japan and the continued rise of communism in the soviet union and china. c-span recorded this event in 2013. ian buruma, the henry r. youth professor in barton college was in holland and japan. he earned several awards for his work. the publications he writes for include the "new york review of books," "the new yorker," the "new york times" and "the guardian" which "the guardian" published "sex and pleasure in japanese art." among his previous books are "taming the gods," "murder in amsterdam and the limits of tolerance" and "inventing japan 1863 to 1964." in "year zoero," most of which e wrote in the commons center in 2012 to serious envy of his fellows that 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 in asia. skeptical about the idea that we can learn much from history, he nonetheless wanted to know, he writes, what those who lived through the war and its end, including his own father, went through, quote, for it helps me to make sense of myself and, indeed, all our lives in the long, dark shadow of what came before. the "wall street journal" called "year zero" remarkable in its combination of modesty, and the "financial times" calls it elegant, humane, luminous. ian buruma has published more than 75 books, among them "money," "london fields," "time's arrow." amos received the james tate black memorial prize for his experience, and was named one of the 50 greatest british writers by "the london times" in 1948. we are 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, then take a few questions from the audience. there are mics toward the front on both sides, so please come to the mic instead of trying to speak from your chair, and then they will sign books. so when they're done speaking, go out to the table to sign. please welcome ian buruma and martin amos. [ applause ] >> well, the first thing to be said, and this is a tremendous book, very -- it's an amazing task of combining great material, because the aftermath of the war was determined by the war itself and shaped by the years that preceded it. and i've been spending recent years writing about this war and wondering about it. it was -- apart from being uniquely devastating with 55 million dead and many a ruined city and all the devastation we know of, it looks increasingly weird and grotesque, i think, some aspects of the war in that it wasn't blundered into like there was one man, i mean, 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 is -- i think it was just before the invasion of pola poland, which set the war in motion, but he said -- he was questioned by a general and he said, i'm not -- i haven't got any nerves about this war. the war i'm worried about is 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 that had ever been, into this padantic exploration is still sort of remarkable. and the weirdness of much of the aftermath is sort of inherent in the war. do you have -- you know,ist 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 the rubber aprons and got to work. do you have any 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, 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 stage with you, because i think we share a sort of horrified fascination with why people are capable of doing terrible things. and i don't think -- people say, you can explain because germans had an exterm igsist mentality from luther to hitler or the japanese are uniquely barbaric or cruel or anything like that. i don't believe that for a minute. and i think your question is a good one. how is it that one of the most highly educated and civilized countries in europe produced so much extraordinary, because, yes, it was hitler that led it but he couldn't have done it on his own. people -- he had very active participation. and i think hits ler 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 basic instincts. and i think the idea that there is a torturer in all of us is a little trite. it's probably not true either. i mean, 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 want with other human beings, ulgs find a large number, and one can't put a particular number on it, 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 again i think another trite thing people often say, for example in the balkans wars, they explained serbian violence against the balkans and they say this is ancient hatred and they explode at a certain time. i don't think hatred is ancient, although there are all kinds of myths that come 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 smoldering hatred that sudden sli like a volcano suddenly bursts out. it's always orchestrated. and i think the -- one of the best examples of this in my book in 1945 is what happened in particularly in czechoslovakia and poland where large german populations whose families had lived there for centuries and suddenly the -- after the war the poles and the czechs were given license, by their leaders as well as the alice 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 what happened to the german populations in poland or czechoslovakia or what the germans in germany suffered from the soviet red army, which was also horrendous in terms of rapes and killing and torture and so on, that somehow this was just as bad as what the germans did to others, which is actually not the case. >> a huge subject of relativizing and trying to not rewrite but put in a different -- put a different complexion on these. i mean, it was said in that thoughtful review, "new york times" book review, that what you didn't do in this book is the fashionable word is de-heroize the haleys. and that usually goes alongle following lines. they say, one hiroshima, two allied bombing, dresden 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, czechoslovakia, et cetera, ethnic germans, 500,000 dead, perhaps a bit more. yalta, where we agreed to return russian p.o.w.s to certain enslavement if not certain death, and the way we revived colonialism, it gave us things like saying that the resistance in france particularly was not that. 