Kimberly Emerson

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, by Peter Eisenman and Buro Happold (Berlin)

Not long ago, I read a blog post discussing the number of people killed in the name of religion.  Spoiler alert: Christianity does not come off well.  Neither does anything else.  The annals of human history run with the blood of innocent people killed for any number of reasons. If you’re in the mood to be really, really depressed, check out the statistics at a page called necrometrics.com.  With determined objectivity, the site scales through every major tragedy of the 20th century, detailing how many people died in each event according to a variety of historical experts.  As you might have guessed, Adolf Hitler, held responsible for possibly as many 25,000,000 outright murders (not including enlisted soldiers that died in the war itself), is a good contender for the prize of Most Disturbed Individual, but it’s debatable whether he actually takes the title.  Josef Stalin is cited as having caused the deaths of at least 20,000,000 of his own citizens, and Mao Zedong oversaw the ending of the lives of 40,000,000 of his people.  I’m calling it a draw.  (In case you have a shred of optimism left, you can verify some of the stats and find other truly horrifying chapters of history at thehistoryplace.com.  The link will take you to their chapter on genocide.)

A curious thought struck me, though, as I looked at these sad statistics.  I don’t know what caused these particularly sick people down the path to psychosis, but whatever it was, it seemed to be contagious.  Hitler, Stalin and Mao were dangerous individuals, but they didn’t pull off these death totals on their own.  Name your tragedy.  You don’t have to limit yourself to these three, there are so many more to choose from – the Armenian Genocide in Turkey, the slaying of Tibetan nationalists, the starvation and execution of Cambodians by Pol Pot…unfortunately, I could go on.  In each instance, the idea may have begun in one particularly unhinged brain, but one person can’t pull off the executions of millions of people.  The most prolific serial killer in history, Luis Alfredo Garavito, has been definitively linked to 114 deaths, and confessed to 140.  For devastation on a seven- or eight-digit scale, you need an organization.  Think about it.  There are lots of people on the street screaming that all the problems in the world are caused by this race or that religion.  Most of the time, we figure they’re suffering from deep mental problems and ignore them as we go about our day.  Yet in some dark episodes of history, people decided not to ignore the crazy, but instead to listen to it and take it seriously.  We blame the dictators for the oppression of the masses, but you can’t oppress masses all at once.  You have to start somewhere and pick up steam, before the fear of you alone will cause people to do your will.

And here’s where I started to wonder: in any of these instances, why did the masses go along with it?

Visits to the Museum of Tolerance here in Los Angeles have given me some idea of the answer to this question, and it isn’t pretty.  In nearly every case, it starts with a shared prejudice.  Take Nazi Germany as an example.  Hitler didn’t have to convince people to dislike Jews.  Anti-Semitism was already rampant.  In order to start the country down the road to genocide, all he had to do was give the populace an excuse to legitimize their bigotry.   Say “I don’t like those people because they have different customs than I do, and they make me uncomfortable” and you are marginalizing a population.  But turn it into “I hate that group, because their ancestors killed Christ!” and all of a sudden it’s okay to persecute them.  Don’t you see, God wants it that way!

Did any of the Germans really believe that God created Aryans to be a super-race?  We’ll never know, because there is no way to determine the distance between what a person believes and what she claims to believe.  Personally, I think a lot of lip-service was paid to the idea, because it supported what people wanted to believe anyway.  Remember, Hitler came to power during the Depression, and the German economy was in freefall.  According to an article on the Weimar Republic by Stephen Tonge, the unemployment rate in 1933 Germany was around 33% – higher in some industrialized areas.  People wanted someone to blame for their misfortunes, and the Jews, whose different customs already singled them out, would do nicely.

Edmund Burke said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”  I agree with the idea that we all need to speak out when we know something is wrong.  But for these dictators to slaughter millions, people had to do more than nothing.  Some people – and there were too many of them to think it was just the bad people – had to pick up weapons, hold them up to their fellow citizens and pull the trigger.  Somewhere along the line, the masses had to decide that it was in their best interests to back the person in charge, to accept whatever comfortable (frequently religious) platitude was thrown at them, and to convince themselves that as long as they were part of the firing squad, they’d never have to face one.

The thought has struck me with the current debate against gay marriage.  I’m sure there are some people out there who genuinely think God does not want people to be gay, but I’m equally certain that a much larger percentage of the world is just uncomfortable with the topic.  The evidence for barring the State’s acceptance of gay marriage just isn’t there.  If your church does not want to marry people of the same sex, it will never have to. Divorce is legal, but Catholic churches aren’t required to marry divorced people.  As my former pastor explained it to me, he could decide he didn’t want to marry cab drivers, and the government couldn’t force him to do so.  (The cab drivers could, of course, go elsewhere to get married, in a more transportation-accepting church, or in Las Vegas, in a civil drive-thru ceremony in their cabs.)  Somehow, citing six or seven generally mistranslated passages in the Bible (see The God Article’s excellent piece on the subject) that agree with our own discomfort is easier than adhering to the much higher number of verses that tell us to love others and leave judgment to God.

We’ve also seen this theory in action after the tragic events of September 11, 2001.  How many people had already made up their minds not to like Muslims before this?  When all of a sudden we were told that Islamic terrorists had flown those planes, we realized it was our patriotic duty to treat all people who looked even vaguely Arabic as second class citizens.  Never mind whether they were really believers in terrorist jihad – it was enough that they knelt down on a carpet to pray or wore a hajib or had brownish skin.  We had to make sure that this could never happen again.  For America.  (The justification doesn’t have to be religious.  Blatant jingoism will do just as well.)

The bottom line is, there are always more followers than there are leaders.  There always will be.  That means that the masses have the power, no matter how much the leaders may try to convince them otherwise.  In order to have a world that never sees another Hitler, Stalin, or Mao, we have to say no to their hate and fear…and be always on our guard for anyone who wants to justify our basest prejudices and put them on display.

Kimberly really wants to see a world-wide revival of the lost arts of thinking for yourself and having compassion for your fellow human beings.

Tags: Armenian Genocide, Christianity, dictators, Edmund Burke, Holocaust memorial, nationalism, religion, serial killers, terrorism, Tibet, Turkey