communist in the soviet union and china. c-span recorded this event in 2013. >> in ber rumia, the professional at bard college was educated in holland and japan. he's won self-awards for his work, among them the international prize and assurances dean journalism award. the publications he writes for include the new york review of books, new yorker, "the new york times," and roothe guardian, wh the guardian recently published his highly learned and highly entertaining review of the exhibition's current exhibition shungia: sex and pleasure in japanese art. among his books are entertaining the gods, religionen and democracy on three continents, murder in amstra dad and islamabad and limits of toll trance and "invading japan, 1963 to 1964." in the zero, most of which he wrote while he was a fellow at the komen center in 2011-'12 to the serious envy of his fellows he was so productive, he produced a brilliant portrayal of the world emerging from the devastation and unspeakable horrors of world war ii in europe and asia. skeptical about the idea we can learn much from history, he none h nonetheless wanted to know, he writes, what those in the world and lived to the end, including his own father went through, quote, because it helps me make sense of myself and indeed the lives of the large, darth shadows of the year before. "the wall street journal" called "near zero" remarkable in its magnificence and modesty and "the financial times" describes it as elegant, human, luminous. and honored last fall as a new york public library lyon included 25 books including many novels "london," "money fds," "times arrow" and most recently, "state of england." amos received the james taught black memorial prize for his memoir experience and was named one of the 50 greatest british writers since 1945 by "the london times" in 2008. 1945 seems to be a theme herep to the. we're extremely fortunate to be able to listen in on a conversation between these two extraordinarily gifted writers who are also friends. they will talk for about 45 minutes and then take questions from the audience. there are mics towards the front on both sides so please come up to the mic, rather than try to speak from your chair. then they will sign books. so when they're finished speaking, please let them get out to the table to soon. please welcome ian brumuma and ti>> well, first thing to be sa, this is a tremendous book. very -- it's an amazing task of organizing a great deal material, because the war -- the aftermath of the war was determined by the war itself and shape by the years that precede years writing about this war and wondering about it. and apart from being uniquely devastating, 55 million dead, and many ruined cities and all of the devastation we know of, it looks increasingly weird and grotesque, i think, some aspects of the war. it wasn't blundered into like the first world war. there was one man, the japanese experience is slightly different, but can be almost considered separately. but one man brought this about, and the only time hitler ever made me smile was -- i think it was just before the invasion of poland, which set the war in motion, but he said -- he was questioned by a general and he said i haven't got any nerves about this war. all i'm worried about is that some swine is going to come up with a peace proposal. he was set on it ever since 1918. and the fact that this one man flipped germany, the most -- the best educated country on earth, the best educated country there had ever been, into this exploration of the best deal, which is happened, is still sort of remarkable. and the weirdness of much of the aftermath is sort of inherent in the war. it's the great crux that no one can answer. it was said of the jews that they went like lambs to the slaughter. you could flip that a bit and say the germans went like lambs to the slaughterhouse and donned their rubber aprons and got to work. do you have any, with your german connections and your feeling for germany -- i think ian is exceptionally well equipped to write such an ambitious book because of your connections with england, with america, with holland, germany, and crucially with japan. >> i don't think it helps, necessarily, to know germany well or japan well to explain the human propensity for extreme violence. one of the reasons i'm very happy to be on the stage with you, i think we share a horrified fascination with why people are capable of doing terrible things. and i don't think it's -- there are people who say, well, you can explain because the germans had an exterminationist mentality, which goes from luther to hitler, but the japanese are uniquely barbaric. i don't believe that for a moment. i think your question is a good one, how is it that one of the most highly educated and civilized countries in europe produced this, because yes, it was hitler who led it, but he couldn't have done it on his own. people had very active participation. and i think hitler is one example, perhaps the most extreme example in modern history, but there are others on a smaller scale, of a political regime that deliberately exploits people's instincts, and i think the idea that there's torture in all of us is trite. not all of us would make good torturers. but it is true, i think, that if the authorities, the government, gives people license to do whatever they like with other human beings, you'll find a large number -- and one can't put a particular number on this, but you'll find a sufficient number of people who will do their worst, and it leads to torture and killing. even if people had lived perfectly happily together before that. and i think, again, another trite thing people often say, for example, in the bulken wars, they explained violence against the muslims, saying these are ancient hatreds and they explode at a certain time. i don't think hatreds are necessarily ancient, even though there are all kinds of myths that keep on coming back and are manipulated by politicians and leaders and so on, in order to put people up to violence. but i don't think there's such a thing as sort of a smoldering hatred that occasionally