge whose scale he fully appreciated and in which his achievements gave him some pride.

None of this, in itself, was evil. The evil lay in the purpose of the work – the attempted elimination of the entire Jewish population of Europe, ultimately half achieved by Eichmann’s employers, the Nazi SS.

Eichmann was executed for his part in that crime. Hannah Arendt, who isn’t exactly obscure but deserves to be far better known if only for the acuteness of her insight, produced an astonishing chronicle of his trial. She ends her book with the words she wished his judges might have addressed to Eichmann: ‘... just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations – as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world – we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to share the world with you. That is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.’

Hannah Arendt: extraordinarily acute insight

I don’t think any argument could ever persuade me out of my inveterate opposition to the death penalty, but those words come as close as any might.

Nowhere in Arendt’s book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, does she claim that Eichmann was a madman or a monster. On the contrary, she portrays him throughout as an ordinary little man, doing what he perceives to be his duty under difficult circumstances.

Eichmann was by no means alone in that: many millions did the same, often in pursuit of ends that few of us would regard as war crimes. During the Second World War, tens of thousands of ordinary young men, many of whom went on to become model husbands and fathers, teachers and businessmen, or perhaps adulterers and cheats and opportunists – in short men of every type and attitude – flew planes over German cities and dropped high explosive and, worse still, incendiary bombs on them. None or next to none of them wanted to cause children to burn screaming to their deaths, but they did it, and they did it with great courage (among British aircrew alone, more than two out of five were killed in the war) and they did it because they felt it was their duty.

Some would argue that what they did was a war crime, and I can understand the argument. All I can say is that I’m not persuaded by it; that my father, though to his lasting relief he was never involved in the bombing of cities, certainly flew bombers and on more than one occasion bombed men; and that had I been alive at the time, I have little doubt that like my father and my father’s father, I would have served in that war in some capacity or another. If such men were war criminals, then I can only accept that I would have been their accomplice, and only a historical accident, the timing of my birth, allows me to escape that complicity.

At any rate, I see nothing in those men or indeed in myself that would make me feel that any of us can sensibly be regarded as mad or monsters.

Now fast forward to 22 July 2011. Anders Behring Breivik has set off a bomb in Oslo and is now killing young people as fast as he can get to them on the island of Utoeya. A good friend of mine refers to him as ‘the beast’. Simon Jenkins, writing in The Guardian tells us ‘...the killings were an act of random madness.’ Today's Sun manages to describe Breivik as both a ‘mad gunman’ and a ‘neo-Nazi monster’ within the space of a few lines.

Well, that’s that, then. Case closed and compartmentalised. We can file Breivik away under ‘monster’ or ‘psychopath’ and breathe a sigh of relief. None of us is like him, so this is a one-off. OK, another in a long series of one-offs, but still just another one-off.

Or is it? Perhaps Breivik, like Eichmann, is neither mad nor a monster. Perhaps he's another ordinary human being who has allowed himself to be duped by some deeply, unconscionably bad ideas, and unlike others who share those ideas, been prepared to take extreme action in their pursuit. No doubt out of a sense of duty. But to label him a ‘lunatic’ firstly does a disservice to the millions suffering from genuine mental disorder, the vast majority of whom are a threat to no-one, and secondly dodges the issue of the ideas that inspired Breivik, which are still around and still capable of inspiring heinous crimes.

If we accept that such ideas can drive even ordinary people – not monsters, not ‘lunatics’ – into doing utterly monstrous things, then we might perhaps be a lot warier about them. We might see that there’s nothing anodyne about David Cameron denouncing multiculturalism, about the Swiss banning minarets, about the French government banning the Moslem veil. Ordinary people can be seduced by that kind of vicious idea into doing extraordinary things. They decide they don’t need to share the earth with certain others, and in mercifully rare cases they have the determination and the means to take a gun and act on their vicious beliefs.

Let’s leave the conclusion to Hannah Arendt  – who could do it better?  Eichmann’s last words were ‘Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. I shall not forget them.’ ‘I shall not forget them’? He was about to die. As Arendt points out, ‘In the face of death, he had found the cliché used in funeral oratory. Under the gallows, his memory played him the last trick; he was “elated” and he forgot that this was his own funeral.’

And then comes her chilling conclusion, ending with the words that are her great contribution to all such debates: ‘It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that his long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.’

The banality of evil. Evil isn’t extraordinary. It isn’t special. It’s banal, it’s all around, it’s in us all.

Probably best not to lose sight of that fact. It might not be smart simply to consign evil to some convenient box labelled ‘monstrosity’ or ‘insanity’. After all, surely we can all think of occasions when humanity has done that before, and evil in all its banality just gets out and comes back to bite us again.