Part I - Groups and Affiliation
Part II - Stereotypes
Part III - Ghettos
My history teacher in high school had a very unique way to teach. It's probably on the reasons I enjoy history as a subject and why I am intrigued so much by socio-political issues. She once wrote down ZEITGEIST on the board and asked us to spend some time finding out what it meant. There were brownie points up for grabs. The only hint she was prepared to give was that it was not an English word. Now this was a pre-internet era where personal computers were just coming in. Only one of my classmates had a computer at home and he was the envy of the whole class. Google was almost a decade away. Our history book for the term, our curriculum and indeed those of our seniors contained no reference to Zeitgeist. What the heck did it mean anyway? And what was its relevance to our subject.
Zeitgeist as I was taught that year is a German word and refers to the way a group of people think, believe and behave during a specific time period. During the preceding or subsequent era people would have felt differently. Wikipedia defines Zeitgeist as - the intellectual, cultural, ethical and political climate, ambience and morals of an era and also notes that Zeitgeist can only be observed for past events. In the previous week while studying World War II, the general consensus in our class was OK Hitler was this total nutcase; a gifted orator and all that but a nutcase nonetheless. He was responsible for the death of millions of people. The only fault of this people was that they had a different identity, they were Jewish, an identity that Hitler hated and he wanted to establish this pure Aryan race. OK Point accepted. But what about the rest of the Germany? Why did they go along? Can you bend an entire nation to do your bidding? Was there no one who felt they were doing any wrong? Yes, we had heard of the Gestapo and yes we knew how humiliated the Germans would have felt during the Treaty of Versailles. We learnt all of it but we could not reconcile to the idea of an entire nation being unable to stop the lunacies of one man. A society contains a variety of people; it contains its intellectual class, its artists, a judiciary, military and policing arm, a representation of people from all sections of society. That variety acts like a fail-safe mechanism. It protects a society and keeps it in line. In the Nazi era however, the fail-safe mechanism did not trigger. How else can one man manage alter the ideological beliefs of an entire nation? Zeitgeist was our teacher's way at offering an explanation. She said Hitler was able to influence the "spirit" of the "times". Zeit is time and Geist is spirit. He was able to channel the resent of the Germans into what he was convinced would become world dominance.
You just have to look behind in the past to see the number of ironies life throws back at us. Somehow we never learn from history. The Jewish community was persecuted for centuries in Europe culminating with the horrific events of World War II. They carved out a nation in the heart of the Middle East and today scores of Palestinians have become victims of a Ghettoized society, forced to live in refugee camps by the very group of people who were themselves victims and survivors of Ghettoism. How can the Jews, a group of people persecuted in the past, have no empathy towards another group? How can they disfranchise and displace the Palestinians and consign them to decades of misery. The irony is that if there is any community that should have understood the plight of the Palestinians, it should have been the Jews. No Arab can even come close to understanding it but a persecuted Jew should be able to understand, because his forefathers have faced much worse, because he has walked down that road before, and he knows the miseries that lie ahead.
No comments:
Post a Comment