Kenya – another void in the knowledge of our own history, centuries of colonial violence, like the Opium Wars, like Tasmania, like the British famines, in Ireland and Bengal – omissions which keep us in ignorance of our past, and so shame us in the present. And, in case you might think these questions are academic, or only about the past, consider for a moment the continuity of thought and behaviour that underlies centuries of such violence, and interventions in other countries by Britain, and how such behaviour continues today. Consider how the minds of our political leaders – in all parties – have been formed and then think about these men and women who thought that going to war in Iraq was the best way of resolving differences in the twenty-first century. Hundreds of thousands of people killed because men and women in countries far away believed that ‘intervention’ was justified. And such beliefs do not materialise out of thin air; they are formed from layers of accreted histories, laid down quite unconsciously, that begin to form national narratives, and are often left completely unchallenged.
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So, how then are such silences in societies broken? How are these taboos, to return to Günter Grass’s original challenge, finally voiced? In the last three chapters we have seen atrocities committed by Britain, Germany, France and the USA. These countries have each responded to their guilt primarily through silences, selective historical ‘amnesias’, differing according to the precise cultures of each society, yet all sharing certain features. Something strikes me strongly here, perhaps it also strikes you. The Holocaust came to be seen as shaming an entire society. It came to be viewed (except by a lunatic, racist fringe) as an unequivocally evil event that brought about near-universal condemnation of Germany by other countries around the world. Until it attempted to come to a kind of reckoning with its own history, Germany would not be welcomed in from the cold. Therefore, ultimately, there was pressure, both from within the country and from outside, for the silence which descended after the war to be broken.
However, the British and American examples are starkly different because these societies have benefited enormously, and continue to do so, from the original acts of genocide, slavery and colonialism. To focus on Britain for a moment, and to look at just one of the sectors of its economy that has always been world-renowned – finance, banking and insurance, still today constituting 20 per cent of the economy and employing 3 million people in associated industries. Yet the majority of this sector, as we’ve already seen, gained its power from the Atlantic Triangle of trade, with slavery providing the central manpower and capital. Barclays, the Royal Bank of Scotland (both still in the world’s top fifty financial institutions), Lloyd’s of London, all springing directly from this trade in human cargo. HSBC (the fourteenth-largest financial institution in the world today) owes its origins to the East India Company and the massively lucrative opium trading that addicted millions in China. This unspoken policy of ‘successful violence’ has undeniably become part of the DNA of Britain and the USA.
And so, over centuries, patterns of thought and behaviour have been passed down, so that extreme levels of violence (usually taking place far away geographically – slavery, drug addiction, arms dealing, wars, ‘free’ trade) have become first tolerated and then normalised. Most significantly, the home populations of both countries have benefited economically from what we could call ‘outsourced’ violence. It is no coincidence that the USA and Britain have the largest weapons industries in the world, disproportionately large armies and (the USA at least) retain the ability to wage global wars. But this kind of violence is only the publicly visible tip of an iceberg. There is exceptional violence too in controlling the loaning of money from the World Bank or forcing islanders to leave their land so that airbases can be built (as in the case of the Pacific island of Diego Garcia), or extracting oil from some of the poorest countries on the planet.
It is worth considering the means by which such silences and denials are ended. For Germany the first stage in the process was military defeat in 1945. But of course the USA and Britain have not, yet, suffered such defeat. We have experienced no equivalent of the Nuremburg Trials, or denazification. Neither has there been the kind of conflict and internal reckoning within these countries that we saw after the break-up of apartheid South Africa. So there is no impetus to begin a process of truth and reconciliation. I wonder whether defeat, or some kind of complete national humiliation, is the only way for a society to truly start to look at itself. Perhaps such a sense of shared catastrophe enables an unblocking to take place, comparable to an individual coming through a breakdown. Suddenly a free space is created, momentarily unformed, inchoate (not unlike the instant immediately preceding revolutions), and into this space astonishing actions can take place.
Willy Brandt kneeling on the ground in Warsaw a generation after his country had annihilated that city and its people – an action so simple, yet it released an unprecedented wave of reflection and discussion. As his knees touched the stone before the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial on 7 December 1970, millions of Germans heard themselves speaking in a different way, their voices unlocked – an almost exact reverse of the process which Jacques Austerlitz undergoes as a refugee child: ‘I could still apprehend the dying away of my native tongue, the faltering and fading sounds which I think lingered on in me at least for a while, like something shut up and scratching or knocking, something which, out of fear, stops its noise and falls silent whenever one tries to listen to it.’1
The electrifying first moment of the breaking of a taboo, or the shuffling off of a shibboleth. The precise moment on 2 June 2005 when courageous television news producers in Belgrade, at RTS and B-92, took the decision to broadcast a film of Serbian paramilitaries, in July 1995, being blessed by an Orthodox priest just before they torture and shoot six young Muslim men in Srebrenica.fn6 The soldiers can clearly be heard taunting the men, their hands tied behind their backs, as they take them down from a lorry to a clearing where they are shot at close range. For many ordinary Serbs this was a watershed which ended a consensus of denial – there could be nothing ‘staged’ about such footage. It was more significant, in terms of breaking the silence, than even Milosevic’s extradition to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which had happened four years before. President Tadić and Prime Minister KoŠtunica of Serbia immediately called the crimes ‘monstrous’ and ‘brutal, callous and disgraceful’ and announced that eight of the perpetrators, clearly identifiable from the film, had already been arrested. The most ardent Serbian nationalists at that moment must have detected at least the flickering of a question mark in their heads, as they saw the images from Srebrenica finally reaching into their homes. The repressed reality of this massacre now finally coming to light. ‘Whenever a secret is kept it will make its way …’
Forty-four years after the massacre of the Algerian demonstrators in Paris, the director Michael Haneke’s extraordinary film Hidden is released. The narrative centres around a protagonist, an Algerian man whose parents are both killed in the massacre when he’s six years old. Although it is only referred to briefly, this is the pivot on which the entire film turns. Haneke documents the impact on individual lives of the devastation and violence that is unleashed through colonialism and the subsequent failure of an entire society to confront its past honestly. Ultimately the violence, like Banquo’s ghost, will always return to haunt the perpetrators, and the silence will be broken. The only irony here is that this breaking of silence, this impassioned and angry film about France and its buried colonial history, did not come from the French. Often an outside eye sees far more. And Haneke’s fury at societal ‘amnesia’ is more understandable knowing that his father was German and Haneke grew up in Austria, a country not known for its honesty in dealing with its own history.