What are our reactions when confronted with difference? Here is the text of a speech given at the Stockholm International Forum on ‘Combating Intolerance’ in January 2001 by the well-known historian and writer Gitta Sereny. A provocative piece which can be used as the basis of class discussions and study.
Over these two days in Stockholm, we are discussing intolerance and xenophobia in one word perhaps: racism, which is the term that most clearly describes these deep preconceptions.
Here in these two days, we are pondering how, through education, legislation and community strategies, we can combat the perilous extremes of violence: against immigrants by those who believe they threaten their livelihood; by passionate separatists in defence of their religious and ethnic cultures; and incipient violence too in massed bands of unthinking youths who confuse identity with ideology. We are seeking ways how, in our age of communication, that new dangerous medium, the internet, can be controlled; and how the print and television media, only too often prone to the intervention of commercial interests, can exercise the self-censorship commensurate with its power.
There is however one aspect of racism which I have not seen mentioned in the programme, but which, to my mind, is the most perilous one. Because, undefined by class or gender, and largely without planned intent, it enters, as of adolescence, almost by some kind of insidious osmosis, the minds or spirits of much of mankind. And this is what I would call ‘Inner Racism’.
Babies, we know, are not born with it; toddlers have no sense of it; children below the age of eight or even ten, appear immune to it. And yet, as of that age, or just beyond it, playgrounds echo with the invectives expressing it; only a little later violent street fights grow out of it; social and political life is permeated by it, and finally people, young and old, see their lives ruined and indeed some die by it.
But, there are exceptions, from which we can take heart and learn. As I was writing this talk a few days ago, I went to a theatre in London, which was showing a play acted by black actors, about life years ago in the townships of South Africa. Sitting on cushions on the floor at the edge of the stage, were three rows of young people, between I would say 18 and 25. And watching their rapt faces as the action unrolled before them, I realised that the ‘inner racism’ I was just writing about was not in them; that somehow, by dint of background, or constant positive educational pressure, not only by schools but the media and all the arts– a kind of shield has been created in them against this invasion. This shield exists too, in many young Germans I have talked to over the years who have to come to terms with the heritage of great violence many of their grand- and great-grandparents were involved in.
But such young people are still a minority, the few, not the many, not us.
In order to understand what provokes our reaction of rejection, dislike or even repugnance to another’s colour, his religion, the shape of his face, or his manner of living or being, we have to first acknowledge its existence in us. We have to consciously recognize it and we have to realise its power of corruption.
There are many examples, past and present, of the consequences of these feelings in us, on this and other continents. Examples how these individual reactions of inner racism which remains passive in most of us, can lead when it becomes active in some, to men, women and children, marked as inferior outsiders, being harassed and hounded. Isolated from the community, deprived of their civic liberties, denuded of their homes and possessions, they become emotionally, psychologically and physically diminished while we, the passively inner racist majority, sit by, surprised, certain of personal blamelessness of violence, but incapable of resisting it.
Time is short, so rather than searching for examples in the present, let me use history to illustrate my points.
Anti-Semitism is now only one and perhaps potentially not the most dangerous of prejudices. But even though I feel, with many others now, that Hitler’s murder of the Jews should now gradually be considered, yes, the most dreadful part of the Third Reich, but not the totality of its history, the fact is that nothing so tragically and clearly delineates the reality and the danger of inner racism as that most dreadful of genocides.
Let me then end with two necessarily brief and selected partial quotes from my books on Albert Speer, and on Franz Stangl, Commandant of Treblinka, to illustrate my points of inner racism, and the corruption it can cause.
One is the answer given to me by Stangl who, probably originally no more anti-Semitic than most Austrian provincials at the time, became entirely conditioned to violence and disastrously corrupted by it. Toward the end of our long conversations in Düsseldorf prison in 1971, I asked whether it would be true to say that he got used to the liquidations.
“To tell the truth” he said slowly..”one did become used to it.” Would it be true to say that you finally felt they weren’t really human beings? I asked. “When I was on a trip once years later in Brazil” he said, “my train stopped next to a slaughter house. The cattle in the pens.. trotted up to the fence and stared at the steaming, hissing train. They were very close to my window, one crowding the other, looking at me through that fence. I thought then “Look at this; this reminds me of Poland; that’s just how the people looked, trustingly, before they went into the tins..” You said ‘tins’ I interrupted. What do you mean? But he went on without hearing, or answering me. “I couldn’t eat tinned meat after that..” So you didn’t feel they were human beings? I asked again. “Cargo,” he said tonelessly. “They were cargo.”
Eleven years later, in 1982, I began the research for my book on Albert Speer, whom I had known well for the last four years of his life. Irrespective of whether one likes or believes Speer, something he said in a long agonized letter from Spandau prison to his then 16-year old daughter, who had asked him to explain to her how he could have remained part of a system that was so evil, is as telling of passive inner racism as anything we might find:
“There can be no excuse; there is no justification, and in that sense I am convinced of my own guilt” he wrote, “To reassure you, however: of the dreadful things (he means the gas chambers) I knew nothing. (And) as far as practising anti-Semitism .. My conscience is entirely clear” And then, to his daughter’s horror, he ended “I really have no aversion to them, or rather no more than the slight discomfort all of us sometimes feel when in contact with them.”
That ’slight discomfort’ - a discomfiting awareness of difference - is what many if not most of us, black brown yellow white, Moslems Hindus Jews Christians, have probably, –DO probably, if only fleetingly feel in our bones at one time or another about one or another of our fellowmen.
We think of ourselves as good people, innocent of prejudice, But perhaps –as Albert Speer would only do toward the end of his life– we need to remember that this innocence is only as real as our capacity to maintain denial. When we admit to inner racism, as we must, then we must fight it, or we give up all claim to innocence.
Thank you.
The above text is the copyright of Gitta Sereny and has been reproduced here with the kind permission of the author. Gitta was born in Vienna and educated in Austria, England and France. Her publications include: “The Case of Mary Bell”, 1972 and 1995, “Into that Darkness”, 1974, “The Invisible Children”, 1984, “Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth”, 1995 and “Cries Unheard”, 1998.
