| |
Killing from a Desk
By shining a light into the world of the bureaucrats,
planners and businessmen who contributed to Nazism and the Holocaust,
the desk killer raises a critical question as to whether
such an event can be viewed as a finished, historical episode or whether
the psychology and behaviour that enabled genocide to occur then is not
only still present today, but exists quite specifically both in the institutional
culture of transnational corporations and in the mindset and activity
of many individuals working for such corporations.
In post-war Germany’s attempt to come
to a reckoning with the Holocaust, particularly after the trial and conviction
of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 the term ‘schreibtischtaeter’ was
coined. This can be translated as ‘desk-murderer’. Strangely
this term has hardly ever been used outside Germany, despite its clear
relevence to much 20th century and contemporary capitalism.
This concept is at the heart of the desk killer’s
argument. International trade has never been less personal. The vast majority
of BP's or Shell's workforce in London will never see the oil pipeline
in Colombia or Nigeria that they work on daily from their desks, let alone
meet the villagers intimidated, displaced or killed in order to enable
those valuable pipelines to operate. This distancing creates the greatest
imaginative challenge - how is it possible to link the BP head office
at Finsbury Circus to Casanare? How is it possible to enable human beings
in London to feel linked on a personal basis with human beings in Colombia?
Or to link the people at the Shell Centre with people in Southern Nigeria?
|
|
Engineer
working at the Saurer factory in the 1940s. Saurer manufactured the
Gaswagen used in the murder of up to 400,000 people in Eastern Europe,
between 1941 and 1945. |
|
“I see a man of around
50, coming back from his work in the City of London. It’s a soft
summer’s evening, so there’s no need to put the car in the
garage. He can hear the sound of his children’s voices coming from
the garden, and he feels an acute sense of wellbeing as he walks around
the side of the house, only pausing to smell the exquisite scent of the
white roses he planted last year. Earlier that day, the man, a senior
accountant at one of Britain’s leading oil corporations, had presented
the final spreadsheets in the report which determined that a coastal area
the size of Scotland in southern Nigeria would soon be developed. He cannot
connect this fragrant evening in leafy north London with his work earlier
that day. He cannot, or perhaps will not allow himself to, connect his
life in London with the lives of those in Nigeria about to be devastated
by his tapping at a keyboard.
Who was the senior accountant
who looked at the spreadsheets for this project?
Who at the merchant bank dealt with the finance capital?
Who authorised the project to go ahead?
Who decided that they wouldn’t negotiate with the Ogoni villagers?
Who telephoned the Nigerian Government to ask for the mobile police force
to be sent?
How are we to show the violence
of a spreadsheet?
How are we to show the violence of a set of minutes?
How are we to show the violence of an idea?"
from the performance 'killing us softly'
 |
|
PLATFORM reasearch
trip to Saurer in Arbon, Switzerland in August 2001 |
Perhaps a starting
point would be to recognise a double proximity:
Firstly, the proximity of corporations
to genocide. For
example the enormous number of corporations, including many British and
American transnationals, involved in supporting the German state between
1933 and 1939 - in some cases, quite literally fuelling Nazism. BP’s
3rd biggest oil market in the world in the 1930s was in Germany. Between
1932-38, almost mirroring the establishment of Nazism, BP’s oil
exports to Germany doubled, with a particular increase in aviation fuel.
In fact, in 1938, one of the most critical years in German re-armament,
BP, Standard Oil (later Exxon) and Shell between them were supplying 58%
of Germany’s oil.
“What for us today
appears to be the contradictory nature of Nazism in fact explains its
success: the connection between destruction and modernisation. Auschwitz
cannot be seen without the V.W. plant in Wolfsburg.”
Christian Pross, ‘Cleansing the
Fatherland’
Secondly, the behavioural proximity between
contemporary corporate mentality and ways of thinking supposedly from
a different time and a different culture.
“Had I been born twenty years later
I would be a highly respected man today. Maybe the head of Daimler-Benz,
Chairman of the Board of Hoechst, Chief Executive of Deutsche Bank.”
Albert Speer, quoted in ‘Speer’
by Esther Vilar |
 |
A Hollerith machine used by the Third
Reich for processing information relating to ‘enemies of the
state’ produced by D.E.H.O.M.A.G. under license from the original
American manufacturers, I.B.M. |
top
The colonial continuum
1889
“The right to establish banking and other companies and associations;
to make and maintain railways, telegraphs, and lines of steamships;
to carry on mining operations and license mining companies; to settle,
cultivate and improve the lands; to preserve peace and order...
and for that object to obtain a force of police and have its own
flag.”
Cecil Rhodes’ charter
for the British South Africa Company, 1889
2002
"Baker Botts has been drawing up the oil companies' contract
documents that are becoming nothing less than the new rules that
will govern this country's future. Touching everything from land
acquisition for military security actions, the contracts supersede
all conflicting domestic legislation. On behalf of BP and its partners,
Baker Botts is shaping the future of Azerbaijan...The agreements
don't trump only current domestic laws, but also all future laws
for up to 60 years."
from the journal'American Lawyer', 2002.
|
|
The prototype concentration camp? De Beers
company compound, Kimberley, South Africa, 1880’s |
A genocidal psychology does not come out of a clear
sky, but is the result of many years, often hundreds of years of prejudice,
oppression and violence. What has been the damage to our collective psyche
of hundreds of years of colonial-ism? What does it do to a country when
a pattern of ‘successful violence’ is repeated again and again?
