Although Alberto was generalising here too, of course, something in what he said has stayed with me. And the more I’ve read about war, genocide and racism, the more I’ve become sure that none of these are possible without the perpetrators first using that lethal third person plural – ‘they’. Those four letters have been used to justify almost every act of terror and oppression, whether it’s Goebbels railing against the Jews, Stalin against the kulaks, Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines against the Tutsis, Bush against his ‘enemies of freedom’. Before killing comes simplification.
We’re shocked today, rightly so, if anyone uses ‘they’ to generalise about any group – it would simply seem crass, absurd, to talk in generalisations about any large number of people or community – imagine hearing somebody say ‘students are X’ or ‘Jewish people are Y’, and you would immediately sense the prejudice, and discount what followed. It is a sign of the progress in our societies that we are now more aware than ever of the linkage between generalisation and racism, homophobia and other prejudices. In a European context, though, there is one group of people in particular who still experience others generalising about them, often in the most vicious and racist way – and that is the Roma.
Some years ago when I was teaching this was brought home to me vividly. It was the time when the authorities in the Czech town of Usti nad Labem had ordered the building of a wall around the part of the town where many Roma lived – a kind of modern ghetto. There was a furious response, the European Union made strong representations, and the Czech president, Václav Havel, called it ‘unacceptable’, and within weeks the wall was taken down. I’d been discussing the issue with my evening class, a mixed group of adults from different African, South American and European backgrounds, some of them refugees, when an Italian – a friendly and intelligent woman, a doctor from Bari – could take no more of all the liberal condemnation:
‘OK, this may be a bit strong, this wall, but you have to admit
Gypsies are a problem. They’re dirty and everywhere they go
they steal and rob.’
‘Are you being serious?’
‘Absolutely! In my city we built them a whole new area, flats, all
modern. And you know what they did? They just broke them up,
sold off the metal piping. No, really, it’s true, they’re happy to live
like pigs.’
At this point all my pedagogical principles about the need for free discussion went out of the window and I became very angry – for the only time in all my years of teaching – and asked her what her solution was. Maybe ‘Gypsies’, as she referred to them, should all be put in camps? Or why not just kill them, as had been done in the Holocaust sixty years ago? I began to talk about how genocide begins with the pronouns ‘they’ and ‘them’. I was relieved when other students started to join in, and the discussion moved on to their own experiences of racism. After a while, the doctor lapsed into a sulky silence. Later I tried to analyse why this particular person had made me so furious. I’d heard anti-Roma prejudice before – sadly it seems to be one of the most omnipresent forms of racism in our societiesfn2 – but there was something almost brazen about her expression of it here. Maybe I was angry with myself, because my impression of her had been wrong, and so this was like being slapped across the face. I was particularly shocked that this was an educated woman in her thirties, a doctor, supposedly one of the ‘caring’ professions.
But I hadn’t handled this well. I’d lost my temper and tried to ridicule her, instead of letting the other students argue with her, as I normally would have done. Maybe I was concerned that some of the others in the class, who hadn’t spoken, silently agreed with her. Perhaps I’d been too anxious on behalf of the more vulnerable students in the group who’d suffered from racism, but didn’t yet have the linguistic skills to be able to express their experience with the articulacy and fluency needed to combat the Italian doctor. Unsurprisingly, she didn’t come back to the class, and I felt a twinge of regret that I’d used my position not to open up critique and discussion, but to close it down.
But, to return to what Alberto said – if we become irate hearing bigots saying ‘the thing about Gypsies is they’re all ….’, or racists generalising wildly about Muslims, then how can we generalise about people working in oil corporations? Or bankers? Or politicians? Criticise the action, not the person. Be as uncompromising as you like in condemning the act, but do not write off the human being. I think here of a remarkable passage in Bernhard Schlink’s book The Reader, where he describes the confusion in the mind of his protagonist – a student who has just realised that Hanna, the woman he’d had his first sexual experience and relationship with some years before, had been responsible for an appalling massacre of Jews in the war:
I wanted simultaneously to understand Hanna’s crime and to condemn it … When I tried to understand it, I had the feeling I was failing to condemn it as it must be condemned. When I condemned it as it must be condemned, there was no room for understanding … I wanted to pose myself both tasks … but it was impossible to do.
Condemning or understanding, the dichotomy that is always in us. The spectrum that we’re always on. Gitta Sereny’s work comes to mind again, with Stangl, with Speer, the extraordinary patience and curiosity about these men, who had experienced years of being judged and condemned. Some would say she slid too far towards understanding, but I strongly disagree. Because she never forgets their humanity, their insecurities, their doubts (as well as their vanities and their self-delusions), she is able to get us beyond the label of ‘perpetrator’ to the three-dimensional person behind, closer than anyone has managed, before or since. And by doing this, we are able to learn vastly more about the psychology of these people – and, perhaps most frighteningly, their ability to maintain a positive self-narrative while being part of genocidal organisations.
I wonder also if there’s not a relationship between ageing and a desire to focus more on understanding rather than condemning. As I get older I’m becoming more and more fascinated by doubt. Life seems dramatically richer, and more nuanced, than it did when I was younger. I’m far more interested in questions than answers. I now think of curiosity and love as inextricably connected. Finding the most beautiful and powerful questions seems to me just about the most useful way of spending a life. How far away my younger self appears! The evangelical student activist burning with certainty and righteousness, ablaze with fixed beliefs. I don’t think I’d be able to talk to that young man any more. I’m not sure he’d be able to listen. If he could, I’d probably say to him, ‘cherish the questions themselves, like closed rooms and like books written in a very strange tongue, live everything, live the questions now’.2
*
Days in that little room at Birkbeck as a succession of women and men arrive, talk about their working lives and the ethical choices they’ve made, and then leave. I’m totally unprepared for how draining the experience is; an intensity of listening, over hours, of not wanting to miss a single word or inflection, each of which could be significant. I’d made a decision – influenced strongly by Gitta Sereny’s approach to her interviewees – that (for the duration of the interviews) I would completely repress my instinct to judge or challenge what people told me. The most important thing was to engage with everyone in as empathetic a way as possible, to let people express themselves in the language they chose, to learn as much as I could about their backgrounds, their ethical values, what they had wanted to achieve when they started their working lives. Naturally, this was extremely difficult at times; I could feel myself straining at the leash on a number of occasions, but I never lost control, because I knew this would shut the interview down, and, in the process, remove all possibility of finding out what I wanted to discover.