I saw a man of simple origins, simply educated, but
with a great sneering pride, deferential but resentful,
not liking himself for what he was doing. He was the
kind of man who, without political doctrine, only with
resentments, had made the Iranian revolution.
(V.S. Naipaul, Among The Believers, An Islamic Journey)
A few years ago, I was travelling on an urban metro train. I was minding my own business, sitting in my seat and reading a newspaper. Unexpectedly, the man sitting opposite me leant forwards and flicked the back of my newspaper with his finger. I peered over the top of my newspaper, but he was sitting back in his seat and pretending that nothing had happened. I carried on reading, and then he leant forwards and flicked the back of my newspaper again, so I asked him what he wanted. He said that he expected that I thought myself pretty clever, and then he started insulting me. It quite quickly became apparent that this was going to get nasty. People sitting next to me started to move away. I had the presence of mind to spot out of the corner of my eye the handle for the emergency brake, so I got up and stood by it. He followed, and with his face six inches from mine, his eyes flared and the veins on his temples throbbing, he hissed insults in my face to try to start a fight. I just stared him down until the train pulled into the next station, and then I pulled the emergency brake. Presumably, he realised that the train crew and the police were on their way, so he spat his last insults in my face and left.
In the chapter The Evolution of Emotion I described how humiliation and the revenge response had origins in evolution by natural selection. Uncorrupted, humiliation results from a threat to biological fitness, and the revenge response is directed at the threat. The genes that drive the revenge response were selected because they neutralise threats to biological fitness. The revenge response is biased towards males in humans because we are a polygynous species, which means that strong males tend to father children with more than one female and as a result, some weak males have no offspring. Males without a revenge response permit their biological fitness to be threatened and suppressed, and so they have no offspring and their genes are not selected. Males with a strong revenge response have more offspring, and so their genes gradually propagate throughout the population.
What I want to explore in this chapter is the perversion of this very basic element of our evolved emotional responses. I will explore ritual humiliation among humans. Humans know, without needing to be told, that to humiliate another human you need to attack their biological fitness. A simple way to do this to a man is to denigrate his virility.
My experience on the train probably lasted no longer than two minutes, and never got to the level of physical violence; but for some time after that, I had frequent fantasies of performing extreme violence on a man – not that man in particular, but some generic random man that existed in my imagination. I just wanted to slam my boot into his face. Good to know that my evolutionary response is still working – after a fashion! But, if my response to a twominute verbal harangue was weeks of violent fantasies, what would have been my response if it had become physical, or had lasted two hours, or two decades?
Once I had stopped thinking about myself, I started thinking about my would-be assailant. Clearly, something had made him angry. Trust me! I saw it very close up. Equally clearly, the something that had made him angry wasn’t me. And then I started wondering, not what makes a man angry (which isn’t so difficult to imagine), but what makes a man’s anger misdirected?
SCENARIO: THE INVENTION OF HUMILIATION
The Man lives in a world where everybody has a home and enough to eat. But the Man’s People are unhappy. The People complain at every possible opportunity: “It wasn’t like this before we lost the Homeland.”
The People gather often. The elders talk at length about the beauty of the fields and orchards in the Homeland. They sing songs about the lakes and mountains, and read poems about the harmony of when the People lived there. When they meet for these gatherings, it brings them together. It is their identity: they belong not just to each other, but to the Homeland. And when they sing and remember, their eyes glow and they clasp one another’s hands. As they look from one to another, they experience a feeling – an awakening that is like a religion.
The People talk constantly of the struggle of their ancestors when they were expelled from the Homeland. They believe that they feel the pain of their ancestors in their struggle. However, it isn’t possible to invoke mental images of what suffering feels like, so they think of behavioural images of their ancestors emaciated and dying in their flight to exile. If the People concentrate on these mental images hard enough, eventually it causes a feeling; a dull ache that is not a recollection of their ancestors suffering, but is a compassionate response caused by forced recollection. But how can they know the difference? To the People, the suffering of their ancestors is continued generation after generation. They have no basis for knowing that their feeling is not the feeling of their ancestors, but something they themselves have created through collective imagination.
The Man’s world also has fields and orchards. Beyond these are lakes and mountains. But this is not the Homeland. Sometimes, the Man thinks that his world is not a bad place at all. But only once had he spoken out loud of the beauty of their new world, and the reaction of the others had taught him that he should never do this again. The People were shocked. The elders’ eyes had glowered, and they bore down on him forcefully. How dare he disrespect the injustice that had been done to the People! If he did not want to be a part of the fight for the People’s justice and the return to the Homeland, then he should leave the People and go his own way. The suffering of the People must never be forgotten. People who did not feel the suffering of the ancestors were not of the People.
The Man often remembers his grandfather. His grandfather had been one of the original generation that went into exile. The Man remembers his grandfather’s stories. He had sat with him for hours listening to his descriptions of their farm and their village until he felt that he knew it better than where he lived now. He can picture it in his head, despite the fact that he has never seen it. But the Man’s grandfather was different to the elders of today. His grandfather had the humility of one who had suffered himself. His grandfather was grateful that he had survived; that he had come to the new land, and that his children and grandchildren were safe. Part of his grandfather’s acceptance of the new land was that he knew that the Homeland had been destroyed by war and that the People couldn’t live there anymore. His grandfather had fought, and he had used up the anger that was within him.