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. and once you remember that as churchill referred to the moral rot of war. and an interesting concept that i saw raised, the 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 in 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 sort of 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 that 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. and 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 were an army of rapists. >> that senator the other day in america who said, when a woman is raped, she switches off the proce procreate agsal mechanism. he might like to know there were a million births from those rapes. >> indeed. not just the soviets, we're not the only ones who are guilty. when -- because of the japanese occupation of countries in southeast asia, such as the dutch east indieindies, so on, asians in those countries, the local population, certainly didn't want to go back to the status quo, where the dutch and french and british to some extent did have illusions that they could simply go back to the pre-war order and take back their colonies. now, the nationalists in these countries had often -- in burma, in 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. so who assent -- north africa, too, algae yeah. who is sent to algae yeah, northeast i northeast indies as soldiers to put down the anti-colonial nationalist rebellions with bruit and often atrocious force, people who had fought in the resistance against the nazis. and so my point really is that human behavior, including the sort of 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 -- if you find yourself -- if you find you have someone completely at your mercy, the human thought that comes next is torture. although we should make note in general of 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 violence has declined and it continuing to decline. of the reasons he adeuces, one important notion that took a loot of re-establishing itself after the war is who has the monopoly of violence? it must be the state. this is a founding idea of what makes a nation state. >> not in this country. >> no, no, exactly. i've always thought americans just haven't accepted that preset and they want to be able to stand up to the u.s. army if things should get slightly t tyrannical in the white house. but the police are what stops violence, going back a couple of sen centuries and that gathers force. also, you may be interested to know, it's sort of flattering for a novelist, that the novel made a big difference, because steven pinker doesn't like the word empathy. he said he heard a mother screaming at one of her two children in the streets saying, show some empathy, but that's what the novel promoted. do you think this is eradicable. >> violence? >> the idea that you 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 could play shoeman absolutely beautifully and read poems by gerta could the next day go to work and pull out people's fingernails? i don't think it's rarely all that mysterious. and nor do i think that higher education makes us into more moral human beings. i really don't think it is a question of, well, as i said, i think of circumstances. and i suppose if you -- if you think of more recent wars, and it's a real moral dilemma, because when you talk about the monopoly of force, saddam hussein certainly monopolized force in his state, and in an extremely brutal manner. it was a state in which torture was widespread, in which people were gassed and is so on. >> he came up through the torture. >> indeed he did. he was a torturer. he monopolized it. one could argue, 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, where we see it in libya now. we see it to some extent in iraq and is so on. which is not to say, well, things would have been better if we left saddam hussein alone, but it does pause -- it's something that people should think about a bit more before they casually say, well, it's, you know, we as americans, it's our duty to fight dictatorship and bring freedom and use military force to do so. >> they should have listened to what saddam said, which is iraq is a very difficult country to govern. >> well, he was right. >> helicopter gunships and poison gas and ubiquitous torture and terror. >> yeah, terrible, brutal, dictatorial order for most people is probably still to be preferred to violent anarchy. and violent anarchy is in many ways what you had in 1945, until order was reimposed. >> ideology, the period 1914 to 1945 is often been called the 30 years war, europe's second 30 years war, but it wasn't a war of religion on the face of it. and ideology, you know, looking back, it was obviously -- the sense was that ideology -- religion was like heroine and ideology was like methadone. it brings you trembling down from religion. but not a bit of it, 100 million super numery dead for naziism and fascism. barbarian is not seen for centuries it because of ideology. >> and the borderline between ideology and religion is not always so clear. at its -- in it's most violent phases, and much of it was very violent, there is not a huge distinction, maoism between religion and ideology because it was also a rjsz cult in which people could be tortured today for treading on a newspaper with mao's image on it. and that's religion at its worst really. it's not ideology. it's not anything to do with marxist, leninism. it's a cult. >> it's to do with the peer group, isn't it? considered -- if you think the peer group is overemphasized as a determinant to young people's lives, the great study of that is christopher browning's police reserve battalion 101 where it's established that the killing squads that went out behind the vehmak in poland and in russia who, you know, would