Category Archives: 2024 Trip to South West United States

Is the Asylum System Broken?

2024 Trip to South West United States, Immigration and Refugees

 

In the US the Secretary of Homeland Security has repeatedly said the asylum system is broken. That means that revolutionary changes to the system are urgently required.  Looking around the world, where so many countries in the world are experiencing the same problem, it is difficult to deny the urgent need for not just reform, but revolutionary change to the system.

 

To understand the issue, we must get back to fundamentals. During World War II there were disgraceful and often successful attempts by governments around the world to deny asylum to Jews and others fleeing Nazi persecution, torture, and death. Canada and the United States were both among the disgraceful countries. Both countries were complicit in sending ships of asylum seekers back to Europe where many of them ended up in Nazi death camps, where they died,  to the eternal shame of such countries.  The infamous statement of a Canadian official who was asked how many Jews Canada should take said, “none is too many.” In more recent times, Donald Trump when he was president, told potential asylum seekers, “Our country is full,” even though it clearly was not full and actually and needed laborers. The history of countries being asked to accept asylum seekers has not been pretty.

 

Then after the war the international community reformed the system and even made radical changes that worked well. For a while. Countries like Canada and the US began to accept asylum seekers. Asylum seekers who were fleeing persecution were by international law given the right to come to countries like Canada and the US and many others and seek asylum. Again that system worked well, for a while.

 

After World War II, as Fareed Zakaria said, people who faced extreme persecution, because of their religion, race or beliefs, were able to find  pathway to arrival to their country. Then countries like Canada and the United States, became a refugee country, from extreme persecution. Yet eventually this system became unworkable. As Fareed Zakaria said,

There are two realities that are critical to turning this idealistic impulse into a workable system.

“First, there are tens of millions of people around the world who could plausibly claim that they faced persecution and the US cannot possibly take them all.

More importantly, the US cannot be forced to give priority to people who break the law and enter the country illegally and then claim asylum status to legitimate that entry, as opposed to those who follow the rules, apply from their own countries and wait their turn. But that is what is happening everyday now at the southern border.

Second, these asylum cases must be special and distinct from all cases all over the world who are trying to immigrate to the United States, because they are fleeing poverty, disease or violence. People who fall into this category fall into a complex and elaborate system that entails several mechanism for obtaining various kinds of visas and work permits some of which can eventually turn into a green card and eventually citizenship. But instead of going through that arduous lengthy legal process many seem to have decided it would be simpler to pay cartels to help them cross the border illegally, present themselves as asylum seekers, and slip into the country while their cases are being adjudicated.”

According to the Homeland Security Inspector General, in just one 7 month period between March 2012 and August 2022, the federal government released 1 million migrants into the US and then immediately lost track of over 177,000 of them who had failed to give an address or had provided an invalid one.

When the system of due process collapses as it has, it is most unfair to those who have legitimate claims to asylum or legal immigrant status. There is only one solution to this crisis. President Biden should either ask Congress for authority to use existing executive authority suspend entirely the system of asylum seekers while the system digests the millions of immigration cases already pending.”

 

Actually Biden has done exactly that and much to the surprise of many a non-partisan group of Senators this year came up with a plan that they believed everyone should endorse. In fact, it looked like 67% of the Senators liked the plan and were about to approve it, when Trump told his minions he did not want them to agree to the plan. Most agree he  did not want the parties to come to a non-partisan agreement because he wanted to use the issue on the campaign trail instead. His Republican sycophants of course followed suit as did those in the House of Representatives.

As a result, these measures Republicans have been screaming for are stalled until after the election. The immigrant “crisis” is not as important as scoring political points.

 

The Immigration and Asylum System is Broken

2024 Trip to South West United States, Immigration and Refugees

 

 

Liberals, such as Democrats in the US, are failing to see the problems with immigration and conservatives and populists and authoritarians are getting ready to pounce on this election issue again, as they did in 2016 in the US. That issue helped spur Trump’s surprising victory in the race for the American presidency. From the first day of that campaign when Trump came down the escalator in gaudy Trump tower and lambasted Mexican illegal immigrants as rapists and murderers is message has resonated with people. Conservatives, including populists and authoritarians, have been successful in latching on to the issue of immigration around the world. Fareed Zakaria, an astute political analyst, is warning Democrats that the issue of immigration could “cripple their chances at the polls” in the upcoming national elections in the US.” Why is that?

