More questions than answers about the Holocaust

My next talk at the Holocaust Centre is to a Probus group, a group of elderly, (though most much younger than I) probably predominantly women. Talking to students I often start with quoting the title of a picture book that my children had more than thirty years ago: 'Why are there more questions than answers, Grandpa?' and say that I hope that they will go away with more questions than answers. The first question I might put to the Probus groups is why do they care about the Holocaust, seventy years after the event that hardly touched the lives of most of them. I might suggest that the questions are not about history, they can read a library full of books about the Holocaust as a historical event. The questions are about themselves, how they would act in circumstances such as the Holocaust, act as victims, perpetrators or bystanders. They might ask questions about their parents' generation, who would have been, by and large, disinterested bystanders. And they might ask questions about present day issues, Donald Trump, the demagogue, the know little populist, and Bernie Sanders, the eternal Jews, who asks difficult questions about social justice. Donald Trump's politics, and Bernie Sanders's might have faint echoes in New Zealand politics, so the questions are not just about American politics, and the questions could well be about Germany in the 1930s and 1920s, demagoguery, injustice, prejudice, and the hatred of Jews as the answer to questions that have no easy answers. I myself struggle with the question of why people care about the Holocaust, when historical events much closer to home, such as the New Zealand Land Wars of the 1860s struggle to find a place in the New Zealand school curriculum, yet people care, and it is my duty to engage with them and challenge them to think.

Music and conflict

The New Zealand School of Music runs a course on Music and Conflict and next week I will have the privilege of talking to the students of this course about the Holocaust. Thinking about what I might talk about I thought that I might start with the photo of the book burning in 1933. Soon after the Nazis came to power they instigated a bonfire of books. The image of this is part of our display at the Holocaust Centre of NZ. We see a large group of students, the very people who should be the guardians of culture and free discussion, saluting the conflagration of books from all corners of the world by authors whose messages the Nazis disapproved of. Goebbels announced that 'we will put an end to this Jewish intellectualism', though the books were not all by Jewish writers. It was intellectualism that the Nazis associated, perhaps not unjustly, with Jewish tradition. However, with this bonfire they put an end not only to questioning and discussion, but also to German culture. Apart from the solitary work of Carl Orff, his Carmina Burana, published in 1937, I can't think of any major work composed in Nazi Germany that stayed in the repertoire. Richard Strauss, the pre-eminent German composer of the time, fell silent, storing up his years of bitterness to give it voice in his Metamorphosen in 1945, after the war. The Nazi years were barren of culture. Contrast this with the equally ruthless, suppressive regime of Stalin's Soviet Union, just as intolerant of dissent, which however produces great masterpieces that stayed in the repertoire, Shostakovich's great symphonies, his No. 5 and No. 7, Prokofiev's War and Peace, his 5th Symphony, his great film scores. Khachaturian's concertos, Symphonies, and his spectacular ballet, Gayaneh. Not only was music sterile in Nazi Germany, there were no great books or great films produced, except for spectacular propaganda films. Contrast this with the memorable films that came out of the Soviet Union in this period. Why one oppressive regime was completely sterile, while the other managed to flourish is one question which is worth asking, a question about the role of the arts in society.

Pure evil

The Assassins of the eleventh and twelfth centuries murdered prominent figures among their enemies, caliphs, viziers, sultans and leaders of the Crusaders, Anarchists were opposed to centralized states and advocated voluntary associations. In their opposition to the state they murdered prominent political leaders. They advocated violence against their opponents, murdered Tsar Alexander II of Russia, President Sadi Carnot of France, E,press Elizabeth of Austria, King Umberto I of Italy, President William McKInley of the United States, King Carlos I of Portugal, and others. They committed these murders in the belief that such acts would enable them to achieve specific aims. But planting bombs in the Brussels airport, and in a Brussels underground station had no such clear aims. Belgium is not at war with the Islamic State, Belgium is no enemy of Moslems, there is nothing that could possibly have been achieved by these murders. How could anyone imagine what was in the minds of the perpetrator. The number of Islamist militants in Belgium is very small. 451 Belgians had travelled to the Islamic State. Most lived in a small enclave of Brussels. How could they be persuaded to blow themselves up, commit suicide for a nebulous cause with no attainable goals. To understand this one has to fathom the meaning of evil. It is much more than the dictionary of it, morally wrong, bad, or wicked. It is a destructive act without motive or benefit for the perpetrators, executed without regard to the welfare of other human beings. The London underground murders, the Paris murders at a rock concert, the September 2001  attacks on the World Trade Centre, and the 2002 Moscow attacks at the Dubrovka Theatre are twenty-first century phenomenons unprecedented in history. Perhaps the aerial bombing of cities and civilian targets during the Second World War created a mindset that made such indiscriminate slaughter permissible. 

