Looking evil in the face

After viewing a new documentary on the Holocaust in Ukraine, a harrowed George Pitcher ponders his duty not to look away.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A mother cradles a child while another stands close by. They wear winter clothes of the 1940s and are amidst others waiting.

A Jewish family at Lubny, Urkaine, prior to the massacre there.

Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung.

It’s a commonplace to remark that Ukraine has a troubled history. It’s almost a means of assimilating its current Russian conflict; Ukrainians are used to suffering and fighting, so here we go again.

But, lest we forget, it’s as well to be reminded on a regular basis of the nature of Ukraine’s suffering. This week, Channel 4 broadcast a documentary called Ukraine: Holocaust Ground Zero, which traced through contemporaneous photography, academic commentary and survivors’ witness how Ukrainian Jews suffered and died in their hundreds of thousands, perhaps as many as 1.6 million, at the hands of Nazis, Soviets and Ukrainian nationalists.

Vocabulary fails. Harrowing doesn’t begin to touch the experience of watching a programme like this. But, I think, watch it we must, especially those with a religious faith who use words like hope and faith.

The “problem of evil”, known in scholastic circles as theodicy, has been a stumbling block for the Christian faith for centuries. If God is all-powerful, the problem states, he cannot love us if he allows this to happen; if he loves us, he cannot be all-powerful for it to happen. Ergo, he cannot both be all-powerful and all-loving.

Counter-arguments, which needn’t detain us here, are many and varied: That the gift of free will includes the freedom to abandon God for evil; that the light of love shines brightest in darkness; that the world is fallen – lapsarian – and has to find its way back to the Garden; that God is joined to the suffering of humanity on the cross.

After Channel 4’s film, I have to say that I’m less interested in all that than in what it actually means for us in a practical sense. I’m left wondering less why than how. I don’t want to know why God allows it. I want to know how we respond.

Allow me to say, as honestly as I can, how I literally responded to this documentary. I had to watch it alone, on Channel 4’s website. I wonder why that is. Perhaps watching it with someone else is too much like entertainment. Perhaps there’s a fear that the act of sharing is dissipating in some way. Perhaps it’s a dirty little secret that I wanted to watch it, through clenched fingers.

The second literal reaction I’d record is that when a photograph appeared of one of the most grotesque (though relativity here is invidious) perpetrators of the mass-murders, SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, I found myself saying at his image on the screen “rot in hell”.

I find it hard to believe in a place of unending torment to which a benign God despatches human souls. I do believe in the hells, like this one in Ukraine, that men like him can create on earth. But I knew I’d found the limit of a human forgiveness and this was infinitely beyond it. And somehow I wished there was an eternal damnation to which Jeckeln could be consigned.

A third reaction to identify is more passive. I had to watch it – or, rather, I couldn’t look away. Please God, may that not be said to be curiosity. Surely not, when you know how scarring it will be.

It contained (and here perhaps I should issue a trigger warning for the rest of this paragraph) details of how the death squads moved on from men of military age to women and children, because they were too expensive to feed; how 90 orphaned children were murdered in one massacre for the same reason; how Jeckeln developed a system of execution to maximise space in mass graves called “sardines”.

I’m conscious of the title of the site for which I’m writing when I say that what is seen can’t be unseen and the horror must stay with anyone who watched this programme. To look away is to conspire with a pretence that it isn’t there or couldn’t have happened.

I wonder whether that means the Christian bears a duty not to look away, any more than we can look away from an innocent, naked young man left hanging in the midday sun, nailed to a cross. In witnessing these horrors, we’re not being brave, we’re acknowledging human reality.

And that human reality means that it really is no good saying “never again”. From the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in the Bosnian war, to the Rwandan genocide of the Tutsi minority in the Nineties, to the Iranian mass graves of dissidents being revealed even today, that is a failed resolution.