It is true that the US Republicans are taking advantage of this problem and keep hammering the Democrats for what they call their policies of open borders. Such rhetoric plays well with nearly everyone, because virtually no one wants open borders. Most Americans think the Republicans, led by Trump are better able to deal with what they see as chaos at the border.

According to Zakaria it is more than that however. He says the other reason Democrats are getting hammered in the US is that “their [Democrats] policies are wrong. Grossly inadequate to the challenge at hand. Apprehensions at the southern border are surging again.”

The borders across the US are bending as they encounter waves of arrivals that seem well beyond the ability of American border agents to effectively deal with. As Zakaria said, “Now that American cities like New York, Chicago, and Washington D.C., local governments there are facing back-breaking expenses to house them.” They frankly don’t know what to do.

 Of course, as I have said before, such expenses should be born by the federal government and not state governments. Immigration, whether legal or illegal is a national issue and costs should be paid by the nation, not the states which are being inundated. That is painfully unfair.

As Zakaria said, “New York city Mayor Eric Adams was exaggerating only slightly when he said, this problem will destroy the city.”

If Republicans are able to persuade Americans that these problems have been exacerbated by weak policies of the Biden administration and states with Democratic governors or Democratic led state governments, this issue could drown Democratic leaders around the US. There are few issues more amenable to Populist manipulation and fear-mongering than images of chaos at borders and massive impositions of expenses upon receiving states, provinces, or governments.

According to Zakaria, “the Biden administration proposals  have amounted to band-aids on a massive open wound.”  Similar arguments are being made by populist opponents of existing government around the world.

America Can Do Better

2024 Trip to South West United States, 2024 Trip to Southwest USA, Immigration and Refugees

 

We have been living in Arizona for nearly 3 months now and immigration is on everyone’s minds. That doesn’t mean they are thinking about it, but they are complaining about it. The complaints are ubiquitous. Thoughts are mostly absent.

First, one thing nearly everybody agrees on is that border reform is urgently needed. In the spring of last year many feared the US was going to have an unmanageable border crisis at the southern border. The government was about to lose the ability to quickly dispel migrants at the border because of the Title 42 provisions that were implemented by Trump in March of 2020 that allowed the Americans to do that as a pandemic prevention measure. At least Trump referred to the measures that way. By 2023 the pandemic restrictions everywhere were being lifted so really this had to go too.

Biden had a plan. He imposed measures that were designed to deal with the expected problem. He imposed stiff penalties for illegal crossings such as a deportation and a 5-year ban on any re-entry. He also expanded the ways asylum seekers could apply for legal asylum from their home countries. Amazingly, this plan actually worked. Encounters at the border dropped by one third! Numbers dropped from about 7,100 per day to 4,800 per day.

As Fareed Zakaria, someone who actual thinks about what is happening on the border said in a Washington Post article, “It was a welcome case of well-designed policy making a difference.”

 But then the Democrats took their eye off the ball. They thought the problem was solved. Border problems are never solved that easily. As Republicans learned but rarely admitted, their “solutions” did not solve the problems either. Border problems are wicked problems that require long-term hard-fought for solutions.

As Zakaria pointed out

“But this success does not change the fact that the U.S. immigration system is broken. The crush at the southern border might be less than anticipated, but it is still an influx, and its effects are being felt across the nation. Texas, overwhelmed by the numbers, has bused migrants to cities such as Washington and New York. But the truth is that migrants have been crowding into major American cities, including Chicago, on a scale that is breaking those communities’ capacities to respond.”

 

A major flaw in the American system is that cities where immigrants arrive are required to pay for the costs of dealing with the immigrants. This is absurd, for the cities are the governments least able to deal with those costs, and more importantly, immigration is a national problem not a city problem. The entire country must chip in to design and pay for a better and more rational system.