go and kill everyone in a village and babia, what is that, 38,000 dead, 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 commander 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 lettering the side down. and there is 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 a while the killing gets -- it's a bit of a strain. even if they got drunk, which they did, 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. it was 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 this cheerful subject, i've often thought that the reason why the violence and civil wars and, again, to come back to the ethnic germans after the war and poland and czechoslovakia, the reason why they're so particularly brutal, and the killing almost always goes together with humiliation. you see it in india where the last famous instance was the -- when the sikhs set upon the -- what was it? i can't remember now. ra jeef -- gandhi's son. in india you see it over and over. in partition you saw it, people who set upon their neighbors and it wasn't enough that they -- to kill people the way the jews were killed also t wasn't enough just to kill them. it had to go -- it was always proceeded by humiliation of some grotesque kind. and i think, this is simply speculation, i think one of the reasons is, it's not easy for one human being to murder another human being, especially if they -- 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 abject 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. >> animalization or insect. >> yes. that's why in rwanda the victims were called cockroaches on the radio. it's easier to kill cockroaches than your neighbor. >> and the self-fulfilling slander is marvelous to watch. in the ghettos of poland, and i think, you know, if the holocaust had never happened, we would regard that as some sort of apagy of beastianity. how the poles were -- polish jews would terrorize, looted, exploited and had to work for their conquerer, but there's a gerbil's report where he said, i visited a -- the ghetto in warsaw, if there's anyone who still has any sympathy at all of these people, they should just go and have a look at what these people left of themselves, en masse, no self-respect, not even the common decency, et cetera, et cetera. the way they treat their children. their children are starving. they don't look after -- imposition of what you think of them and then humulous recording of your indignation. >> hitler found it rather unpleasant to visit concentration camps. >> did he? >> yeah. >> saw a mask and fainted, didn't he? >> yes. >> if i had been a german in 1942 and heard in koenigs berg in east pressure sha, they were machine gunning mental patients for bed space who had gone mad while killing women and men in the east. i thought, something is not quite right in germany. >> no, but on the other hand, in the same koenenings berg after the liberation, russian troops, often teenagers, raided hospitals and raped people on -- sometimes on their death beds, i mean, patients. so, i mean, we have to be a little careful, the two of us. when you write about violence, there is, of course, the danger of the pornography of violence and that -- that we're frightened of it and, therefore, fascinated by it, and one as a writer i don't know what you feel, but one always has to be a bit careful that you don't revel in descriptions of it because there is a pornographic element. and how one guards against that, i have no clearance to it, but it's a factor. >> yeah. >> as we sit here. >> very closely allied to what primo levy called literary lecture when you would come to these horribly and unwelcomingly rich human experiences, dense human experiences. >> and it's close to sex. that's why i think there is a pornographic element. people read about violence with a fascination that's not entirely unrelated to the fascination for reading about sex. >> well, it was said in my lie that many americans had erections, visible erections as they were -- but in line with what pinker's argument, one might note that there was a standing ovation in congress when callie got his sentence commuted and there was a rockabilly hit song called -- what was it, the battle hymn of william kennedy that was on top of the rockabilly charts for months, and americans didn't find my lie shocking. >> well, i don't know if that's not quite true. >> not immediately, not en masse, anyway. >> no. but i think the war is sort of a horror that americans -- again, americans are, of course, as capable of doing these things as germans are. and miele is an interesting case because people often wonder about the rape of nan king in 1937 when the japanese took the chinese capital at the time and there was massive rape and killing and looting and is so on. and it's often been explained as the japanese are particularly cruel and barbaric. again, circumstances. how is it possible that an army behaved like that even though in the r suchlt so-japanese war in 1905 the japanese army was known for its discipline and how well it treated its p.o.w.s and is so on. and i think miele is -- 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, they're often country boys. they -- you could be shot at by anybody. the distinction between guerrilla fighters and soldiers and so on is -- almost doesn't exist. you go into a town or village, you have no idea who's going to be shooting at you. there is then a great temptation to be trigger-happy and just shoot the bruits and shoot them all. and i think that's what -- i don't think miele was an active, necessarily, despite the erections of calculated sadism, i think these things can also come out of fear. >> and they had taken many -- they had been -- they had taken a lot of losses. >> as had the japanese. again, there's are this thing of dehumanization of the enemy. quote/unquote, gooks in sort of black pajamas in some remote village to a lot of those