By the Way

Yes I had a nice holiday. I really did. I spent a week on the Hebridean Island of Luing, for my Summer Holiday, and for the most part the sun shone and the sea was blue. And it was very, very hot. I had no TV, no radio and very limited internet access via a very dodgy phone signal. I re-discovered giant jelly fish after foolishly attempting to bathe in the iced translucent ocean.

Usually, when I go "away", something massively newsworthy happens. I only find out about it weeks later when this terrible event gets mentioned in passing. Do tell me if I did.

GERMANIAC (music by Die Krupps)

All I can see for now is that Bernie Ecclestone has made some comments about Hitler being "organised" and that dictatorships are not all that bad. This has caused those who love to be offended to go into hyperdrive. It is a measure of society's insecurity about morality, that people cling to the last vestiges of what is held (collectively) to be definitively "evil". In other words, many things in this world are abhorrent, but people no longer agree with each other as to what these things are.

Conveniently, Hitler is clumsy synonym for a lot of bad stuff; you know, that stuff which is bad, killing Jews and stuff, which I agree is bad, but for reasons that I have spent time thinking about at great length. Hitler did not kill 6 million Jewish people. A considerable number of his fellow Germans killed them and many more stood by and nodded approvingly, or supplied the forced labour, or the manufactured the Zyklon B or just kept their heads down and refused to dissent.

Individuals cannot commit genocide, any more than individuals can decide what kind of government we should have. It requires collective will, which I find rather more scary (and evil) than the rantings of an obviously mad man.

Bernie's mistake of course, is not thinking that Hitler had his good points or that you would rather drive a BMW than a Rover 75, Bernie's mistake was believing he could say such a thing in a climate of witchhunting and paranoia, mediated by insecurity and ignorance, and this desperate desire we have to find scapegoats for our own lack of belief in basic morality.

Strange but true:

The man who invented Zyklon B, the chemical used to gas Jews, Homosexuals, Gypsies, and other unwanted humans - was a Jew. Fritz Haber was a Nobel Chemistry Prize winner who fled Germany in 1933 due to the persecution of his race.