And one thing I have learned in my 3 months in America, the Americans are much more interested in yelling at “the other side” and wining political points than in solving this vexing problem. That is a problem.

 

Unite the Right with Hate

2024 Trip to South West United States, 2024 Trip to Southwest USA, Domestic Terrorism, Extremism, Hate, Political Violence, racism, Right-wing Extremism, Trump

 

A transformational event for the far-right occurred on August 11 and August 12 2017 in the US.  This was during the presidency of Donald J. Trump and  It happened in a  college town called Charlottesville Virginia. As Professor Jacob Ware described this event to his listeners at Arizona State University, this was “where a group of outspoken, explicit, proud, white supremacists, and Neo-Nazis, and anti-government extremists gathered in what they called a ‘Unite the Right Rally.’

Before the event, one of the main organizers, Jason Kessler, had been publicizing the event for months by his protests against the proposed removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee. This helped to fire up white supremacists and other right-wing extremists around the country. Even right-wing Canadians wanted to attend this event.

The trigger for the event was a threat to dismantle a Confederate statute in that community. A young woman, Heather Heyer, was killed during a domestic terrorist attack led by white supremacists. The attack was led by James Alex Fields Jr. who deliberately drove his car into a crowd of people who were peacefully protesting the right-wing rally that was being held in Charlottesville. Only one person, Heather Heyer, was killed but 35 others were injured. As Wikipedia reported,

“Fields 20, had previously espoused neo-Nazi and white supremacist beliefs, and drove from Ohio to attend the rally. Fields’ attack was called an act of domestic terrorism by the mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia’s public safety secretary, the U.S. attorney general, and the director of the FBI.”

 

Some witnesses reported that Fields’ vehicle sent protesters “flying through the air.” After the initial impact, Fields changed the car into reverse to target more people. He backed up at high speeds for several blocks with protesters chasing him.

Fields was subsequently convicted in a state court of the first-degree murder of Heyer, as well as 8 counts of malicious wounding and hit and run. He also pled guilty to 29  hate crime charges  presumably in order to avoid the death penalty. In typical America hyperbolic legal “justice,” Fields was sentenced to life in prison as well as 419 years for the state charges, with an additional life sentence for the federal charges.

As egregious an event as it was, it soon became an international sensation when President Trump entered the aftermath with his infamous tweets and statements. At first president Trump wavered about whether or not he should condemn the terrorists. Trump just could not bring himself to condemn outright the terrorism since the right-wing attackers did not look like terrorists to him. They looked like supporters, which many of them, of course were. How could be publicly criticize his base? That is not like him.

The marchers had been chanting repeatedly, “You will not replace us. Jews will not replace us.” as they carried their patio torches. This of course is a direct allusion to the common white supremacist trope that members of the American left are trying to replace whites with more compliant people from other races.  It was also clearly antisemitic. The closest he could come to criticism of his adoring fans was to say “I think there’s blame on both sides. You also had people, on both sides, who were very fine people.”  What was so fine about whites who mowed down protesters while chanting those racist memes? Recall, he did exactly the same thing on January 6, 2021when his staff insisted he tell the rioters to leave he did ask them to leave but first told them he loved them.

Trump has demonstrated a pattern of praising violent people who support his causes. He is always willing to do his best to unite the right with hate.

The reason this was such a pivotal event in the history of the rise of right-wing violent extremism is that those extremists realized they had a powerful friend and ally in very high places. In fact, they had an ally in the highest place in the land and this filled them with exuberance and confidence.

 

Racism provided the infrastructure for growth of the far right.

2024 Trip to South West United States, Domestic Terrorism, Extremism, Immigration and Refugees, racism, Right-wing Extremism

 

In their book and their talk to us at Arizona State University, Ware and Hoffman point out how much members of these domestic terrorist movements learned from each other. The Internet of course has made such self-education much easier than it had ever been before. And as they said, racism provided the infrastructure for the amplification of their ideas.