Milk or grass?

A recent article in the NZ Listener about Fonterra, the giant dairy cooperative, had a bearing on how New Zealand positions itself in the world, what sort of country New Zealand perceives itself to be, and some general challenging ideas about business and business practice. You can hardly open a newspaper or listen to the daily news broadcasts without coming across tales of woe about the catastrophic collapse of dairy prices and its impact on farmers and the country's economy.  Briefly, as I understand it, the article maintains that the New Zealand dairy industry is in its current precarious position because it failed to understand the business it was in. It thought that it was in the business of selling milk, milk powder and milk products, but in fact, originally it was in the business of selling grass converted to milk by cows that grazed in open paddocks. New Zealand was one of the world's most efficient dairy producer, simply because the grass grew, it needed little additional investment to turn cows into efficient milk producers. This was very profitable. Then the industry got greedy, stocked more cows than the land could carry, had to buy additional feed, and lots of additional fertilizers. The profit margin, the return on capital plummeted. In hindsight one may ask how seasoned, experienced farmers and business leaders could make such elementary mistakes. But while the going was good it was very good, milk prices were at record levels, the assumption was the more the better, and no one except a few pessimists imagined that the good times would not last for ever. With all the talk of knowledge economy, rock star economy, the dire strait of the dairy industry brought home the fact that despite all the changes in the last fifty years, New Zealand's is still essentially a colonial economy greatly dependent on the exploitation of its natural resources, in this instant, its benign climate. Intensive dairy farming ruined New Zealand's rivers, waterways, with nitrate leaching into the soil and ultimately into the ground water due to excessive farming practices. There is a lot to be said for lack of natural resources. Israel lacks these, so Israeli society was forced to exploit the ultimate resource, human inventiveness. New Zealand could learn a lot from that.

An insider's view of Israel's early political leaders

I have just finished reading Yehuda Avner's The Prime Ministers, all 700 closely printed pages of it. It took me a while, but I found it riveting. It is an insider's account of four of Israel's founding Prime Ministers, Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin and Menachem Begin,  Avner worked with all four as speech writer, secretary, and adviser. Begin used him to Shakespearize his speeches. He got to know all of them well, and attended many of the crucial meetings that shaped the history of Israel, meetings with Henry Kissinger, Presidents Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan, and Egyptian Prime Minister, Anwar Sadat. He was particularly close to Menachem Begin, whom Avner, as a religious Zionist, admired for his uncompromising stand on his Biblical vision of Jews, the Jewish people and their destiny. However, reviewing, describing or summing up the book would  do it an injustice. It is vivid anecdotes and personal insights that stay in my mind: Levi Eshkol, an efficient minister of agriculture and economic manager being unsure about his duties as a Prime Minister when the position was suddenly thrust upon him, and his calm stance in face of the threats Israel faced on the eve of the Six Day War; Gold Meir lecturing the Austrian Prime Minister, Bruno Kreisky on his disloyalty to the socialist cause and abandoning Israel, a fellow socialist country, Yitzhak Rabin torn by the choice of negotiating with the hijackers of the Air France plane that was flown to Entebbe, Uganda, or authorizing a risky rescue operation with possibly large number of casualties. But the most memorable account is that of Menachem Begin, about half of of the book,  his meeting with President Reagan, his meeting with Sadat and the personal friendship they forged, his decision to drive the PLO out of Lebanon, the death of his wife, and his ultimate retirement and life in seclusion. Avner's quotes of Begin's speeches are full of Biblical references to Jewish fate and history: Balaam's prophecy, the Jewish people as an  eternally abnormal nation within the family of nations, a people that dwells alone, a concept that flew in the face of the Zionist belief that Jews, with their own land and state, would be like all other nations. It is with this vision in mind thatBegin was not prepared to relinquish any part of the West Bank, Judea and Samaria. 