The elders of today have not suffered, and therefore have no humility. They have not fought, and therefore have not used up their anger. They are the next generation, and they cannot see that their efforts to maintain the culture of the People is manufacturing anger in a place where there is no natural cause. The injustice of which they constantly speak is not an injustice that has occurred to them. But ritualising it makes it feel as though it’s theirs. Their unhappiness in the new land is acted out to create their anger. They need to manufacture their anger to keep their identity alive. The people who had forced their ancestors to flee are no longer alive, so they have no object for their anger.
Their belief in their right to their Homeland is irrefutable. An injustice needs to be righted. It does not matter that nobody is alive who has perpetrated that injustice, and none of the victims of that injustice are alive. They manufacture the feelings of despair through ritualised emotional behaviour. This makes them victims of the injustice also; they create their own victimhood by acting it out to the point where they believe they themselves have suffered it. Happiness can only be achieved in the Homeland, despite the fact that living there is not possible. But the constant dream of living there fuels their sense of loss and creates their anger. This anger is targetless because the perpetrators are all dead, so it is redirected – to the new land; to the people who now live in the Homeland; to history; to people that no longer exist; to people who might never have existed; to hypothetical evil that is a construct of their own imagining.
The dominant source for this Scenario is Brian G. Williams, The Crimean Tartars.248 Williams quotes numerous Crimean Tartars discussing their concept of homeland and their concept of national identity following their exile by Stalin to the Soviet Far East. Importantly, he quotes separately both the first and second generation of exiled people. In particular, the first generation of exiled people were relatively humble and philosophical about their situation but the second generation were much more angry and radicalised. We can also see this generational shift among Tibetans, where the generation born since the Chinese takeover and the flight of the Dalai Lama are much more prone to violent resistance than their parents.
SCENARIO: THE DENIAL OF HUMILIATION
Exhausted, the recruit plunges into the mud and scurries on his elbows under barbed wire. He is nearing the limits of his endurance, but he is nowhere near the end. The cold drizzle has taken away all the feeling in his feet and hands, and fatigue burns his muscles. But he cannot admit failure by stopping. His goal is to succeed, to belong with his colleagues as a member of the army brotherhood. The boot camp sergeant runs along the path beside the course screaming abuse at him, that he is fat, lazy and worthless.
The army tells him that endless assault courses are necessary to make him tough. But that is not the real reason.
Every morning, he is woken at 5am. He spends an hour polishing his boots and the buttons on his parade uniform. He makes his bed in the precise proscribed manner, and lays out his kit exactly as he is supposed to. On the parade ground, he is told to stand stiffly upright with his chest forced out. He is told to hold his face still and expressionless with his jaw locked with a determined jut. He does as he is told – stands there proud and strong. And then comes more abuse, that he is a mess, that he is sloppy. Despite being treated like an idiot, he shows the sergeant absurdly exaggerated respect. Every time he is abused by him, he shouts “Sir, yes Sir!” When his training is all over, he is told that he should be proud of what he has achieved, that what he has done is something great that will live with him for the rest of his life.
The army tells him that the parade drill is necessary to teach him discipline. But that is not the real reason.
How can a man know that he is humiliated if he suppresses the behaviour that would naturally be his response?
The process of infantry training is purposely a ritual humiliation: forced marches to the point of exhaustion; absurd muddy obstacle courses; screamed abuse for trivial misdemeanours; pointless work such as polishing what is already clean; having all power to act as an independent agent taken away from you; and finally having to pay undeserved respect to your abuser. However, it is essential that the deliberate humiliation is concealed from the recruit. The concealment occurs by forcing him to act, not as if he is humiliated, but as if he is proud. His humiliation is therefore unconscious. How can he have a concept of having been humiliated if his own behavioural response indicates the opposite?
Humiliation has an evolutionary origin, and its violent response is also an evolved response. But the humiliation of military training must be unconscious because otherwise the response would be directed against the humiliator. The point is that the violent response to humiliation is canned, put in a sealed receptacle to be released on cue. This is how the army makes a normal man a killer. A soldier is a man with intentionally stored revenge. It doesn’t matter that the person he kills was not the person who humiliated him. The soldier doesn’t know that he has been humiliated because that fact has been concealed from him, but the response is still there. To release this response, all that is required is that you mythologise the person he is to kill as the “Enemy”. His emotional makeup wires him to respond violently when humiliated, and direct his response at the threat to his fitness. The origin of the threat must be concealed, so that the threat can be reinvented.
A man whose behaviour has been forcibly manipulated in this way is programmed to kill.
THE ORIGIN OF MAN’S INHUMANITY
In the opening section of this chapter, I asked the question: How can a man’s anger be misdirected? In other words, if we look at the evolutionary origins of humiliation and revenge, how is it the process in humans can become so corrupted? The previous two Scenarios explain that humans (because they can tactically manipulate their expression of emotion) can distort the revenge response but may not realise that they are doing this. On the one hand, we can invent humiliation – perhaps to reinforce a national or group identity – and on the other hand, we can deny humiliation. Let us put the two prior Scenarios into the context of the Scenarios of Part I.