During the Obama presidency another major battlefield arose that would have profound effects on the United States, Canada, and in fact, the world. This was the establishment of social media that provided the fuel, the bombast, and the energy for profound political and social change. We still don’t know how this will end. We have no idea.

As Professor Ware said in his talk, “the Obama administration faced the rapid almost blitzkrieg emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.”  This was very important for the development and normalization of the far right. It was supercharged by social media. ISIS showed how powerful social media can be. A small extremist group in a very short time grew into an organization that scared the entire western world. That could never have happened without social media. Social media was the powerful engine of modern far right terrorism.

The rise of ISIS led to an enormous increase of immigration into Europe which then was used by far-right extremists in Europe and around the world to amplify their movement. They latched onto the great replacement theory to enlist support virtually everywhere. They blamed the far left for trying to replace the white citizens with immigrants from countries around the world, but often with brown or black skinned people from places the whites had often not even heard of. No place in the world it seemed was immune to the invitations to hate the immigrants.

Immigration to many right-wing extremists, around the world was the key issue to justify their cause. Immigration was the issue that bonded Donald Trump and Steve Bannon into a dramatic force and is being used again in the start of the 2024 presidential election campaign. Immigration allows the right to pick scapegoats for every aspect as of the far-right agenda. It is impossible to imagine the far-right without immigration as a grievance.

Immigration at borders invariably is used to fire up domestic support for populist causes. It is usually the easiest cause to latch onto by populist leaders. Dissatisfaction with immigration is often the glue that holds together diverse unhappy actors into a powerful force for violent change.

Nowhere does it do that more than Arizona where we are currently living. Mention immigration and you are bound to obtain heated discussion.

 

The Return of the Right and racism rekindled

2024 Trip to South West United States, 2024 Trip to Southwest USA, Domestic Terrorism, Hate, Political Violence, racism, White Supremacy

 

After the Oklahoma bombing the FBI started to realize the significance of the militia movement and clamped down on the more extreme of them. For a while it seemed to the terrorist analysts that the domestic problem was not so serious. In my view, this is partly because to so much of law enforcement the right-wing looks like home to them. And terrorists never look like your friends and neighbours, until they do. As Professor Hoffman said during his Arizona State University talk that Chris and I listened to,

 

“the last thing I ever imagined in my career was returning to this particular threat. Then in 2020 with the rise of the pandemic, I was amazed at how quickly, literally within days of the lockdown in March, anti-Sematic, anti-immigrant, anti-Asian and anti-Asian-American and also racist tropes began to surface attempting to target these groups to blame for Covid.”

 

The election of Barack Obama as the first black President of the United States unleashed an ugly and powerful streak of backlash. The FBI suppression of the far-right movement after the Oklahoma bombing led to the movement lying dormant in the US for 8 or 10 years. It was dormant, but it was not dead. It was revived by the election of Barack Obama. Racial fear by whites of being replaced by blacks is part of the bedrock of the modern right-wing and white supremacist movement.

As Professor Jacob Ware said at that same ASU talk, the election of a black president “also led to a huge surge in hate crimes.” White supremacy and anti-government extremism also exploded after that election.

During his first election the volume of threats against Obama led to the greatest secret service protection so early in an election in the history of the country. There was a tidal wave of hate against him and his family. As Ware said. “this was a harbinger of things to come.”

During his terms in office Obama faced two major terrorist attacks. The first was in Norway in 2011in Oslo and Utoeva island by a massacre by Anders Breivik. 77 people were killed the large majority of whom were children. It was a summer camp of the youth wing of the Norwegian labor party. He published a long Manifesto in which he called his victims cultural Marxists, a term since adopted widely in the American right. He said that by attacking the next generation of the left he would be cutting off the head of the snake of multi-culturalism. He saw what he thought was a movement to replace ethnic Norwegians, resembling of course, similar fears of replacement of white nationalists in other parts of the world such as New Zealand, America, and many other places.

