Reader Danielm80 pointed out this important essay, which reader Bluejay suggests needs its own post… and I agree. It might seem at first to be out of the wheelhouse of a film-criticism site, even one at which the critic — that is, yours truly — often discusses film in the larger cultural and political context. But it isn’t. Not least because I have been floored by the utter lack of empathy, compassion, and simple, basic human kindness and decency that I have been seeing the comments here lately. The shit that I have been putting up with for years as a critic who is feminist and progressive has gotten much worse, because our society has gotten so much meaner and coarser in recent years.
So: Mike Jones at Quora responded to this question:
When you watch a stadium filled with white people chanting “Send her back!” about a US Congresswomen and our President silently endorses it, what comes up for you?
I urge you to read his entire response, which is thoughtful and incisive. But here’s a taste. He begins by saying, “Honestly? This.” And by this he means:
And then he goes on:
This photo was taken sometime between May and December 1944. These people are enjoying a bit of “down time” before going back to work. At Auschwitz.
Not because I think what we’re doing is like what the Nazis were doing in 1944, but because this looks so normal. These people didn’t think of themselves as “evil,” any more than the people chanting at the Trump rally do.
Here’s the point: the Holocaust didn’t drop out of a clear blue sky in 1941. The concentration camps had been operating since 1933.
From there, he offers a brief history of the camps and the very slow ramping up that was required to go from, “Oh, these places aren’t so bad, certainly not anywhere anyone was intended to die in” to the intentional death factories they eventually became. It took time for people to adjust to each incremental step along the way. It was a slow eroding of human dignity… on the part of those who implemented the Holocaust.
[T]he Nazis were not all Eichmann and Mengele. Their horror was possible because of the many, many people who went along with what they were doing or at least were willing to look the other way. And it didn’t start with Chelmno and Sobibor. It started with people being willing to vote for Nazis out of fear of the communists and responding to their appeals to “true Germans.”
Jones then discusses some of the slow dehumanization that those working at the current US border camps are doing to themselves in order to survive their own crimes, as well as the excuses for the existence of the camps in the first place. But
[T]hose [people and excuses] are all justifying inhuman behavior. I’m not saying the people running the camps or the people in the government are Nazis; every historical moment is different. But they’re using many of the same tools the Nazis used. And the same tools are being used against the Uighur in China. And the Rohingya in Myanmar.
Please do read the whole thing… and think about what Jones has written.
Alas, I fear the people that need to see that essay are the least likely to see it, or — if given to them — to accept its criticism. And so those angry about this tribal acceptance of inhumanity only get angrier. What does the future hold?
It’s not just the die-hard Trump supporters who need to see that essay. It’s ALL OF US. All of us who are appalled at the dehumanizing being done in our name, but not QUITE appalled enough to shake up our own lives to devote significantly more time and effort to oppose it. All of us who shake our heads at the headlines, and then tweet and post outraged comments and chip in a couple of bucks to the ACLU and call it a day. All of us who wring our hands and ask “What does the future hold?” without perhaps asking the next question: “What can *I* do, in my family, my neighborhood, my city, my state, to fight for the future I want?” We aren’t doing nearly enough; we need to do more. Myself included.
It’s been said many times before, but it gets truer by the day: If we’ve ever wondered how we would have acted or failed to act during the times when the shadow of Nazism and fascism was growing, now we know, because that shadow is once again here. And if you aren’t satisfied with what you’ve done, then the question has to be: What are you going to do about it?
When pondering the holocausts that could happen, and are happening, I tend to soften the visions of horror by mentally recasting myself as Lord Humungus, Ruler of the Wasteland, from Mad Max 2, a facetious bit of fingers-in-ears self-distraction, because actually confronting the notion that humanity’s very worst atrocities may lie in our future hasn’t properly punctured my bubble. Articles like this are so important to demolish the destructive ignorant assumption that “it can’t happen here” and to contextualise the atrocities of the past, to counter the clangheads dismissing comparisons to Nazis. It reminded me of a recent YouTube essay on a similar theme:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8UzmLsXGRU
Sometimes I wonder about Mike, detached from reality.
In what way?
I really recommend the documentary show I saw (maybe on History Channel or the Military Channel before it was renamed) with the very dramatic title “Nazi Scrapbooks from Hell” that was about the two Auschwitz photo albums, one of which included the photo you have here, as well as many other photos of those who worked at the camp and seemed to enjoy their time there. The other photo album showed those who were the victims.
Interestingly enough, they were connected by a few days–the Nazi who had the first album had started his posting at Auschwitz the day before the second album’s photos were taken. In fact, the Nazi had gotten a light sentence because no one could ever put him on the platform where they did the selection of who worked and who was gassed, but in investigating the photos from the second album, they think that they might have placed him there (his back was always to the camera, but his build and stance fit other pics from his own photo album).
The second album traced the entire progress of the camp victims, from the time they got off the trains on the platform, through selection, then onto the gas chambers where they were forced to wait since the Hungarian transports were so full. The photographers only missed what happened next. (The story of how the album was found is one of the most amazing coincidences in WWII history–Lily Jacob had been on that transport that was photographed, was send to work, then forced a death march 400 miles north when the Russians moved in, then liberated by the Allies at a camp near the ocean. When she was recovering in the officers’ quarters that had been converted into an infirmary post liberation, she woke up and looked around her room for a blanket, and found the album in a drawer. She saw her hometown’s rabbi on the first page, then found her family and friends in the rest of the album, and even a photo of her after she had been dressed in the camp uniform and had her head shaved.)