The great historian of the Holocaust Raul Hilberg titled one of his last books Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders. I wonder how he might have looked at this painting. Adriaan is clearly the victim here; Dr Tulp and his colleagues, though not the direct perpetrators, are certainly the beneficiaries of his execution. And the bystanders, the witnesses? Surely the audience, and, by extension, ourselves. The bystanders – those whose responsibility is the most critical, as well as the least understood.
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If we could fully understand the psychology that underpins The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp, we might also understand more of a mindset that still exists today. Though of course there are no longer public dissections of executed criminals, the underlying thought processes concerning the relationship between the development of societies and the casualties involved in such ‘progress’ survive. An enormous amount of international trade, including the vast majority of extractive industries, particularly mining and oil, are based precisely on an unspoken assumption that the world is divided into what could be called ‘zones of progress’ (i.e. the countries and places where these companies are based, and where their consumers and shareholders live), and ‘zones of sacrifice’fn1 (i.e. the countries and places where the minerals or oil are, essentially seen as sites of extraction, the inhabitants seen as peripheral, only necessary to deal with to aid the process of extraction and export). Companies may produce warehouses of reports and publications detailing their concern for ‘community development’ in their ‘partner countries’, hundreds of UN initiatives and NGO dialogues may be launched, but these do not even begin to impact on the fundamentally abusive psychology that has been in existence for centuries.
The psychology is so pervasive in our society that most of us do not even question it. We might notice the occasional tree but we cannot see the forest. The very idea that it’s acceptable for a Western oil company to be working in a country where a civil war is raging, or where there’s a military dictatorship, or where there’s no independent judiciary or media – the assumption that it is acceptable for our corporations to work in such contexts is staggering. We do not seem able to understand the inevitable, catastrophic consequences that will flow when you have a corporation whose annual turnover dwarfs the GDP of the country it’s operating within. Or whose international legal team and lobbyists have scoped the deal long before the official negotiations with the host government begin. Our society only appears to register concern or criticism when a company does something so blatantly wrong that it offends the powers that be (because such actions could threaten the unchallenged existence of the status quo). I’m writing this chapter in October 2011, when the following three examples of corporate abuse have come to the attention of the British media:
ITV have reported that Arcelor Mittal, the largest steel corporation in the world, have been polluting the town of Ostrava in the Czech Republic to such an extent that on many days children and the elderly have been told to stay inside; 15 per cent of the children in the suburbs suffer from asthma, and many need to use oxygenators on a daily basis.
The Guardian have revealed that Shell, according to a report by Platform and others, had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to Nigerian government forces and militant groups in the Delta, which had resulted in the destruction of the town of Rumuekpe and the killing of sixty people and displacement of thousands more between 2005 and 2008.
BBC’s Newsnight have featured a report on the Scottish company Edinburgh Woollen Mill, highlighting the fact that their clothes, advertised as ‘Designed in Scotland’, were actually made in Mongolia, with factories staffed overwhelmingly by North Korean workers. These workers were not paid by the factory, who preferred to pay the North Korean government directly.
It is of course entirely right that all of these violations of human rights have been reported and received media scrutiny. Yet, in the same time period, what else has been happening? For instance, how much attention has been given to the role oil corporations, particularly BP, played in keeping Mubarak’s dictatorship in power in Egypt for the last thirty years (including £17 billion invested in recent years); or indeed the role that the company are still playing now, working with the new regime there? I sometimes feel that we look at individual trees while not seeing the forest.
But it is not enough to focus only on the perpetrators of these abuses. The perpetrator may carry out the act of killing or plunder or trade, but the bystander will often emerge as the ‘beneficiary’ of such actions. Just as the residents of the seventeenth-century Netherlands no doubt benefited from the advancement of scientific knowledge achieved by dissecting the corpses of executed criminals, so we today are also the beneficiaries of ‘the merry dance of death and trade’, as Conrad called it.1 We drive and fly with hardly a thought for the oil we depend on, which flows out of countries in turmoil like blood from arteries. And usually these countries, where countless abuses have been carried out, are far away from the direct view of the bystanders, sometimes even on the other side of the world. This is psychologically more acceptable, because then there is little need for any moral reckoning with the victims involved. We do not have to look into their faces.
My grandmother, on my father’s side, Violet (‘Vidi’) Hilda Waterhouse, bought this farmhouse in Suffolk and around fifty acres of land in 1939, just before the outbreak of war. My father and my aunt were brought up here (when they weren’t away at schools across the country). It is the place where my brother and sister and I grew up too, and where my nephews and nieces are now children. So it’s been an important part of our family’s life across four generations; it seems to have become part of us. It is the stillness at the centre of my world, even if I do not go there physically for months at a time. The fact it exists means that I’ve felt able to lead what has sometimes felt like a risky and insecure existence in London. However problematic in terms of privilege, I know and love this place more than any other. Set in a wooded hollow, arriving and turning into the drive feels like crossing into another country, a sense of refuge, being far away from the rushing world. A slow river bends around the bottom of the garden, there are paths through the woods, ash, oak, horse chestnut. In February it is carpeted with a million snowdrops and in the summer we eat outside, under a sallow tree, in dappled shade. It is a kind of dream space, and whenever I’m there it still seems miraculous to me.
But how did my grandmother come to be buying a farmhouse and land in 1939? She was the daughter of Sir Herbert Furnivall Waterhouse and Lady Edith Florence, and by the time she and her sister Dody were born at the turn of the century, Sir Herbert was already established as one of London’s leading surgeons, who, later in his career, operated on prime ministers (Asquith, Bonar Law) and the royal family. He had made his name, not unlike Dr Tulp, as a demonstrator in anatomy at Charing Cross Hospital, and later at the Royal College of Surgeons. During the First World War, he was a key figure in the success of the Anglo-Russian hospital in Petrograd (today St Petersburg) – a humanitarian gift from the British people to their Russian ally, then suffering major casualties on the Eastern Front, with insufficient medical resources. Waterhouse was appointed the principal surgeon, and the makeshift hospital, housed in the Belosselsky-Belozersky Palace on Nevsky Prospekt, saved thousands of lives between 1915 and 1917. For his years of work in Petrograd, and contribution to Anglo-Russian relations, he was knighted on his return to Britain in 1917.