His accomplices in the crime were neither gangsters nor men of the underworld, but the leaders of the nation – including professors and scholars, robed dignitaries with academic degrees, educated persons, the ‘intelligentsia’. We shall encounter them – the doctors and lawyers, scholars, bankers and economists – in those councils which resolved to exterminate the Jews.
I also think it’s possible that Hausner himself was influenced by an earlier piece of writing – which I first came across many years ago, at the very beginning of this research. It was written by C. S. Lewis during the war – The Screwtape Letters (first published in February 1942), a meditation on the nature of evil, conducted as a playful exchange of letters between a senior devil and a junior accomplice. Lewis writes this in the preface:
I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of ‘Admin’. The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.
Lewis’s prescience is chilling. It is extraordinary to realise that at exactly the same moment that the printing presses were rolling with this book in January 1942, Eichmann and fourteen other men – the educated elite of the German civil service and security services – were meeting in an elegant mansion in Wannsee, Berlin, to co-ordinate ‘the final solution of the Jewish question’ – calmly organising genocide around a table in a pretty lakeside villa.fn4
But the reason I have been haunted by this concept for most of my adult life is not primarily because of events that happened sixty or seventy years ago – it is because the desk killers have always been with us, and today are more numerous than ever. I’ve known one or two in my time, you might have met more. You can find people killing from their desks and their computers in the military, but also in the civil service. They might be in the oil industry, armaments, pharmaceuticals, but you can also find them in finance, insurance, politics or law. They rarely intend to kill, or injure, but their actions, combined with the vast and diffuse reach of government and contemporary corporate power, result in hundreds of thousands of deaths and devastated lives. And, as we race forward with ever more highly advanced technologies, it is inevitable that desk killing will become still more commonplace, because so many of the technologies now being developed only aid the process of what I would call ‘distanced killing’.
Let me give you a single example of what I’m talking about. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as ‘drones’, are now a central part of many countries’ military and security forces; seventy-six nations around the world now have some type of UAV capacity. The market in drones is expected to rise from $5.9 billion to $11.3 billion in the next five years. This development has fundamentally altered the way wars are now being fought across the globe. Killers now do not even have to be on the same continent as those they kill. Most of the armed drones being used every day in Afghanistan and Pakistan are co-ordinated and flown from operators watching computer screens 8,000 miles away in the Nevada desert. Originally the vast majority of the drone operators were air force pilots, who may at least have had some experience of the reality of combat, but this is beginning to change as the technical demands alter, and younger operators are sought, the so-called ‘PlayStation generation’. The terrifying extent of the desensitisation to killing can be seen in a recent advertising recruitment campaign for drone operators in the UAE:
Executive Solutions ME are currently recruiting UAE National UAV Operators for an aerospace development project based in Abu Dhabi.3
This is an exciting opportunity to learn how to fly UAVs (Unmanned Arial [sic] Vehicles)
And what was the very first question for potential applicants who were going to be learning how to kill human beings from thousands of miles away?
‘Do you enjoy playing computer games?’
*
In all of our lives over the last decades, just think about the staggering pace of technological change. So many rapid developments, so many aspects that are liberating. Just in the years since I began researching this work in the 1990s, I think back to the enormously time-consuming nature of having to physically travel to archives all over Europe, having to spend days and weeks accessing documents – many of which are now available by travelling digitally in a fraction of a second, with a simple tap of a key on my laptop. There are, undoubtedly, massive benefits for anyone interested in accessing information. And the collaborative nature of some of this technology is also remarkable. So much so that it now seems impossible to conceive of an era when we didn’t have free access to information.
Many technological innovations have had profoundly positive impacts on our daily lives – undeniably what could be called progress. But do we yet have the ability to assess the physiological and psychological impacts of the technologies we’re now becoming dependent upon? And, crucially, does each element of these new technologies bring us closer to each other or take us further away from understanding others?
Not long ago, I had arranged to meet a friend at the Barbican, and as it was a warm evening, I decided I’d walk from my place in Hackney. I headed through the park, and out at the gate by the canal. As soon as I stepped on to the towpath, I was almost run down by a young guy on his bike, headphones on, clearly not in this world at all. And so many people walking along, looking down, eyes glued to their phones … Through Haggerston Park, a line that Speer used suddenly came to mind – how he used technology as a way of distancing himself from the realities of Nazism, as he wrote – what seemed to be ‘the moral neutrality of technology’ … And what did Hannah Arendt say, just before she died? The Sonning speech she gave in Denmark, where she predicted, with remarkable accuracy, so many developments now in our world – ‘the threatening transformation of all government … into bureaucracies, the rule of neither law nor men but of anonymous offices or computers whose entirely depersonalised domination may turn out to be a greater threat to freedom … than the most outrageous arbitrariness of past tyrannies has ever been.’ But has anything really been learnt, as we race ever faster into digital nirvana?
Through Old Street now, down the lane that runs past Bunhill Fields, where William Blake is buried. A friend has told me (and surely this cannot be true?) that the City of London, in its rapaciousness, is now wanting to build offices on top of this graveyard. I remembered his words about London: ‘I wandered through each chartered street, / Near where the chartered Thames does flow. / And mark in every face I meet, / Marks of weakness, marks of woe.’ Even in those days, everything ‘chartered’, everything commodified, all visible in the faces of the people he passed.
I continued on, down Bunhill Row, some fine, eighteenth-century buildings I didn’t remember ever seeing before, and then a place that looked like a university halls of residence. Students padlocking their bikes to the railings. I walked on, and there to my left there was a long library with students working on their Sunday-night essay deadlines. I say ‘library’, but there are almost no books in this room at all. Just students, in rows, as if in some kind of digital factory, all gazing down at their screens, most with headphones on. Each person cut off entirely from their neighbour. All illuminated in their own digital worlds. The whole room a single blue glow.