The Invention of Humiliation is an example of Scenario D. When a person lives in an environment where people affect an emotional state (humiliation), they form beliefs that they experience the emotion even though the feeling that would normally be associated with that emotion is absent. However, in this case it comes with a strange twist. The normal flow of things is that we have incentives to affect positive emotions and suppress negative ones. This Scenario presents the reversal of the normal flow. The People maintain their sense of identity by the affectation of undesirable emotions. They do this, despite the fact that they live in an environment where they have everything they need to thrive.
The Denial of Humiliation is an adaptation of Scenario B: When a person suppresses the behaviour associated with their own emotional state, they cannot know that they experience that emotion. In Scenario B, I portrayed a man who suppresses the behaviour of anger and, once this becomes habitual, he loses the ability to know that he is angry. Not knowing that you are angry logically means that you are unable to identify the cause of your anger. In the chapter The Myth of the Ghost in a Coma I explained that the unconscious mind should be seen as the collection of all emotional states where the concept is absent. We have the word for the emotion, but the behaviour associated with that emotional state has been suppressed in certain circumstances and therefore the connection with the feeling is missing because the behaviour would be the only visible means of making the connection. The anger felt by the man in Scenario B is unconscious because he suppresses the behaviour, and therefore cannot identify it in himself. He does not ask himself where it comes from because he does not know it exists. Because he does not know that it exists he cannot cure it, and goes through life with the risk of the unconscious anger being triggered by circumstances where he is not used to suppressing it.
Let us apply exactly the same concept to humiliation and the behaviour that would normally result from it. Behaviour, in the sense in which I use the word in this book, means the behaviour that is immediately caused by the feeling. In the case of humiliation, this involves cowering, a look of defeat, expressions of subordination, inability to look your humiliator in the eye, etc. However, there is also another response – the need for revenge. This can be one of the most powerful and enduring yearnings in humankind. Consider what happens when the humiliated person suppresses the behaviour that immediately follows humiliation. When this is done systematically until it becomes habit, the person loses the ability to know that he is humiliated. Humiliation is unconscious. A disconnect arises and so the person detaches from the natural target for revenge, which is the threat to biological fitness. His yearning for revenge does not attach to the appropriate target of revenge.
This is how a soldier in every professional army in the world is made into a killer; it is the same way a soldier has been trained for centuries: you humiliate him, and then force him to suppress the behavioural response. You give him a sharp uniform and a shiny sword and make him raise a flag; you tell him that he is the greatest soldier alive; brave and proud.
His humiliation is unconscious.
His need for revenge is targetless.
He will kill anybody you want him to: coldly, silently, professionally, with no sense that anything is wrong, and with no remorse. All that is required is the key to unlock his revenge – a mythology of an enemy and their purported evil.
Of course, all armies will deny that this is how infantry training works. That is because they have to. Their training only works because the fact of the suppressed humiliation needs to be concealed from the recruit, or his humiliation won’t be unconscious. In theory, any army recruit who reads this book should be able to immunise himself from the effects of his training, but he would likely hate the army because he would correctly see them as the source of his humiliation.
Having created killers, each with a canned unconscious revenge response, armies all over the world then have the problem of keeping this response contained. This is a continuous process. It only takes a momentary loss of vigilance and uncontrolled violence is released. This can either turn inward or outward and there are, sadly, numerous examples of this, whether in Chechnya, Gaza or Iraq.249 There is usually excessive zeal in passing responsibility directly to the perpetrators, and silent foot-shuffling from the chain of command. In all cases, we should understand that the perpetrators were purposefully and deliberately created. I asked a former soldier about abuse within the US Army, and he answered “they want you to hurt yourself.” Abuse can be constructed in astonishing ways that permit deniability, a skill in which most professional military organisations are adept.
The effect of suppressed humiliation in the military occurs in a relatively controlled environment. Let us look at this phenomenon in an uncontrolled environment. Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party, Führer und Reichskanzler of Germany, had a vicious, tyrannical father who used to beat him almost daily. Hitler once said of his childhood,
I then resolved never again to cry when my father whipped me. A few days later I had the opportunity of putting my will to the test. My mother, frightened, took refuge in front of the door. As for me, I counted silently the blows of the stick which lashed my rear end.250
Hitler trained himself in childhood to suppress the behavioural response of humiliation.
He had plenty of opportunity in early adulthood to put this skill into practice. His first choice of career was as an artist, but he failed to gain acceptance into art school. His second choice of career was as an architect, but he failed at this too. He also experienced the defeat in World War I as an infantryman, including being gassed. Before he rose to power, there was almost no period of Hitler’s life during which he did not experience humiliation. Most importantly, however, Hitler’s humiliation was unconscious. There can be little doubt about this. In Mein Kampf he eulogises his parents, despite the fact that his childhood was brutal:
My father, a dutiful civil servant, my mother giving all her being to the household, and devoted above all to us children in eternal, loving care [my emphasis].251
Hitler was certain that his parents loved him, despite admitting in Mein Kampf that he has little memory of his childhood. His need for revenge was targetless and became detached from the source of his humiliation.252 Hitler not only did this to himself, he actually thought this was morally praiseworthy. He encourages it in the German education system.
