Mundane Normalcy of the EVIL

There are times and events which we witness that freeze us with stunning disbelief. Usually they are either extraordinary feats of courage in the face of insurmountable obstacles of fate or they are incogitable acts of cruelty committed on humanity. 

However, when I toured Auschwitz, what really made me suffocated was neither the fact that 1.1 million people were killed and burned to ashes at the very place where I was standing and walking, nor the stomach-sickening visible artifacts of tons of human hair, thousands of shoes, countless pictures of hopeless eyes that pierced me right through my heart and swept me off my feet, nor was the massive industrial scale of operations (similar to how we build cars in assembly lines today) were built with a primary motive of ethnic cleansing

What really distressed me was the normalcy at which the EVIL has pervaded across and percolated down in so many individual humans to the levels where acts of showering Zyklon-B down on masses to their gruesome deaths, burning mountains of human flesh, physically torturing hapless broken souls have become daily mundane routines in those years, that it was boring in some ways to the people involved on both sides of unprecedented genocide operation in human history. 

Reading memoirs and diary entries of Rudolph Hoess the commander of Auschwitz camp, Adolf Eichmann the architect of entire Holocaust operation, Heinrich Himmler the head of SS reveal that they took this killing as a regular every day job, just like we go to work during day and spend time with families in evenings and weekends. Rudolph Hoess who at times oversaw 12,000 deaths a day in those crematoriums comes across as a nice father, teaching right values to his kids. Himmler on the other hand would call his wife and daughter every day. Parties, massages and sometimes cultural activities in after hours and early hours are similarities that we can find in any normal life outside of these camps across any time period and any society. 

The daily routineness was not limited to administrators who built and administered the Inferno on earth , but it can be seen in daily lives of victims too. We can see hints of them in holocaust survivors’ Eli Weisel's ‘The Night’, Victor Frankl's ‘Mans search of Meaning’ and various interviews of others who walked out alive. 

Everybody in SS went around as if it is his or her daily job, executing the orders passed from above, not stopping for any brief moment and pondering on what were they doing or what was being done. After all these are Germans, I wondered loud. They are supposed to be cultured people, not primitive society's savages! More than how could they do this, the unfathomable thing was the ordinariness in the atmosphere or habitualness of people involved in those make-shift death-towns. 

In fact that is what Eichmann, a man who held operational responsibility of holocaust claimed during his trial in Jerusalem. It was reported that ‘man displayed neither guilt for his actions nor hatred for those trying him, claiming he bore no responsibility because he was simply "doing his job". He asserted that he did his duty, he obeyed the law’. 

What a travesty?! 

“Banality of the Evil” – the most famous phrase we all know was written by philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt for New Yorker magazine after watching Eichmann’s trial. She basically concluded that Eichmann has built and organized the massive industrial operation of holocaust, not because he hated Jews, not because he had malice in his heart, not because he was antisemitic, not because he was a psychopath. He did it because it suited his careerist, ambitious reasons, conforming to the order, obediently executing them with no ideological passion. All reasons which we can find in most of our career lives in varying degrees today. (For those who are interested: Watch the movie “Hannah Arendt” on Netflix) 

The banality of the times was in the air, not just among SS officers, but also among prisoners. At the very same time the black fumes with an odor of human flesh pouring out of crematoriums joining clouds in the cruel sky that is watching the atrocities silently, there were regular life activities occurring among prisoners under the very same blue umbrella. Cultural, religious activities may have been rare but they did take place. Frankl writes that they tried to find humor whenever they can as a get away under extreme conditions of work. Other prisoners recalled playing football on Sundays. Ron Jones who played as goalkeeper, wrote the book called ‘The Auschwitz goalkeeper”. He says “Football was a brief summer time respite from suffering, as throughout the games smoke would rise ominously from the chimneys. We were frightened that we would be next”. In the same breath he also says “There was the humiliation and the lack of food but on the whole life wasn’t too bad. The Germans, contrary to what a lot of people think, were pretty good to us on the whole.” 

