Having just read Anne
Frank's diary I cannot help but ponder over questions regarding the
Nazi persecution of European Jews during WW2, and of racial and
religious hatred in general. In many ways Anne Frank was a slightly
unique teenage girl: witty and intelligent beyond her years; Anne was
constantly in a mode of self-assessment and self-improvement, not
just academically but morally. Her descriptions of both the banal and
the exceptional living conditions in which she found herself living
under were vivid due to her writing abilities and philosophising
mind. But, in other ways, Anne was a typical teenager with typical
feelings of confusion, angst and alienation. What child of that age
doesn't feel misunderstood by their parents, and by adults in
general. It was this mixture of both her uniqueness and ordinariness
that helps to draw the reader into her world, and leaves you
pondering questions of humanity: the kindness and courage of some
verses the cruelness and hatred of others.
The risks that many
people took to hide and protect Jews in Nazi occupied Europe, as well
as other persecuted peoples, was nothing short of heroic. To put
themselves on the line in that way, knowing in full the penalties
that await such people if caught, shows a beautiful mix of compassion
and courage that makes you both sad and hopeful all at the same
moment. Equally, Anne Frank's desire to live as full a life as
possible whilst in hiding, and her commitment to do the same once the
occupation was over, while all that time living in constant fear of
capture, torture and death, is inspiring and heart-warming. When
faced with such cruelty as was commonplace under Nazi rule, and also
for those who unfortunately fell under imperial Japanese rule too,
it's comforting to know so many people fought back, and not just with
violence but with kindness too.
But what drives people
to commit such abominable acts in the first place. The fact that a
large group of people, in this case the Germans, can be so
systematically cruel to another group of people, the Jews, is
horrifying, and you can't help but wonder what horrors await us in
the future. Having said that, we know many Germans at the time were
repulsed by Hitler and the Nazi ideology, some fighting back while
others were coerced or intimidated into playing along. Nevertheless,
there was big support for Hitler among the German population,
certainly at the beginning of the war, and anti-Semitism was rife.
It's simply to easy and dismissive to label these people as brutes
and animals, and it gets us nowhere in trying to understand what
caused the support for this ideology.
At the time of Hitler's
ascension to power, Germany was on it's knees economically, causing
many hardships for ordinary people. We now know from experience that
when people are suffering they often look for someone to blame.
Extreme elements of society exploit this, often by pushing their own
prejudices onto other people by blaming those who are different to
them for societies ills. Hitler was clever and charismatic, and he
seemed to be able to offer the Germans a way out of the mess they
found themselves in. He gave them someone to blame and fight, someone
they could hate - a common enemy. Unfortunately, a combination of
Nazi propaganda and a feeling of helplessness among many sections of
the German people, caused a nation to come together to fight for a
deluded ideology that sickens me to my very core.
If we can agree that
people aren't inherently cruel, born either good or evil with no room
for movement between the two, then there must be cause for hope and
optimism for the future. If we know that what drives people to do
good or bad mostly depends on their environment, then as humans we
must do our best to discourage unfavourable conditions, like poverty,
and encourage socially desirable ones, like equality. We will never
be able to entirely eradicate human cruelty from our repertoire, but
lessening the conditions where this behaviour thrives would hopefully
reduce the chances of us seeing such large scale atrocities like
those we have witnessed in the past.
Unfortunately we are now seeing it happen in Greece. With the economy on its knees we are seeing a rise in the popularity of extreme right wing groups who are using immigrants as scapegoats. Worrying times!
ReplyDeletehttp://stream.aljazeera.com/story/greeces-right-wing-new-dawn-0022199