The discouragement of whining complaints, of bawling, etc., also belongs in this province. If a system of education forgets to teach the child in early years that sufferings and adversity must be borne in silence, it has no right to be surprised if later at a critical hour when a man stands at the front, for example, the entire postal service is used for nothing but transporting whining letters of mutual complaint.253
It is hard for someone who has not been brutalised to imagine a need for revenge of this magnitude, and it is logically impossible to imagine a humiliation that is unconscious, but consider this eyewitness report by the CBS correspondent William L. Shirer of the surrender of the French to Hitler. In 1918, the Germans signed their surrender to the French in a railway coach in Compiègne, Northern France. In 1940, Hitler, in a piece of political theatre that indicates a deep need for vindication, dictated that the French should surrender in the same place in the same railway coach:
I observed his face. It was grave, solemn, yet brimming with revenge . . . There was something else, difficult to describe, in his expression, a sort of scornful, inner joy at being present at this great reversal of fate – a reversal he himself had wrought.254
Hitler looked at the French memorial commemorating their victory over the Germans in 1918. Shirer observed:
I have seen that face many times at the great moments of his life. But today! It is afire with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph. He steps off the monument and contrives to make even this gesture a masterpiece of contempt. He glances back at it, contemptuous, angry – angry, you almost feel, because he cannot wipe out the awful, provoking lettering with one sweep of his high Prussian boot. He glances slowly round the clearing, and now, as his eyes meet ours, you grasp the depth of his hatred. But there is triumph there too – revengeful, triumphant hate. Suddenly, as though his face were not giving quite complete expression to his feelings, he throws his whole body into harmony with his mood. He swiftly snaps his hands on his hips, arches his shoulders, plants his feet wide apart. It is a magnificent gesture of defiance, or burning contempt for this place now and all that it has stood for in the twenty-two years since it witnessed the humbling of the German Empire.255
The Holocaust was a perversion of an evolved emotional response that arose because the perpetrators had a stockpile of unconscious humiliation. Their revenge response became detached from the source of their humiliation and was misdirected. Once this is understood, it becomes plausible that there is no such thing as an unprovoked attack; only provoked attacks that are misdirected away from the provoker. This is explanation, and it should not be confused with exculpation. It is beyond the scope of this book to restate the entire history of the Holocaust. But I need to summarise it, and it is necessary to change the emphasis from how it is usually told.
MANKIND’S GREATEST ATROCITY
600 boys were led there in the middle of one bright day. 600 Jewish boys aged 12–18, dressed in very thin, long striped camp uniforms, with ragged boots or wooden clogs on their feet. The boys looked so beautiful and were so well built that not even those rags could make them look bad . . . 25 SS men, heavily loaded down led them in. When they reached the square, the Kommandoführer ordered them to disrobe . . . The boys saw the smoke belching from the chimney and realised instantly that they were being led to their death. They began running around the square in wild horror, tearing out their hair, [not know]ing how to save themselves. Many of them broke down in grievous weeping, a terrible lament [went up]. The Kommandoführer and his helper beat the defenceless boys mercilessly to make them disrobe. His club broke from that beating. So he fetched another one and kept beating them over the heads until his violence won out. The boys disrobed with an instinctive dread of death, and huddled together naked and barefoot in order to protect themselves from the blows, and they did not move. Many of the boys made a wild dash towards [the Jews] from the Sonderkommando and threw their arms around their necks pleading for salvation. Others ran around that large square [to escape] death. The Kommandoführer called for the Unterscharführer to help with his rubber club . . . The clear young voices of the boys grew louder by the minute [until they changed into] bitter crying. That terrible lament carried far.
(Zalmen Lewenthal, Memoir of Auschwitz)256
The Holocaust was a genocide committed by Nazi Germany during the years of World War II. This is one of the most analysed and chronicled events in history, but I intend to look at it in an entirely new light. Different historians use the words ‘holocaust’ and ‘genocide’ to mean different things, and much confusion arises from this. So I need to explain how I will use these words, and then we can look at the events without being confused by the language.
The term ‘holocaust’ derives from the Ancient Greek holos meaning whole and kauston meaning to burn, and the term holocauste first appeared in the twelfth century to refer to the massacre of Jews. This derivation causes some historians to use the modern term ‘holocaust’ to refer solely to the genocide of Jews, and so they analyse the causes of the Holocaust predominantly in terms of anti-Semitism. This analysis either ignores the other victims, or assumes that their deaths were a completely separate set of events with a separate causality. This is totally unrealistic.
I use the word ‘Holocaust’ to refer to the entire programme of killing, so I include all victim groups that total about seventeen million people.
The term ‘genocide’ is frequently defined and redefined with microscopic precision. The United Nations defines it as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.257 However, the majority of genocide scholars are members of ethnic groups that have been victims of past genocides, and there is a tendency to redefine genocide in terms of what was done to their ancestors. Scholars bicker among themselves over the minutiae of one massacre versus another in unseemly squabbles which one scholar dubbed the “Suffering Olympics”.258 The debate reduces to a question of which massacres qualify as genocides and which do not. Causality is forgotten. This seemingly leads to the conclusion that we don’t need to care about the massacres that the wordsmiths don’t think are “genocides”. I use the UN definition of the word.
