The seeds of racism
Christopher Booker
One of the most depressing sights in Europe is to be seen in the hills above the little village of Mauthausen, on the Danube in Austria (I have no doubt that similar sights may be seen at various other places in Europe, but it happens that Mauthausen is the only former concentration camp! have visited). Just outside the grim, granite walls of the place where some 200,000 people were murdered between 1938 and 1945, is a series of memorials to the dead, erected after the war by the various countries whose nationals died there. Those of the Western nations are fairly small and unobtrusive (that for the mere half-dozen British victims being one of the smallest of all). But these are completely overshadowed and dwarfed by a series of huge, unutterably tasteless monuments (combining the worst of modern art with the worst of social realism) erected by the governments of Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe.
What is depressing about these vulgar lumps of concrete and granite is the realisation that they were put there not from any inner desire to commemorate the countless individual human beings who were so cruelly put to death on this site, or who suffered so terribly in the notorious Mauthausen stone-quarries . These memorials are a purely political gesture, erected by one collectivist, totalitarian tyranny to express its 'undying hostility' to another. Nowhere among the faded wreaths from 'the Central Committee of the German Democratic Republic' or 'the dockyard workers of Odessa' is the slightest evidence that the real lessons of places like Mauthausen have been learned. The crimes of the Nazis arc commemorated not because they were crimes against humanity but solely because they were committed by a group which was once ideologically opposed to the totalitarian governments who have erected these memorials.
It may seem a far cry from these melancholy thoughts to the little down-page news item in Monday's Daily Telegraph which reported that 'a memorial to the 11 million victims of the Nazi holocaust is to be built in Whitehall, opposite the Cenotaph'. The site for this new monument has been donated by HM Government, it is to be 'co-sponsored' by the Council of Christians and Jews, its design is to be supervised by an 'artistic committee' under the sensitive `chairpersonship' of Lady Birk, and not the least purpose of the memorial, according to Mr Greville Janner MP, President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, is that it may serve as 'a reminder and a warning to generations to come of what can happen when racist policies are carried out'.
Of course we are all as firmly opposed to 'racism' these days as previous generations were to sin. We rightly recall the crimes against humanity committed by the Third Reich as among the most terrible events in the history of the world. So what could be more innocuous and desirable than that the victims of those crimes should be commemorated in this way? I fear I am once again about to revive an argument which I first embarked on a year ago at the time of the television series Holocaust, and the question I wish to address myself to, with very great care, is this: are we absolutely sure of just why it is that we are all so opposed to racism, and to the terrible crimes which have been perpetrated in our century in its name?
What is the essence of the racist? For a start, he is someone who views human beings collectively, as being defined in some important sense not by their qualities as individual human beings but by their membership of a particular group. The racist is opposed to blacks, whites or Jews, Irishmen or Englishmen, because their blackness, Jewishness etc (and the supposed collective characteristics which go along with them) is to him the most important thing about such people. If he carries this sense of arpagonism to its extreme, as did the Nazis, the racist may even set about killing the objects of his hostility, simply because they are members of that particular group and for no other reason.
Now of course, this capacity for seeing the identity of human beings as defined not by their individual characteristics but by their membership of a particular group is not limited just to racists. It may afflict the members of any group, whether defined by religion, class, or political ideology — and it may, if it gets out of hand, lead to just the same appalling consequences as the evils of racism, The Christians who are helping to sponsor the Whitehall memorial are, for instance, members of an organisation which at certain shadowy moments in its past, as we all know, has projected the most violent and murderous hostility onto other groups of human beings whether they were here tics or infidels, Catholics or Protestants. Losing touch with that individual responsi bility for one's own inner moral kingdom to which Christ exhorted his followers, Christians behaved towards other human beings in this•collectivist fashion preciiely because they could be seen as excluded from the 'group membership' which gave the 'true Christians' themselves such an important part of their sense of identity.
Similarly the Jews belong to a group which, to a degree almost unique in history; has encouraged its members to seek their deepest identity in belonging to a collectiv, ity that is both racial and religious — and simply as a historical fact, it cannot be denied that this has on occasions led them into violently aggressive actions which cannot be justified in terms of moral absolutes, but only in terms of the interests of the group.
I am particularly thinking here, firstly, of the treatment over the past 40 years of the Palestinian •Arabs; and secondly of a great many incidents in the Old Testament, such as that extraordinary episode in Deuteronomy 7 where, only minutes after Moses has once again piously read out the Ten Commandments — 'thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's goods' — he is urging his followers to cross over into the Promised Land to do precisely those things to the tribes who already live there, and to 'show them no mercy'.
In our own time, of course, the 'groupideology' which has led to mass-murder on an even vaster and more continuous scale than anything which could be called 'racism' has been totalitarian socialism. It was something of an irony that the item in Monday's Telegraph immediately below that reporting the memorial to the victims of 'racism' was an advertisement appealing for moneY to help the survivors of what has been proportionately the most terrible act of genocide of modern times—the slaughter of some three million Cambodians, not in the name of 'racism', but by their fellow Cambodians in the name of building the ideal world of socialism. The point is — and it can never be made often enough — that it is not 'racism' which is the worst enemy of the human race. It isanY ideology Whether racial, religious or political — which sees human identity primarily in terms of race, class or any form of collective identity. It is a basic, unchanging fact of human psychology that as soon as human beings project their universal need for identity outwards onto the group, whether it be race, class or anything else, preciselY because they are avoiding the probleln of finding their true identity as individuals, they will also project their shadow outwards too — onto some other group, different from their own. In our own time, because they were so unrelievedly wicked, the Nazis have become a convenient scapegoat for avoiding the truth about the real seeds of all these evils. That is why. when I read about the ,proposed memorial in Whitehall, I cannot help but think about those other memorials at Mauthausen: not because it would be quite so obviously hypocritical as they, but because it seems to be just another collectivist ritual gesture. It will be ultimately meaningless because it tucks away the evil that divides human beings into a cosy little pigeon-hole called 'racism', where all the evil can be safely projected onto those appalling 'others' and where there is not a hint that the seeds of precisely that satne fanatical, collectivist intolerance may lie in all of us.
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