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No ‘Happy Friday’ post here today: the thread aims to offer up relatively light-hearted short observations about selected current events, maybe linking them to historic parallels or amusing anecdotes. However, when the week’s news is dominated by a truly horrific event, that goal becomes impossible. And, it seems to me, the unconscionable actions of the terrorist group Hamas in southern Israel have constituted what is probably the most barbaric incident in my lifetime.
I know, I know, there’s stiff competition when one starts singling out an event as ‘the worst’, but I believe it to be justified in this case because Hamas’s openly avowed purpose, mission, intent is the annihilation of all Jewish people. We’re on a par, here, with the aims detailed in the Wannsee Protocol1, the minutes of an infamous meeting that took place on 20 January 1942 chaired by Reinhard Heydrich. The author of an account of this hideous event describes the participants’ shift from ‘Mass Murder to Genocide’, a policy supported at the time by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammad Amin al-Husayani. Heydrich’s assistant was Adolf Eichmann. When, in 1961, Eichmann was put on trial in Jerusalem, it led Hannah Arendt to coin the memorable phrase ‘the banality of evil’2.
So, this week, forgive me if I jot a few thoughts about a far-from-happy outcome.
The Hamas atrocity and its aftermath are profoundly disturbing. What is equally disturbing is the sight of crowds in UK cities and other Western cities celebrating the event and filling the online media with their support: celebrating an obscenity; celebrating the murder of civilian men, women, children, even babies; celebrating rape and other unspeakable abuse.
Is this really the the community that I grew up in? Is this really the country where I was born? It certainly doesn’t feel like it. Good and evil have, of course, always co-existed. I’m not naive. But I would never have imagined that the day would come when I would witness such an egregious event and such egregious follow-on behavior. It surely represents the very pinnacle of hate?
Then I think about the delivery mechanism that enables and amplifies the awful messages. The internet. The internet that I am relying upon at this very moment to bring this message to you. The hardware and software of the internet are, of course, neutral - neither good nor evil. The internet just is. So what is happening to amplify the hate?
There can be only one answer to that question. People. People en masse. Us. And I recall some words of Aldous Huxley:
‘Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.’ In the midst of two or three hundred, the divine presence becomes more problematical. And when the numbers run into thousands, or tens of thousands, the likelihood of God being there, in the consciousness of each individual, declines almost to the vanishing point. For such is the nature of an excited crowd (and every crowd is automatically self-exciting) that, where two or three thousand are gathered together, there is an absence not merely of deity, but even of common humanity.3
This is a root of totalitarianism. And, today, of course, it’s not just thousands or tens of thousands who are involved. It’s millions or tens of millions. And, in their siloed channels they - we - are at risk of acting as Huxley describes … but on steroids.
We need to find a way to communicate en masse in a way that does not rob us of our common humanity but, rather, reinforces it. Failure to do so really doesn’t bear thinking about.
Mark Roseman. The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution (2002)
Hannah Arendt. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)
Aldous Huxley. The Devils of Loudon (1952)