Perils of Obedience and the Need for real history

Adam Curtis has produced a number of excellent documentaries. One of the ones I have seen recently is the The Living Dead 1/3: On the Desperate Edge of Now. While the title suggests a horror film this documentary is a cutting and incisive documentray about the explitation of post war memory for political ends.
The BFI decribes it as: "First part of a three part documentary in which those in power in the post war period are accused of reconstructing the public's memories of the past. The starting point is a photograph taken at the Nuremberg trials of Hermann Goering, Ewen Cameron and Airey Neave. Looks at how Goering and Hitler tried to control the history of Germany's past and how the Allies did the same at Nuremberg. "

The Wikipedia article gets to the heat of the matter describing the allies portrayal of "WW2 as a crusade of pure good against pure evil, even if this meant denying the memories of the Allied soldiers who had actually done the fighting, and knew it to have been far more complex. A number of American veterans told how years later they found themselves plagued with the previously-suppressed memories of the brutal things they had seen and done. The title comes from a veteran's description of what the uncertainty of survival in combat is like."

The Stanford Prison experiment, and the Milgram experiment which was conducted at Yale show how the notion of what a good or evil person is is far more complex, and that nearly all people show elements of good and evil. As Milgram himself observed:

"Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority." (from the Perils of Obedience)

Milgram devised the experiments to answer this question: "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"

Understanding what caused the evils of Nazism and what can be done to prevent them happening again requires far more than a simplistic morality tale of good versus evil. Curtis rightly points out that Nazis had their own manufactured history about the great teutonic knights. Wikipedia argues that: "German nationalism often invoked the imagery of the Teutonic Knights, especially in the context of territorial conquest from eastern neighbours of Germany and conflict with nations of Slavic origins, who were considered by German nationalists to be of lower development and of inferior culture" Thus their own manufactured history caused them to believe them to be a superior race and above all others.

Similarly the manufactured history of the entirely good Allies against the entirely evil Nazis allowed a sense of moral superiority over other nations in war by allied nations that meant overlooking or covering up crimes committed by ones own side. The US Action in My Lai for example was covered up by the investigator Colin Powell

As a sidenote it is worth noting John Pilger's view of the My Lai massacre: "Vietnam is said to have been the first 'media war' in which there was no censorship and nothing escaped the scrutiny of the television camera. There were more than 600 reporters in Vietnam at the time of the My Lai massacre. None of them broke the story. For more than a year after the event a soldier who had heard about it tried to interest Newsweek, and others, without success. Finally the story was broken by a freelance reporter based in the US, Seymour Hersh, who believed the murder of civilians by his country's soldiers was news. Only then did many of the correspondents tell their own 'atrocity stories'.". Journalists didn't want to know and broadcasters were initially fearful of broadcasting as this story contrasted so utterly with the self image the Allies had that had been built up over the preceding decades and which had been reinforced by the popular image of the second world war.

Links:
BBC Documentary on the Stanford Prison experiment
Adam Curtis- The Living Dead 1/3: On the Desperate Edge of Now