Recently we commemorated the 71st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. My Facebook newsfeed was peppered with photos and statues that all carried the same theme: Lest We Forget. I sat backand thought for a moment: since the end of World War II, what have we learnt from the Nazis?
The first question asked after 1945 was: “How could this have happened?”
That is a question that puzzled many, but a few found the answer to. We learned, through the Stanford Prison Experiment, that putting people in positions of power without important parameters and rules very quickly leads to abuse and inhumane acts against those without power. Almost instantly participants were driven to the edge of insanity, at one point attempting suicide.
We have learnt, through the Milgram experiment, that people will obey orders without question and deliver fatal electric shocks to someone they don’t even see simply because an authoritative looking individual told them to. This highlighted how authority plays a big role in numbing our senses to human suffering, when we think that, if we get into trouble, we can just pass the buck over to our ‘leader’.
Jane Elliot took it a step further, this time with her third-grade students in her classroom in the US. By telling her students that those with blue eyes are better than those with brown, and treating one group differently from the other, forbidding the brown-eyed group from even playing on the swings, she created the phenomena seen in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Within hours the blue-eyed students had changed from innocent children to outright vicious brutes. When the roles changed the next day, with brown-eyed children being favoured, exactly the same thing happened. This is the force of such ideologies. Those who were once friends, became hateful and hurtful enemies.
Authority plays a big role in numbing our senses to human suffering, when we think that, if we get into trouble, we can just pass the buck over to our ‘leader’
The reactions to such ideologies have been analysed and written about numerous times. Academic circles have exhausted the subject. But have we learnt the lesson? Have we taken that lesson to its logical conclusion? Some statuses seemed fatuous and emotive rather than resolute and enlightened, and politicians still haven’t quite got their heads around what all the research actually means.
The far right is on the rise in Europe. Many politicians are afraid of it. Some even, opportunistically, use its existence to support claims that the European project cannot work. Their evidence is the number of people now supporting right wing parties like Golden Dawn, UKIP, and Le Pen.
Despite the insight we have into our past mistakes, we still encounter the exact same issue and it scares us. Since people’s reaction to such ideologies is automatic, then shouldn’t this inform our opinion of the far right? The far right is popular not because it is right, but because it is right wing.
Of course there will be supporters. It’s almost human reflex. Yet we still take the far right seriously. The EU seems to cower in the face of this well-known enemy when in reality it should be strengthening the very values it was built on. Now, more than ever before, we need to move forward and live by example, rather than fall back on old and dangerous ideologies.
I conclude with a reference to the last words from the Eichmann trial videos: “For each of us who has ever felt that God created us better than any other human being, has stood on the threshold where Eichmann once stood. And each of us who has allowed the shape of another person’s nose, or the colour of their skin, or the manner in which they worship their God, to poison our feelings toward them, have known the loss of reason that led Eichmann to his madness. For this was how it all began for those who did these things”.
Edward Caruana Galizia is an actor and studied psycho-social studies at Birkbeck University of London.