On Ambient Genocide
I began reading Let Us Descend the same day I watched The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s film about Rudolf Höss, commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The film depicts the lives of the Höss family - Rudolf, his wife, and their five children - as they go about their daily activities while living immediately adjacent to the Auschwitz concentration camp - the wall of the camp, stacked with barbed wire, is the wall that separates their backyard filled with beautiful flowers, a swimming pool, and lush gardens. Just over the fence are towering chimneys churning out fire and ash of human remains. As they sit in their garden watching their children play in the pool, they can hear gunshots, dogs barking, women and children screaming. They are very aware of what is happening just a few feet away from them, but they are unmoved. The banality of their daily lives continues on amidst the genocide occurring just feet away from them.
I thought of this often as I read the early chapters of Let Us Descend, thinking about the Georgia men and their cruel treatment of the enslaved people they forced to walk for days to New Orleans, watching them fall to the ground in pain, watching them drown as they were forced to cross rivers while bound and not knowing how to swim. I thought also of the white men and women who came to the auction block once they arrived in New Orleans, viewing and inspecting the enslaved as property, uncaring of the horrors they had experienced that were surely evident on their bodies. And I thought of the white Northerners - not present in this book but present at the time - who were fully aware of slavery and what was being inflicted on the enslaved in the South, yet were largely unmoved by this for decades. The capacity to ignore the torture, pain, and suffering of others is a defining characteristic of humanity - one that has been employed by humanity for centuries.
In 1963, Hannah Arendt introduced the term “the banality of evil” in the subtitle of her book, which reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, to describe how evil can be perpetrated by some without any notion of guilt or feelings of responsibility. Similarly, in a new essay about The Zone of Interest, Naomi Klein discusses the film as a depiction of “ambient genocide”:
“Genocide becomes ambient to their lives”: that is how Glazer has described the atmosphere he attempted to capture in his film, in which his characters attend to their daily dramas – sleepless kids, a hard-to-please mother, casual infidelities – in the shadow of smokestacks belching out human remains. It’s not that these people don’t know that an industrial-scale killing machine whirs just beyond their garden wall. They have simply learned to lead contented lives with ambient genocide.
Of course, it is impossible to watch this film without thinking of the genocide we are currently witnessing in Gaza today, the genocide that is being perpetrated by the settler colony of Israel on the people of Palestine. Although we are not living literally next door to the genocide, we are seeing it live-streamed on our TVs, on our computers, and on our phones daily. The reality of this genocide is impossible to escape. While witnessing this genocide has spurred many of us to act - through protests, through marches, through writing, through voting - many others have blatantly chosen to ignore what is happening around them and simply go on with their day to day activities. Yet even for those who have acted, there is a growing sense of hopelessness, of a sense of normalcy creeping back into our daily lives, as the genocide churns on in our backdrops. Of this, Klein writes:
It is this that feels most contemporary, most of this terrible moment, about Glazer’s staggering film. More than five months into the daily slaughter in Gaza, and with Israel brazenly ignoring the orders of the international court of justice, and western governments gently scolding Israel while shipping it more arms, genocide is becoming ambient once more – at least for those of us fortunate enough to live on the safe sides of the many walls that carve up our world. We face the risk of it grinding on, becoming the soundtrack of modern life. Not even the main event.
Although The Zone of Interest was filmed months, if not years, before the genocide in Gaza began this fall, Glazer has said the film was always intended to be a reflection of our present, rather than our past. In his widely viewed Oscar acceptance speech, he said, “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present – not to say, ‘Look what they did then’; rather, ‘Look what we do now.’”
I think of this as I continue to read Let Us Descend. This is not intended in any way to compare chattel slavery to the Holocaust or to the genocide happening in Gaza today, but rather to acknowledge the capacity for humans to do evil and for many more to allow evil to happen. In an earlier paragraph, I wrote about people who are ignoring what is happening around them, but the idea of “ignoring” isn’t sufficient to capture the throughline I am thinking of - the throughline I haven’t been able to rid from my thinking over these past few weeks. It is an acceptance of evil, and a privileged protection from evil that allows for this acceptance to settle in, that is much more dangerous and harmful than simply ignoring it.
I wrote previously about my thoughts on Aaron Bushnell, whom Naomi Klein also references in the close to her essay. These words capture my thoughts over the past week:
And as genocide fades further into the background of our culture, some people grow too desperate for any of these efforts. Watching the Oscars on Sunday, where Glazer was alone among the parade of wealthy and powerful speakers across the podium to so much as mention Gaza, I remembered that exactly two weeks had passed since Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old member of the US air force, self-immolated outside the Israeli embassy in Washington.
I don’t want anyone else to deploy that horrifying protest tactic; there has already been far too much death. But we should spend some time sitting with the statement that Bushnell left, words I have come to view as a haunting, contemporary coda to Glazer’s film:
“Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow south? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
I hope you’ll share your thoughts in the comments. And I hope you’ll join us on WEDNESDAY, MARCH 27 at 6:00 PM ET for our discussion of Let Us Descend. Come ready to share a line from Let Us Descend that made you pause, or an idea that has stayed with you since reading. We’re looking forward to seeing you soon.