Crawling from the Wreckage (29 page)

So why did the Russians get paranoid about it? Because although they knew how the American military-industrial complex worked—they have similar problems with their own domestic version—they simply could not believe that the United States would spend so much money on something so stupid and pointless. Surely there was something they were missing; some secret American strategy that would put them at a disadvantage.

No, there wasn’t, and almost everybody (except some Poles and Czechs who want U.S. troops on their soil as a guarantee against Russian misbehaviour, and some people on the American right) was pleased by Obama’s decision to pull the plug on the project. But why did the Bush administration choose to deploy this non-functioning weapons system in Eastern Europe in the first place?

The answer lies in another weapons project that began in 1946: the nuclear-powered airplane. It could stay airborne for months and fly around the world without refuelling, its boosters promised, and that would give America a huge strategic advantage. There was only one problem. The nuclear reactor needed a lot of shielding, as the aircrew would be only feet away. The shields had to be made of lead. And lead-filled airplanes cannot fly.

Fifteen years and about ten billion dollars later (in today’s money), there was still no viable design for a nuclear-powered bomber, let alone a flyable prototype. Ballistic missiles were taking over the job of delivering nuclear warheads anyway, and so, when Robert McNamara became defence secretary in the Kennedy administration in 1961, he was astonished to discover that the nuclear-powered aircraft was still in the defence budget. It was, he said, “as if I came down to breakfast in the morning and found a dead walrus on the dining-room table.” It took McNamara two years to kill the program, against fierce opposition from the air force and defence industry, and the fact that the nuclear-powered aircraft did not and could not work was irrelevant.

Former general Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency is perhaps best remembered for his warning against what he called the “military-industrial complex” in his farewell speech in 1960, but he actually gave two warnings. The other was that “public policy could become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” These were the lobbies that kept the nuclear airplane going for seventeen years, and they have kept the
BMD
system going for more than a quarter-century.

President Obama has killed the most pointlessly provocative of the Ballistic Missile Defence deployments, but he still cannot take the political risk of admitting that the system doesn’t work (though he twice explained in his speech that the United States needed missile defence systems that were “proven and cost-effective”). It is the grandchild of Star Wars, a sacred relic blessed by Saint Ronald Reagan himself, and it will keep appearing at dining-room tables for years to come.

“He could be very entertaining,” Stalin’s niece Kira Alliluyeva told biographer Robert Service in 1998. The dictator had her jailed in his last round of purges, after the Second World War, but she still remembered how kind he had been to her when she was a little girl, how he took her on his knee and sang songs to her—and that he had a fine singing voice. Not only that, he wrote limpid poetry in Georgian as a youth, read Dostoevsky and his subordinates saw him as a considerate boss.

He also had millions of people killed, which is why, until Service’s recent book,
Stalin: A Biography
, people were reluctant to write about his human side. Yet a moment’s thought will tell you that the “great” dictators could never have achieved such power over other people if there were not something attractive about their personalities.

Maybe it’s the fact that most of their victims are no longer with us that now makes it possible to see the mass murderers of the mid-twentieth century as complex human beings rather than mere one-dimensional monsters. It will be quite a while before some brave Cambodian makes the first film that shows the human side of Pol Pot, and in China they haven’t gotten around yet to admitting officially that Mao Zedong was a monster. But in Europe, where the horrors are a bit more distant in time, it’s all the rage.

The current wave of books and films about human monsters began with a couple of ground-breaking Italian biographies that showed the human side of Benito Mussolini, but he wasn’t really on the first team of mass murderers. Service’s biography of Stalin is different—and so is Bernd Eichinger’s groundbreaking film on the last days of Hitler,
Der Untergang (Downfall
).

Released in Germany to generally positive reviews in September,
Downfall
is the first German film to tackle Hitler directly—fifty-nine years after the man’s death. Set in the last twelve days of Hitler’s life, as the Soviet army fought its way towards his deep, multi-storey bunker in central Berlin in April 1945, it documents his rages and his self-pity, and depicts him as an ordinary human being.

Hitler says “please” and “thank you.” He eats pasta. He is kind to the terrified women who continue to carry out their secretarial duties as the apocalypse rages overhead. When he finally marries his mistress Eva Braun (which he always refrained from doing because, he said, he was wedded to the German people), he is implicitly accepting that his life is over, and that they will have to die in a little while—but he kisses her gently on the lips.

It’s all true, based on the accounts of people who were in the bunker and survived, but the film stirred up a storm in Germany. Most of the criticisms echoed the words of Golo Mann, one of Hitler’s first biographers, who warned thirty years ago that the more biographers explored Hitler’s origins and psychology, the more inclined people would be to understand him. From there, Mann said, “it is only a small step towards forgiving and then admiring.” But that is not true.

Admitting that Hitler and the other great murderers were human is painful, but to deny it is to absolve ourselves of any moral connection to what happened. Whatever the risks involved in acknowledging our
common humanity, they are outweighed by the need to understand that it is human beings, not instantly recognizable as moral monsters, who commit great atrocities.

Consider Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the revolutionary hero whose iconic image, taken from a 1960 photo, once graced millions of students’ walls. There is no doubt that injustice inspired genuine rage in him. Since he never got to rule anywhere, however, his image is unsullied by any knowledge of what he would have done if he actually had power.

There has been a film out about Che, too. Called
The Motorcycle Diaries
, it follows the epic trip he and a friend made up the length of Latin America on an old Norton 500 in 1952. It documents how these young Argentine sons of privilege had their eyes opened to the realities of poverty and exploitation in Latin America—and leaves them just before Che joined Fidel Castro in his Mexican exile and began his own meteoric revolutionary career.

