I read an article in a magazine recently. It was on the plight of the polish Jews in the Second World War during the German occupation of Poland. Jews were of course being systematically eliminated across Nazi Germany and German occupied lands. Similar exterminations were unfolding in Poland. In Poland, the Germans had drafted Polish citizens into a ‘citizen’s militia’. This militia was taking active part in the exterminations. So it was ordinary Polish citizens playing an active part in eliminating their fellow citizens. They would apparently break into Jewish homes during the night. They would take them out into the woods and simply shoot them. They would not discriminate either basis age or gender. They would kill the old and the infirm and the children too. Some of them even considered killing children an “act of kindness”, particularly those who had lost their parents to said exterminations. This, of course, is common knowledge.
The article’s focus was something else. It was on the ‘ordinariness’ of the constitution of this citizen militia. The members of the said militia were ‘average joes’. Ordinary people. Some holding blue collar and some holding white collar jobs. Under normal circumstances you would not have mistaken them for such cold blooded killers. A lot of them would have been good neighbors and helpful human beings. Some of them were even friends with the very Jews they were helping kill. This struck me. The ordinariness. The sheer capacity for evil that somehow emerged under a certain set of circumstances. One would not have mistaken these people to be bad or evil before. Yet here they were. Murdering in cold blood. They were not paid killers either. Around 20% of them apparently were distressed the first time they did this. But a lot of them, 80%, continued indulging in this. They went on killing. They continued to take orders. They continued to obey authority towards these ends. I was struck by this as much as I was struck by the extent of hatred which is needed to accomplish this. Did they hate the Jews so much? Even gentile citizens who were not part of the killings, knew something like this was going on. Yet, across Nazi Germany, everyone seems to have commiserated with the killings. It was almost like a conspiracy of silence. Were all of them so badly affected by the Jews, that they actively condoned this?
I am hard pressed for an explanation. But upon further reflection, it occurs to me that such behavior is not out of the ordinary. It occurs time and again. The Stanford Prison experiment, for instance, shows us both people’s capacity to submit to authority as also their ability to inflict pain on their fellows. People don’t necessarily either actively resist or actively speak up against evil.
Closer home, take the 2002 riots for example. Again ordinary citizens, transformed. Extracting an illusory ‘revenge’. Protecting a false ‘ideal’. And of course, egged on by self-serving and irresponsible leaders. One may not agree with the parallels being drawn. What happened in Germany was genocide. They were systematic. These were just riots. Spontaneous. I would submit that this is just semantics. And that the similarities dwarf the differences. Here too we have stories of ordinary citizens, ‘good people’ otherwise, participating actively in the riots. No one would have considered them killers. Yet they were. And many who didn’t participate actively, condoned the killings, either passively by their silence or actively, later by their votes. Hell, around 34% of the active voting population of the country-twice.Of course, we voted for different things. Most would say they voted for development. But in full knowledge of what transpired.
It is quite scary actually. That when it comes right down to it, our capacity to question and stand up to evil is questionable. That we may fail ourselves at the critical moment. History seems to be full of such examples. We either become silent or we become complicit. Or we simply do not care. When it comes right down to it, we become one with the evil – for personal gains, out of an inability to question or via apathy. In that sense, it looks like a powder keg we are all sitting on. The right circumstances and it will always blow up. This is all the more scary considering how just about everything is communalized in our country these days. Things are either green or orange.
In Nazi Germany, there was a long campaign of hatred and misinformation against the Jews. However, this misinformation also fell on a fertile ground of bigotry that always existed. Together, this is what perhaps produced the circumstances for the subsequent genocide. We have something similar playing out in our country today. Of course the ruling dispensation here is nowhere as explicit in their hatred as the Nazis were. At least the top echelons are not. They have suitably modified this playbook for the pseudo democratic milieu we inhabit. The ruling dispensation gives us a masterclass on how to press democracy into the services of dictatorship. But that aside, what is really striking is how bigotry is becoming mainstream. I am discovering attitudes in people that I had not seen a few years back. Most of us seem to be ‘casually bigoted’. I have known of people – friends, relatives who used to justify the 2002 riots. I always thought they were nuts. And used to think that, thankfully, there are not many of them. However, the ranks of these people seem to be swelling. Hatred and bigotry are mainstream. They are fashionable.
There is a vehement sense of grievance. A palpable, passionate hatred. A sense that certain ‘wrongs’ need to be righted. The sense of the ‘other’ strengthens. Facts don’t seem to matter. Reality be damned.
And as things get worse, these attitudes only harden. Reason slowly ceases to exist. Facts are actively ignored. And the vicious cycle repeats.
It is quite scary. I have a feeling it is only going to get worse.
REALLY RANDOM RAMBLINGS 