There is another resource on this topic, a book called 'Ordinary Men' by Christopher Browning. It chronicles how a perfectly ordinary, even mediocre, reserve police battalion from Hamburg, ended up in Poland regularly shooting thousands of Jews per day without any apparent feelings of remorse or insight.
A combination of wilful blindness and self-delusion, peer pressure, self-interest - no more than that - turned a bunch of second-rate pen-pushers into a monstrous execution force.
I guess the moral is that evil is much closer to the surface than we would care to admit, and that the threat of soulless, sustained evil is ever-present.
Thank you, Nicholas! This is a very important post and well written.
Another film is the Boy in the Stripped Pajamas. From what you and Dr. Toby write, the two films sound very, very similar.
I sincerely find that the manner in which human beings--not just in the global north but in the global south--are raised, is to start numbing your emotions early on..
Along with this comes a conditioning that the way to socially survive is to compete, and emotions get in the way, require extra time, attention, understanding, and are contagious--"if you have feelings I need to watch out, as they will transmit to me".
Thus, emotions, if you have them, are to be severely restricted, only accepted for your dog, or your son, or your grandmother, but not for me, or the people over there.
Thus in a functioning social world, moving at a unprecedented pace towards its self-demise, emotions have no place and seem forbidden for some people, especially those that hate humanity and want to destroy us.
I have not seen this film but I watched one called Killers of the Flower Moon which was about the systemic killing of the Osage nationals in Oklahoma for their very lucrative mineral and oil rights. That one was good, though occassionally plodding. I felt like just a few well placed lines (both about main characters Mollie and Ernest's age, a lawerly type explaining the dependent compensation scheme and an environmental type fleshing out the relationship between the Osage people's generally poor health and the oil fields which made them rich: or was it all just poisoning by outsiders?) could have changed the direction and tenor to make the story easier to understand. It amazes me the ways in which people justify murder (they're as good as gone anyways) and still somehow manage to see themselves as the good guys...
I've changed the NY Times review link to a non-paywalled waybackmachine link in the quote from Toby Rogers' piece. Here is the wayback link again:
https://web.archive.org/web/20231214213437/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/14/movies/the-zone-of-interest-review.html
There is another resource on this topic, a book called 'Ordinary Men' by Christopher Browning. It chronicles how a perfectly ordinary, even mediocre, reserve police battalion from Hamburg, ended up in Poland regularly shooting thousands of Jews per day without any apparent feelings of remorse or insight.
A combination of wilful blindness and self-delusion, peer pressure, self-interest - no more than that - turned a bunch of second-rate pen-pushers into a monstrous execution force.
I guess the moral is that evil is much closer to the surface than we would care to admit, and that the threat of soulless, sustained evil is ever-present.
Thank you, Nicholas! This is a very important post and well written.
Another film is the Boy in the Stripped Pajamas. From what you and Dr. Toby write, the two films sound very, very similar.
I sincerely find that the manner in which human beings--not just in the global north but in the global south--are raised, is to start numbing your emotions early on..
Along with this comes a conditioning that the way to socially survive is to compete, and emotions get in the way, require extra time, attention, understanding, and are contagious--"if you have feelings I need to watch out, as they will transmit to me".
Thus, emotions, if you have them, are to be severely restricted, only accepted for your dog, or your son, or your grandmother, but not for me, or the people over there.
Thus in a functioning social world, moving at a unprecedented pace towards its self-demise, emotions have no place and seem forbidden for some people, especially those that hate humanity and want to destroy us.
A great deal more could be said on this. . .
Thank You Nicholas. Blessings from the waves.
I have not seen this film but I watched one called Killers of the Flower Moon which was about the systemic killing of the Osage nationals in Oklahoma for their very lucrative mineral and oil rights. That one was good, though occassionally plodding. I felt like just a few well placed lines (both about main characters Mollie and Ernest's age, a lawerly type explaining the dependent compensation scheme and an environmental type fleshing out the relationship between the Osage people's generally poor health and the oil fields which made them rich: or was it all just poisoning by outsiders?) could have changed the direction and tenor to make the story easier to understand. It amazes me the ways in which people justify murder (they're as good as gone anyways) and still somehow manage to see themselves as the good guys...