In 2015 the Obama administration faced another attack by the right, this time in Charleston North Carolina. There a young white supremacist, Dylan Roof, who killed 9 people during a Bible Study in a black church.

According to Ware these were both highly significant events because “they both provided tactical and ideological inspiration.”

The Historical picture of Domestic Terrorism in the United States

2024 Trip to South West United States, Domestic Terrorism, guns, Political Violence

 

Hoffman and Ware argue in their book, Gods, Guns, and about how  and spoke to us at ASU about how violent extremism in the United States has been a story of a historical trajectory that they believe is well described by the title of the book. According to the two of them this variant of extremism which has existed in the US since at least the period of reconstruction by groups like the Ku Klux Klan, was suppressed in part by the creation of the Department of Justice at another time of insecurity in the country for the purpose of suppressing that violent extremism. The Klan was revived again in the 19 teens as well as 1920s and one more time in the 1960s.

The 1970s violence was mimicked in the current era. Particularly xenophobia, and  distrust and dislike of immigrants, the gradual unsuccessful ending of a quarter of a century war in South East Asia contributed to a malaise that upset many Americans, especially those who felt America was losing its greatness. At the same time in the 1980s members of various religious groups helped give some justification for the white sheet part of the Klan and the Brownshirts of the neo-Nazis from Biblical scripture. The religious right became an enthusiastic supporter of the political right. This mixture of right-wing politics and conservative religion became acutely toxic.

White Supremacist churches became active in support of the American right, particularly the church of Jesus Christ Christian attempted to unite a group that was actually very diverse. It included anti-government extremists, tax resisters, gun advocates, racists, anti-Semites, xenophobes, and militant anti-abortionists needed uniting, they thought. Many of the leaders of the political movement were also Pastors or Reverends who also led churches or organizations of churches.

The guns part of the movement became prominent in the 1990s. Terrorist groups according to Hoffman, always are looking for ways to broaden their appeal. They started to advance the cause for gun rights coupled with salient religious rights as well. During the Clinton administration gun enthusiasts became convinced that the federal government would try to expropriate their guns while the religious right accepted that, but was also deeply concerned about the perceived immorality on the left. This was exemplified by the what they thought was the absolute corruption and immorality of the Clintons.

It was this fear of losing guns and freedoms to an aggrieved federal government that inspired Timothy McVeigh to launch an attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. 169 persons, many of them children, died in that attack and it is still the most lethal internal terrorist attack in the history United States. I remember when that attack occurred and how most people, including at first me,  assumed it had been caused by Jihadist terrorists.  That was where the fear of terror was born. No one thought at the time that home grown terrorists were a serious problem. That bombing changed that point of view.

Hoffman said when he first started his career as an analyst of terrorism 43 year ago, he was concerned about right-wing terror but that dissipated after 9/11 when American learned to fear Islamic extremism first with Al Qaeda and later ISIS.

Domestic Terrorism in America

2024 Trip to South West United States, Domestic Terrorism, Extremism, Political Violence, Right-wing Extremism

 

When we visit Arizona each winter, we always connect with Arizona State University (‘ASU’) because they have so many programs to which they invite the public—like us. Not just scholars, but ordinary people like us. We have found many of them fascinating. This year the first one we watched we watched online as it was not offered live. It was called God, Guns, and Sedition. The title caught my eye.

Shocking acts of terrorism across the country have erupted from violent American far-right extremists in recent years, including, among many incidents, the 2015 mass murder at a historic Black church in Charleston and the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Sadly, however these incidents, however, are neither new nor unprecedented, but are common. Frankly, they happen all the time.

One of these events, a mass shooting, happened about an hour by car from where we are staying here in Arizona. On January 8, 2011, Gabrielle Dee Giffords  who at the time was serving as a member of the United States House of Representatives. She was a member of the Democratic Party representing the 8th congressional district. She was shot in the head outside a Safeway Grocery store in suburban area outside of Tucson, by a man who ran up to a crowd of people participating in a political event and fired his 99mm pistol with a 33-round magazine.  His bullets hit 19 people killing 6 of them.

