Chapter Thirteen: Into This Darkness
1 I should emphasise that I was extremely surprised that none of the figures we approached to take part in the ‘Ethical Compartmentalisation in Business Leadership’ interviews questioned us in detail about our political views, or the work of Platform. I’d made a point of being very open about this, but even so, I would have expected greater scrutiny. Perhaps the title of the research was actually cleverer than I had realised – both hitting the right kind of academic note, while also subtly flattering the prospective interviewees.
One of the strangest aspects of having worked on a project over many years is that, at times, you re-read earlier drafts and are struck by how dramatically things have changed. The most savage irony of all though hit home today – 9 November 2016, the day after the American presidential election – as I’m editing this chapter (which was originally written in the heyday and optimism of Obama’s first term). Today a man who ran his campaign by making the most racist and xenophobic generalisations about minorities has just been elected President. Doesn’t Obama’s argument about ‘the arc of history bending towards justice’ now seem very fragile indeed?
2 ‘cherish the questions themselves, like closed rooms and like books written in a very strange tongue, live everything, live the questions now.’ is from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke.
3 Although I have changed names and, in some cases, the gender of interviewees, all the words quoted are taken verbatim from the transcripts of these interviews. The companies the individuals worked for have not been changed.
4 John Browne’s justification for BP staying in apartheid South Africa – ‘BP of course stayed in South Africa during a very tough time during apartheid …’ – from the BBC Reith Lectures 2000, ‘Respect for the Earth’.
5 Lord Salisbury’s phrase about bringing ‘English civilisation … [to] the dark places of the earth’ comes in a speech to the British Parliament in 1900 concerning the activities of the Royal Niger Company (quoted in A Swamp Full of Dollars: Pipelines and Paramilitaries at Nigeria’s Oil Frontier by Michael Peel).
How People in Organisations Can Kill
6 “When I was on a trip once, years later in Brazil …” Stangl account from Into That Darkness by Gitta Sereny.
7 Einsatzgruppen language taken from The Einsatzgruppen Reports, ed. Arad, Krakowski and Spector.
8 Sir Timothy Garden, article in Guardian, 18 March 2003, ‘Bigger, better bangs: new weapons on trial’
9 Description of the capabilities of the MQ-9 Reaper drone quoted in Drones – the Physical and Psychological Implications of a Global Theatre of War, report by Medact, 2012.
10 Stephen Sackur’s interviews with drone operators in Nevada was for the programme Drone Wars, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 25 September 2011.
11 Speer on Hitler’s attitude to violence, ‘As a rule he avoided not only physical, but indeed visual contact, with violence …’ quoted in Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth by Gitta Sereny.
12 ‘With the killing of Jews I had nothing to do …’ and ‘During the trial, he showed unmistakable signs of sincere outrage …’ Both quotes relating to Eichmann taken from Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem.
13 ‘Stangl, insisiting that he had never shot into a crowd of people …’ from Sereny, Into That Darkness.
14 ‘Eichmann said … after much delay and a great deal of discussion…’ Wisliceny’s testimony is taken from Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945 by Richard Overy – ‘Document 11 The Führer Order [Dieter Wisliceny]’.
15 Ohlendorf’s testimony at his trial is taken from The Holocaust: An Encyclopedia and Document Collection, ed. Paul R. Bartrop, and Michael Dickerman.
16 Milgram’s experiment, ‘Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View’, has understandably received an enormous amount of attention ever since the results were first published in 1963. However, in recent years criticisms regarding the ethics of how the experiment was conducted have increased, particularly in regard to the amount of information given to the volunteers before the experiment, and the stress that some of them experienced being pressurised to administer what they believed were electric shocks. My own view regarding such criticisms is that the value of the research gained was so important that the methodology of the experiments was justified. It should be stressed that the volunteers were debriefed at the end of the experiment, told of the real purpose of the research, and assured that they had not given any electric shocks in reality.
But if the volunteers had been told at the outset that the shocks weren’t real, or that the ‘learner’ in the other room was only an actor who was part of the experiment, the research would have had no value at all. This for me has always been the glaring weakness at the heart of Philip Zimbardo’s ‘Stanford Prison Experiment’ in 1971, when college student volunteers were allocated ‘roles’ as ‘prisoners’ or ‘prison guards’. All participants were essentially involved in a piece of role-play from the outset, everyone knowing that the conditions were only simulated, and far from real world. However disturbing some of the subsequent behaviour was, there was never an underpinning of reality to the research, as there was with Milgram’s experiments.
Chapter Fourteen: The Oilman and the Broken Wing
1 ‘Oil exploitation has turned Ogoni into a waste land …’ Ken Saro-Wiwa, from A Month and a Day taken from his address to UNPO in Geneva, summer 1992.
2 ‘To the eyes of a miser a guinea is far more beautiful than the sun …’ from William Blake’s letter to Dr Trusler, 23 August 1799.
Chapter Fifteen: A Painting in The Hague; A Farmhouse in Suffolk; A Stadium in Somalia
1 ‘the merry dance of death and trade’ is from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.
2 The USS investment figures were from the ‘Trustees Annual Report’ for the year ended 31 March 1998. But in 2013 the figures were still substantial – a total of £694 million invested by USS in BP and Shell together (figure from the Times Higher Education website, 16 January 2014, ‘USS’ Largest Investments in Companies 2013’ by Holly Else).
3 ‘The secret of great wealth is a forgotten crime’ from Le Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac.
4 ‘In a world filled with such inequalities …’ from On the Edge of the New Century by Eric Hobsbawm.
5 ‘The moral “authority” of the face of the other is felt in my “infinite responsibility” for the other …’ is from Entre Nous: Essays on Thinking of the Other by Emmanuel Levinas.
6 ‘It is in the glance, in the eyes’ is from a lecture delivered by Hannah Arendt at the New School, New York in 1974 (cited in The Survivor by Terrence Des Pres).
7 I was very shocked to discover, some years ago, that The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H.is no longer in print. It was only available as a ‘print on demand’ book from the University of Chicago Press
Chapter Sixteen: A Walk from Goethe’s Gartenhaus to the Gates of Buchenwald: 10,166 Steps