So is a faith in vain? It’s hard to argue a case for the divine in the face of 91-year-old Janine Webber, who says quietly on Channel 4:

“They killed my brother. They buried him alive. He was seven.”

Meanwhile, 86-year-old Bella Chernovets says of that countless million-plus:

“God keep them in paradise.”

Perhaps, we pray like that. I don’t know.

It’s impossible to conclude a column like this without being glib, or fumbling for closure. Because there are no conclusions. So I’ll just stop here.

Review

Books

Culture

Freedom

Politics

11 December 2024

1 min read

All this can be yours: the momentum that drives mafia states

Once abhorred opinions gain traction among the distracted nursing grievances.

Simon Burton-Jones

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

Preisdent Putin stands behind a lectern with a gold door and Russian flag behind him.

What is Putin thinking?

Is there a new Cold War today? This assumption, spurred by the war in Ukraine, is challenged by Anne Applebaum in Autocracy, Inc. (Penguin Random House, 2024). Instead, she argues, there is a growing group of autocratic nations where ruling elites exercise staggering levels of corruption, accumulating wealth, eviscerating the common good and suppressing any meaningful dissent. There is rule by law rather than rule of law, where the courts become the means by which brutal, cynical state power is employed to destroy and imprison opponents.

The Cold War was underpinned by ideology, but autocratic states today support one another through logistics, resources and propaganda despite big differences in outlook. Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, China, Russia and Zimbabwe, to name a handful of autocratic nations, share little by way of common ideology, except the desire of their dictators to stay in power, both to ensure their wealth and to protect themselves from legal action. The fig leaves of religious beliefs and nationalism are often used in different combinations but fool few.

If there is a common denominator for these autocracies, it is the wish to scrap the post-war settlements – the institutions and laws that have marked global affairs since. The body of existing international law is a particular target, as its dismantling immunises dictators against judgment.

Framing the present global picture in clear, criminal terms like this is helpful. Mafia states exist, and they are growing in influence. But it is too easy for others to place themselves on the side of the angels. These kleptocracies have been enabled by corporate bodies elsewhere. In the UK, London is host to lawyers, accountants, bankers and PR experts who have helped to launder money for corrupt elites. They argue their support is legal, but it is also amoral; such is the professional framework of some of the biggest names in law and finance. London’s property market, like several other global capitals, has been grossly distorted by the laundering of foreign money, to the detriment of working people trying to afford their own homes.

At the end of the Cold War, there was a widespread sense that liberal, democratic values had prevailed and it only remained for this dye to leak into the fabric of remaining nations. Not only is this not true today, if anything the momentum is with autocratic values infecting democracies with their ways. The global technology revolution has assisted this, as once abhorred opinions and positions gain traction in the minds of distracted people with grievances, real or imagined.

There is a special hypocrisy when criminals who have stolen billions and murdered thousands claim to speak for God.

The late Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, said the key question for the new century was: who speaks for God? If the suggestion was that this is a question different religious traditions need to answer in ways that support our common humanity, we now have no shortage of dictators who say they speak for God. Their claims that other regions of the world are godless and degenerate are made time and again. Like Goebbels, they know that the endless repetition eventually wears people down until phrases become believable. No-one who cares about God’s character would claim their society reflects his character well; there is injustice, hatred and violence everywhere. But there is a special hypocrisy when criminals who have stolen billions and murdered thousands claim to speak for God.

When Jesus faced his life-defining temptation in the wilderness, the devil showed him the kingdoms of the world and promised they would be his if he ‘turned’. He also tempted Jesus to turn stones into bread. Power and wealth, the very trappings coveted by the world’s dictators. And his final temptation: to throw himself from the roof of the Temple, only to be saved by the angels. To surround himself with a loyal cadre of officers sure to protect his interests at all times.

Instead of the highway to autocracy, Jesus took the uneven and winding path of service to others. One of self-denial, deprived of the material wealth made available by his elevated position. This is the human standard we have been set and it compels self-reflection, not boasting and threats.