The speakers at the ASU event were Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware who are leading experts on domestic terrorism in the US.  In their book God, Guns, and Sedition In that book they provide a brief synoptic history highlighting developments including the use of cutting-edge communications technology; the embrace of leaderless resistance or lone actor strategies; the emergence of characteristic tactics and targets; infiltration and recruitment in the military and law enforcement; and the far right’s intricate relationship with mainstream politics. The history of domestic terrorism is what interested me the most.

This is what these two extremely knowledgeable intellectuals talked about in the ASU program.  Bruce Hoffman professor emeritus of terrorism  at St Andrews University and has written  a number of books on terrorism. Jacob Ware is a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. The moderator was Peter Bergen another expert in the field and a professor at ASU. In addition to being a professor at ASU he is also the Co-Director of the Future Security Initiative, at ASU. The first question they answered was, ‘Why is a book on far-right terrorism at this time?”

Professor Bruce Hoffman, made it clear there also  many other terrorist threats facing America today. He insists it was not a partisan choice that they focused on the far-right out of all those choices.  Although there are left-wing terrorists in the US as well, they are greatly outnumbered by those on the far-right. He also acknowledged that one of the most significant terrorist events from recent years occurred in June of 2017 by someone on the far left who claimed to be a supporter of Bernie Sanders a well-known left wing politician and Senator in the United States. This was the event where he attacked several members of Congress who were practicing for an annual Congressional baseball tournament. He seriously wounded 5 members of Congress.

According to Hoffman it is just “that the numbers on the far right completely eclipse the threats from the far left as well as other actors. Cynthia Miller-Idriss Professor, School of Public Affairs and School of Education Department of Justice, Law and Criminology and a recognized expert on violent extremism in the United States “put the number of armed far-right extremists at an estimated 75,000 persons. Needless to say, that is a lot of violent extremists.

A few years ago, the New York Times put the number of armed members of militia movements at 20,000.  Many of the violent extremists come from that pool. Added to that if you read the FBI reports it is easy to see where the overwhelming majority of threats come from—i.e. the far-right not the far left or any other group including Jihadis, Antifa, eco-terrorists, indigenous groups, or any others. The far-right is the main reservoir for terrorism in America. Unfortunately, many on the less extreme right-wing in America are blind to this uncomfortable fact.

Hoffman reported,

“In 2019 for example the FBI had 850 active domestic terror investigations. That number doubled in 2020. It tripled in 2022…that includes 3 big buckets: racially motivated violent extremists, home grown violent extremists of both the left and the right, and others such as INCEL, eco-terrorists, animal rights people, militant anti-abortion. But even within those figures the overwhelming majority of the current over 2,000 investigations, are the violent far-right extremists.”

 

There is no domestic terrorism statute in the US just like there is none in Canada. As a result, scholars like Hoffman and Ware have to rely on non-governmental organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League (‘ADL’) and Southern Poverty Law Center for figures. Although the numbers are not yet available for 2023 , according to the ADF, all 25 of the extremist related murders in about a dozen incidents in 2023 were linked to violent far right extremists and according to  Hoffman of that number , “of that number 95% were committed by white supremacists or white nationalists.” Hoffman also said, “this is part of a decades long trend that the ADL has followed. Since 2012 75% of the people who have been killed were killed by far-right extremists and of that number 73% were killed by white supremacists.

I am frequently bothered by right-winger complaining about extremists on the left without mentioning that there are vastly more extremists on the right. It is difficult to call out people who look like us as extremists. After all, we are the good guys.

 

The Oscars are Great

2024 Trip to South West United States, art, Movies

 

You may scoff at the title to this post. How could the Oscars be great? They are not good at determining which films and which actors or technicians did the best job?  No of course not. How naïve can you be?

But they are good at one thing. They point to some very good movies and, of course some dogs.  Yet they have made suggestions to me about movies I might not have notice otherwise. In fact, that I probably would not have noticed otherwise.