The following is a list of the groups of people killed during the Holocaust, starting with the most numerous group and declining:
The arithmetic of genocide is in theory straightforward. The number killed is the starting population, plus normal birth rates, less normal death rates, less the closing population. The Soviet Union had over twelve million civilian deaths (including over one million Jews). There are many difficulties with estimating the number of Slav deaths,259 but they need to be identified as a group in any historical analysis of the Holocaust because that is how the perpetrator saw them – that is why they were killed. Despite these difficulties, there is little doubt that Slavs were the largest victim group and the number killed exceeded ten million.
A huge amount of scholarly research has enabled us to pinpoint the number of Jewish victims to between 5.8 and 6.0 million. There is a strong consensus about these numbers, with outlying estimates seemingly the product of dubious motivation. However, there were no pre-war Europe-wide demographic statistics for the Romanies, so we have to rely on crude methods of estimating the numbers killed.260 The difficulty of counting the Romany dead is one factor that has led to their victim status being undermined.
All of the remaining victim groups were not ethnic groups, and were mostly German citizens.261 We therefore need to rely on German records, and not demographic measures. The number of political opponents killed is difficult to quantify because there is no method of identifying them as a cohesive group or separating them from executed common criminals (which is how the Nazi regime saw them).
Germany during this period was a state as focussed on genocide as it was on war. During the final stages of military collapse, there was no slackening of the efforts applied to the continuation of the genocide, and this considerably diluted the German military effort. The disproportionate amount of research applied to the Jewish victims of this genocide has resulted in it becoming normal, including in scholarly writings, to refer to all the non-Jewish victims as the “other” victims. However, the Jews represent approximately a third of the total.
The tendency to place the Jews at the pinnacle of victimhood is based on an analysis of intentionality. There is no question that the evidence of intentionality is strongest for the Jews. In Mein Kampf, Hitler specifically mentioned only five victim groups: Slavs, Jews, Marxists, Freemasons and the mentally or congenitally ill. He focusses his hatred almost equally towards Jews and Marxists, and from about eighty pages into the book constantly tried to conjoin the two. “Marxism, whose goal is and remains the destruction of all non-Jewish national states.”262
Hitler’s idea of a Marxist appears to have been rather confused. In Mein Kampf, he argued in favour of trade unions, but then went on to smash the German labour movement, and the Nazis murdered many trade unionists. Although large tracts of Mein Kampf are unconstrained hate rants against Jews and Marxists, it does not specifically set out plans for killing them. Hitler proposed the enforced sterilisation of the mentally ill, but not killing them.263 But he made no secret of his intention of spreading the German nation eastwards into Poland and Russia by military conquest. “The foreign policy of the folkish state must safeguard the existence on this planet of the race embodied in the state, by creating a healthy, viable natural relation between the nation’s population and growth on the one hand and the quality of the soil on the other hand . . . Only an adequately large space on this earth assures a nation of freedom of existence.”264 This was in accordance with his principle of “Lebensraum”, or “Living Space” which he deemed necessary for the German “race”.265 There is little doubt of the implied intentionality of Hitler’s plans for Slavs, and it is also not open to doubt that he regarded them as inferior to “Aryans” and it was this supposed inferiority, he argued, that enabled them to be subordinated by the “Jewish doctrine of Marxism”.266
Mein Kampf mentions the Freemasons in several places, but not Jehovah’s Witnesses. This is curious, and perhaps is explained by tracing the path of a myth that flows throughout Mein Kampf that was generally known at the time as the “Dolchstoßlegende” or the “Stab in the Back Theory” that Germany lost World War I because Jews betrayed it. This myth was widely believed in post-WWI Germany and was derived from a forged document that conjoined Jews and Freemasons.267
Homosexuals are another victim group not mentioned in Mein Kampf, but Hitler did demonstrate a bizarre sexual prudishness. He devotes several pages to explaining that Germans must marry young because this would reduce prostitution and syphilis. Hitler also mentioned people of African descent with disdain, and it is troubling to speculate what might have occurred if large numbers of African American or African French soldiers had become German POWs.
The Romanies are the most significant victim group that gets no mention in Mein Kampf. The Romanies also got no mention in the Nazi Nuremburg Laws of 1935 that explicitly targeted Jews for segregation. (The Nuremburg Laws also did not target Slavs.) Once again, evidence of the intentionality towards the Jews is overwhelmingly strong. However, the evidence of intentionality cannot be used to segregate the Jews as a victim group because the ultimate fate of both the Jews and Romanies was almost identical, and the difficulty of quantifying the Romany dead should not permit this fact to be glossed over.268
Since the end of WWII, the fate of the Romanies has been immeasurably worse than that of the Jews. Romanies were mostly illiterate, and this made reuniting people with their families almost impossible. The Romany language was not then a written language, and only now is human rights law being written in Romany. Romanies, unlike Jews, had no representation at the Nuremburg trials. They relied on an oral tradition, so the loss of all their elders destroyed their culture. Today, they struggle with dire social conditions. The racial prejudice against Romanies continues unabated.269 “They are at the bottom of every socio-economic indicator: the poorest, the most unemployed, the least educated, the shortest-lived, the most welfare-dependent, the most imprisoned, and yes, the most segregated.”270
So if the fate of Jews and Romanies under Nazism was similar, how does the fate of Slavs compare? The key difference here hinges upon how the Nazis saw these “races” under their theories of eugenics. Jews were seen as an evil threat that was out to destroy the German “race”. Romanies were seen as a source of pollution to German purity because of their perceived tendency to interbreed (hence the policy – introduced in 1933 – for their sterilisation).