(It is probably worth mentioning here that a few Nazis cannot command vast masses of Jews, hence they assigned some Jewish prisoners as Kapos with few extra privileges than regular prisoners, to supervise Jewish labors and act as confidants of SS. It is widely reported that Kapos were frequently more brutal towards their brethern than Nazis, with the intention of impressing SS men)

The words ‘Life wasn’t too bad’ were intriguing for me. We all know that human mind is unique and has far-reaching flexibility that it can adapt to any circumstances, but describing Auschwitz life as ‘not bad’ was the least I expected to hear especially from the oppressed.

You see, it wasn’t that bad.

It isn’t that bad for him, except when it is his turn to walk into gas chamber and become victim of the institutionalized evil. I don’t blame him. After all, life has it’s own ways to find means to continue to live until it cannot. Life drives the encompassing body, mind and soul into many unimaginable paths, twists and turns with the sole purpose of survival. Nothing else, and no one else matter. So everyone falls in order, become conformists and a new practice gets established. A new routine emerges, and everything from there is banal again. 

But it made me think. Yes, it wasn’t that bad for slaves. Yes it wasn’t that bad for oppressed castes in India. Yes it wasn’t that bad for women for eons in every society. Yes it wasn’t that bad for minorities living under majorities scornful tolerance. Yes it isn’t that bad for girls of FGM victims. Yes it isn’t that bad for non-binary humans. Yes it isn’t that bad for systematically oppressed sections across the planet. We can fill reams of papers with this list, extending to count even microaggressions in our everyday lives. And the list will reach each one of us in the end. 

I wondered how much of banality was I part of evil practices in my times, both as an imperceptive aggressor and as an unequal, ill-treated individual in certain microcosms of my own society. No wonder I can recall the later easier than the former. 

As I think of that, the normalcy that is associated with every bad thing with every practice in every society since hunter-gatherers to the current day digital communities living in hyperbole is troubling. Some traditions, methods, systems ranging from repugnant social practices to sinful, immoral, evil ways seem to be peculating into humans with utmost ease that they seem mundane from within. There seems to be some banality to them that is escaping the purview of collective moral compass. When we collectively lose the trajectory offered by that compass, too often the result seems to be the twirling and turning of our societies gyrating towards an ungraceful and abrupt fall in front of a mirror. 

And the selfie in that mirror looks EVIL. I have seen that in various artifacts and relics as I said in the beginning. 

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In search of current world order roots

Picking a vacation/tour place(s) is always a bit of work by itself. I generally try to follow a theme if I can. For ex: going to places like a) early republics with some democratic elements or b) to be in the cradle of renaissance or c) tracing the reformation etc., 

This time I wanted to follow the path of events which gave us the current world order, an order that has resulted in almost 70 years of relative peace and prosperity across Europe and around the world. The alliances, treaties, institutions, agreements and pacts that were put in after the second world war WWII have given us the new world-order, in other words new-rules. In general it is safe to say that the world has adhered to this order and played by these rules, at least until recent past. 

Like most of the people living today, I am one of the biggest benefactors of this world-order. I wanted to learn more of the roots, which gave rise to this order. More importantly I wanted my children to understand that the world-corridors through which they pass every day, and systems they engage with and participate in cannot be taken for granted, moreover they weren't here since beginning of time. This order, as much as sound and sturdy it looks from outside, it has been relatively new and seemingly fragile these days. 

Well, let’s face it. An ignorant septuagenarian born soon after the end of WWII, who now wants to be the premiere of the pinnacle of western liberal democracies, is threatening that order with his know-nothing crusade of anti-intellectualism. 

Hopefully the populace will send him into political oblivion. We will wait and watch. 

I digress. 

Any attempt to understand the current world order and it's institutions like United Nations, IMF, World Bank, treaties like NATO, systems like Bretton Woods which introduced Gold-Exchange-Standard, agreements like GATT, WTO takes us to the Second World War. We all know that the seeds of WWII were sown at the end of First World War in Treaty of Versailles. With that in mind and with many calendar limitations and hurdles, I have finalized the plan and I set out to follow a path touching down at important places along the way. 

