The devil in each of us

Christophe Busch has written a book. It has turned out to be quite a tome, an opus of over 800 pages. It is a very smooth and readable book: De duivel in elk van ons, Van Holocaust tot terrorisme: hoe gewone mensen in staat zijn tot buitengewoon kwaad  (The devil in each of us, From the Holocaust to terrorism: how ordinary people are capable of extraordinary evil) (Borgerhoff & Lamberigts, also available at Standaard Boekhandel, Bol)

I found it particularly interesting for two reasons.

• Because we are learning more about our behaviour as humans and

• also about the way we think.

In this book, he examines the human being

• before the Holocaust,

• during the Holocaust and

• even after the Holocaust (the aftermath)

The book consists of two parts.

• The first part consists of biographies of a number of people.

• Part two then provides an analysis.

1 Part One - The Face of Evil

The first part tells the story of four people.

Rudolf Höss

The first is Rudolf Höss.

• He fought in the First World War.

• In 1922, he joined the NSDAP.

• One year later, he is sentenced to five years in prison for a politically motivated revenge killing.

• But eventually he became the specialist in the field of mass destruction during the Second World War.

In the film The Zone of Interest you can see how he and his family live in a house right next to the Auschwitz concentration camp, with a view of the crematorium.

Adolf Eichmann

The second person is Adolf Eichmann.

• He is Austrian.

• At nineteen, he left school,

• become a salesperson and

• a few years later, in 1933, he loses his job due to the economic crisis. He then moves to Germany, where he joins the Austrian SS Legion in Germany. He becomes a bureaucrat and pursues a career there.

• He eventually became the specialist, the logistics specialist, and was therefore also responsible for the transport of millions of Jews to the extermination camps.

Irma Grese

The third person is Irma Grese.

A story about a reclusive girl who becomes a cruel camp guard.

For example, she is said to have once ordered that a woman who was about to give birth have her legs tied together.

Marcelle Gombeir

And the fourth person is Marcelle Gombeir.

• She is a girl from Poperinge (a village in Belgium).

• An extreme right-wing family.

• She also becomes a camp guard, the only Belgian camp guard.

• And she is sometimes described by witnesses as even more cruel, even more inhuman than her German SS colleagues.

2 Part Two - The Analysis of Evil

In part two, we find a detailed analysis.

The examples from part one ensure that the stories always remain concrete.

Busch approaches the subject from various perspectives. For example, he devotes three chapters of 100 pages each to the different types of functions.

• There are managerial positions,

• the administrative functions

• and the executive functions, the people who pulled the trigger, so to speak.

They were not monsters.

We learn that the Holocaust was not the work of monsters or people we might consider monsters.

On the contrary.

The Nazis primarily wanted people they could trust and rely on, so they definitely did not need disturbed personalities.

Graduality

We also learn that those involved were not immediately horrific murderers. It was a gradual process.

First, there was the propagated urgency. ‘We are being flooded with Jews!’ they cried. Not only in Germany, but also in other European countries. ‘We are not the social services of the world!’ was more or less how it sounded.

• Initially, migration was considered, migration to Palestine, which was then a protectorate of Great Britain. But that proved to be anything but a miracle cure.

• This was followed by measures against Jews. Little by little, their rights were taken away.

• And at the end they were sent to extermination camps.

There was a gradual process, and many tried to shirk their responsibility by saying that they had only been following orders.

No more war

‘Never again war,’ people said after the Second World War. And that's pretty much what people say after every war. In the twentieth century, approximately a quarter of a billion people lost their lives in genocides.

However, Christophe Busch does have some thoughts on the statement, ‘No more war.’ Immediately after a war, we tend to focus our attention on the victims, which is understandable, but we must also focus on the perpetrators, because it is from their behaviour that we can learn lessons. Lessons that ensure we do not make the same mistakes ourselves.

In other words, if a party invests a significant amount of money in social media to convince us that all the world's problems are attributable to Jews, Muslims, etc., is that any more innocent than what a civil servant did during a genocide? Or an executor? It all happens in small steps.

And the first step is often decisive. It's like getting stuck in a swamp that you can't get out of. Christophe Busch calls this the swamp effect.

3 Concepts

In the book, Christophe Busch teaches us about how we behave and think as human beings.

a The banality of evil

Monster

For example, in 1961, more than fifteen years after the end of the war, Adolf Eichmann was put on trial in Israel. He had managed to hide in South America for years, but was eventually kidnapped and brought to Israel. There, a trial took place that attracted enormous media attention.