Slavs, by comparison, were not seen as evil, but merely inferior. The Nazi theories of eugenics said that Slavs could be enslaved and made to serve their German masters. There were plans to prevent Slavs from marrying, and so the plan was that as Germany expanded to fill the newly conquered lands of Eastern Europe, Slavs would gradually die out. We can see the cruel logic of this theory if we look at the fate of Slavs in the Nazi camp system. Few of them were gassed, but huge numbers of them starved while working as slave labour. The genocidal intent of Nazi Germany towards Slavs cannot be denied – it was the expectation that over the course of 25–30 years, Slavs would cease to exist in the German-occupied world. The fact that the Nazis killed more Slavs than any other group was because they conquered more of them. The fact that the percentage of Slavs killed was much lower than the percentage of Jews and Romanies is that the plan was to exterminate them over a generation, and the plan was barely under way when the War ended.
There is an unfortunately common model of Jewish scholarship on the Holocaust that creates elaborate arguments about how the Nazis intentions towards Jews were worse than “other” victim groups, and then to explain the whole of the Holocaust in terms of anti-Semitism.271 This is the victim creating a mythology about the mythology of the perpetrator – a pointless analysis. We cannot say that anti-Semitism was the cause of the Holocaust, when it was simply the reason that Jews were included in it. The Holocaust was a broad program of genocide that swept up every group that existed in the land occupied by Germany that was subject to any form of prejudice or discrimination. So we have to look for another explanation, something that accounts for all victims: a perversion of the evolutionary response of revenge misdirected because it was unconscious through suppression.
I have already discussed evidence of Hitler’s humiliation, as well as evidence that this humiliation was unconscious. That suppressed humiliation is the main subtext is announced in the first page of Mein Kampf, when Hitler refers obliquely to “our Fatherland’s deepest humiliation”; not daring to specify what this humiliation was. But we cannot look only to Hitler’s humiliation, because he had armies of helpers. We therefore need to look at the humiliation of Germans more broadly.
It is undeniable that Germans of the time were humiliated. They were humiliated by the loss of WWI and by the terms of the Versailles Treaty that ended it. However, the humiliation of German-speaking people goes back much further than that: squashed between all the competing forces of the Great Empires: Russian, French, Ottoman and British, they were constantly pushed around and divided. This was, however, political humiliation, and if we are to look to evolutionary theory for an explanation of the Holocaust, we have to find humiliation that is biologically relevant – i.e. a threat to biological fitness.
After the WWI armistice, Germany was forced to relinquish its navy, and then the British operated a naval blockade of Germany. Part of the justification of the blockade was the enforcement of the “War Guilt” clause of the Treaty of Versailles. Hostility towards Germany at the end of WWI meant that there was little pressure on Britain to lift the blockade and so it was maintained until March 1919. The blockade directly caused death by famine of hundreds of thousands of Germans, with a particular bias towards children. German estimates of deaths caused by the blockade were 762,000. A British government estimate at the time was 800,000. A more recent estimate was 424,000.272 The journalist Walter Duranty visited Germany in 1919 and found people living on black bread and potatoes. They had no meat, butter, milk or eggs. Ninety per cent of children were malnourished and more than half had rickets.273
This was undoubtedly a threat to biological fitness, and in terms of evolutionary theory we should expect a revenge response. But was the humiliation suppressed? If it was, then we could expect the humiliation response of revenge to be misdirected. This is difficult to verify when we apply it to the nation of Germany as a whole, but Hitler certainly buried the fact. In Mein Kampf, he talks endlessly of trivial humiliations of Germany, but doesn’t mention the blockade once. In fact, throughout the book he talks admiringly of the British despite the fact that they were the source of the real biological humiliation of his country. (Compare his unconstrained admiration of the father who savagely beat him.)
It seems likely to me that Germans denied their humiliation. Hitler taught them how to do this. In the same way that the military teaches its army recruits to act proud when their training is a ritual humiliation, Hitler told them that they were the greatest race on Earth. He spent huge resources on giving his soldiers the finest uniforms that money could buy and he applied this mentality to the entire nation. He built a cult of denial of true humiliation and replaced it with mythologies of humiliations that were marginal to the point of being tolerable. The result was an entire nation of people who were brimming with revenge but who had disconnected that response from the appropriate target. This revenge was applied to all the victims of the Holocaust, and the pattern of ritual humiliation applied to them was the same as the humiliation that the army applies to recruits during training: pointless marches, worthless work, the need for absurd respect to your abusers.274 However, the difference between the humiliation of the Holocaust and that of soldiers is that the humiliator did not have any use for the victim once it was over.
THREE LEVELS OF HOLOCAUST DENIAL
Holocaust Denial has been a contentious issue ever since the full extent of the Holocaust became apparent. A Holocaust Denier is generally taken to be someone who states that the Holocaust did not occur, or that the numbers of people killed has been exaggerated, or even that it is a hoax or propaganda. However, there has been a recent trend towards revisionism that seeks to reduce the estimates of numbers killed (rather than deny them). I call such a person a “Level-One Holocaust Denier”. Holocaust denial is a crime in many countries, but I think this is a mistake. Some people’s Level-One Holocaust Denial is motivated by a political or racist agenda (former President Ahmedinejad of Iran falls into this category) but I think it plausible that some humane people fall into this category out of a form of cognitive dissonance – they have a concept of people as humane that simply contradicts the facts of the Holocaust.
