It’s impossible at the moment to look at a historical documentary about war and not think of what is happening in Gaza. I recently watched one of those vividly colourised films of the second World War where scenes of carnage are interspersed with the memories of aged veterans. Two moments hit hard.
One was a Canadian pilot called Donald Wickens, who served in the Royal Air Force in 1943 when it began its carpet bombing of German cities. He had taken part in Operation Gomorrah which created a massive firestorm to engulf Hamburg, killing an estimated 37,000 people.
He was then summoned to a further mission briefing and told “Well, the only building left standing is the main post office and they’ve built emergency shelters and there are 60,000 civilians. That’s your target.”
Telling this story as an old man, Wickens was close to tears: “You’re thinking just what we thought. You closed your eyes. They’re the bad guys and here we were the good guys – and we’ve got to do this? We had no choice – we went and did it. I never saw a sicker bunch of young fellas when that chore was given to us.”
The other moment that struck home was, as it happens, another Canadian called Maurice White, who took part in the Allied invasion of Sicily. Maurice and his comrades entered a village: “We could hear some noise in this big house ... We busted in and it was about 20 people in there, old people and women and children and they hadn’t eaten for days. They were starving to death, really they were. If you gave them a can of bully beef that was like giving them life.” And he too cried as he relived it in his mind.
The faces of these old men were haggard and haunted. Seventy years had not been long enough to exorcise the spectres of memory. They had lived with these ghosts for most of their lives and you could see and hear the pain of it in their expressions and voices.
And yet, there was also consolation in their distress – not the sadistic pleasure of witnessing pain but the relief of remembering that most human beings are not naturally cruel. For these are good ghosts. Without this night-visiting anguish, there is no hope.
If the “bunch of young fellas” going off to bomb the refugees in an already destroyed city are not sick to their stomachs, humanity itself is terminally ill. If a soldier is not plagued by the sight of “old people and women and children ... starving to death”, the plague of indifference is more rampant than the Black Death.
Seeing the phantoms of grief behind the eyes of those old men, I thought of a poem by another warrior, Wilfred Owen’s Insensibility, written from the abyss of the first World War. Owen evokes those so deeply immersed in carnage that they “Can let their veins run cold” – “Happy are these who lose imagination:/ They have enough to carry with ammunition./ Their spirit drags no pack.// ... Having seen all things red,/ Their eyes are rid/ Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever.”
Owen’s last verse rings out now like a thousand discordant alarm bells going off all around us: “By choice they made themselves immune/ To pity and whatever mourns in man/ Before the last sea and the hapless stars;/ Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;/ Whatever shares/ The eternal reciprocity of tears.”
The eternal reciprocity of tears – our inability not to be tormented by the anguish of others – is the beating heart of humanity. Which is why despots and mass murderers (the Venn diagram shows a great area of overlap) need to put a stop to it.
It is hard, though, to do this all at once. The heart has to be hardened before it can be stopped. Insensibility is induced gradually. Immunity to pity is built up through multiple doses of the vaccines of polarisation, mendacity and whataboutery.
The rise of the far right throughout the democratic world is fuelled by its ability to channel pity into self-pity. Compassion must not be reciprocal. It can be felt only for “people like us”: real Americans, true Christians, proper patriots, the civilised who are eternally at war with the barbarians. When we venture out there, beyond our pale, we must drag no packs of sympathy or imagination.
The war on Gaza is of course primarily a war on those who are being murdered, starved and murdered when they try not to die of starvation. But it is also a war on the human instinct for compassion. It is a toughening-up exercise. We are all being induced to inure ourselves to depravity. “Habit”, as Samuel Beckett has it, “is a great deadener.”
This is how fascism proceeds – people can be blooded like hunting dogs. We can get used to masked men plucking people from the streets, to disappearances into holding areas (let’s not call them concentration camps – yet), to children dragged from their parents and kept in cages, to cries of “burn them out!”.
And it helps if we have before our eyes examples of even worse stuff playing on our screens every night: pulverised cities, bombed hospitals, emaciated children, glib spokesmen telling us that none of it is really happening and/or they deserve it anyway. Democratic leaders simultaneously wringing their hands and washing them. If you get used to that you can used to anything.
Resistance to insensibility is not just a moral duty to far-off people. It is an imperative for self-preservation. When the good ghosts of grief for our fellow human beings are banished, in come the dark ghouls of vicious despotism.
When we learn to shut down pity, we summon the pitiless to power.
Between March and June, Israel allowed just 56,000 tonnes of food to enter the territory, less than a quarter of Gaza’s minimum needs for that period
B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, described an “official and openly declared policy” of mass starvation.