like a volcano certainly bursts out spontaneously. it's always orchestrated. and i think one of the best examples of this in my book, in 1945, is what happened particularly in check slovakia and poland, where there were people whose families had lived there for centuries, and suddenly they were given license by their own leaders, as well as by the allies who did nothing to stop it, they were told now you can do what you like with the germans. we can't live with these people anymore, they have to be expelled, and in a way do your worst. and people did, for several months. now, german nationalists like to claim that what happened in the german populations of poland and check slovakia, what the germans in germany suffered from the soviet red army, which was also horrendous in terms of rapes and killing and torture. but somehow this was just as bad as what the germans did to others. >> which is not the case, the huge subject of relativizing and trying to not re-write, but put a different complexion on these. i mean, it was said in that review in "the new york times," the book review, that what you didn't do in this book was -- the fashionable word is de-heroize the allies, and that usually goes along the following lines. they say, one, hiroshima, two, allied bombing, dressed in being the paradigm of that, the return of the ethnic germans, where i think the figure you come to is of 10 million people turfed out of poland, et cetera, ethnic germans, half a million dead, perhaps a bit more. and we agree to return russian pows to certain enslavement, if not certain death, and the way we revived colonialism and gave it a shot in the arm, and also things like saying that the resistance in france, particularly, was not that. it was certainly -- i mean, that's become the myth, but the truth was something like collaboration, not resistance. but i find myself very much reacting against that in a sort of visceral way. and there is no moral equivalence. one should remember that as churchill referred to the moral rot of war, an interesting concept that i saw raised, that wars get old and the bigger they are, the faster they age. and six years in, there's just a kind of -- a loss of patience, a mild way of putting it. but we don't feel that, do we? and i think he said, well, we created the united nations and the european community, but i would say we destroyed hitler. that was the achievement. >> yes, and it was a necessary achievement, of course. one can't take away the heroism of that. but i think the bleaker conclusion one can draw is that very often heroes can very quickly turn into villains. for example, the soviet red army fought like heroes. the sacrifices of the soviet soldiers were extraordinary and they fought like lions and it was a necessary fight. without them, we wouldn't have defeated hitler. but those same soldiers behaved like beasts often. when they invaded germany, likewise -- >> they were an army of rapists. they say that when a woman is rape, she switches off the pro creational mechanism. he might like to know there were a million births. >> right. but the soviet were not the only ones who were guilty. because of the japanese occupation of countries in southeast asia, the dutch indys and so on, the asians in those countries certainly didn't want to go back, whereas the french and british and dutch did have illusions that they can go back to the pre-war order and take back their colonies. now, the nationalists in these countries had often in dutch east indies, had collaborated with the japanese, quite understandably, because they saw that as their chance to liberate themselves from their european colonial masters. but after the war in europe, these nationalists were depicted as collaborators, collaborators with fascism. and north africa, too, algeria. so who is send to algeria as soldiers to put down the anti-colonial nationalist rebellions with brut and often atrocious force? people who had fought in the resquir resistance against the nazis. my point is that human behavior, including the atrocity and extreme violence, is not a matter of character or of culture, it's a matter of circumstances. the same people who can behave like heroes in certain circumstances can behave like animals in others. >> yes, and that finding, that if someone -- if you find yourself, if you find you have someone completely at your mercy, the human thought that comes next is torture. we should make note in general, steven pinker's book, "the better angels of our nature, why violence is declined", and one sort of rears back a bit from his conclusion that the violence has declined and is continuing to decline. of the reasons he had used, one very important notion that took a lot of reestablishing itself after the war, who has the monopoly of violence. this is a founding idea of what makes a nation state. >> not in this country. >> exactly. i've always thought that americans just haven't accepted that precept, and they want to be able to stand up to the u.s. army if things should get slightly tyrannical in the white house. but that has been -- the police are what stops violence, going back a couple of centuries and that gathering force. also, you may be interested to know it's rather flattering for the novel that the word made a difference. steven pinker doesn't like the word empathy. he heard a mother screaming at her two children in the streets, and that's what the novel promoted. do you think this is irrevocable, the idea that you can torture someone if you get the chance? >> no, i don't think so. and i don't think high culture makes us into better human beings. i mean, this is one of george steiner's great hobby horses, how is it possible that an ss officer who would play chopin could the next day go to work and pull out people's fingernails. i don't think it's really all that mysterious. and nor do i think that higher education makes us into more moral human beings. i really do think it is a question of -- well, as i said, i think of circumstances. and i suppose if you think of more recent wars, it's a real moral dilemma, because when you talk about the monopoly of