Every year I try to watch all the films nominated for Best Picture and this year, I believe for the first time I did it. I watched all 10 of those films so nominated. I watched 2 of them in Steinbach before leaving on our southern journey and then the other 8 in Arizona.  I watched 4 in one week since it was hard for me to find them all until a local theatre chain here had an Oscar film festival. They showed every film at theatres around this huge city and charged a mere $5 a pop. What a great deal!

As a result I saw films I would have never seen before. For example, I likely would not have seen Zone of Interest or Anatomy of a Fall or Past Lives because of the heavy use of subtitles. I find subtitles difficult.  I would have missed each of these 3 films is a gem. Actually, I liked all 10 of the films. Some more than others, but all worth it.  Some were outright gems of civilization. I think I am a better person for seeing them. Isn’t that what great art if for?  I am still not good let alone great, but I am a little better. That is enough for me.

I wanted to blog about the films so I have reflected on them. In some cases I actually read the entire screenplay. That is sometimes a task. But I have learned a lot about the films.  I have enriched my life.

Is the Academy Award ceremony absurd? Absolutely. How can you compare films and say this is the best? It is an absurd task. But looking carefully at films is well worth the effort. I actually think it is part of my spiritual quest in the modern world.

Now what is the best Film? I don’t think the Academy Award ceremony will help us determine that. I don’t know which is the best. I know the pundits have a very hard time predicting too. This year most critics say Oppenheimer will win. Will it? I have no idea at all. So I will just say which of all of these wonderful films I liked the best.  That was The Holdovers!

I am writing this literally one minute before the ceremony starts. So soon we will know. I also really like Past Lives, Zone of Interest and Killers of the Flower Moon. I also liked Oppenheimer a lot but don’t want to vote for the favourites.

Let the show begin! Let the best show win!

The Oscars are great. They inspire me.

Zone of Interest.

2024 Trip to South West United States, 2024 Trip to Southwest USA, Fellow Feeing, Genocide, Mass killings, Morality, Movies, War

 

 

The greatest films and novels are those that change your life. That is the purpose of art.If seeing this film does not change your life, you should quickly make an appointment to see a psychiatrist before it’s too late.

This is the story of blind human indifference to the suffering of others. Not just by Nazis either! It is a story about all of us! It tells the story of an ordinary German family of a Commandant in Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II.  The family lived on the very edge of Auschwitz Concentration camp in Poland.

According to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, unlike some of the other German Concentration camps during the Second World War,

“the Auschwitz camp was above all a place of extermination. In other camps, the death rate was lowered from 1943 in an effort to conserve the labor force. In Auschwitz, however, where new transports, mostly of Jews, arrived continuously and kept the camp supplied with labourers, human life never had any great significance.”

As a result, historians estimate that around 1.1 million people perished in Auschwitz during the less than 5 years of its existence. Of course, around 90% of these were Jews and it is estimated that the majority, around 1 million people, were Jews. Coming in a distant second were Poles. 70,000 to 75,000 of those killed were Poles and coming in third were approximately 20,000 Roma.

That are a lot of people who were slaughtered here, but this fact is ignored by nearly everyone in the film. The film is an examination of the way this carnage was ignored while people went about the minutia of their daily lives. The victims did not count.  They were outside the zone of interest. The Germans who lived their lives and tried to establish a civilized life next to the crematoriums were the ones who counted. How is that possible?

The German family of Commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) presided over their family home immediately adjacent to the Concentration Camp, from which sounds are emitted from time to time but pleasantly ignored. The Commandant is in charge of a facility in which thousands of people are murdered each week, but he is more engaged by the fact that the locals have insufficient respect for his prized lilacs while Hedwig, his wife, has time mainly for her children and her lovely garden of which she is justifiably proud. Rudolf and Hedwig were like the Lord and Lady of the castle. Hedwig loved it when Rudolf called her “the Queen of Auschwitz.”

The family has no time to give attention to the people being murdered. They don’t see them or hear them. It is as if they are not there. The victims don’t count. Only the Höss family counts. That is as far as their zone of interest stretches.

