Member-only story
A warning from history
In 1997 the BBC released their seminal series Nazis: A Warning from History[1] which detailed the systemic and systematic nature of the National Socialist’s co-option of the whole of German society which enabled the slaughter of millions of innocent people. Not one person in that society could escape the burden of guilt placed on the German nation, and to this day German culture has a deep aversion to the mentality that led to the gas chambers. The 1979 Iranian Revolution swept away a despised and despotic Shahist regime to replace it with a regime rooted in fear, terror, and the stripping of all rights except for the men who controlled the levers of power. Both Iran and Germany have faced indoctrination by regimes which terrorise their societies, with the thread they have in common the removal of women’s rights over her appearance, work, and ability to move through society as an equal to men. The stripping of women’s rights in the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy and Hungary ignore these warnings from history at their peril.
Banality of evil was a concept coined by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem[2], to help her understand why a man such as Adolf Eichmann could do the acts he did. Unlike Eichmann many of the apparatchiks who sat behind desks organising the despotic dehumanising of millions of people escaped any definitive punishment because the allies realised that to punish them would…
