Friday, January 10th ....

I missed the One to One interview with Geoffrey Rush where he talked about his new film, The Book Thief, but I did see a snippet where he talked about how so many Germans were taken in by the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. He claimed that only 8% of Germans maintained a moral stand and refused to join the Nazi Party and/or take part in the atrocities.

That's extraordinary, that a whole population of ordinary people could be so influenced by their leader that they set aside their ethics and supported attacks on Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, the disabled and other minorities which led to concentration camps and, eventually, places like Auschwitz where millions were murdered.

The first concentration camp, Dachau, was opened in 1933, and its inmates were political prisoners, communists, trade union leaders and other 'enemies of the state'. The relentless propaganda machine was so effective that there was little outcry. By 1942, the first death camps were built, for Jews, gypsies and other 'defectives'. Again, there was no difficulty in staffing these places.

Sadly, we don't learn from history. The same propaganda techniques which make ordinary, decent people set aside their innate morality have been used in Japan in the 1930’s, the United States in the McCarthy era, Kosovo in the 1990's, Africa throughout history and innumerable other cases.

An unscrupulous leader identifies a common enemy and uses rhetoric and the mass media to build up fear and resentment among the population. Whether it is blaming the Jews for all the problems of the world, or the communists, or the other tribe over the hill, when the fear becomes intense enough, people will have no trouble accepting that killing is a solution.

And it continues to happen today. Our targets now include Muslims and Asylum Seekers. The use of the techniques applied to make us see them as dangerous is there for all to see. The rantings of Alan Jones and the Government's use of derogatory terms such as 'illegal immigrants' and 'detainees' paints as black a picture as possible. Our favourite ally has Guantanamo Bay and we have concentration camps too. How can we claim to be a civilized society?