#7 On the Barbarism of Others
We tend to think that our own evil is complex, ambiguous and fraught with moral qualms, while the evil of others is simple, clear cut and savage. But all evil is complex.
There is a video making the rounds on social media showing far-right activist Douglas Murray being interviewed by Piers Morgan at the Gaza-Israel border. The video seems to have appealed to a number of very serious people even on the mainstream of German politics and economic elites. This included a member of the council of economic advisors and even the current (SPD) Minister of Health, who considered what Murray said “very worth watching”, mostly because it highlighted the barbarism of Hamas. In the video, Murray makes the same argument that he had made a few days prior in the Jewish Chronicle, namely that
Average members of the SS and other killing units of Hitler’s were rarely proud of their average days’ work. Very few felt that shooting Jews in the back of the head all day and kicking their bodies into pits was where their own lives had meant to end up. Many spent their evenings getting blind drunk to try to forget. Nazi commanders had to worry about staff “morale”. When the war ended, the Nazis tried to pretend that Treblinka and other death camps never existed.
Compare this with the behaviour of Hamas on October 7. As those of us who have viewed the raw footage from the day have seen and heard for ourselves, these terrorists were not just pleased with what they were doing. They were elated. They spent the whole time screaming “Allahu Akbar” with delight. As they decapitated bodies and shot terrified civilians, they were grinning, congratulating each other and seeking acclaim from others.
A lot of the outrage about this interview and article focuses on the first paragraph and the fact that it seems to trivialise the crimes of the Nazis by arguing that at least they had moral qualms. I think this critique actually doesn’t focus on the right reasons why these statements are wrong. They are wrong because they assume that non-Western perpetrators of atrocities are fundamentally different from Western ones.
It is probably not wrong to argue that (some) perpetrators of the Holocaust may have had moral qualms about what they were doing: otherwise how do you actually get an entire nation to engage in and support a genocidal project? Soldier morale in the commitment of atrocities was an issue, but not for everyone. It doesn’t excuse anything. A member of a Sonderkommando who perpetrated mass executions in Eastern Europe reported that
as a result of the considerable psychological pressures, there were numerous men who were no longer capable of conducting executions and who thus had to be replaced by other men. On the other hand, there were others who could not get enough of them and often reported to these executions voluntarily. Gustave Fix, member of Sonderkommando
Even the German command noted that constant control and justification was necessary to keep executioners involved in the killing:
All the men coped with the tough physical stress well. No less considerable were the extreme psychological demands made on them by the large number of liquidations. The morale and self-possession of the men was kept up by personally reminding them constantly of the political necessity [of what they were doing].' Activity and Situation Report, No.1, 31 July 1941 (same source as above)
None of this excuses anything; the opposite is actually true in the sense that thinking that perpetrators were senseless monsters unlike us is a reassuring, but wrong, idea. In some way it is probably comforting to assume that atrocities are committed by barbarians and not humans like us, who are complex and face doubt. It hides the reality that it is very easy to sleepwalk into evil. But the Nazis and those that helped them were mostly people like us. They had kids, families, brothers, sisters. They committed depraved atrocities because they had found some form of (obviously wrong) justification for it, out of greed or self-interest, or were led to believe that what they were doing served an ultimate superior goal. Some part of them were probably psychopathic and sadistic, but probably a minority. I don’t really understand why this characterization might not apply to Hamas militants except if you start from grossly xenophobic premises. They’re also people. They also have kids, families, brothers, sisters, and yet they engage in abominable violence.
What is deeply wrong (and xenophobic) in Murray’s argument is to assume that Hamas terrorists are fundamentally different in their complexity because they are not Western. In his worldview, Murray assumes that we Europeans (or people in the West) are complex beings with contradictory drives, nuances and moral ambiguities, while people who don’t look like us in unfamiliar places are unidimensional, barbaric and simple. Murray is an extremist figure but this view actually pervades the way we think about Africa, the Middle East, and the Global South. We tend to flatten and simplify what we don’t know well or understand.
This is actually strengthened by the images and heinous chants and celebrations of death by Hamas militants coming out of Gaza that Murray draws on. But these are also part of a spectacle for the media that Dutch writer and journalist Joris Luyendijk described very well in his book People Like Us (in Dutch, but there is a English translation). In the book, Luyendijk precisely engages with the stereotypes amplified by the media that he was confronted with while being a correspondent for Dutch newspapers in the Middle East. The central tenet of the book (and its English title) is that people in the Middle East are “people like us”, complex, multidimensional, ambiguous. However, that is not the image that the media, politicians or even the people themselves there want to promote. One of the most striking passages of the book is an account of when Luyendijk visits the family of a dead Hamas suicide bomber in the Gaza strip.
On the surface, the family of the suicide bomber actively plays the part that the media want it to play: revengeful, proud, ready to send all their sons as martyrs to kill Jews. But inside, there is regret, sadness, loss. The book explains really well why we cannot really trust the image people want to project of themselves on camera as a reflection of what they really are:
“You could also say, 'Apparently, these terrorists hate Israelis more than they love their own lives. What terrible people indeed, those Palestinians. The Israeli PR machine obviously promoted the latter statement and was greatly helped by the parents of the suicide bombers. Indeed, as soon as someone had blown himself up, news agency camera crews raced to the parents, who invariably declared, 'We are proud and support our other children if they do the same.'
Luyendijk goes to visit such a family in Gaza whose son (named Arafat) had just blown himself up while running against Israeli soldiers a few days prior. The family was receiving congratulations from the neighborhood for having had another martyr. They were drinking sweet tea because “this death was not bitter”. To the neighbors, the father regretted not hugging his son after he went on to kill the soldiers, and himself. He tried to look proud, declaring that his son wasn’t dead because
Martyrs go straight to heaven and stay alive there. May my other sons also become martyrs; may I myself become a martyr. Death to the Jews!'
This was the spectacle for Luyendijk, for the journalist, for the neighbors, and for the cameras.
However, afterwards the suicide bomber’s brother (named Yasser) took Luyendijk to his room, telling his father he wasn’t allowed to come. There, he showed the clothes that Hamas had sent the family, the ones that his brother was wearing during the attack. The clothes were riddled with bullet holes, and the top part of the jacket was missing. His body had been torn to pieces by a grenade even before reaching the Israeli soldiers. The brother had no idea what to do with these. When asked why his father was not allowed in, he answered that now his father was acting out. But when he would see these clothes, the bullets, that would kill him.
Luyendijk then interviewed one of the few psychiatrists in Gaza. There is a strong taboo around mental health problems there. The psychiatrist argued that the public displays of joy after suicide attacks were temporary, that they were also a coping mechanism. Behind the scenes, families faced anger and depression. It turned out that Hamas pressured volunteers to record farewell videos right away upon signing up as suicide bombers, even if they were called up months or years later. This created a sort of psychological contract that made it harder for them to back out. They were not allowed to tell anyone, especially not their families, that they had volunteered to die and kill Israeli soldiers or civilians. If everyone in front of the cameras seemed so eager and proud to kill Jews and die as a martyr, why were all these mechanisms in place to pressure volunteers to not back out and not tell their families?
In contrast to the images of jubilant Palestinian parents, this account seemed less compelling, however. Luyendijk writes that maybe one could have shown the depressed parents on camera or the brother telling his real story of loss and despair. However, nobody wanted to show this side of things: neither the media, nor Hamas, nor the families in Gaza, nor the Israeli government. These stories were only visible when the cameras were off, and without pictures, there was no story for the media.