Why the villains win

By David Simmons

Like many baby-boomers whose fathers fought in World War II, I was mystified in my youth by how quickly the Western Allies reconciled with the Japanese, Italians and especially the Germans. In the early 1970s, I travelled around Germany to try to make sense of it. I saw Dachau, the memorials in West Berlin, the still war-damaged buildings of East Berlin.

And I met wonderful people.

Years later, I went to Israel, where I saw the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. I spent three months on a kibbutz, where I met more wonderful people, including our Israeli hosts and the Arab labourers, along with the foreign volunteers from Britain, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, the US, France and Canada.

And Germany.

How could this be? How could these young Germans, these intelligent, fun-loving, perfectly normal people, be connected in any way with those monsters who slaughtered Jews by the millions? Young, bright-eyed, idealistic like the rest of us, and working hand in hand with Jews, eating, drinking and playing with them, including some who still had memories of those dark days in Europe?

And yet they were not monsters, those Hitler Youth members of the 1930s, those brave soldiers of the Wehrmacht, maybe not even the guards at Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz and the rest. They were people, humans who trod a path spared others only by the grace of the gods. They loved their country but saw no hope for it to rise from the ruins and reparations of the Great War, the hyperinflation, the exploitation of the bankers, many of whom were Jews.

Until an ugly little man with a swastika on his armband stirred their aspirations, and their hatreds, with his bold rhetoric.

As I write this, I hear the television in the next room, the anti-government Blue Sky channel that my wife watches day and night, spewing bold rhetoric from an unattractive man with a Thai flag on his armband. He offers hope to save Thailand from – what? Hyperinflation? Mass poverty and unemployment? Enslavement by foreign powers?

No; the Thai economy is one of the strongest in Asia, poverty has been nearly eliminated, unemployment is less than 1 per cent, foreign investment is pouring in, factories are popping up all over and churning out cars and computer components. Wages are rising, and the worst villains of exploitative capitalism – the garment industry – are fleeing to havens like Bangladesh and Cambodia.

No; he will save the land not from any of these things but from a family from the northern province of Chiang Mai who exploited the democratic system to establish themselves in the once totally dominant Central region. He will save the land, therefore, from the real culprit – democracy itself. For it is a flawed system, empowering the lower classes to install governments that promise them a better life and, worse, spread the wealth around outside the great city of Krung Thep, the City of Angels, the seat of a quasi-divine monarch.

Western media haven’t been able to grasp what is happening. They are used to covering street revolutions, but those are nearly always struggles to rid their lands of dictators, absolute monarchs and military juntas. Here in Thailand, it’s the complete opposite.

It’s not logical. And ironically this anti-democratic, anti-unification, pro-class-war revolution flared up at almost exactly the same time as most of the rest of the world was mourning the loss of a black man who spent decades in prison for fighting apartheid, but who went on to become his country’s president and forgave his former tormenters, who preached reconciliation.

But as in 1930s Germany, logic is not the main issue. Yes the man from Chiang Mai they now demonize was a crook and a murderer, and the current bureaucracy, security forces, and Parliament itself are deeply corrupt. Yes some of the populist programs favoured by the rural majority have been ineffectual, even damaging. Yet the real momentum comes not from meaningful solutions proposed from the protest stage, but from soothing words backing the myth that the fair-skinned Central tribe with its strong Chinese ethnicity is superior to the Lao and hill-tribe-tainted Northern highlands and Northeastern plateaus, and let’s not even talk about the Malay Muslims in the South. In fact let’s not talk about anything but how much we hate that one family, and by extension all those who support them.

Let’s not focus on the usurious Jewish bankers who are getting fat on the misery of Aryan Germans, said the ugly little man with the swastika; let’s exterminate all the Jews, even our friends and neighbours and co-workers, our children’s teachers. And let’s not stop there; let’s celebrate our superiority by conquering the lower races, the Slavs and the Latins, to expand our Lebensraum. For we are not of the world; we own it.

I have often thought about what my life would have been like if I had been born thirty years earlier, and not in Canada but in Germany. Would I have been among the Righteous Gentiles who protected Jews from persecution? I doubt I would have, not just in Germany but anywhere else in Europe at that time, for anti-Semitism was rife everywhere – the Germans (and the Soviets) just took it to its logical extreme. I might have been skeptical of National Socialist fantasies and uncomfortable with its aggression, maybe. I really don’t know.

We don’t have to look far, after all, to see the power of rhetoric over logic. The Cold War was mostly based on the former, and that decades-long conflict wasn’t embraced primarily by naive little Asians or goose-stepping fanatics, but by the great democracies that dominated much of the world after 1945.

And we have not been permitted to enjoy our complacency of having survived the Cold War without nuking one another into oblivion. Now there is a new struggle, currently being lost by working people everywhere, against out-of-control corporatism and financial terrorism that threatens not just civilization, but possibly the ecosystem itself.

So there are villains everywhere, and they win by exploiting our own failings, our refusal to think for ourselves, like the whistle-blowing mobs now paralysing Bangkok. They too easily breach our weak defences against the prejudice, greed, close-mindedness inside our own hearts, that can fester into hate so quickly.