force. saddam hussein certainly monopolized force in his state in an extremely brutal manner. it was a state in which torture was widespread and people were gassed. >> he came up through the torture. >> he did, he monopolized it. one could argue that there's one thing people fear more than a brutal dictatorship, and it's anarchy, in which it's every man for himself and chaos, which we see to some extent -- well, we see it in libya now. we see it to some extent in iraq and so on. that is not to say things would have been better if we left saddam hussein alone, but it's something people should think about a bit more before they casually say well, we as americans, it's our duty to fight dictatorship and bring freedom and use force to do so. >> they should have listened to what saddam said, this is iraq is a very difficult country to govern. helicopter, gunships and poisoned gas. >> terrible tidictatorle order preferred to violent anarchy. that is what you had until 1945 when order was re-imposed. >> ideology, the period 1914 to 1945 has often been called a 30-year war, europe's second 30-year war. it wasn't a war of religion on the face of it, and ideology, looking back, it was obviously -- the sense was that ideology, religion was like heroin and ideology was like methadone. it brings you trembling down from religion. but not a bit of it, 100 million dead for communism and naziism and fascism. it was not seen for centuries because of ideology. >> and the boarderline is not always so clear. in its most violent phases, and much of it was very violent, there is not a huge distinction between religion and ideology, because it was also a religious cult in which people could be tortured to death for treading on a newspaper with an image on it. and that's religion at its worst, really. it's a cult and it's to do with the peer group, isn't it? i mean, if you think the peer group overemphasized the determinant of young people's behavior, and in fact throughout their lives, the great study of that the christopher browning's "police reserve battalion 101" where it's established that the killing squads that went out in poland and russia, who would go and kill everyone in a village, and kill all day, kill women and children and men all day, and no one ever got punished for seeking -- seeking transfer. they weren't sent to the front, they weren't sent to some commando at the front. they would be transferred. and all you might have in the meantime is a bit of jostling in the lunch queue, as people said you're letting the side down. and there's not a single case of anyone being punished for requesting a transfer, and yet rather than shame themselves in front of the group, they would kill women and children all day every day. >> yeah, they didn't necessarily enjoy it. there was a sort of wear and tear on the nerves of ss killers, which is why, of course, the gas chambers were employed, because after awhile the killing gets -- it's a bit of a strain. and so even if they got drunk, which they did, and so it was considered to be cleaner and more efficient to have gas chambers and the people who operated the gas chambers were not usually germans either. it was left up to the victims to do that. so it's not necessarily the case that the killers found it easy, but i suppose you can get used to anything. and the other thing is, while we're on a cheerful subject, i've often thought that the reason why the violence in civil wars and, again, to come back to the ethnic germans after the war in poland, the reason why they're so particularly brutal, and the killing almost always goes together with humiliation. you see it in india, the last famous instance was when the seeks set upon the -- i can't remember now, on gandy's son. in any case, in india you see it over and over. people set upon their neighbors and it wasn't enough to kill people, the way the jews were killed also. it wasn't enough just to kill them. it was always preceded by humiliation of some grotesque kind. and i think this is simply speculation. i think one of the reasons is that it's not easy for one human being to murder another human being, especially if they identify with them, if they were their neighbors, if they look like you and so on. so it makes it easier if you reduce your victim to the status of an animal, some object creature crawling around in the mud, and then you're killing an animal and no longer a human being. which is why you have to reduce people to that state. >> and animalization or insect. >> that's why in rwanda the victims were called cockroaches. >> the self-fulfilling slander is marvelous to watch. in the ghettos of poland -- and i think if the holocaust had never happened, how the palish jews were terrorized, looted, exploited and had to work for their conquerer. there was a report written where he said i visited the ghetto in war s warsaw, if there's anyone who has sympathy, they should go and have a look. these people have no self-respect, not even the common decency. the way they treat their children. their children were starving. you have what you think of them and then the recording of your indignation. >> hitler found it rather unpleasant to visit the concentration camps. >> he saw a mask and fainted nearly. >> yes. >> and if you had been a german in 1942 and heard that in east prussia, they were machine gunning mental patients to clear bed space for people who had gone mad while killing women and children in the east, i would have thought something is not quite right. >> no, but on the other hand, in '45, after the liberation, russian troops, often teenagers, raided hospitals and raped people sometimes on their death beds, patients. and so we have to be a little careful, the two of us, that when you write about violence there is, of course, the danger of the pornography of violence, that we're frightened of it, and therefore fascinated by it and as a writer, i don't know what you feel, but one always has to be a bit careful that you don't start to revel in descriptions of it, because there is a pornographic element. and how one guards against that, i have no clear answer to