'Sure - anything you say, authority figure...'
Who says history couldn't repeat itself?
A rare guest piece this week, by a Rarely Certain subscriber who remains anonymous for professional reasons.
The decision to publish this was inspired by a comment they made outside of Substack around the same time as chatter about a recent film. Zone of Interest portrays an ordinary family life, which happens to be that of Auschwitz commandant Rudolph Höss, his wife and five children. An ordinary man and an ordinary family finding equanimity with extraordinary evil.
If you haven't seen or heard about Zone of Interest, Ian Leslie's reflections on it - in Hitler's Willing Executioners - is a convenient introduction.
We blithely trot out lines about 'the banality of evil' and know about Stanley Milgram's experiments but hearing this story gave me pause enough to want to share it.
Instructing people to take part in crimes against humanity turns out to be quite easy.
I know, because I did it.
--
The Italy where I grew up was soaked in politics. It was very normal throughout secondary school and university to have teachers and tutors who didn't hide their personal and social agendas or their political leanings, which were brought into the classroom as a side dish to a main of ledgers, derivatives, maps and exercises in comparative literature.
I was taught by former Bank of Italy employees, communists, straight people, gay people, undecided people, left and right leaning, church-goers and staunch atheists. The ability to identify and navigate somebody's viewpoint was an important skill, and one which took me a while to work out.
In Britain, studying for a Master's degree in Translation, university classrooms felt sterile in comparison.
The tutor came, delivered an exercise, left. At first I found it liberating - no more having to bring a compass to every lesson. All they wanted of me was the knowledge. Fine. I could relax into lots of beautiful academic exercises on what it means for a translation to be faithful to its original, and my geeky brain said "where was *this* all my life?".
At the end of that year, I was apparently ready to start my career as a professional translator.
Or so the university apparently thought.
I had all the translation theory, but little else to set me on my path.
How would I negotiate a fair rate for my services? How do you deal with a troublesome client? What happens if they don't pay me?
I got on with the job as best I could, with plenty of costly trial and error.
A few years later, I was appointed as an Italian translation tutor by the same university. They gave me a syllabus detailing what my module should cover. With no experience of teaching, I first shadowed a more experienced tutor from a different language pair.
In that classroom the smell of surgical theatre and cookie-cutter teaching hit me again. Here's the feedback from your previous lesson - questions? Here's your new text, translate it. I'm here if you need me.
I did it differently.
I brought a Kinder Egg for each student to my first lesson and gave them two minutes to build it.
I smiled and said I was confident they'd be able to complete the task - then started the timer.
They cracked the eggs. I stared at them intently, 'helpfully' encouraging them as they struggled to beat the clock. How's it going? Can I help? Going out of my way to appear supportive, while really just piling on the pressure and getting in the way. Because that's what clients do.
When the timer stopped we debriefed. They were probably surprised that I wasn't interested in their toys. Instead, I asked them to access their emotions and describe how my behaviour had made them feel. They mentioned feeling anxiety, annoyance, a sense of being patronised.
But they had pretended to be sanguine. No one dared tell me to stick my eggs where the sun don't shine, ten minutes into having met me, because I was an authority figure.
Where have we heard of this dynamic before?
I trained them as I wished I'd been trained, which meant acting as their imaginary client for assignments. I 'hired' them, making unreasonable demands until they learned to say no at appropriate times and to care less about being liked.
But that wasn't the only way I messed with their heads. Nor the most revealing one. The task that tells us something about history.
I craftily had them helping to commit mass murder.
A work request came in from a "representative of the Home Office, on behalf of the Secretary of State". It was to translate a manual for a new piece of tech to be installed in British prisons and originally developed by an Italian engineer. While they could ask questions about the task and the content, the text itself was classified and could only be accessed after signing an NDA. They would be more than adequately remunerated for their work.
They all accepted, signed the NDA, got the text and started working on it.
It was an invented manual describing the installation and maintenance of a new waste management system, and the introduction banged the drum on how this was a new and improved version of an old system that had used something called Zyklon.
'Waste' would be treated with carbon monoxide fed in from the central heating network of the prison - therefore removing the requirement for a supply of special gas, and ensuring a colourless and odourless process that could be easily replicated in other gas-heated settings, such as care homes for the disabled and the elderly.
The manual emphasised how practical and cost-efficient this would be in "large scale operations". The sample prison plan was from Nazi Germany archives, describing the installation of pipework leading to shower rooms. The manual explained that by-products of the process would require interment - even emphasising the importance of following installation and maintenance instructions to the letter in order to keep the operators safe from intoxication and possible death.
I recall feeling discomfort that I had written that document. That it was easy for me to think like a Nazi, and make it all professional, clean and business-like. Colourless and odourless. Practical and cost-efficient. Waste. By-product.
Only one or two would ask is this ... gas chambers?
Sometimes someone would pause, suspicious of the purpose for this installation, then carry on.
The rest just did the job and handed it in.
Debriefing consisted of projected pictures of Hannah Arendt and Adolf Eichmann illuminating the room, as I charged my budding translators with crimes against humanity. Crimes they had committed through a heady mix of professional ambition and trust in their government.
Of course they would be unlikely to receive tasks that would implicate them in genocide, but sometimes their work would have moral or political implications.
They asked how they could avoid falling into such traps, and I still wish I knew the answer. Not a day goes by without me making decisions that influence people's lives, whose consequences I might well not be sufficiently considering. And yet.
My teaching got sky high reviews from my students. For several consecutive years I was the departmental top performer across all measures of student satisfaction. This suggests that young people see the relevance of exploring how to operate in a world where the sleep of reason can produce monsters. But do our institutions?
We think we know about the dangers of systems that focus on conformity and standardisation rather than the individual. We think we know it from history. I think I know it from the present.
Project update
Although the project to research the US 24th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron’s history appears on the surface to be a military story, it sometimes crosses paths with more usual Rarely Certain themes. Sensemaking is one of them.
Something I’ve wanted to explore for some time is the concept of ‘information cascade’. That’s a mimetic process under which everyone follows everyone else, often on the basis of originally ambiguous or false information. So the next piece here connects a Covid controversy with D-Day and ‘Bloody Omaha’.
Speaking of which, the project is becoming expensive, with research tools to be paid for, expert archive navigators to hire, web hosting to secure - the list is growing. If the project is of interest to you, please support it. A microfilm document costing 85 cents to digitise sounds cheap, until you need a lot of them.
Very thought provoking.