fearful provencal soldiers from rural america would not have seen to be entirely human. >> i would like to read a sentence because what this book does so well is capture the amazing complexity in all the different theaters, the different situations. and so you ram ified it all was. this is talking about yugoslavia. parties in several civil wars going on, fought along ethnic, political and religious lines. croatian catholics versus orthodox serbs versus muslim bosnians, versus communist palozans versus slovenian communists. >> sounds a bit like syria. >> let me look at greece and indonesia. churchill, again, said, wars don't end until they roll through villages but they don't end even after they've done that, do they? revolutionary violence is -- >> and what wars do just as dictatorships often do and foreign occupations is they deliberately manipulate resentments, divisions and so on that exist in societies anyway. in france, the vishi regime would have never come to power if it hadn't been the german occupation. in greece again, the antagonism between the left and the right goes back to the prewar period when they had a right-wing dictatorship and the left wing opponents were locked up in jail. the germans invade occupy 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 in 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-speaking flemish national nationalists were enflamed against the french-speaking waloons. 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. what happens after the war is it's not that you topple the dictator or bring the brutal enemy to heal. in some way it is problems go on. the problems which have been made worse by war and how do you contain that? well, having a -- sort of a national figure, a king or a queen or de gaulle in the case of france, who has the legitimacy to sort of patch things up and de gaulle did it very deliberately by talking about -- everybody had been anti-german and now it's time to pull together again as though you hadn't had had the veshi 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 are whats in france and italy is stalin -- the soviets and the westernized very clearly divided the world and stalin told the french and italian communists he was not going to support a revolution there. >> talk a bit about japan, because it's very extreme process wents on there. the cult of macarthur, receipt vamping of japan root, ball, and twig. the umperer had to confess he was human and not divide. >> which came as great relief to the emperor. i don't think anybody likes to be a god. the emperor preferred to have his english breakfast. >> talk about the process of -- >> well, the difference between germany and japan is that -- which is the other thing, of course, after world war ii, the allies often had a very hazy idea of what it -- of what it 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 that is one that churchill, i think, long believed for a long time, it was the prussian influence. of course, we knew better. >> the prussians were the officers -- the colonels -- >> who tried to assassinate hitler in 19d 44, although some of them had been quite enthusiastic nazis before. nonetheless, yeah, 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. there was a nazi party, there was hitler. 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 nazidom, germany could be restored to a decent european country. after all, it was also the country of mozart and beethoven and gerta and all that. there was a real culprit, the nazi, the ss, the guess stap poe. in japan there was no equivalent of the nazi party, there was no hitler, there was no holocaust, in fact, even though there was enormous -- a huge -- enormous amount of killing, in china in particular, but also in southeast asia, but there was no deliberate systematic attempt to exterminate an entire people so there had to be another explanation. in japan the explanation was precisely -- it was a variant of prussianism. it was the spirit, the militarism, there was something deeply rotten about japanese culture. in germany you could de-nazify and revive the best of german culture, the belief of ignorant allies after the world war, there is something so rotten about japanese culture there is something feudalistic, but the whole culture has to be turned upside down. so kabuki plays had to be banned, anything to do with feudalism. they had to be re-educated in a very fundamental way. there were comical instances. there was one man from 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 because that -- square dancing was democratize the japanese. there was the case of the first screen kiss in the cinema. the idea was japanese men and women have to be able to -- have 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 japanese -- the american occupation authorities, the censureship board t wasn't call the ken soreship board, the occupational authorities decreed 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. but 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 have to -- they would be raped and massacred and so on, that they -- whereas, in fact, the u.s. occupation army, and it was mostly the u.s. in japan, were relatively benign. that came as such a relief that most of the japanese, also thoroughly sick of war and everything to do with war and the military, were more than happy to be the pupils of american re-education efforts. indeed, even the emperor probably was. >> we are sort of coming to the end of -- perhaps you could tell two -- well, one about what happened to your father and then that very nice epilogue to your book when you went -- >> well, the -- what gave me the idea to do this book was really my father's story. and -- which is as follows, and it baffled me for a long time. he was a law student at the university of utrect in 1941. if you were a law student, the thing was to join a fraternity because that's