We need to add to Level-One Holocaust Denial two further tiers of denial, and a complete acceptance of this history requires us to look in much more detail at what happened, and then to look at ourselves in a much more critical light.
A “Level-Two Holocaust Denier” is someone who admits that the events took place, but says that they were performed by “Nazis”. In other words, they de-personify the perpetrators and blithely assume that the people who did this were “brainwashed” or subject to propaganda or “indoctrination”. That propaganda was a major component of the Nazi Government is undeniable, but it is a component of most governments, including ones that don’t commit atrocities. Hitler talks at considerable length in Mein Kampf of propaganda’s necessity and how it should be executed. This does not mean, however, that the people who executed the Holocaust were mindless villains. I cannot find anybody who can describe how “brainwashing” or “indoctrination” is done anyway, and it is absurd to talk of it as if we understand its causality. Level-Two Holocaust Denial is the denial that this could have been done by people like ourselves unless they had had their minds mysteriously tampered with. I have sought to construct a causal path whereby rational people could execute the Holocaust as a corruption of a response that is a normal part of everybody’s evolutionary makeup.
Until recently, it has been standard for Holocaust scholars to be Level-Two Holocaust Deniers.275 I was overwhelmed by a sense of it when I visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Although hundreds of thousands of Germans were involved in the execution of the Holocaust, the USHMM mentions almost none of them by name, gives little clue as to who they were or how they lived. It gives no sense that they were ordinary people. By contrast, much detail is given (including names) of people who risked their lives to save victims. The Level-Two Holocaust Denier wants to deny that perpetrators were people, but is happy to celebrate heroes as people. It is perhaps understandable that a museum peddles this line, otherwise nobody would want to visit it, but the risk is that it panders to people who want to “care about” the Holocaust without bothering to understand it: a generic form of political kitsch – the denial of shit. At the time of my visit (July 2010) there was a special exhibit on Nazi propaganda, and visiting the museum it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the whole thing could only have occurred if the executers were somehow duped or acting under duress. There is almost no attempt to describe the motivations of the Holocaust’s foot-soldiers.276
The bubble of Level-Two Holocaust Denial was spectacularly and controversially burst in 1996 by Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners.277 Goldhagen demonstrates that the Holocaust was executed by large numbers of ordinary Germans, and not a small group of ideologically indoctrinated Nazis. The idea that Hitler indoctrinated the Germans is false; he merely exploited prejudice that was already there.278
Goldhagen establishes several important points: the perpetrators were ordinary Germans; they were people with moral consciences; they lived normal lives; and they acted willingly.
The perpetrators were ordinary Germans: Goldhagen demonstrates that police battalions recruited ordinary German men.279 Generally, they were too old for normal military duty, but were otherwise fairly average. They went through very little ideological indoctrination.280 The men of these battalions included members of the SS and the Nazi Party in only slightly higher percentages than the German national average. However, during the period before the establishment of the death camps, the police battalions operated throughout the area of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and were the Nazis’ principal agents of genocide.
The perpetrators had moral consciences: Goldhagen opens the book with an anecdote about Captain Wolfgang Hoffmann, a commander of a police battalion that executed thousands of civilian Jews; yet he was outraged that he was asked to sign a declaration that he would not steal from Polish people. Not only did he find it morally objectionable that his superiors implied he might steal, he refused a direct order to sign the declaration.281
Another example of moral conscience is the outrage at the Nazi government’s euthanasia program for the mentally ill or congenitally defective. This program was called the T4 program, after its Berlin headquarters at Tiergarten Strasse 4. “Germans (1) recognised this slaughter to be wrong, (2) expressed their views about it, (3) openly protested for an end to the killing, (4) suffered no retribution for having expressed their views and for pressing their demands, and (5) succeeded in producing a formal cessation of the killing program, and saving German lives.”282
A bizarrely ironic example of German moral conscience is their treatment of animals. Goldhagen gives the example of the commander of Police Regiment 25. Goldhagen quotes his information sheet: “One should with renewed strength take measures against cruelty to animals . . . Special attention is to be devoted to beef cattle, since through over-crowding in the railway cars great losses of the animals have occurred.”283 This compares to the treatment of Jews in similar cattle cars. Goldhagen quotes a member of Police Battalion 101: “The cars were stuffed so full that one had to labour in order to close the sliding doors. Not seldom did one have to lend aid with one’s feet.”284
The perpetrators had normal lives: Goldhagen demonstrates that the Germans executing the Holocaust went to the movies, drank, sang and danced. They went to church, and the Catholics took confession. Goldhagen describes that they openly took their wives and girlfriends to witness massacres of Jews. A Captain Julius Wohlauf of Police Battalion 101 took his pregnant wife Vera to an “action”.285 His officer was outraged that he took her to a massacre of Jews while pregnant. He was not at all bothered that other nonpregnant wives witnessed the same thing.
