Let me just start by saying that the phrase, "Banality of Evil," the Thracian maid's well wrought phrase is over used and devoid of the power it once had. It also seems to be doing a lot of theoretical work for people. For Hannah, the phrase was rooted in a fundamental misalignment of the Kantian moral compass. There was no Kantian in Nazi Germany. Or, and perhaps more frightening, they were all Kantians and what was normal was abnormal everywhere else.
All that is said only to say this--I saw the banality of evil tonight.
I went to a screening of The Wannsee Conference. We all know that they decided on the course of action, or the final solution, to the Jewish Question/ Problem. The film watched was a TV documentary called Wanseekonferenz . It was filmed in the 1980s and is only 85 minutes long--the same about of time it required to seal the fate of millions of Jews.
Well in my university we watched the film. Everyone was pretty attentive it seemed. But afterwards, instead of silence, after watching this banal movie in which the characters damned millions of people, who sought to exterminate a race not only from the face of this earth but from our memory as well--who tortured and gassed and shot women and children along with the men, with smug gloating and murderous calm. With managerial and bureaucratic efficiency, these people dispatched--murdered millions. Millions. I cannot repeat this number enough. I cannot even understand what a million really is. Millions of people. People. With this calm and "another day at the office" air.
Then the entire audience got up and got pizza and coke. After watching a film in which a horror unfolded, like which the world has never seen and hopefully will never see again, they got up and got food and drink. Behind the boring veneer of the movie, bubbled the image of emaciated people in concentration camps, of partially decomposing bodies, of experimentation--yes those were images not shown, but they were underneath the technological dispatch of depicted in the film. And yet they had no problem getting food. Just like the persons at that conference, they were able to deal with the "problem" have a cognac, smoke a cigarette and go about, business as usual.
Then some people go on to ask questions about the bias of the film--what that the nazis were not evil?
I think people missed it. The film was boring. But the climax was a decision on exterminating, annihilating an entire race and how they planned to do it. The next question was who got the Zyklon-B and who got the faulty CO trucks.
And yet we still think that we can just toss around food and drink and critique. I feel like we are so jaded and divorced from the real impact of these kinds of films, of our education and perhaps our humanity.
I'll end with a line from Plato which I have used previously, but I think it is important. Why do we look?
“Well, I said, there is a story, that is Leontius, the son of Aglaion, coming up one day from Piræus, under the north wall on the outside, observed some dead bodies lying on the ground at the place of execution. He felt a desire to see them, and also a dread and abhorrence of them; for a time he struggled and covered his eyes, but at length the desire got the better of him; and forcing them open, he ran up to the dead bodies, saying, Look, ye wretches, take your fill of the fair sight” Plato Republic 440a book 4
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2 comments:
Je me permets de commenter, je le fais vraiment très rarement sur ton blog.
Tout d'abord, un mot (j'ai écrit par inadvertance "mort", étrange non?) sur l'indifférence. Je crois que cette indifférence est due partiellement au fait que nous n'arrêtons pas d'évoquer ce génocide. Ca peut paraître insensé mais cette répétition amène à désensibiliser les personnes.Tu entendras certains dire que c'est toujours la même rengaine. Et puis, cette indifférence est aussi due au simple fait que nous, hommes modernes, qui n'avons pas rien connu de tout cela, et pour qui tout cela ne représente en fait qu'une mise en scène de l'horreur à laquelle malheureusement nous sommes confrontés chaque jour et qui nous désensibilise toujours un petit peu plus, je disais, nous, hommes modernes, nous nous pensons infiniment plus supérieurs que ceux du passé, certains de ne pouvoir retomber dans les mêmes erreurs.
Or nous nous trompons. C'est justement la désensibilisation de l'horreur qui nous amène à commettre d'énormes erreurs. Je te parlais de cette émission de télé-réalité où il s'agissait d'envoyer des secousses électriques à un homme, parfaitement conscients que cela pouvait entraîner la mort. Voilà, une preuve moderne de ce que nous, hommes contemporains, sommes capables de faire à nos semblables. Cela me rappelle d'ailleurs, Se questo è un uomo de Primo Levi, dans laquelle on voit très rarement les SS. On ne les voit en fait qu'à deux reprises dans l'oeuvre, le reste du temps le pouvoir est délégué à d'autres juifs. L'horreur est aussi là, enlever la dernière parcelle d'humanité mettant les uns contre les autres. La violence que l'on renferme est préoccupante et ce qui est encore plus préoccupant, c'est que, par péché d'orgueil, nous nous éloignons de notre passé, n'admettant pas nos faiblesses.
Les films sur les génocides ont cette aura qu'avaient au 18ème et 19ème siècles les pièces de théâtre et l'opéra. Ce genre de films met en scène la tragédie, une tragédie qui provoque chez le spectateur aussi bien crainte, crainte que cela ne se reproduise, que pitié, pour les victimes, nous amènant à une véritable catharsis au travers de laquelle nous nous purifions. A la fin du film, une fois purifiés, nous nous rassurons tous en nous disant "cela fait parti du passé. Cela n'arrivera plus" et nous dormons en paix sur nos deux oreilles. Sauf qu'il ne s'agit pas de fiction, il s'agit de la réalité. Se dire que cela ne se reproduira plus, c'est nier l'essence même de l'être humain qui est fait de violence.(cf. Pascoli qui évoque à merveille dans sa poésie cette dualité de l'être humain ou encore les sermons de Maître Eckhart édifiant sur le thème)
Le discours peut paraître confus et peut-être répétitif. Je m'en excuse.
You bring up a lot of very good points. We are desensitized to this kind of dialog. We get inundated with the numbers, compartmentalize it, we turn it into science. We turn it into percents. We don't want to see the real damning fact-- these are people. Human beings are being killed and brutaly murdered, just like us in every way.
The thing about the Nazis is that they were masters of desensitizing an issue. They turned it into bureaucracy, just as the news nowadays seems to. But beyond this, they fviewed what they were doing as seizing on being, as something necessary to living in this world. That is scary.
And I think you are also right in saying that movies and films make these issues someone more tangible but further away from us at the same time. I can watch a movie on the holocaust or a documentary on Darfur and say "wow I felt it." But what did I feel? I did not smell the bodies burning and decomposing, I did not smell the excrement, I did not look into the eyes of a survivor, who seems barely a human--the light slowly disappearing. What did I see? I saw a movie. We start to conflate these things with experience. IT is horrible. It is callous. It is dangerous.
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