RS: And you raised the question -- not you, really, more people in Poland who are worried about the rise of neofascism and what has happened to the Polish movement --
CH: Solidarity.
RS: Solidarity, after Communism was defeated. I found that an incredibly depressing and alarming article. And I don't know if you meant it that way, but I would recommend that everyone read it, because you raise the most fundamental question about barbarism in the modern era. Which is that the major barbarism did not come from people of so-called primitive culture.
CH: Yeah.
RS: Or uneducated, or given to all sorts of ritualistic tendencies that might be destructive; it came, beginning in Germany, in the most civilized, well-educated society, people who respect --
CH: Yes, although we should be clear that after [1933], the Nazis destroyed culture in the same way that neoliberalism has destroyed culture.
RS: Ninety --
CH: After 1933.
RS: Thirty-three, yeah.
CH: So that if you were 10 years old, you were pretty much yanked out of your family into the [Hitler] Youth and indoctrinated.
RS: OK. And in your article, you actually have one of the people you interview questioning what is human nature, and that human nature is not necessarily some enduring, innate quality; it's something that is learned and taught. But the fact of the matter is -- and I'm half Jewish and half German, so I've wrestled with this ever since I was born, in the beginning of all this, back in '36. I've been back to Germany, I've visited my relatives. My father's brother, my half brother was in the U.S. Air Force bombing our hometown in Germany, and my father's brother was one of the people being bombed, and he was in the German army, wounded at Stalingrad. So I've wrestled with this, and yes, there was a gap in the workings of German education. But the fact is, they still had the best music, and they had the best science, and they had all of this in Germany. And it didn't save them at all, it didn't help them at all. And I have always found that very depressing when I apply it to the United States.
CH: Well, because I think that the problem was that -- I mean, just as under Stalinism, there was a war against culture, replaced with faux culture. You know, the whole attack on Jewish science was part of Nazism and Stalinism. So you're right, except that it shows how swiftly a society that reaches those cultural heights can be reoriented towards barbarism. And I would argue that that is one of the fundamental dangers in the United States, is the war we've made on our own culture. The Nazis made, had a huge movie industry, and they didn't make -- they made some horrible propaganda films. But most of it was fluff, was garbage, was Hollywood-type entertainment. And you know, mindless entertainment; spectacle.
Spectacle -- fascists do spectacle very well. Stalin did spectacle very well. And that creates a kind of cultural milieu where people lose the capacity to think critically and self-reflect, which is what authentic culture is about; that capacity to get you to look within yourself, look within your society. And it's replaced with this collective narcissism, which has been on display at this convention. And that's very dangerous. And we've seen Trump ride that collective narcissism, and exploit it through right-wing populism, and do what proto-fascist movements always do, which is direct a legitimate rage and a cultural narcissism towards the vulnerable. Undocumented workers, Muslims, homosexuals, you know, on and on and on. So the destruction of culture is a key component -- actually, my first book, "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning," and the wars that I covered, noted that a culture that goes to war destroys its own culture before it destroys the culture of the enemy.
RS: But basic to that manipulative concept, obscuring your own responsibility -- the denial of, say, Jesus, who may not have existed but it was attributed to him in Luke, of the Good Samaritan -- trying to understand the other, and that the other also has a soul, and so forth. Obliterating that, making people throwaway people, whether they're the people you deal with in jail, or the people we're bombing. As the Democratic convention is going on, a Democratic president is randomly killing people with drones and what have you. And you even had Madeleine Albright get up there to a standing ovation -- I was stunned -- and she's a woman who at one point defended the bombing, starvation, actually, in Iraq, and you know, this is the price you pay. And I was thinking about that; essential to this whole narrative is that idea that Reagan pushed -- he wasn't the first, but the Germans had it too -- that you are the city on the hill. You are the place that God is watching.
CH: Right. Well, that's what the collective narcissism is about. And with collective narcissism, means you externalize evil. So every moralist -- I mean, having covered war, I know how thin that line is between victim and victimizer. I know how easily people can be seduced into carrying out atrocity; I've seen it in every war I've covered. And I think the best break against that is understanding those dark forces within all of us, and the capacity we all have for evil. That's what makes Primo Levi such a great writer about the Holocaust. And so collective narcissism essentially says we -- it creates a binary world, as you correctly point out, where other human beings embody evil, and when we eradicate them, we have eradicated evil. And that, of course, propels a society into committing atrocious acts of evil in the name of good. And that's what the Nazis did, and I would argue that's what we do in the Middle East; that's what we do in this vast system of mass incarceration; that's what we do in our internal colonies; that's what we do to our poor.
RS: And that's what we do in our foreign policy. And there is a common theme that we saw at both the Republican and Democratic conventions. And it was surprising to me how much they had in common in this respect: that we are the aggrieved. It's like the people in Germany after World War I, who became convinced that they had been victimized by the rest of the world. Right, whether it was Jewish bankers in New York, or it was the French, or the Allies, or what have you. And it was interesting, we're recording this at the point when Barack Obama's going to speak at the convention tonight. But last night, listening to the speeches, they had you know, first responders; 9/11 was a big theme, because after all, Hillary Clinton, senator from New York, and she had the credentials of having been around during 9/11 and so forth. And it was all about, you know, this -- first of all, sort of a continuation of the idea that no other people in the world have ever been attacked in this way. Right? You know, we are a nation --
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