We began with Poland. Few countries on planet suffered as much as Poland did. It was crushed between Germany from west, and Russia from east during WWII and thereafter. This is the country which was robbed of its place and name from the map before WWI. A country which was bulldozed by giant powers of Europe/Eurasia with ease more than once. It is a country where the helpless side of humanity has witnessed its EVIL side, to a degree that is inconceivable to an individual mind even by standards of savages (read Auschwitz). And yes, this is also a country where an ideal town Nowa Huta was built by Soviet Union as a model town of communist ideology. This is also a place where USSR has refused to permit even a single church, a decree against which a local bishop has vehemently fought against by placing the cross in its place, every time it was removed by authorities, who eventually rose to be the leader of catholic church as Pope John Paul II . This is a place where Solidarity Movement among workers started. A movement in the end challenged the mighty soviet empire with the help of church, inspiring others along the way, leading to the collapse of Iron Curtain. 

I had to see all of it and show all of that to kids. 

As part of this trip, we have visited THE city of 20th century aka Berlin. I cannot think of any other city like Berlin in the entire world. It was the epicenter of WWII and a front line during Cold War. Younger people say 9/11 changed the world in profound ways. May be so, but for my generation, and a few more before and after mine, there is no other year like 1989. It was a year unparalleled in modern history. Those six months in 1989 not only shook the world, but also put every nation and every citizen of this world on a new path, into a new paradigm. The period 1989-1991 has changed this world in so many ways and so much so that, Frank Fukuyama wrote 'The end of History and the Last Man' in those days of euphoria, arguing in essence that history of both world-wars and the result of struggle between two opposing ideologies has finally proven that the destiny of all societies has arrived and it is called 'capitalist liberal democracy'. (We now know how premature conclusion it was! No wonder Fukuyama is ridiculed relentlessly even to this date. Hindsight is 20/20 always!). 

I vividly remember 1991. It was the year in which USSR collapsed. I still remember the split-second intense pain that I felt in disbelief, as if a great revered figure was hurt, when I read in Telugu newspapers in my rural village that Lenin statues were being dragged in streets and people were hitting those statues with their shoes. Some even spat on him, I read. I could not fathom it. How in the world any human, let alone residents of the so-called paradise on earth, can treat a great man Lenin like how it was described in those papers? I had a totally different mindset back then. I grew up in south, learning about world through the writings that were slanted left. I was never a radical by any definition, but I could see the point in the argument from an intellect perspective. Not because I was in the so-called lower-middle-class strata of society or more aptly put higher-poor-class, but because of compelling moral case that I found in those writings of various op-eds. The heck, even learning real physics had to come from "Nithya jeevitam lo bhoutika sastram" (నిత్యజీవితం లో భౌతిక శాస్త్రం) by soviet author Yarkov :) 

Ultimately when Berlin wall fell down, I did not know that in few more years, I would be working for a German company which not only participated in demolition of wall with its cemented carbide tools, but also would proudly display the small relics of that wall in show-cases across their plush front-offices around the world, and I would be walking past daily and looking at them with wonder, pondering about the unseen walls behind which my early formative years were shaping up. 

Nothing would take me back to myself and to the world that has left long ago for good, as much as standing at Berlin Wall or in Tiananmen Square (that I am yet to visit). To me it would be a sort of an emotional closure of the past, to give that one final wave off to a world that has promised the manifestation of humanity's best ideals but never came close to fulfilling them, cursed by humanity's own worst practices. As much aching as it can be, and as much dramatic as it sounds, how melancholic and exhilarating, both at the same time would it be to play the real life Shakespearean's Hamlet standing on Berliner Mauer, contemplating to take that one final step to put both feet on West side forever? 

What else would be content enough, to exactly stand in a place where at once, the young man from 1989 dug down his both feet staring down the column of tanks in that square near Forbidden city? The image of that “tank-man” from an arguably the most powerful picture of 20th century was etched on to my mind and into my heart for an eternity. I would stand upside down to shake his hand, even if it is an imaginary one, as the fate of him remains a mystery to-date. 

This trip also took me to Paris and London. 

Oh London! Dear London!! Where would I begin and where would I end? May be I can start with couple of hours that we spent inside House of Commons watching Article 50 of Brexit being debated! 

London, my London! It would take a long time, so I stop here for now.

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