Talking to a friend from Belfast today.
I had been listening to a podcast which mentioned Primo Levi. Levi was a survivor from Auschwitz. He had been in the concentration camp from 1944 -45.
He said that the network inside the concentration camps was not simple. It could not be reduced to Them and Us, the persecutors and the victims.
He saw that the enemy outside was also the enemy inside.
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.”
My friend and I both were born and grew up in N.Ireland. We lived through the Troubles. We come from a divided community.
We talked about how the IRA, while claiming to fight for the liberation of the Irish people from British oppression, also terrorised and oppressed their ‘own’ people in West Belfast.
And exactly the same occurred with the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Protestant extremists resisting Irish republican elements, who were also involved in crime and drug dealing. Their territory was East Belfast.
I imagine that the same applies to Hamas.
There are those in any of these organisations who at least started out with ideals. As there are those in the IDF who thought they were defending their country from annihilation.
There is no simple Them and Us, however we would desire this to be the case-so that we know who to love and who to hate. And we do not have to wrestle with the burden of uncertainty.
When we are caught up in what Time Eisler called ‘dominator consciousness’ where there must always be a ‘winner’ and a ‘loser’, and we desire certainty and the surge of righteousness, then we are always in danger of denial of our own shadow. It is easily projected onto The Other who becomes the embodiment of evil.
This then leads directly to dehumanisation.
A friend of mine, long gone from this earthly realm, had been held in Bergen -Belsen. She told me of how the women would do small things in order to feel that they had some agency in their days. They would tear a strip off the hem of their shapeless camp uniform in order to make a belt.
There are stories too of those who would give what little food they had to another because they felt the other needed it more.
There are people who are capable of holding onto human dignity and integrity in the most extreme of circumstances.
How do we hold on to a humanity which is rooted in the heart?
This is the work that my dear friend and colleague Arielle and I have been doing since we met three years ago.
These are volatile times. All the more important that we be willing to examine our own heart. Where is the shifting line?
And in the midst of it all, I endeavour to make room for joy, warmth and for the sheer beauty of our world.
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