History repeats itself so much it stutters

As a child I remember being intrigued by stories of the Holocaust. There was a TV series by that name which I wasn’t allowed to watch – understandably enough – and this only whetted my curiosity all the more. I remember thinking at the time: but how could so many people not realise what was happening for so long? And if they did have an inkling of what was going on… how could they acquiesce to such a gargantuan atrocity being committed under their very noses?

Looking back I now realise that there was a basic misunderstanding of human nature underpinning this entire thought process. Naïvely (for yes, I was terribly naïve as a child) I genuinely believed that most ‘people of goodwill’ would somehow stand up and be counted when the occasion arose. It never occurred to me that a silent and deadly majority would not only condone, but also applaud mass murder on an uber-human scale.

Yet there was plenty of evidence for this at the time: not least, all the footage and images of impossibly enormous mass rallies to glorify Hitler and the Third Reich throughout the late 1930s.

Perhaps I was brought up that way, or perhaps it is a common attribute among human beings. But part of me wanted to believe that the hundreds of thousands who adored Adolf Hitler on a quasi-theistic level were doing so out of compulsion. For fear of being blacklisted, arrested or killed.

It was only much later that I realised that at any moment, anywhere in the world, the propensity for mass hatred of minorities, and violence on an inconceivable scale, is never really very far below the surface. What happened there can happen here, too. And it is already happening in various other parts of the world.

By the same token, watching footage of those rallies again brings with it the chilling realisation that among the hundreds of thousands who congregated at Nuremberg and elsewhere, all performing the Nazi salute with verve and gusto, there would also have been the equivalent of one’s neighbours, friends, acquaintances and even family. Who knows? Possibly also oneself.

We do after all look at these things through the wrong end of the telescope of time. Without the benefit of hindsight, who knows how all of us would have reacted to a political movement which (like it or hate it) also reforged the German national identity, and gave the previously shattered country a new sense of direction and purpose?

Such considerations seem at a glance to not only confirm the age-old maxim that ‘history repeats itself’, but also illustrate precisely how and why it does so, too. A cursory look at everything that is happening today seems to confirm that no lesson has been learned from the mistakes of the 1930s and 1940s.

On a different scale, the stories that now seep in from Libya suggest that the difference between life and death may be no more than a Misurata or Tripoli ID card. Likewise, being a Sunni or Shi’ite Muslim – or for that matter a Christian – in Iraq is enough to qualify one for death or worse. And all sides in the 2014 edition of the Hunger Games are likewise supported by nameless, shapeless masses which openly applaud at each atrocity.

But it is the situation in Gaza that – ironically, it must be said – best epitomises my earlier perplexity regarding how monstrous behaviour can be simply ignored by so many people. As I write, news reports are coming in suggesting that 110 Palestinians have been killed in the past 24 hours alone. The Palestinian death toll stands at 1,100 people, mostly civilians. The corresponding statistic for Israel is 42. These numbers may not compare to the scale of the Holocaust, but then again there are only one million people living in Gaza, and the war only started in earnest two weeks ago.

There are however other aspects in which these two historical occurrences can be compared. For what is Gaza, but a prison camp in which one million civilians have been concentrated? And what is an invasion of this prison camp – from which civilians have no means of escape – but a systematic annihilation attempt?

Admittedly the analogy breaks down at certain points. I am unaware that Jews in Germany and other parts of Europe fired rockets into Nazi strongholds… though as documented in The Pianist and other films, they did mount some form of resistance where possible. Still, you can’t really compare the motives of the Third Reich in undertaking the annihilation of so many people with those of the Israeli war machine today.

The latter’s reaction may indeed be disproportionate, and it may indeed be using the ongoing rocket attacks as a pretext to do what it wants to do anyway. But there is no escaping the fact that violence in Israel and the occupied territories is a two-way affair.

Comparisons can however be made with regard to the ideological underpinnings of this latest conflict, and the rest of the world’s response. In the past weeks alone, we have heard calls for the extermination of Palestinians which unnervingly echo the Nazi propaganda machine of the 1930s.

This is from a Haaretz report quoting Rabbi Dvor Lior: “Therefore, in a time of war, the attacked nation is permitted to punish the enemy population with whatever measures it deems proper, like blocking supplies or electricity. It may bomb the entire area based on the judgment of the war minister and not wantonly put soldiers at risk.” He added that “deterrent measures to exterminate the enemy” are allowed.

The same Lior also echoed widespread sentiment among the ultra-orthodox Israeli population when he observed that "All of those who believe in the Torah know that this land was promised solely to these people. There is no room for another national entity in this place. There has never been a state belonging to another people here. It belongs exclusively to the Jewish people.”

Replace ‘Jewish’ with ‘Aryan’, and bleep over the bit about the Torah… and that could just as easily be Hitler talking about Europe in 1939.

Even more pointedly, Ayelet Shaked – an Israeli MP representing the ultra-nationalist Jewish Home party – recently called for the slaughter of Palestinian mothers: "They have to die and their houses should be demolished so that they cannot bear any more terrorists," Shaked said, adding, "they are all our enemies and their blood should be on our hands. This also applies to the mothers of the dead terrorists.”

She separately observed that: "Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there."

The rhetoric and thrust of both those declarations is lifted straight from the racist handbook of Josef Goebbels.

This, for instance, is part of the narration of ‘The Eternal Jew’, a 1940 film produced by The Reich Ministry for Propaganda (with a direct input by Goebbels himself): "Where rats appear, they bring ruin by destroying mankind's goods and foodstuffs. In this way, they spread disease, plague, leprosy, typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery, and so on. They are cunning, cowardly and cruel and are found mostly in large packs. Among the animals, they represent the rudiment of an insidious, underground destruction - just like the Jews among human beings.”

‘Rats’, ‘little snakes’... it all blurs into one and the same thing really:  dehumanisation of a minority, for the express purpose of justifying its destruction.

And this points towards another, more poignant reminder of the horrors of yesteryear. It’s not as though the rest of the world had no indication of what happened in Nazi-controlled Europe throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Long before The Eternal Jew, the Nazi propaganda machine had unleashed reams of hatred targeting the Jews, alongside other minorities which were somehow anathema to the Third Reich: Roma, Serbs, blacks, homosexuals, the disabled, etc. Scientific papers were published to ‘prove’ that such minorities were either sub-human or not human at all, and could therefore be killed just as you would step on a cockroach.

These studies were all in the public domain for years before the extent of the genocide came to be known.

Yet World War Two and the ultimate overthrow of the Third Reich were not precipitated by these and other indications of a holocaust in the making. It was German expansionism and the threat it posed to other counties that eventually forced countries like Britain to abandon its previous appeasement policy. And it was a direct attack on its own territory that eventually brought a reluctant United States into the equation.

We are seeing the exact same dynamic in action today. Clearly, wanton destruction of human (mostly civilian life) is not regarded as a reason for the international community to intervene in Gaza, just as it wasn’t a reason to get involved in Germany in 1933… despite the abundance of evidence (including all the aforementioned propaganda) that a genocide was on the cards.

There is, however, an overwhelming irony which didn’t exist in 1933. To date, there is no indication of a UN mission to prevent further bloodshed in the Gaza strip, of the kind we saw in Libya in 2011. Yet the United Nations, as we know it today, itself came into being in the aftermath of World War Two: and specifically so that the lessons of history would not be forgotten. Yet they’ve been forgotten all right. And we’re all about to make the same mistakes again.

So yes: history certainly repeats itself, and very often too. In fact it repeats itself so much that it may need a speech therapist to help with that stutter…