where you made your contacts and so on. so, to join a fraternity then and still today, meant you had to go through an initiation. that meant a lot of hazingy and bullying and humiliation made to jump around like a frog and beaten up and so on. the fraternities in 1941 were actually banned by the germany authorities because they thought they were sources of resistance but it went on for another year but underground. so all the hazing went -- was clandestine, as it were. you also as a student had to sign an aoath of agee gans 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 german war industry. and my father, like others, went into hiding and then somebody screwed up in the student underground, resistance, told him to come back to his hometown. he was meant by my grandfather, who was in bad health. there were a lot of german police around. it was announced that those young men who didn't sign the oath had to go to germany immediately. if they didn't, their parents would be arrested. my father was afraid this would happen to his parents so he ended up in berlin. he lived through the bombings day and night, the raf, the red army, the battle of berlin. he was almost shot by a soviet soldier. he collapsed in the middle of berlin from hunger. >> vermin. >> vermin, fleas. he said those that didn't have fleas didn't have lice, vice versa. he was nursed back to son-in-law kind of health by a german prostitute, ended up in a displaced persons camp and back to holland in 19 -- 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 over again. and there were boys who had suffered far worse than my father, who had been -- who suddenly were forced to jump around like frogs and is so on. so, i said to my father, how is it possible that you could have put up with this nonsense after all you'd experienced? he sort of shrugged his shoulder. he said, well, it was the way it was. also, we thought that was normal. and i think that's the keyword because i think there was yearning for some kind of nor malty and go back to the word it had been before the war. to him and to others, this represented the normal world. now, he was not as particularly -- he is not, he's still alive, he's 90. he's not a particularly traumatized man. he was not -- he never was even particularly anti-german. but certain things from his war experience did linger. one of them was the 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, we would go spend the 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. my father was perfectly happy to be there. and 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. we had lost our father in the crowd. we couldn't find him. and we looked for him, looked for him, and then in the end went back to the hotel and at about 2:00 in the morning he staggered into the room and he had been hit by a fire rocket right in the -- 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 order -- new world order. feenlly we were in this better world that everybody had hoped for. >> the end of history. >> the end of history, et cetera. and i somewhat mischievously used that anecdote to show that, unfortunately, we're -- the very new world will never come. i think it's time for you to -- [ applause ] >> please stick your hands up. >> i think it's better if they come to the mic because -- >> but it's hard for some people -- >> okay. if it's too hard, talk loud. >> i'm glad it's cooled off a bit. i was feeling a little like albert brooks in "broadcast news." >> maybe just a question -- directed to maybe both of you -- >> we can't hear you. >> is this on? >> no. >> can someone turn it on? >> that's better. >> maybe a question directed to both of you and triggered by mr. amis's comments about hiroshima and some allied atrocities. i certainly agree there's no moral equivalence. i buy into that. but it seems to me that kind of one of the unique qualities of warld war ii was the targeting of civilians on both sides. i mean, prior wars were basically professional military people killing professional military people. and that was on both sides. i mean, the germans bombed london and the raf, as you mentioned, the raf and the u.s. air force bombed, you know, german civilians, some of whom may have been just like the rest of us in the room, maybe not particularly political and so on. and i wonder if you would just comment on that. >> well, there were two reasons -- it's a bit like these killers in poland. i mean, you get used to it. and there are two reasons why the british began to bomb deliberate by civilian populations in cities like hamburg. and one was an illustration of how people often learn the wrong lessons of history because the generals who fought in warld war ii had memories of world war i. the last thing they wanted was a war of attrition. they thought that bombing would demoralize the enemy population. they would then turn against their leaders and bring the war to a speedier end, which turned out to be a completely faulty analyses. in fact, it often did the opposite and raises the morale in a odd way like london can take it and the blitz and so on, so forth. >> they talk about the air wars as being a defeat. >> yes. >> a defeat for the bombers. >> but there's another reason, though. which is that the british were desperate in, i think, hamburg was '42. there was no way the british then or -- because they were -- no, it must have been earlier. and they -- 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, that kind of thing. it was too costly because they didn't have the kind of equipment that allowed you to bomb there a great height. so, this he had to go too low and were losing bomber crews like flies. and so that's why they thought this new aktic of bombing civilians and demoralizing them. once they started doing that, it got progressively worse. something that would have still thought to be an atrocity, except, by the way, when it came to the