Assignment task:
The 1930s and 40s would come to represent some of the most brutal years in modern history and European history in particular. Communism and Fascism would quickly come to be associated with all manner of atrocities from Communist famines and gulags (labor camps) to World War to outright genocide.
Let us being with a quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Soviet citizen who survived Stalin's forced labor/death camps. It is a commentary on the nature of good and evil that resides within mankind.
Looking back, I saw that for my whole conscious life I had not understood either myself or my strivings. What had seemed for so long to be beneficial now turned out in actuality to be fatal, and I had been striving to go in the opposite direction to that which was truly necessary to me. But just as the waves of the sea knock the inexperienced swimmer off his feet and keep tossing him back onto the shore, so also was I painfully tossed back on dry land by the blows of misfortune. And it was only because of this that I was able to travel the path which I had always really wanted to travel.
It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains... an unuprooted small corner of evil.
Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.
And since that time I have come to understand the falsehood of all the revolutions in history: They destroy only those carriers of evil contemporary with them (and also fail, out of haste, to discriminate the carriers of good as well). And they then take to themselves as their heritage the actual evil itself, magnified still more.
According to Solzhenitsyn, normal people are capable of great evil.
While World War 2 provided the world with no shortage of atrocities, it is the Holocaust that is perhaps the single best remembered event. It showcased the evil that human beings are capable of. Some 10 million people were systematically exterminated in Nazi death camps, including 6 million Jews. This was over half of Europe's Jewish population.
The horrors were not isolated to the Nazis. Japanese unit 731 conducted some of the most horrifying experiments known to history including live vivisections of prisoners (including some Americans).
After the conclusion of the war, one observer commented that "We are in the presence of a crime without a name." Indeed, the sort of mass killing seen in this period shocked Americans and many other people at the time. Even after many years, the events still still manage to inspire shame, disgust and horror.
Many people have asked... how could this happen? What would make normally civilized people act this way?
Hannah Arendt, a German Jew who fled the Nazis, would later comment on what she called "The Banality of Evil" after her analysis of Adolf Eichmann (a prominent Nazi and architect of the holocaust). She was struck by the fact that Eichmann always refused any personal responsibility for the atrocity, instead always claiming that he simply followed orders.
Here is a dramatization of one of her speeches.
Among the best lines of the speech is this one...
"In refusing to be a person, Eichmann utterly surrendered that single most defining human quality: that of being able to think. And consequently, he was no longer capable of making moral judgments. This inability to think creates the possibility for many ordinary men to commit evil deeds on a gigantic scale, the like of which one had never seen before."
Indeed, we find that the Nazi leadership killed almost no one on their own. It was in fact rank and file everyday people in Germany and elsewhere who conducted the killings. So why then did THEY do it? The answer.... they were just "following orders."
The preponderance of this answer when it came to those who had committed atrocities prompted Stanley Milgram, much of whose family also died in the holocaust, to create an experiment into the nature of human obedience. This would famously be known as the Milgram or Obedience Experiment.
Here is a brief overview. I encourage you to research more.
It is perplexing, and depressing, to know that the greatest crime in human history was caused by people simply doing what they were told.
However, there are those who did not obey, those who remained defiant.
People like Schindler, Sophie Scholl, Irena Sendler. and many others refused to participate in the horrors of the time. Even more remarkably, they actively fought against it.
It is perhaps comforting to know that even at the darkest of times, there are those of us whose sense of righteousness is inextinguishable.
Here is a clip on Irena Sendler, a young Polish Catholic who withstood torture and potential death in order to save Jewish children. This was a project started by some students in Kansas that helped to bring the story of Irena Sendler to the world.
Makes ya feel good doesn't it?
See... it's not all depressing. :)
So on to our discussion... we're gonna be a bit deep on this one...
Questions:
Q1. Do you think that the sort of thing that happened in Germany can happen again? Could it happen in the USA? Why?
Q2. What is your personal opinion on why it is that most people just follow orders? Why are people like Irena Sendler so few?
Q3. Does the line between good and evil run through every human heart? Is Solzhenitsyn right when he says that "even in the best of all hearts, there remains... an unuprooted small corner of evil."?
Q4. Share some other thoughts you have related to the topic. Anything that impressed you or made you think.