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What happened in Peshawar was so unthinkable that perhaps no one will believe that we actually let it happen

This incident is a valuable lesson and a perspective on violence that we have not only forgotten but actively try to repress at every opportunity. Photo: ReutersPremium
This incident is a valuable lesson and a perspective on violence that we have not only forgotten but actively try to repress at every opportunity. Photo: Reuters

On 4 April 1945, soldiers belonging to the US Third Army liberated a German concentration camp in Ohrdruf. It wasn’t really a camp, as much as a sub-camp—an outpost of the infamous Nazi murder machine known as Buchenwald. Ohrdruf was the first such camp to be liberated by American forces through the end-game phase of the second world war.

That the Germans had such camps was not news to the civilian leadership of the Allied forces, their military commanders or their soldiers. All knew that the Nazis had been killing men and women and children with industrial vigour throughout the war. Yet they were taken aback when actually faced with the machinery of this slaughter and the dead and dying bodies left behind. So aghast were they at what they found in Ohrdruf that a week later General Eisenhower himself visited the site. He later noted in his diary:

“In a shed . . . was a pile of about 40 completely naked human bodies in the last stages of emaciation. These bodies were lightly sprinkled with lime, not for the purposes of destroying them, but for the purpose of removing the stench."

The Americans then did something poignant.

Eisenhower is usually credited with this step, but some believe it may have been the idea of a subordinateGeneral George S. Patton or perhaps General Walton Walker. First the Americans flew down a planeload of senior journalists from the US to witness the horrors firsthand. Then Eisenhower ordered every American soldier in the area and every German civilian who lived in Ohrdruf village to tour the camp.

Sixty-four years later Barack Obama reminisced that moment during a state visit to Buchenwald along with Chancellor Merkel. Eisenhower, Obama said, “had seen the piles of bodies and starving survivors and deplorable conditions that the American soldiers found when they arrived, and he knew that those who witnessed these things might be too stunned to speak about them or be unable to find the words to describe them... And he knew that what had happened here was so unthinkable that after the bodies had been taken away, that perhaps no one would believe it."

This is why Eisenhower insisted that both the Americans and Germans confront Ohrdruf, and witness the madness for themselves. To sear those scenes into human memory.

Six decades later this is a valuable lesson and a perspective on violence that we have not only forgotten but actively try to repress at every opportunity. Look at some of our earliest responses to the terrible, terrible massacre of children at that school in Peshawar. Within moments of the tragedy, pictures and photographs began to stream through the internet flooding our social media timelines. Some people prefaced their posts with the tag [GRAPHIC] or [DISTURBING]. Others not only refused to post these pictures, but also spoke out against them.

How dare we post them? How dare we leer at the picture of the dead? How dare we defile the memories of the dead? And aren’t we playing right into the hands of the terrorists by watching these images and sharing them?

Please. Spare me this saccharine sanctimonious bullshit that passes off as solidarity with the grieving.

And don’t even get me started on the hypocrisy of it all. A camera phone colour photo of a bloody schoolchild is outrageous. But if Raghu Rai takes a black and white picture of a dead baby, and some gallerist frames it on the wall, those lifeless little eyes piercing into our desiccated, lifeless souls, we line up for hours to witness a modern masterpiece. Where is that dead baby’s dignity? Do we care?

No we don’t. Of course not. Because you see many of us don’t have the heart, the courage or even the basic morality to honestly confront the inhumanity that pervades our societies, our cultures, our nations and our realpolitik. Even, mind you, even when we are democratic agents instrumental in creating and sustaining these very same realities.

Citizens in a modern democracy, the political theorists and freelance public policy experts will tell you, willingly relinquish their right to violence to the state in return for a host of privileges and entitlements. Thus soldiers fight our wars for, and policemen enforce our laws for us.

But what about a right to a conscience or moral awareness. Do we relinquish these to the state too? Must we also depend on the state to decide where to the draw the line? Do we delegate all knowledge of blood-splattered, skin-scorched reality and instead run ourselves obese on a cloying drip-feed of sanitized public opinion, safe for work imagery and inane moral outrage?

No, no, a thousand times no. Instead, print pictures of those children. Large, painful, terrible pictures. Show them to every Pakistani, every human being. Not so that these pictures will turn away even a single mind from mindless fundamentalism and terror. That will never happen.

But so that we can at least admit to ourselves that this happened on our watch, in our neighbourhood and in our communities. Because what happened in Peshawar was so unthinkable that after the bodies have been taken away, and the news cycle has moved on, perhaps no one will believe that we, with our candle-light vigils and hashtag solidarity and limitless moral high ground, actually let it happen.

Every week, Déjà View scours historical research and archives to make sense of current news and affairs.

Comment at views@livemint.com. To read Sidin Vadukut’s previous columns, go to www.livemint.com/dejaview

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Published: 20 Dec 2014, 01:11 AM IST
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