Avner spent a lifetime writing and editing speeches, writing letters to Presidents and Prime Ministers, expounding government policy. He was a seasoned writer, and his book is a very vivid account of fifty years of Israel's history, so vivid that although you, the reader knows what happened in the end, reading about the Entebbe rescue, about the Six Day War, the Yom Kippur War, the peace treaty with Egypt, or about the war in Lebanon, the book captures the tension, the drama at the time. It is like reading history as it happened. 

Where have all the tuis gone?

We had a large tree just on the other side of our back fence. Although we never saw their nests, a large number of tuis made their homes there. The tree was alive with bird noise in the morning. We saw many tuis in our garden. They particularly liked our plum tree, but they were everywhere. A few weeks ago the tree was cut down. Infill housing makes good town planning sense. The two houses backing on to our section have been removed, one, is actually on trailers right now ready to be moved, The sections have been cleared, Five townhouses will be built on the site. But the trees are gone, and so are the tuis. We have blackbirds, sparrow, but no tuis any more. I wonder whether the tuis just migrated  elsewhere, rebuilt their nests there, quite elaborate complicated nests, or perished. Relocating, finding a new place where their can be at home, appraising possible new threats, accommodating to other birds, can't be easy for tuis any more than it is for people who are dislocated.

Labour leader's dog whistle

What's wrong with politicians? How could Andrew Little, leader of the New Zealand Labour Party believe that there is political traction to be gained by advocating a restriction on the immigration of chefs. Let's assume that ten or twenty chefs with skills to cook ethnic food, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Indian, French or Italian, or Hungarian for that matter, are excluded. Would that solve the Auckland housing crisis, or make a dent in the unemployment rate, which is anyway, not high by international standards? He also attacked banks? Why not go the whole hog and advocate nationalising them? Earlier this year he happened to notice that many people who bought houses in Auckland had Chinese names? So what, you might say. But Little and the Labour Party is deliberately fueling xenophobia. This is now very unfashionable in a New Zealand context. Is he learning his political strategy from Donald Trump? Fortunately I believe that Donald Trump would be laughed out of court in New Zealand. With policies like this, it may be the end of the New Zealand Labour Party. There are already people who think that Labour has lost its way and the Greens are the only genuine opposition on the left to the National Party. Perhaps the demise of the Labour Party would not be a great loss. The various faction within the present National government, Bill English on the left, John Key in the pragmatic, opportunist middle, and Gerry Bronlee, Judith Collins and some others on the right, might provide enough opposition for the country to be democratically governed.

Vladimir Putin's surprise

Vladimir Putin surprised the world when he sent in his troops to Syria, and surprised the world again when he ordered their withdrawal. He could make such surprise moves because he is not heading a democratic government where every move of the government is scrutinized and because of the confrontational nature of democratic government, criticized. With the circus of the American presidential election process, with the ridiculous collapse of the consensus within the British (and indeed, the New Zealand Labour Party) it is hard to argue the superiority of Western style democracy over the Russian oligarchic system of government. Spies as politicians would not normally be my preferred choice, but lining them up against egocentric billionaires, or even heirs to political dynasties, perhaps I would trust spies more. Putin is walking in the shoes of blood-thirsty monsters, and he is a tough man, proud of his physical and mental toughness, but he is not a Stalin, not an unscrupulous mass murderer. In a world that is not ruled by a sense of moral right and wrong, where democratic states are quite prepared to compromise with ruthless regimes and sell out their allies for the benefits of big busienss, moral compasses that should point to choices of right and wrong keep wobbling.

Gratitude

My twenty-third grandchild, my twelfth grandson was born this week. It behoves me to count my blessings. Both I and my wife, Judy come from families that were gradually dying out. I had only one cousin, Judy had four, yet all our grandparents came from large families. When our parents were young people didn't want children, certainly not in Central Europe. Some didn't marry, some lost their husbands or fiances during the Holocaust. So now, a generation later I count our blessings, six children, three boys, three girls, all happily married with families.  Counting my blessings is an expression that I can't quite explain.  I grew up in a liberal European tradition. I cannot believe in a God up above, who takes a personal interest in my welfare. Nor can I believe in the luck of the draw, fate, good things, just as bad things, just happen. All that I can do is to acknowledge my great good fortune and not take it for granted. Somewhere between not taking things for granted and fervently believing in a divine being that pulls the strings lies faith.