Hannah Arendt was also present in the courtroom. She was a German Jew who had to flee Germany and ended up being stateless for eighteen years. She eventually found her home in New York.

She wrote a report and also a book about the trial, which caused a huge stir. She talked about banality, the banality of evil. The banality did not refer to evil, but to the man.

She was massively cancelled. Why? Because people understood that she trivialised evil. But that was not the case. On the contrary, she wanted to point out that evil – which was anything but banal – was carried out by someone who was very boring, very banal.

This also teaches us how we as humans sometimes react emotionally.

We also learn that there are two approaches to remembering the Holocaust.

• One is a comprehensive approach in which we try to learn lessons from what happened to victims and perpetrators in order to prevent further genocides from occurring.

• Another approach is more limited and focuses more on the Holocaust during the Second World War. It focuses more on what happened to the Jews. This approach focuses more on processing the grief of the victims.

Both of these points of view are addressed in Mechelen.

• The Kazerne Dossin memorial focuses primarily on the victims.

• The museum highlights both of them, and

• The Hannah Arendt Institute helps to think along with solutions for current problems in our society today.

Christophe Busch was director of Kazerne Dossin until five years ago. Today, he is director of the Hannah Arendt Institute.

b Complexity

In his book, Christophe Busch also discusses the complexity of human beings.

For example, he talks about how easily we as humans label people. Someone who has committed murder once is a murderer once and for all. Someone who has stolen a car once is a car thief once and for all... But is that right? Is that correct? Isn't the person behind it sometimes much more complex?

It used to be simple. You had one cause, one effect, one crime. But that doesn't apply to genocide. Things are much more complex. There is the story of a path, a trajectory that is followed. Step by step.

A perpetrator does not become a murderer overnight. There are various actors and factors at play. There is a process of desensitisation, step by step.

And then there are certain conditions that come into play. Conditions that may not be sufficient on their own. Take Höss, for example. He was taught that order and discipline were important. That was a condition, but it was not sufficient.

Christophe Busch draws a comparison with IS fighters, who follow a similar path.

c Future

We learn in Christophe Busch's book that genocides arise during crises.

Zo moeten we opletten voor crisissen ten gevolge van klimaatwijziging. Door verandering van klimaat zijn in Syrië heel wat arme boeren hun heil gaan zoeken in de steden in Syrië. En zo is heel de crisis in Syrië ontstaan. Gevolg, heel wat vluchtelingen, enerzijds, en anderzijds,

een verarmde bevolking, een ideale voedingsbodem voor een terroristische organisatie als IS.

If we refuse to learn from the past, we must be prepared for even more refugees in the future as a result of climate change. Secondly, we must be prepared for even more breeding grounds for terrorist organisations and, thirdly, we also risk becoming victims of increasingly extreme weather conditions ourselves.

It is unfortunate that those who suffer most from the consequences of climate change are actually those who have contributed least to it.

d Mankind

De duivel in elk van ons (The devil in each of us) of course also reminds us of Bregman's book Mankind. (Also read the blog Humankind A Hopeful History)

‘To light the barbecue’ or ‘as support for a wobbly cupboard.’ That's what I read as a comment on one of my Facebook posts.

I have met Christophe Busch briefly and I understand that he has much more respect than this.

The title of the Dutch version literally means ‘Most people are good’. Some people read or hear ‘all’ people are good, but that is not what it says; it says ‘most’ people are good. The book also describes exactly who those most people are and who they are not.

Christophe Busch doubts whether people are inherently good. He assumes that people are neither good nor evil, but that there is a potential devil in each of us.

But then I also like to refer to this book: Factfulness by the late Hans Rosling, based on facts and data that is widely available. That is one of the reasons that gives me hope that there is a positive evolution after all.

Are people good, or are we all devils in disguise? A book with a title that has a negative connotation (“the devil in each of us”). I don't expect it to be used as barbecue fuel any time soon.

But we must beware of cynicism. That is how Bregman ends his book. Cynicism is a form of laziness, he says. And I completely agree with him. It is easy to be cynical. You can hide behind cynicism. But if you choose the cynical narrative, what will you do when you yourself have to choose between something positive and something negative? Will you also choose the negative? Or will you choose the positive? What you give your attention to grows.

Sometimes it takes more courage to choose the positive for our fellow human beings and society. But isn't that worth so much more? And if we all did that a little more often, wouldn't our society become a much better place?