The perpetrators acted willingly: Goldhagen goes to great length to demonstrate that some Germans chose not to participate. There were very few, but by demonstrating that they were not punished, Goldhagen proved that they did not act for fear of punishment should they refuse. Goldhagen found evidence of at least eight different police battalions where “the men had been informed that they would not be punished for refusing to kill.”286
Goldhagen quotes Erwin Grafmann, a member of Police Battalion 101. When asked why he and the other men did not take up the sergeant’s offer to excuse themselves from a killing squad, he replied, “at the time, we did not give it any second thoughts at all.”287 Another member said, “The Jew was not acknowledged by us to be a human being.”288
Goldhagen, despite extensive research, fails to answer the fundamental question: why did this happen? He simply resorts to the all-too-common model of Jewish scholarship: downplay the suffering of “other” victims and explain what is left in terms of anti-Semitism. “The one explanation adequate to these tasks holds that a demonological anti-Semitism, of the virulent racial variety, was the common structure of the perpetrators’ cognition and of German society in general.”289 To conclude this, he had to ignore the Romanies – a form of Level-One Holocaust Denial. He refers to them only three times in a 600-page book, and only admits their treatment was similar to the Jews in an endnote that most readers will miss. This endnote says that, “Germans’ policies towards the two people [Jews and Romanies] differed in important ways.”290 If these differences are important, why does he not explain them?291
Goldhagen’s analysis reduces everything to factors unique to German culture at the time, and this is an example of what I call “Level-Three Holocaust Denial” – the belief that although ordinary Germans could do this, ordinary people from your own culture could not. We all need to maintain the belief that we could not do this, and this means that we have to find some feature of the people who did it that distinguishes them from ourselves. Many historians have tied themselves in knots trying to do this without being racist themselves.
The circumstances that gave rise to the Holocaust were a basic human element of emotional makeup – revenge – and a pattern of behaviour manipulation by the perpetrators that caused that revenge response to be unconscious. This was a perversion of our evolved nature that resulted in the revenge being executed against someone other than the humiliator, and every group that was subject to prejudice was swept up in the dreadful path of a simple belief – an irrefutable thought. This is something that could happen to anyone, including you, dear reader, and all that separates you from a genocide perpetrator is that your humiliation hasn’t been severe enough, or that you have never had cause to deny or mythologise it.
So, once you have embraced the concept of Level-Three Holocaust Denial and admitted that you were until now such a denier, should you have compassion for the perpetrators of the worst crime in the history of humanity? Are we ready to reach out to the place where forgiveness can be total? All humans are innocent, but for some it isn’t possible to understand how.
Consider this story told by Primo Levi. He does not tell the story in one place. You have to piece it together from snippets in his writings spread over decades.292 Levi worked in Auschwitz III, Monowitz as a slave labour research chemist, and the most senior civilian German he dealt with was a chemist. One day, the German asked Levi if he was OK, and Levi was utterly stunned. Levi thought silently to himself “What is the man thinking?” What common meaning could be found for the expression “OK” in a conversation between a German and an Auschwitz inmate? The German gave Levi a chit to get a new pair of shoes. An insignificant act you might think, but Levi explained its significance in an interview years later. When you arrived at Auschwitz, you were stripped and showered, and then you were given a striped uniform and two shoes. These shoes could be both left shoes, and would be in random sizes. What you would quickly realise is that you must find someone with two right shoes, and then if your shoes are too small, you must find someone else who had shoes that were too big. Everybody would trade until they had two shoes (certainly not a matching pair) that approximately fit. But what if the pair you ended up with were worn out or caused you to have blisters? Bad shoes meant that you ended up unable to walk, and therefore unable to work. And in Auschwitz if you couldn’t work, you were gassed. Bad shoes, says Levi, killed you. So the German chemist quite possibly saved Levi’s life. Levi admitted this (only indirectly in other writings) but he never showed gratitude. Years later, after the War, Levi met the German. Perhaps this wasn’t by chance because the world of European research chemists wasn’t large at that time. The German and Levi corresponded briefly, and the German told Levi “compassion was not tolerated”.
Let us examine these two men, thrust together by an unfathomable set of circumstances. Levi was struggling with his perception of the German’s compassion, but he simply couldn’t reconcile it with his daily treatment by Germans. We can tell that the event had a huge impact on him because it crops up over and over in his work, but in no one place does he tell the whole story. Levi could not put all the pieces together in one place because that would force him to admit that the German had compassion.
Consider the German. He said that compassion was not tolerated, but how was this order to be obeyed? Easy! All he had to do was suppress the behavioural response of compassion in himself. Doing this on its own seems innocent enough; it could even be portrayed as a coping strategy. Over the course of the War (and perhaps some of the years before) it became a habit and then he forgot he was doing it. Gradually his concept of his own compassion dims until it is barely perceptible to him. There he was, years after the War, trying to reconcile his past and his morality and pretending that life was normal – when suddenly Primo Levi walks back into his life. Ask yourself if you really have no pity for this German. You cannot shed a tear? Are you really so certain that you are not suppressing your own emotional response? Is there some history of yours that you need to think about? Consider the giving of the shoes – in many ways a pathetic gesture – and think about what it means. It should not be seen as an act of kindness because this action is all about the German. He is looking into himself and asking “why do I have this sudden urge to help a strange Jew?” He is reaching out, not to Levi, but within himself. He is grappling to try to regain the concept of his own compassion, and he is unable to do so. Suppression of the behaviour has made his recognition of his own emotion a hazy blur, and all that he can find within himself is this pitiful floundering.