On some days you can look around our society and almost everything seems
to be founded upon the suffering of others - be it the marbled buildings
of the City of London or the pillars of the Tate Gallery.
Yet how often do we really question the right of a British transnational
corporation to be operating in a developing world country? In an era of
‘globalisation’ you cannot even ask this question. Of course
there is consensus that the British Empire is over, only a small minority
regret its passing - yet, at its root, perhaps military violence has simply
been replaced by economic violence? Harder to see and for that reason
more pernicious.
What has our material comfort been founded
upon? What do we allow to happen in our name?
“Anglo-Persian Oil Company, Buenos Aires
& Pacific Railway, City of Bahia, Durban Roodepoort Deep Ltd,
Indian Copper Corporation, Imperial Chemical Industries, Panama Corporation
Ltd... an inventory of the British Empire. Suddenly, momentarily,
I could see the skull beneath the skin...... I don’t feel we’ve
begun, as a culture, to ‘open our minds and spirits to suffering’
with regard to our history. And I often think about how our children,
and grandchildren will judge us in this regard - not just in our collective
failure to come to terms with our past, or even try to, but in what
this means to our relationship to the present. On some days the continuum
between the British Empire and British transnationals seems overwhelming.”
from the performance 'killing us softly'
|
|
The XV1 Brigade of the Colombian Army, closely associated with
security for BP facilities, has been implicated in human rights
abuses. Here soldiers and BP staff observe a community meeting about
BP's oilfield developments. |
top
Breaking through
the Compartmentalisation of Mind
“I accuse Shell and Chevron of practising
racism against the Ogoni people because they do in Ogoni what they
do not do in other parts of the world where they prospect for oil.
I accuse the oil companies of encouraging genocide against the Ogoni
people... The profits from oil come to Britain because it is their
technology that is keeping Nigerian oil going. So they have a moral
responsibility to intervene... My mission has been to inform the West
of the truth of what is happening in Nigeria, which has been hidden
from them. I believe if people knew they’d do something about
it and stop this robbery and murder that is going on in broad daylight.”
Ken Saro-Wiwa, Ogoni writer and
anti-Shell activist, 1993, killed by the Nigerian Government on 10/12/95 |
|
“To reassure you however,
of the dreadful things I knew nothing. The Americans told me later
that they never thought I did. Even so, I’m not entirely content
to leave it at that, for I ask myself what, given my lofty position,
I could have found out had I wanted to. Even then, perhaps not everything,
but certainly a great deal... I saw my fate, if you like as God’s
judgement - not for having infringed any laws (for my transgressions
in that sense were comparatively minimal) but for the deeper guilt
of having so readily and unthinkingly gone along.”
Albert Speer, letter to his daughter Hilde,
May1953
“The only way I could live was by compartmentalising my
thinking.”
Franz Stangl, Commandant of Treblinka
|
Out of all the research
carried out so far in the desk killer into different
aspects of what is known as ‘perpetrator psychology’ the most
disturbing, and recurring, theme has been that of mental and emotional
compartmentalization - the process which allows a seemingly ‘civilised’
or ‘moral’ individual to participate in systems and organisations
which have terrifyingly destructive end results. Although such compartmentalisation
is a clear feature of both historical examples of perpetrator psychology
and contemporary corporate psychology, it is remarkable that so little
research has been conducted into this phenomenon.
With more analysis of patterns of deep-rooted psychology and behaviour,
we hope to contribute to a significant shift in the way our society and
its corporations function - that we may be able to contribute to a growing
understanding of the hidden violence of contemporary capitalism.
| “The planet today is the battlefield of a 4th
world war (the 3rd was the so-called ‘Cold War’). The
aim of the belligerants is the conquest of the entire world through
the market. The arsenals are financial; there are nevertheless millions
of people being maimed or killed every moment... Globalisation is
merely the totalitarian extension of the logic of the finance markets
to all aspects of life.” |
|
“.. The first step towards building an alternative
world has to be a refusal of the world picture implanted in our minds
and all the false promises used everywhere to justify and idealise
the delinquent and insatiable need to sell. Another space is vitally
necessary... First, a horizon has to be discovered. And for this we
have to re-find hope - against all the odds of what the new order
pretends and perpetrates.... The act of resistance means not only
refusing to accept the absurdity of the world picture offered us,
but denouncing it. And when hell is denounced from within, it ceases
to be hell.” |
from an exchange of letters between
Subcommandante Marcos and John Berger, 1999 |
top
A walk from 'civilisation' to barbarism
In August 1999, PLATFORM
walked between Goethe's house in Weimar and the Buchenwald concentration
camp, Germany - a distance of 10,166 steps
|
