Apocalypse 60 Years ago

Last summer I was down in Killarney saving Ireland's natural oak forests with a group of international volunteers. Generally the craic down there is fairly mighty and there's plenty of wit flying around the place, but someone took it upon themselves to take the piss out of people of a certain nationality for their alleged lack of humour, with slightly disturbing consequences.

When the German girl told us that she had a German joke she got our attention fairly pronto. I think that although The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass and Felix Krull by Thomas Mann are two of the funniest books I've ever read, the stereotype of Teutons as being humourless isn't without a modicum of truth, so I was intrigued to hear the joke as well.

Unfortunately for almost everyone concerned, the joke went a little like this.

The Pope goes into a supermarket somewhere in Germany. He takes his goods to the checkout and the girl there tells him the price. He takes a €10 note out of his pocket, and the girl looks really stunned. His Holiness asks what the matter is. She replies:
"That's the first time I've ever seen a Pole pay for anything."

Everyone responsed with a pointed silence, but the German girl, bless her dear little heart, assumed that we'd just not gotten the joke.
She started off explaining, "You See..." and I shouted out "No!" as loudly as I could, guessing that she was going to dig herself deeper into a hole, which she pretty much did by explaining zat zey have all zese Poles coming over to zeir country und stealing stuff.

The Year before I was on a trip through Halong Bay in Vietnam, when I overheard this big, fat, German discussing the Euro with an English woman. I wasn't eavesdropping, HE VAS TALKING REALLY LOUD ZE VAY SOME GERMANS DO. He wanted to know which parts of the UK had accepted the Euro. He'd heard that IRELAND had accepted the Euro, and then he shook his head disgustedly, and said "ALWAYS WITH ZE FIGHTING", with a total lack of irony.

This week the German nation is being reminded that they have a bit of history of being with ze fighting and stealing stuff from Poles, for example, Oh, I don't know, their land, their freedom, their dignity and, in the cases of those of semetic origin or left-wing views, their lives.

Let me declare an interest by saying that I'm part German-Jewish on my mother's side and that if my ancestors hadn't left Germany then the man who became my grandfather would probably have been enslaved and then gassed.

There are those who think that Germans have suffered enough for the holocaust and that they should be able to put it behind them, that their past doesn't matter all that much. I think this would be a reasonable argument if they were willing to knock down every building over the age of 50 years and never listen to Beethoven, Bach or Wagner or read Goethe or look at paintings by Durer or Friedrich or watch movies by Murnau or Fritz Lang ever again.

Of course the past matters; the past is what makes us what we are. It's ironic that many of those right-wing brits who criticised Tony Blair for aplogising for the famine are the same people who want to preserve their ancient institutions like the Monarchy and the House of Lords.
It's also wishful thinking to imagine that Germans have learned the lessons of Auschwitz. Though in many ways the Modern German state is as liberal as any, when you see even the sort of Germans who go trekking in the jungle in Vietnam or working in woodland conservation express the sort of attitudes that led to the Holcaust, you wonder how much they've really changed.

In one respect the Germans are treated unfairly as they're hardly unique in committing acts of genocide. At the same time the Nazis were gassing six million Jews the British were deliberately starving at least two million Bengalis to death, yet they don't go through a periodic ten-year guilt fest. At the same time around double the amount were being slughtered in Russia, and in the United States, a country many of whose citizens have the same belief in their own infallibilty that gripped Germany in the 30's, it was only 30 years before that native Americans were granted basic civil rights, up till then the constitution protecting Caucasian Americans from "the savage Indian" by giving them the right to murder them if they felt threatened. It's also been pointed out by Daniel Goldhagen and in a recent BBC Documentary that many occupied nations were extremely complicit in the genocide.

For many, though, it's the clinical, industrial efficiency of Auschwitz that makes it so shocking, that so many people could be so cold-blooded as to make murder their 9-to-5 job. Yet in virtually every industrial country today there's a thriving arms industry where people who may appear to be decent fathers and husbands build weapons that kill and maim innocent people around the world.

Many people see the holocaust as an aberation which is why every ten years you get people platitudinously insisting that it must never happen again. Ten years ago this week, the editor off the UCC college mag used this exact same cliche, I mean phrase. If only Slobadon Milosevic, Robert Mugabe, and the junta in Indonesia had read that. If only! Still waiting for the UCC pubs officer (1994-95) to come and sort out those tyrants in whatever way she deemed fit, though.

Yet it should hardly surprise people that as people have been slaughtering each other since time began, that people people would do it in an ordered, efficient way on more than one occasion, or that slavery was used by Europeans so recently. Yet we still utilise slavery, except these days we call it "outsourcing", promtoting such massive population growth in Asia and Latin America that people have to work twelve hours a day to make the basic amount of money to live on.

I see Auschwitz not as an aberation, but as the apex of industrial civilistion. As a vegetarian, I'm aware that the death camps were modeled on Fordist Mass Procution factories, which were in turn modelled on Chicago stock-houses. But when I tried to explain this to my mum, she replied "I know the difference between a cow and a jew. Maybe you don't but I do." Sometimes I wonder why I bother.

Vegetarians are often accused of sanctimony but I'm not going to claim that just because I eat meat that the Holocaust has nothing to do with me. I'm the sort of person who can never stop realising that all the wealth and security that I enjoy, like the computer I'm writing this on right now, are the product of theft and opression. Sitting in a nice, warm library reading the Cambridge History of SouthEast Asia, I learned that when Europeans first arrived in those countries the people were just as well developed as themselves, yet as Europeans gradually took over their countries we became fitter happier and more productive while the exact opposite happened the victims of colonistion.

This is why periodic guilt-fests like the current Holocaust jamboree annoy me. But at least they piss off the holocaust-deniers no end. I've never understood why these people bother. They must imagine that everyone would think those nazis were absolutely spiffing chaps if it wasn't for that awful slaughter-of-six-million business. They cite the "evidence" of people like Fred Leucther, a non-German speaker who went to a gas chamber and said it looked more like a bomb shelter to him, then sent a big chunk of the wall for examintion and when it showed no signs of gas, concluded that there was no holocaust. The thing is, that after 50 years only a minute trace of gas would have been left on the surface of the walls and the fucking idiot crushed a huge chunk of wall into dust before sending it for analysis. That neo-Nazis use the work of such a plonker to justify their arguments shows how weak they are. The funny thing is that many neo-nazis actually call themselves nazis, when "nazi" is a bavarian word roughly equivilant to the Cork term "langer" (according to Micheal Burleigh). So every time someone says they're a nazi, their actually saying that they're a langer.

But I see the second world war like I did the last American election, not as a Manichean struggle between good and evil, but between the greater and the lesser of two evils. In the sixty years the less-evil countries that won the war have, variously, napalmed 5 million people in Asia, started dozens of other proxy wars all over the world, pushed the Earth to the brink of environmental catastrophe, given more money to feed cows at home than starving people abroad, and invented boy-bands. And yet the people they defeated were even worse. So if you call yourself a nazi, I guess the word "langer" is actually a compliment.