it. but it's a factor as we sit here. >> very closely aligned to what was called literary lechry, unwelcomely rich human experiences, dense human experiences. >> it's close to sex and that's why i think there's a pornographic almost. people read about violence with a fascination that's not entirely unrelated to the fascination for reading about sex. >> many of the americans had erections, visible erections. but in line with what pinker's argument, one might notes there was a standing ovation in congress when kelly got his sentence commuted and there was a hit song called -- what was it, "the battle hymn of william kelly" that was on top of the charts for months. and americans didn't find my lie shocking. >> well, i don't know if that's -- >> not on mass, anyway? >> no, but i think there was sort of a horror that americans -- again, americans are, of course, capable of doing these things as germans are. and that is an interesting case because people often wonder about things like the rape in 1937 when the japanese took the chinese capital at the time and there was massive rape and killing and looting and so on. and it's often been explained that the japanese are particularly cruel and barbaric. how is it possible that an army behaved like that, even though in the japanese war in 1905, the japanese army was known for its discipline and how well it treated it's pows and so on. and i think that explains a little bit what happened in world war ii and afterwards as well, in that it's a particular situation when soldiers are in a foreign country, they don't understand the language, they're at sea and they're often country boys, you could be shot at by anybody. the distinction between guerrilla fighters and soldiers almost doesn't exist. you go into a town or village, you have no idea who is going to be shooting at you. there is then a great temptation to be trigger happy and just shoot them all. and i think that's what -- i don't think that was an act of necessarily, despite the erections of calculated sadism, i think these things can come out of fear. >> and they had taken a lot of losses. >> as had the japanese. and, again, there's this thing of dehumanization of the enemy. quote/unquote gooks in black pajamas in a remote village to a lot of those fearful soldiers from rural america, would not have seemed to be entirely human. >> i would just like to read a sentence, because what this book does so well is capture the amazing complexity in all the different theatres, the different situations, and how ram it all was. >> they fought along ethnic, political and religious lines. croatian catholics versus serbs, versus muslims and communists a slovenian communists. >> it sounds a bit like syria. >> but, i mean, look at greece and indonesia, they said wars don't end until they roll through villages, but they don't end even after they've done that, revolutionary violences. >> right. and what wars do, just as dictatorships often do, they deliberately manipulate resentments, divisions and so on that exist in societies anyway. i mean, in vans the regime would never have come to power if it h hadn't been for the german occupation. in greece, the antagonism between the left and right goes back to the pre-war period when they had a right wing dictatorship and the left wing opponents were locked up in jail. the germans occupied greece, the resistance comes from the left, often communists. the old guard become collaborators with the germans and that goes on after the war. and so in greece it ended up in a very brutal civil war. in italy it could have easily become a civil war. in france it was simmering. in belgium the dutch-speaki flemish nationalists were inflamed against the french-speaking, and there was no monarch in belgium to keep things together because he was tainted by trying to make a deal with the germans and so on. so what happens after the war is it's not that you topple the dictator or bring the brutal enemy to heal. in some ways the problems go on and the problems which have been made worse by war. and how do you contain that? well, having sort of a national figure, a king or a queen, who has the legitimacy to sort of patch things up and it was done very literally by talking about everybody beeping anti-german and now it was time to pull together again, and it was as though you hadn't had the vichi regime, but it was probably a necessary thing to do because otherwise the country could have been torn apart. the other reason you didn't have civil wars in france and italy, is that stalin, the soviets, they clearly divided the world and stalin told the french and itali italian communists he was not going to support a revolution. >> talk a bit about japan, because it was an extreme process, the revamping of japan, root, branch and twig. the emperor had to confess that he was human and not divide -- >> which came as a great relief to the emperor. i don't think anybody really likes to be a god. the emperor referred to have his english breakfasts and be human. >> talk about the process of -- >> well, the difference between germany and japan, which is the other thing, of course, after world war ii, the allies often had a very hazy idea of what had produced all this horror. as you said in the beginning, what explains what the nazis did, what the germans did. from one of the most common theories at the time, and one that churchill i think for a long time believed in, it was all because of prussian militarism that had produced all of this. of course, later that was -- we knew better. >> and the prussians were on the officers, the colonels -- >> who tried to assassinate hitler in 1944. although some of them had been quite enthusiastic nazis before. they were relatively speaking, gentlemen. but in germany it was fairly easy, because there had been a clear takeover in 1933 by a criminal regime that came to an end in 1945, the nazi party, hitler. so in germany you could make the case and there was some truth to it that if you get rid of the nazi elements in the government, you get rid of it, germany could be restored to a decent european country. after all, it was