Moments of what we call history and moments of what we call memory

Who were they? What motivated them to commit their acts? What did they want to achieve? With what value system did they intend to rationalise their acts? Such a memory, which does not excuse anything but just does not want to accept moral judgements that are as plausible as they are simple, and instead endeavours to see in the perpetrators people like us who are subjected to the same psycho-social mechanisms, can provoke internal resistance. However, it does offer the opportunity to understand the events and thus to give us a kind of awareness, that is, in a sense a cognitive and moral filter which allows us to truly recognise the dangers in our own, familiar and all too obvious world. This conviction results from the fact that, in order for a system of repression to develop, which manifests itself in the opposition of victim and perpetrator, the attitude and the acts of the perpetrator is of uppermost, yes even of constitutive significance. Usually, the victim does not choose his role himself: The victim is chosen. Therefore, the fact that the framework of the situation is determined by another, dramatically restricts the victim’s freedom of action. I am not even thinking here of the camp sadists who simply enjoyed the violence they asserted. They are the last link in a long chain. I am much more interested in the chronologically and above all logically earlier phase: What systematic ideas relating to the organisation of a society, what views of humanity, what conceptual frameworks were able to cause this issue? What justifications, what rationalisations, what defence mechanisms? Don’t some people still find concepts to protect society from dangers to its cultural, ethnic and religious cohesion or to its identity constructs ostensibly rational?!  Doesn’t the same apply to demands to intervene in a corrective manner when antisocial elements breach general norms and standards? Or resocialise the edges of society however they are defined? And what about repressive measures as an educational method at every level of society? And what is the situation with hierarchies and with discipline as undisputed values and links for human groups? Can the instrumentalisation of third parties be discounted as a human resource for enforcing values which favour a group?  Or the subordination of the right of the individual to a self-determined life, starting with the defining of permitted life choices right up to the literal right to survive that should be dependent upon the fulfilment of arbitrarily defined criteria? All these clichéd concepts, these banal manifestations of everyday dominance and violence can be defended to a certain extent. Or at any rate they find people to defend them. They do not have to end in totalitarian horror, but they can do. And what is more, they are the humus upon which the horror is developed. So where is the line?