Read Theater of Cruelty Online
Authors: Ian Buruma
Theater of Cruelty (30 page)
Leni Riefenstahl performing her dance
Dream Blossom
at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin, 1923
Werner Herzog filming Dieter Dengler for the film
Little Dieter Needs to Fly
, 1997
Members of the 72nd Shinbu Squadron at the Bansei Air Base, Japan, May 26, 1945, the day before they committed suicide in kamikaze attacks
US soldiers advancing through the streets of Zweibrücken, Germany, March 1945
Israel’s separation wall at the Qaladia checkpoint, near Ramallah, 2010
Count Harry Kessler, 1917
Satyajit Ray during the filming of
Ghanashatru (Enemy of the People)
, 1989
Max Beckmann:
Self-Portrait in Tuxedo
, 1927
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner:
Berlin Street Scene
, 1913–1914
George Grosz:
Grosz as Clown and Variety Girl
, 1958
A wedding couple at the Window of the World theme park, Shenzhen, China, 2008
Drawing by R. Crumb, 1977
Mishima Yukio posing as Saint Sebastian, 1966
In some countries, most people are religious. A consequence of the constant sneering about religion, of any kind, is that it obscures political analysis. What should we think, for example, of the persecution of religious parties in Middle Eastern police states? Must we stand with secular dictatorships in Egypt and Syria just because they are opposed by the Muslim Brotherhood? Was a military coup in Algeria justified only because Islamists won democratic elections in 1991? There is no simple answer to any of these questions. But atheistic sloganeering does not help.
Hitchens seems to be perfectly well aware of this. He writes in his concluding chapter:
The usual duty of the “intellectual” is to argue for complexity and to insist that phenomena in the world of ideas should not be sloganized or reduced to easily repeated formulae. But there is another responsibility, to say that some things are simple and ought not to be obfuscated.
4
He is right. Standing up to Nazism or Stalinism was the only decent thing to do in the last century. There are turning points in history when there can be no ambiguity: 1939 was such a year, and for Communists perhaps 1956. The question is how Hitchens came to the conviction that 2001 was such a time. The mass murder perpetrated in lower Manhattan, Virginia, and Pennsylvania by Osama bin Laden and his terrorist gang must be strongly condemned. Nor do I have a quarrel with the claim that Saddam Hussein’s “state machine
was modeled on the precedents of both National Socialism and Stalinism, to say nothing of Al Capone.” But the idea that September 11 was anything like 1939, when Hitler’s armies were about to sweep across Europe, is fanciful.