also the country of mozart and all of that. there was a real culprit -- >> so de-nazi-fy. >> there was an enormous amount in killing in china in particular, but also in southeast asia, but there was no deliberate systematic attempt to exterminate people. in japan the explanation was a variant of prussianism, it was the spirit, militarism, there was something deeply rotten about japanese culture. so while in germany you could de-nazi-fy and revive the best of german culture, the feeling among the ignorant allies after the war was there is something rotten about japanese culture that is feudalistic, warrior-like, so the whole culture has to be turned upside down. so everything to do with feudalism and to democratize japan, they had to be re-educated in a fundamental way and there was some comical instances of this. there was one man, i think, from kansas, a u.s. army officer, who was in charge of a town somewhere in japan, in rural japan, who thought that square dancing was the answer. square dancing would da mo democracyize the japanese. the idea was that japanese men and women have to be able to treat each other like equals and that means, like americans, they have to be able to show their affection openly and not in this feudal way that it's always hidden, so it's good to have a kiss. so the american occupational authorities, the censorship board, the occupational authorities, decreed that they had to have the first cinematic kiss, which was hugely popular with young audiences in japan who knew when the kiss was going to come and burst into wild applause. in any case, unlike germany, they had to be re-educated, which was a key phrase at the time. and the japanese were so frightened that the americans would do to them what they did to the chinese and other asians and that they would be raped and massacred and so on, that they -- and where, in fact, the u.s. occupation army, and it was mostly the u.s. and japan, were relatively benign. and that came as such a relief that most of the japanese, who were also thoroughly sick of war, were more than happy to be the pupils of americans re-education efforts. and indeed, even the emperor probably was. >> we're sort of coming to the end. perhaps you could tell two anecdotes, one about -- well, what happened to your father, and then the very nice epilogue to your book. >> well, what gave me the idea to do this book was really my father's story, which is as follows. it baffled me for a long time. he was a law student at the university in 1941, and if you were a law student, the thing was to join the fraternity because that's where you made your contacts and so on. and to join a fraternity, and then and still today, meant you had to go through an initiation and that meant a lot of hazing and bullying and humiliation being made to jump around like a frog and being beaten up and so on. and the fraternities in 1941 were actually banned by the german authorities because they thought that they were sources of resistance. but at his university it went on for another year, but underground. so all the hazing was clandestine, as it were. you also as a student had to sign an oath of allegiance to the nazi occupational authorities, and 75% of the students, including my father, refused to do this. if you refused, you were forced to work in the german war industry. and my father, like others, went into hiding and then somebody screwed up in the student underground and resistance told him to come back to his hometown and he was met by my grandfather, who was in bad health, and there was a lot of german police around and it was announced that those young men who didn't sign the oath had to go to germany immediately, and if they didn't, their parents would be arrested. and my father was afraid that this would happen to his parents, so he ended up in berlin. he lived through the bombings day and night, the u.s. air force during the day, the red army, the battle of berlin, he was almost shot by a soviet soldier. he collapsed in the middle of berlin in exhaustion and hunger. vermin, all of that. fleas, in his case. he was particularly frightened. he always said that those who had fleas didn't have lice and vice-versa. he was nursed back to some kind of health by a german prostitute and ended up in a displaced person's camp and then back to holland in the summer of 1940 and went back to university, only to be told by senior members of the fraternity, that because the initiation in '41 had gone on underground, they had to do the whole thing all over again. and there were boys who had suffered far worse than my father who suddenly were forced to jump around like frogs and so on. so i said to my father, how is it possible that you could have put up with this nonsense, after all you had experienced? he sort of shrugged his shoulder and said that's the way it was, and also we thought that was normal. and i think that's the key word, because i think there was yearning for some kind of normality and to go back to the world that had been before the war. to him and to others, this represented the normal world. now, he was not particularly -- he's still alive, he's 90. he's not a particularly traumatized man. he never was even particularly anti-german. but certain things from his war experience did linger and one of them that was a horror of fireworks and sort of loud bangs. german crowds are not his favorite place to be stuck in either. and in 1989 we decided, my sisters and i, that we would go spend new year's eve in berlin and it was only the second time that he had been back. and there we were at the wall and it was all very festive and my father was perfectly happy to be there, in these enormous crowds of people sort of with champagne bottles and singing and sitting on the wall and all that. and it was near midnight and suddenly the fireworks exploded and we had lost our father in the crowd and we couldn't find him. and we looked for him, looked for him, and then went back to the hotel and about 2:00 in the morning he staggered into the room and he had been hit by a fire rocket. and the reason i use this story is that 1989 was seen