The Thin Line Between "Us" and "Them"

A couple of years ago I was discussing the horrors of World War II with a friend, and I commented that as a child the events of WWII had seemed like part of the distant past, but that as I grew older they seemed frighteningly proximate. She responded that they still seemed like ancient history to her. And I think a lot of people continue to view WWII that way - as something that happened "a long time ago" and, figuratively speaking, "in a galaxy far, far away".

More recently, I had the opportunity to discuss the atrocities of the Holocaust with somebody a few years younger than me, who had just seen the Dustin Hoffman film, "Marathon Man". In that film, Lord Laurence Olivier played Dr. Christian Szell, a sadistic Nazi war criminal presumably inspired by Dr. Mengele. Ensuing discussing revealed that over the course of twelve years of public education and four years of college, the Holocaust had never entered into her school curriculum, save as an abstraction.

Today in the Washington Post, Anne Applebaum represents my view of human nature. After detailing the great effort some make to claim that cultures like pre-WWII Germany are somehow so different from our own that they created horrors that "could never happen here" she observes the brutal truth:

The argument that torture or mass murder could have happened only in a particular culture has deep appeal: No wonder it has been made so many times, about so many cultures. During any conversation about the Soviet Union, someone will eventually claim that Soviet totalitarianism derived from ancient Russian traditions of czar-worship. Many people also assume, even if they don't say so, that the mass slaughter in Rwanda would not have happened in a less primitive, more "civilized" place.

And yet -- the Soviet Union exported its concentration camps to places as un-Russian as Romania and North Korea. The Nazis found allies across Europe, in France and Holland as well as Lithuania and Ukraine. Explaining the Rwandan massacres by pointing to "primitive" Rwandan culture doesn't explain the Cambodian massacres, which took place in a very ancient, very different Buddhist society. Surveying the history of the 20th century, it's clear that any culture is capable of terrible atrocities, given the right conditions.

As some have pointed out, the American Indian didn't fare particularly well in early North America, both Canada and the United States were all-too-willing to round up and intern men, women and children of Japanese descent (but not of German descent) during WWII, and prior to the Civil Rights era many Americans suffered through a dark period of Jim Crow laws, segregation and lynchings. While Appelbaum correctly notes that offenses such as the torture at Abu Ghraib (or, although not mentioned in her column, the internment of the Japanese) are of a different order of magnitude than the crimes of Nazi Germany, "their actions do prove, if further proof were needed, that no culture is incapable of treating its enemies as subhuman."

There is an enormous comfort in thinking "it can't happen here", whether because of better social safety mechanisms or because "'we' aren't like 'them'". But we know that in individual cases, people still do commit unspeakable atrocities, people still do attack or lynch other people for their race or sexuality (while in some cases others applaud the murder), and the Iraq incident demonstrates that even within the context of an authoritarian command structure ostensibly replete with checks and balances to prevent this type of misconduct, some Americans not only find it amusing to torment and abuse prisoners, they take pictures as souvenirs. We also know that it is human nature to let other people fight the system, to turn a blind eye toward government excesses or abuses (especially when the subject of the overreaching conduct can be compartmentalized as "one of them"), and to protest primarily in retrospect - "If only we had known", or "What could one person have done?"

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