The Höss family appreciates their privileges but assumes they are natural and fully earned. The film shows how easy it is to take for granted one’s privilege. Privilege slips on as easily and as comfortably as a glove.  The discomfort—and much worse—on the other side of the wall is not allowed to disturb the peace of the Höss family. There is a complete moral vacuum in the family.

Even if you see the smoke from the Crematoriums, as we do from time to time, and even if people are being incinerated, and even if you hear gunshots or snarling guard dogs, you can ignore them and make a comfortable life for yourself and your family. As a result, Hedwig is able to curate carefully the clothes that are available as a result of Jews dying. She takes a fur coat for herself and gives dresses to her staff. She was disappointed that she was outbid by others when she tried to purchase clothes that had belonged to her Jewish neighbour before she was carted off to be transferred to a Concentration Camp—perhaps even Auschwitz itself. Hedwig just tried to create the best life for her and her family. No one else mattered. She was not interested in any one else.

Someone called this a “cerebral” movie. In some ways that is accurate. It makes you think.  But in other ways, it is completely wrong. This is a movie about how people don’t think. They don’t think about those outside their zone of interest.

I was particularly struck by the German officers—including Rudolf Höss—who dispassionately discuss how to improve the efficiency of the killing machine of the camps. They are each eager to make their own camp more efficient thus improving their chances of promotion. The more people are killed the better for the officers. The effect on the camp residents is entirely irrelevant. After all, they are outside the zone of interest.

It is important to remember that the Höss family was just an ordinary German family. Really, they were like families around the world during the war and at other times.  Ordinary people—people like you and I—are often indifferent to the suffering of others. Those victims are outside our zone of interest. How many of us consider how indigenous people on Canadian Indian Reserves live? How many of us worry about how poor African Americans live in American cities? How many ordinary citizens were interested in how slaves lived on American slave plantations? They were all outside the zone of interest.

We can appreciate how the Nazis in the concentration camp were not monsters. They were ordinary people. They were people like us! And this makes the film even more disturbing. Ordinary people could turn themselves with enthusiasm to the task of making the murder of people more efficient. The spouse of the Commandant could cheerfully ignore that a fur coat she coveted was owned by a neighbour. She could feel the injustice of a minor privilege being taken away from her, but could not feel the injustice of an innocent person being murdered right beside her. And the really scary thing is that we would probably be exactly the same in such circumstances. Do any of us have the right to think for one minute that we would have acted differently?  What gives us the right to think that?

I watched an interview with Jonathan Glazer the director of the film on Amanpour and Company.  He pointed out how the significance of the German family beside Auschwitz was that “they were so grotesquely familiar.”  They, like us, were able to compartmentalize the suffering. Those people on the other side of the wall were “them” not “us.” Here on this side of the wall, the family (us), played in the pool, enjoyed the lovely garden while other people (them) were burning on the other side. This raises the question of how this is possible. How can there be such a grotesque disparity between the treatment of us, our family, and the others on the other side of the wall? Why are some lives more important than others?

The victims of the holocaust are never seen in the film. We hear some vague and disturbing sounds but they are invisible. Glazer said enough films had been made showing the victims and how we should empathize with them. He wanted to make a film where, “rather than empathizing with the victims, we have the discomfort of feeling like the perpetrators.”  Our perspective is from the garden side of the wall. As Glazer said, “It is a film not about ‘look at what they did;’ it’s a film about ‘look at what we do.’

The only element of hope in the film comes from a 9-year-old girl who lives nearby and fills small packages of food for the prisoners. Glazer actually met that girl, now an old woman, and talked to her. She still lives nearby. She demonstrated the best of humanity.

The deep horror is that the Germans living next to the concentration camp were people just like us. Not monsters at all. Ordinary people. They are us. We are them.

 The film establishes what Hannah Arendt said. Evil is not monstrous. Evil is banal. Evil is every day. Evil is ordinary. Evil is us and we are its cheerful and enthusiastic instruments. And that should scare the hell out of all every one of us. Sadly, our zone of interest is incredibly small. It is so small that we are moral pygmies.

Sometimes there is nothing more scary than us!