wotiwrote

The BBC (Radio 3, to be exact) has broadcast the whole of Wagner's Ring today. I listened in whenever I could: the Ring is one of those cultural peaks I always feel I should climb but I've yet to set out from base camp. In my stridently anti-Fascist days (as opposed to my current rational and deeply-concerned anti-Fascist position) I tended to feel that Wagner - like Nietzsche - was tainted by association with Hitler. This was unjust, of course, however disgusting his anti-Semitic views (and those of his even more repugnant second wife, the far-from-fragrant Cosima): again, like Nietzsche's work, the music cannot be blamed for the significance attached to it by the twisted mind of Herr Hitler.

I was going to add 'and his cronies' after Hitler but the whole point of the Nazis is that there were not that many truly twisted minds. It is the normality of almost all the perpetrators of the worst atrocities that makes Nazism and the Holocaust so chilling. I've just begun reading Auschwitz by Laurence Rees, which uses the history of perhaps the most famous of the death camps to illustrate the almost mundane processes that led to its creation and the deaths of over 1 million people within its boundaries.

The Ring and Auschwitz were both created by Germans but it's important to remember that, just as wonderful opera has been created elsewhere, the idea of death camps are not unique to the german psyche. The onslaught on freedom by Bush and Blair in the Middle East and domestically within the US and UK (viz. the various anti-terror laws and the illegal leaks, imprisonments, wore-tapping ad nauseam) is treated with some complacency within the press through a combination of complicity and smugness: we believe our constitutions are so robust that they cannot fail to withstand encroachment by evil. That remains to be seen. I'm not feeling hopeful.