I had been avoiding The Zone of Interest because I didn't feel like watching yet another film about the nazi holocaust, especially when there is an ongoing genocide happening right now. There have been so many medias on the nazi holocaust that many people especially in the west have an impression that it is a singular most horrific atrocities ever committed to humankind. It isn't.
But the director Jonathan Glazer's speech at the Oscar ceremony got me really curious and I found his approach to the film to be very interesting. He shared the perspective of Primo Levi on how the nazi in cinema were often portrayed as "mythologically evil". Levi wrote, "Monster exist. But they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions." He also drew from philosopher Gillian Rose who envisioned a film "that could make us feel 'unsafe', by showing how we're emotionally and politically closer to the perpetrator culture than we'd like to think" and a film seen through the "dry eyes of grief" that is unsentimental and "forensic".
It is unsettling how eerily close to the present the feeling is when watching the film. Very recently a close friend for almost twenty years said that genocide, mass killing, rape, kidnapping, murder, were just parts of our dark history and were necessary "price to pay" (quoted verbatim) for political stability and power. She also talked about a particular murder of an alleged dissent with such glee like it's just a usual and necessary procedure to do within the military. She believes that she's immune and isn't in the slightest worry that all those atrocities could happen to her because a certain family member was a high rank in the military.
I have been questioning since what exactly "morality" is when people don't seem to have the same code of standards to uphold. It is disturbing that I can't see the difference between her living in the present day among us with the SS commandant's wife living by the wall of Auschwitz.
C.S. Lewis on his book 'Mere Christianity' defended the existence of God because there is a universal moral law, we know what is good and what is bad. But is there really?
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I went to Sarajevo couple of years ago and I had written about how the visit impacted me. Ever since I was a kid the word "Sarajevo" is identical to something horrifying, the siege, the genocide. Names of the people involved sounded familiar. Still I wasn't prepared at what I saw at the gallery I accidentally visited. The gallery was small containing mostly photos but one documentary film was playing. I stayed, sit, and watched the whole film and I was stunned.
The most disturbing thing in my mind was that it all happened not so long ago. I was alive at the time and it's still there ingrained in my brain remnants of the things I read on the newspaper when I was a kid. It horrified me how people in this supposedly modern era could do such a thing. This was the 90s, not the era of the World War. I watched people being lined up and shot and thrown to holes on the ground like it was nothing. Aren't we supposed to be a more civil society that universally morally recognised what human rights are?
And then of course the genocide of Palestine happens and whatever I knew about "morality" was again thrown out of the window. I haven't read the whole hundred years of colonialism in Palestine but knowing even just one single event that is the Deir Yassin massacre was already enough to made me lose my mind.
One of the signs that struck me most from the protests for Palestinian liberation was "Train yourself toward solidarity and not charity. You are no one's saviour. You are a mutual partner in pursuit of freedom." I will remember this line forever. In this era of hyperindividualism it's too easy to be apathetic to everything as long as it doesn't directly affect oneself. People who suffer were seen as those beneath who could be saved by charity instead of those we could fight together with as equal human being with solidarity.
Sure it's hard to do anything anyway, but to be in complete apathy in front of such unthinkable violence against humanity, what's the difference really with the wife in The Zone of Interest who cares more about living in luxurious house tending garden surrounded by servants when people are literally being systematically killed.
The thing I thought I learn these days is that the imperialist, the people in power, and the ruling class operate in a completely different set of moral law. But thinking of how my friend (ex-friend) had intentionally hidden for twenty long years the fact that she is and has been a fascist made me think that maybe there is a universal moral law, but the consequences of the law only applied to common men, while the ruling people walk with arrogance and impunity. Why would anyone want to live in such world?
