“The absence of a transcendent dimension in secular society weakens this social contract in which each supposedly limits his or her freedom in order to live in peace with others. Such universalism of interest is another aspect of modern illusion. There is no such thing as scientifically based human solidarity. I can convince myself that it is in my interest not to rob other people, not to rape and murder, because I can convince myself that the risk is too great. This is the Hobbesian model of solidarity: greed moderated by fear. But social chaos stands in the shadows of such moral anarchy. When society adheres to moral norms for no other reason than prudence, it is extremely weak and its fabric tears at the slightest crisis. In such a society, there is no basis for personal responsibility, charity or compassion. We need instruments of human solidarity that are not based on our own instincts, self-interest or on force. The communist attempt to institutionalize solidarity ended in disaster.”
— Leszek Kołakowski
“We are frequently told that we must sympathize with Israel because of the suffering of the Jews in Europe at the hands of the Nazis. I see in this suggestion no reason to perpetuate any suffering. What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy.”
— Bertrand Russell
“Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”
— Ephesians 6:10-12
I am not big fan of World War II films. Especially not action war films (they have been largely done to death, become saturated, unoriginal). For me to be interested it must be something more grounded, focused, limited in its scope, bottom-up rather than top-down, more about the emotionality and morality than the spectacle (which is more often than not all that it is — superficial, hollow, skin-deep, unimaginative, lazy, without any interest in the nuance that characterises any human being and therefore any human historical event).
The Zone of Interest represents such an exception to the rule of World War II films, in my view. I would describe it as surreal horror. Surreal in its banal treatment (by design) of one of if not the most inhuman events in human history; horror in that not a single one of the characters (of whom are all staff or family members of staff working at Auschwitz) is repulsed, horrified, or remotely disturbed by the events taking place just over a wall from them (the goings on being audible at all times throughout the film, but never visible); the entire event — the extermination (or attempted extermination) of an entire people — is treated as a benign backdrop to their happy family lives and promising career prospects; as a matter of fact rather than something to investigate morally in any way (there seems to have been a definite cascading psychological effect on Germans from first using Zyklon-B to bug bomb factories before it was used on humans). And this to me is a more accurate portrayal of what life was like for the average German at the time (dispelling the myth that the average person knew nothing of the camps): not anxious, unsettled, disquieted, or merely tolerating the goings on around them — for fear of the tyranny that might come their way instead — but gradually having come to accept it, to adapt to it, to pay it no mind, to blend it into the otherwise monotonous scenery of everyday life, it eventually becoming as banal as everything that envelopes it (in fact the thing that first attracted me to the film was that it reminded me of the weird photo albums and footage of life for staff at the camps; smiles, picnics, bike rides, pretty dresses, crisp uniforms — only a few hundred yards from a death factory, mass graves).
All this is to say that I would recommend the film. Highly recommend it. It is a slow burn. A very monotonous one at that. But that is where the true horror lies. As Hannah Arendt put it in Eichmann in Jerusalem, “Conscience as such had apparently got lost in Germany, and lost to a point where people hardly remembered it and had ceased to realize that the surprising ‘new set of German values’ was not shared by the outside world... In the Third Reich evil lost its distinctive characteristic by which most people had until then recognized it. The Nazis redefined it as a civil norm.”
“To learn proper use one must first inhibit all improper uses of the self. Refuse to be hurried into gaining ends by the equivalent (in personal, psycho-physiological terms) of violent revolution; inhibit this tendency, concentrate on the means whereby the end is to be achieved; then act. This process entails knowing good and bad use — knowing them apart. By the ‘feel.’ Increased awareness and increased power of control result. Awareness and control: trivialities take on new significance. Indeed, nothing is trivial any more or negligible. Cleaning teeth, putting on shoes — such processes are reduced by habits of bad use to a kind of tiresome non-existence. Become conscious, inhibit, cease to be a greedy end-gainer, concentrate on means: tiresome non-existence turns into absorbingly interesting reality... Awareness and power of control are transferable. Skill acquired in getting to know the muscular aspect of mind-body can be carried over into the exploration of other aspects. There is increasing ability to detect one’s motives for any given piece of behaviour, to assess correctly the quality of a feeling, the real significance of a thought. Also, one becomes more clearly and consistently conscious of what’s going on in the outside world, and the judgment associated with that heightened consciousness is improved. Control also is transferred. Acquire the art of inhibiting muscular bad use and you acquire thereby the art of inhibiting more complicated trains of behaviour. Not only this: there is prevention as well as cure. Given proper correlation, many occasions for behaving undesirably just don’t arise... Hitherto preventive ethics has been thought of as external to individuals. Social and economic reforms carried out with a view to eliminating occasions for bad behaviour. This is important. But not nearly enough. Belief that it is enough makes the social-reform conception of progress nonsensical... So how satisfactory to find that there seems to be a way of making sense of the nonsense. A method of achieving progress from within as well as from without.”
— Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza (1936)
“Peace is the natural effect of trade.”
— Montesquieu
“God may or may not exist. But there is the empirical fact that contemplation of the divinity — of goodness in its most unqualified form — is a method of realizing that goodness to some slight degree in one’s life, and results, often, in an experience as if of help towards that realization of goodness, help from some being other than one’s ordinary self and immensely superior to it.”
— Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza (1936)
“If you call a man a bug, it means that you propose to treat him as a bug. Whereas if you call him a man, it means that you propose to treat him as a man. My profession [anthropology] is to study men. Which means that I must always call men by their name; always think of them as men; yes, and always treat them as men. Because if you don’t treat men as men, they don’t behave as men... If one looks for men, one finds them. Very decent ones, in a majority of cases. For example, go among a suspicious, badly treated, savage people; go unarmed, with your hands open. Go with the persistent and obstinate intention of doing them some good — curing their sick, for example. I don’t care how bitter their grievance against white men may be; in the end, if you’re given time enough to make your intentions clear, they’ll accept you as a friend, they’ll be human beings treating you as a human being. Of course, it sometimes happens that they don’t leave you the necessary time. They spear you before you’re well under way. But it doesn’t often happen — it has never happened to me, as you see — and when it does happen, well, there’s always the hope that the next man who comes will be more successful. Anthropologists may get killed; but anthropology goes on; and in the long run it can’t fail to succeed. Whereas your entomological approach... You can’t be intelligent about human beings unless you’re first sentimental about them. Sentimental in the good sense, of course. In the sense of caring for them. It’s the first indispensable condition of understanding them. If you don’t care for them, you can’t possibly understand them; all your acuteness will just be another form of stupidity... The anthropologist has got to learn to overcome that hostility and suspicion. And when he’s learnt that, he’s learnt the whole secret of politics... That if you treat other people well, they’ll treat you well... In the long run they’ll always treat you well.”
— Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza (1936)
“It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen.”
— George MacDonald