by many as now finally world war ii is over, this is the end. eastern europe is now finally free, now we live -- george bush talked about the new world order. finally we are in this better world that everybody had hoped for, the end of history, et cetera. and i somewhat used that anecdote to show that, unfortunately, the brave new world will never come. i think it's time for you to -- [ applause ] >> please stick your hands up. >> it's better if they come to the microphone so everyone can hear them. >> okay. but it's hard for some people to get there. >> if it's too hard, talk louder. >> i'm glad it's cooled off a bit. i was feeling a bit like albert brooks in "broadcast news". >> just a question maybe directed to both of you, but really triggered by -- >> we can't hear you. >> is this on? >> no. >> can someone turn it on? >> speak into it. >> okay. >> that's better. >> just a question maybe directed to both of you, and triggered by mr. amis' comment on hiroshima and some of the allied atrocities. and i certainly agree that there's no moral equivalence and i buy into that. but it seems to me that kind of one of the unique qualities of world war ii was the targeting of civilians on both sides. prior wars were basically professional military people killing professional military people. and that was on both sides. i mean, the germans, the raf, as you mentioned, the raf and the u.s. air force bombed, you know, german civilians, some of them who may have been just like the rest of us in the room, maybe not particularly political and so on. i wonder if you would just comment on that. >> well, there were two reasons -- it's a bit like these killers in poland. you get used to it. and there are two reasons why the british began to bomb deliberately civilian populations in cities like hamberg and later other cities. one was an illustration of how people often learn the wrong lessons of history, because the generals who fought in world war ii had memories of world war i and the last thing they wanted was a war of attrition. and they thought that bombing would demoralize the enemy population and they would then turn against their leaders and bring the war to a speedier end, which turned out to be a completely faulty analysis. in fact, it often did the opposite and it raises the morale in a way. >> they talk about the air wars being a defeat, not just ineffective, but a defeat. >> there's another reason, though, which is that the british were desperate and i think hamberg was 42 and there was no way that the british then -- because they were -- no, it must have been earlier. there was no way to fight back at that stage against what was still a formidable german enemy. and it was felt that they had to do something and they thought that bombing german cities, at least, was a token of fighting back. in the beginning they tried to bomb harbors, railway stations and that kind of thing, and it was too costly because they didn't have the kind of equipment that allowed you to bomb from a great height. so they had to go too low and were losing bomber crews like flies. so that's why they thought this new tactic of bombing civilians and demoralizing them. now, once they had started doing that, it got progressively worse and then something that was -- would have still been thought to be an atrocity, except, by the way, when it came to the fuzzy wuzzies, the first instance of bombing, i think it was in iraq, when churchill was minister of war and harris was already involved, that's when it started. when they started doing it on a large scale in germany, it got progressively worse and more vindictive. in japan, it was even worse than that because the cities were made of wooden houses and they dropped bombs and they had firestorms and it became worse and worse. the famous phrase by the american air force general, we're bombing them back to the stone age. people often associate with vietnam, actually he said that in in late '44, when they were bombing japan. and robert mcnamara later in the famous documentary by aaron mcdonald, said if the allies had lost the war, they would have been war criminals. >> when the moral equivalence idea is brought up, people have said that it was just as bad as the death camps. >> it's a different thing. >> it's a different thing for this reason, among others, that the losses of the air crews were staggering, tens of thousands of people died delivering those bombs and only a handful of ss ever got killed in the rebellions in the calvmps. >> that's true. they didn't do it because there was some idealogical program of exterminating germans or japanese. it was an act of war. it was an atrocious act of war, but it was an act of war, as it were the war against the jews had nothing to do with any kind of military exercise. it was purely about killing. >> yeah, and in fact that detracted from the war effort. >> yes. >> my question segues into that. did america really have to drop the atomic bombs on japan or were they so weak they would have surrendered anyway? >> they probably would have, but the question is when. and the americans wanted to finish the war as quickly as they could because they were running out of money. most americans were sick of war, they wanted their boys to come home. so the appetite to prolong it was very low. and there was also the fear at that stage that the soviet would invade japan first and so they did want to bring it -- they wanted to avoid an invasion at all costs. now, was it really necessary? we will never entirely -- we will never know for sure. what we do know is after the second atom bomb on nagasaki, the japanese war council, which they were the ones who had to decide on whether to surrender or not, and it had to be a unanimous decision. diehards in the war council still argued that they had to fight until the last man, woman and child. and it was only the second time in his reign that the emperor actually did step in. i'm sure he didn't do it off his own bat, but he did step in and said, no, no, we have to surrender. and the main reason i think was that the japanese were afraid that the red army would get there