Che comes across as an attractive human being, and his dedication to the poor is clearly genuine. But the ideology he espoused in order to change the human sorrow he saw was Marxism, and he did not water it down. He used to prostrate himself before portraits of Stalin, and advocated “relentless hatred of the enemy that … [transforms] us into effective, violent, selective and cold killing machines.” If Che Guevara had led a successful revolution in Bolivia, instead of dying in the attempt in 1967, there would certainly have been mass killing.

Mass murder in the name of a principle is as human as apple pie, borsht and steamed rice. Treating the perpetrators as space aliens simply disguises the nature of the problem. The potential mass killers live among us, as they always have. They often have perfectly good manners; some even have high ideals. And the only way the rest of us have to keep them from power is to remember always that the end does not justify the means.

I know. It’s trite. But the reason things are trite is often because they are true, and they are no less true because they are said a lot. The problem is that time passes, and eventually we forget to say them
.

Adolf Hitler has now been dead slightly longer than he was alive, and he is about to stop being real. So long as the generation whose lives he terrorized is still with us, he remains a live issue, but the sixtieth anniversary of his death on April 30 is the last big one that will be marked by those who survived his evil and remember his victims. By the time the seventy-fifth anniversary comes around, the survivors and witnesses will almost all be gone. And then Hitler will slip away into history.

It’s a process that is nearly impossible to avert because basic human psychology is at work here. Once enough time has passed and all the people involved in a given set of events are dead, we forget to think of them as real people whose triumphs and tragedies matter. Only the loving attention of a filmmaker, a dramatist or a novelist can bring them to life again for us even briefly.

Federico Fellini made the point in his 1969 film
Satyricon
, a story set in the ancient Mediterranean world that has its characters emerge from classical myths and come to life. For about a hundred minutes, we really care about them, in a strange way. The last shot shows the hero coming out of a labyrinth into fresh air and sunlight—and then, with no warning, in the middle of a sentence, the frame freezes and morphs into a time-worn fresco of the same scene. Fade to black.

It’s shocking because Fellini makes us understand the true nature of our relationship with the past. Its people have been dust for hundreds or thousands of years, and for all that we try to give them the respect and the weight that we give to the living and recently dead people, the fact is that we can’t. The point when historical characters, good or bad, make the transition from flesh-and-blood heroes and villains to mere frescoes on a wall is the point where living people no longer remember them with love or hate. With Hitler, we are nearing that point.

You don’t think that could happen? Consider the way we now treat the “Corsican ogre,” Napoleon Bonaparte. He has become a veritable industry for military historians, and is revered by half the population of France because he ruled the country at the height of its power and led the French to several dozen great military victories before his boundless ambition finally plunged the country into total defeat. Nobody seems
particularly perturbed by the fact that his wars caused the deaths of about four million people.

That is a far smaller number than the thirty million or so deaths that Hitler was responsible for, but Europe’s population was a great deal smaller in Napoleon’s heyday. Europeans actually stood about the same chance of dying as a result of Napoleon’s actions at the height of his power in 1808 as they did from Hitler’s actions in 1943—and Napoleon has been forgiven by history. So, if all of those who died in Hitler’s war are soon to enter the same weightless category of the long-dead, what is to keep history from forgiving him, too?

There is one profound difference between Napoleon and Hitler, however: both were tyrants and conquerors, but only Hitler committed deliberate genocide. Most of the people who fought and died in the Second World War didn’t even know about the Nazi death camps at the time. Nonetheless, in retrospect, it is the Holocaust, the six million Jews who died not in the war but in the camps, which has come to define our attitudes towards Hitler, and has transformed him into the personification of absolute evil.

So he should remain, but history is mostly about forgetting and not very much survives the winnowing of the generations. Jews are right to want this piece of history not to be forgotten, and the rest of us need it too because remembering the astonishing amount of pain and loss that a man like Hitler could cause by manipulating hatreds is an essential part of our defences against a recurrence. But the bitter truth is that from now on maintaining this level of awareness will be increasingly uphill work.

I would not raise this issue at Passover if the anniversary of Hitler’s suicide did not make it the one right time to do so. I also understand why most Jews have zealously defended the unique status of the calamity that befell their people and resisted any link with other, smaller but not utterly dissimilar tragedies that have befallen other peoples: the Armenian massacres, the Cambodian genocide, Rwanda and the rest.

We cannot afford to let Hitler fade into the past because we need him to remind us of our duty to the present and the future. If the memory of the Holocaust is to stay alive not just for Jews but for the whole world, it may be time to start rethinking how to present it to twenty-first-century audiences for whom the Second World War and the Second Punic War seem equally lost in the unremembered past. Was it only about the Jews, or should we see the Holocaust as a warning to us all?

What happened to the Carthaginians at the end of the Second Punic War gives us a clear answer to that question. History gives us lessons, but the world is full of distractions and it’s hard to remember
.

Two years ago this month, there were twenty-four left. Now they are all gone, and there is nobody alive who fought in the First World War. Well, there is still Jack Babcock, who joined the Royal Canadian Regiment in 1917 but got no closer to the fighting than England, and American veteran Frank Buckles, who drove an ambulance in France as a seventeen-year-old in 1918. But the last real combatant, Harry Patch, who was wounded at the Battle of Passchensdaele in 1917, died on Saturday.

They’ve been going fast. Erich Kaestner, the last German veteran, died in January 2008. Tony Pierro, who fought with the American Expeditionary Force in France in 1918, died in February. Lazare Ponticelli, the last of the generation of French men who fought in the trenches, died a month later. (One-third of all French males between thirteen and thirty years old in 1914 did not survive the war.)