brooding about atrocities

[johncomic]

Most of my life I've had an on-again, off-again fascination with Nazi Germany. Lately, with all the talk of the Holocaust being bandied about by the Islamic cartoon-protesters, it's on again. I've found myself looking up histories and sociological descriptions and photos and testimonies, and my response is pretty much the same as it's always been:

I find it so difficult to believe that such things could actually happen. There's a weird sense of unreality, like I'm reading some sort of unusually twisted dystopian fantasy and wondering who the eff could think up such a place. But there it is. Holy shit.

But now I find myself reading further, looking into things I've vaguely been aware of but never explored in any detail: the USSR under Stalin, Mao's China, Cambodia under Pol Pot -- hell, Pol Pot was in power the whole time I was doing my B.A., and at that time "Cambodia" for me was one of those "political things I don't worry about", that's all I knew and all I wanted to know.

God forgive me. Please.

And I haven't even gotten to any of the African ones yet...


Every time my response is some variant on: how could human beings do such things? And it all seems so unreal and far away...

But it happens right here, too. Just last week I heard about an elderly couple, in charge of their grandchildren, who starved one of them to death. After her recent release from prison, Karla Homolka's name has been in our news a lot lately [but no one seems to mention Paul Bernardo, who was at least as guilty and remains behind bars, thank God].

And an image that has haunted me from my high school days: I stumbled across an account of American lynchings and saw a photo of folks gathered around the blazing body of a black man. And the thing is, they were folks. Just plain folks. A whole crowd of them gathered around the human bonfire, calm as you please... a few of them having a smoke or holding a beer... a comradely forearm leaning on someone's shoulder... some of the guys posing and smiling for the camera...

And none of these guys looked like monsters or twisted fiends or lunatics. They all looked like nice normal people, the kind you'd meet at church or work next to in the plant or at the office. All nice normal people, socializing around the man they set fire to. [I've found an example of these photos: if you have the stomach for it, it's here.]


How much difference is there, really, between being capable of doing this to one person and being capable of doing it to millions?


In school, I was taught that John Locke said "man is basically good", and Thomas Hobbes said "man is basically bad". Since then, I've read that the Japanese have always believed that man is both: he is angel and devil and everything in between. He is the firefighters of 9/11 as well as the lynch mobs. He is Beethoven as well as Cannibal Corpse. His glorious creations and heroic deeds do not excuse the evil that he does, and his atrocities do not lessen the good that he does. It's all in there together with us, all the time.


In some ways, the quality of our life is determined by which of them we choose to focus on.

Something else I read recently was a lady defending her decision to avoid news media because of all the crimes and disasters and so on that make up the bulk of it. She said something like, "A lot of people hear about these things and talk about them and dwell on them and get depressed because of them... but your hearing or knowing about someone else's misfortune doesn't do that person any good. Dwelling on it doesn't help them, and it harms you. So if it's a situation that you can actually do something to help improve, by all means do it. And then let it go."

Her "solution" is a tad too extreme for my tastes, because I want to be informed, and I want to care about what goes on in the world. But continuing to focus on things I can't help, as I've been doing today, definitely does bring me down and doesn't achieve anything good. So I need to direct my focus on things that help me and help others. This whole post has been a divergence from that focus, and it's time to end it now.