first or that there would be a communist-inspired rebellion. the other thing the atom bombs did, it gave the diehards in some ways an excuse to surrender, because they could say well, we haven't lost face, we haven't lost, we fought a war, we were not defeated. but with that weapon like that, it's like boxing somebody and your opponent somebody draws a gun. what can you do? so it served as a way out. now, whether it was absolutely necessary, as i said, we won't know because they would have surrendered, but it may have taken more time. i would like to know what martin thinks, because you've written on this more than i have, really, is the moral question. is there a moral difference between fire bombing tokyo and killing more than 100,000 people in a few nights and using an atom bomb and killing 67 -- and the numbers are not perhaps the relevant factor, but let's say killing an equivalent number of people. is there a difference between -- a moral difference between one weapon and another? it's not always clear to me. >> we should say about hiroshima and nagasaki that they had only two bombs, one uranium, one plutonium and they had spend an incredible amount of money making those bombs. you would thought a demonstration over the ocean, perhaps, but they had to make those two things count. this comes up all the time, the moral difference. did you feel there was a moral difference when -- in syria when chemical weapons were used? >> well, no, it wasn't immediately clear to me. yes, of course, using chemical weapons is absolutely horrific, but i think the red line was a rhetorical mistake because if you do nothing for 100,000 people being killed by other means and you suddenly say we have to go to war because they're using chemical weapons, i'm a bit dubious about that distinction. >> well, i think chemical weapons and biological weapons, that they're exponential weapons and one should have, certainly in terms of international policing, you have to have a different -- >> to ban them, of course. i would be entirely in favor of that. but to say that there's an absolute moral distinction, i'm not so sure of that now. >> not an absolute one, but partly a practical one, that they do kill lots of people and they can go on -- >> yes, but then you would have to say that gassing people also killed a lot of people, more quickly and more efficiently than shooting them. but was there a moral distinction between the gas chambers and sending in and shooting them in the neck? >> the gas chambers, they would have probably got close with using bullets. >> gas was a lot cheaper. >> that's a practical concern. >> thank you. i've learned a lot from the things you have said. i really liked what you said about the fact that we are all very educated, does that mean we are better, and we act so differently from the ignorant, illiterate people of this world. for me, the question then is, what formation should we be talking about to help humanity, to make sure that people behave well, or are we doomed to believe that there's no formation out there that we can put together to help humanity so that, you know, each time we get into a crisis situation it becomes a question of circumstances and we just become violent. along with this, i realize in the last few years, especially in this country, the humanities have been taking a hit and studies in technology and science seems to be what the universities want to promote. they bring more money in, i realize. are they thinking this way also, that the reading of humanities is not going to improve our well-being? i don't want to ramble too much, but you are giving me very wonderful and insightful information. >> if you will help me think through this, whether -- what kind of formation. >> i'm not sure i can help you. unless you're religious and you believe that religion will make us behave better, which in some cases may actually be true, but it's largely a question of institutions and law. and you need to have a monopoly on force as a government, you need to have laws that play a major role in making people behave. you need a police force, you need proper institutions. and without proper institutions, the law of the jungle prevails and as i said, i think that when the law of the jungle prevails, it doesn't matter whether you're german or american or japanese or black or white or yellow, then the worst happens. >> i'm sorry? >> what about -- [ inaudible question ] >> i'm not saying all human beings are monsters. there was a heroic, a moral hero. he was a man who -- [ inaudible question ] >> again, i don't think that if circumstances -- if you have a government -- well, a government or an occupation or whatever it is that works on people's bassist instincts, it's obviously not true that everybody then will behave like a monster. i think the number of people that behave like absolute monsters quite deliberately is probably -- is not the majority. the majority always tries to survive and look the other way if it suits them. so the absolute monsters are not the majority, but nor are they the moral heroes. the moral heroes are probably even rarer. even in the worst circumstances, you will have moral heroes. and bonherfer was one of them. he stood up to the nazi regime and they were a moral human being and there were others in germany. [ inaudible question ] >> that determines whether you're going to be a monster or a hero, yes, that may be true. but, again, i think -- yes, you're right. but as i said before, i think sometimes heroes can become monsters and possibly even the other way around. >> but he was an isolated case. that wasn't much heroism in germany and people -- there are many more monsters than there are heroes. >> yes. >> in the camps, in auschwitz, about one in ten of the ss were monsters who clearly got sexual satisfaction out of what they were doing. >> yes. >> but one in, what, 1,000 were heroes, the prisoners? >> and it's much more dangerous to be a moral hero in those circumstances. to be a monster is easy. >> the real heroes, that's a minor consideration to the real hero, the moral hero. >> yes, absolutely. >> on that same point, you mentioned george steiner and levy. he said hans in berlin was one of the best nofles describing the period. >> which novel? >> "alone in berlin" or "everyone dies alone". i was wondering if you have opinions about the moral immigration of the author or about the novel. >> i'm not entirely clear of that novel. >> yes, that novel and also he was considered to be part of inter-immigration, so he stayed in germany even though his british publisher was going to get him out and he stayed and recounted what ordinary german life was like and he didn't say he was a hero. but he was able to give voice to what germans experienced during the war. >> when was that published? >> it was published in 2010 by penguin in the uk. it was published in 1947. it was the last book that he published after his death. he died a month before it was published. >> yeah, i couldn't finish that. and he goes off on a huge red herring with the gastapo. he has them wearing the star in '41, but the star was not prevalent, but the writing of the book was very courageous. have you heard "the man in despair" by frederick reich. skaiting, hateful recount. he had little chunks that he hid ten feet deep in his garden. >> like the diaries of victor klemper. >> i don't know if heroic is quite the word, but a fascinating one. the question of integration. if you were a non-jewish german, immigration was a possibility. you didn't stick your neck out, you tended your roses, and you would survive. under mao or stalin it was not possible. you had to participate and voice your enthusiasm. and you could not withdraw and retreat. it wasn't an option. >> i want to look -- my question is about japan. the japanese government is becoming more and more right wing and also the 1945 kmep ration and now the japanese government is trying to sell the nuclear industries. what do you think about that? this is a long way from 1945, but not entirely. let's leave the nuclear question aside for a minute. the right wing nature of the current prime minister does go everywhere. and part of the reeducation of japan was that the americans wrote, as you well know, a new constitution. and they blaminged it on the military and it was a pacifist organization. but some japanese nationalists felt it was robbing japan of it's sovereignty. and you would have to leave it to someone else. there was always a minority that wanted to change the constitution and restore japan's right to use it's armed forces in any way it saw fit. now, the main stream in japan, and especially the left, used the argument against revision of the constitution saying japan, if it were, is like an capitolic. you can't wave a drink under it's nose because it will go back to it's own ways. as long as that argument is used, the revisionists, the right, will say every country has cars in history. wars are terrible, we did bad things, but no worse than any other country. nothing that we should feel particularly ashamed about. so let's revise the constitution and feel proud of ourselves. what e is disturbing everywhere is that history has become so polarized and politicized in ja than in no someone talking about -- nobody attempts to find the truth any more, it's all about what political agenda you have and that determines the war rather than facing it coolly and smoothly. late, but they learned. >> i'm interested in the german people's acceptance of hitler. i'm not sure that you that it was as easy as you have defikted. were there not more than a score, perhaps, as many of 30 active plots against hitler the most famous of which in 44. but twlr not other military groups of people that were cooperating very, very closely. but anglo-american historians seem not to realize that, is that true? >> the only institution that stood out to hitlup to hitler effectively was the army. i think they always melded in france. no one believed that he could concur france in the way that he proposed. and he did it, and it did look like a miracle. and very sound and good people like james hamlet said just for a few weeks or so well, he is a little rough around the edges but look at this. france, a historical enemy. but once the army came aboard, that was the end of the sop suggesti -- oppositi opposition. >> and he got along with generals, and there was people in germany that opposed him in the 30s. but the use was very effective. and so it took more and more courage to oppose him openly, openly was almost impossible. once he was in power. and there was many people who didn't like what was going on. but many chose inner immigration because that was the only way to survive. but i think that -- i don't think it is anglo-american prejudice to say that there was not much in the way of real organized opposition. there was some, there was opposition groups here and there in the army, but not much. >> but the people, i mean when the assassination attempt -- e colonels plot. >> and most people were okay until they got badly bombed. life wasn't all that bad. it was depressive. but it took a huge amount of courage to resist it. i don't think there was a huge amount of it. >> it was, i mean, he goes into -- it was very difficult to be brave in nazi germany. you had to be prepared to die, but you had to be prepared for prelu p preludial torture. and it's not very accessible to us. but it is a very german thing that in the occupied countries any criminal could die like a martyr. in germany it was arranged so that any martyr could die like a criminal. and you wouldn't be celebrated after your death. your wife would turn your photograph around, your parents would not talk to your. your children would be told -- >> that doesn't matter after you're dead. >> no, but a german would find it very difficult to contempl e contemplate. and he says that is what topped people, not the physical courage necessarily but the shame. >> thank you. >> 51 countries joined forces on october 24th to create the united nations in hopes of presenting future wars and peace and justice worldwide. up next we feature films on the u.n.'s 75th anniversary.

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