fuzzy wu sflchlt zies in the colony because the first instance of bombing civilians, i think it was in iraq. when churchill, and bomber harris was already involved then, that's when it started. when they started doing large scale in germany t got progressively worse and more vintictive. then in japan it was even worse than that because the cities were made of wooden houses and they dropped p had. osfur bombs and -- the famous phrase by the american air force gentlemen of bombing them back to the stone age people associate with vietnam. actually, he said that when they were -- in '44 and -- i think late '44 when they were bombing japan. and as robert mcnamara later in the famous documentary by erroll macdonald said that if the allies had lost the war, they would have been war criminals. >> although when the moral equivalence idea is brought up, once it's stressed -- and people have said it's 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 only got killed in the rebillions in the camp. >> that's absolutely true. also, they didn't do it because there was some ideological program of exterminating germans or japanese. it was an act of war. t it was an atrocious act of war but it was an act of war as it were the war against the jews have nothing to do about military exercise. >> and, in fact, 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? >> well, 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 the boys to come home. so, the appetite to prolong it was very low. and there was also the fear at that stage that it is soviets would invade japan first. and so they did want to bring -- 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 even after the second atom bomb on nagas i nagasaki, the japanese war council, and they were the ones who had to decide on whether to surrender or not, and it had to be unanimous decision and die-hards in the war council said they had to fight until the last man, woman and child. it was the only second time during his rein he stepped in -- he did step in and said, no, no,ing 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 there would be a communist inspired rebellion. the other thing the atom bombs did was that it gave the die-hards in some way an excuse to surrender because they could say, well, this is force ma jeer. we haven't lost face. we fought a war. we were not defeated but with a weapon like that, i mean, it's like boxing somebody and your opponent suddenly draws a gun. what can you do? it served as a way out. whether it was absolutely necessary, as i said, we won't know because they would have surrendered but it may have taken more time. the more -- i would like to know what martin thinks because you've written on this more than i have. the moral question shg, there is a moral difference between fire bombing tokyo and killing more than 100,000 people in a few nights? and using an atam bomb and killing 67 -- and the numbers are not the relevant factor but, let's say, killing an equivalent number of people. is there a difference between one -- 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 spent an incredible amount of money making those bombs. and they wanted it -- >> you've got to use them. >> you would have thought they were just a demonstration over the ocean, perhaps. but they had to make those two things count. i don't know. this comes up all the time, the moral difference. did you feel it was a moral difference when -- in syria when chemical weapons were used? >> well, be i -- no, it waebts meetly clear to me because, 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, well, we have to go to war because they're using chemical weapons, i'm a bit dubious about that distinction. >> well, i think, you know, chemical weapons and biological weapons, that they -- they're exponential weapons. and i think one should have certainly in terms of international policing. >> yeah. >> you have to have a different -- >> to ban them, of course. i'd be in entirely in favor of that. but to say there's an absolute moral distinction, i'm not sure about that. >> not an absolute one but partly practical one. >> yes. >> they do kill lots of people and they can and go on -- >> yes, but then you'd somewhere to say gassing people also kills a lot of people more quickly and more efficiently than shooting them. was there a moral distinction between the gas chambers and sending and shooting people in the neck? >> the gas claim bers were a phenomenon because they probably would have got closed by just using bullets. gas was cheaper than bullets. >> that's a practical matter. >> yes. >> thank you. i've learned a lot from the things you've said. i really liked what you said about the fact that we're all very educated, does that mean we're better and act so differently from the ignorant elite people of this world. for me the question -- the question then is what formation should we be talking about to help humanity, to make sure people behave well, or are we doomed to believe that there's no formation or 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, you know, we just become violent and along with this i realize in the last few years, especially in this country, the humanities of taking a hit and, you know, technology -- studies in technology and science seems to be what the universities want to promote. they bring more money in, i realize. are they thinking also 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 -- >> the novel -- >> any one of you will help me think through these, whether -- what kind of formation -- >> i'm not sure i can help you, but unless you're religious and you believe 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 the 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. [ inaudible ] >> i'm sorry? [ inaudible ] >> what about him? [ inaudible ] >> well, no, i'm not saying all human beings are monsters. von herfer. was a moral hero. he was a -- [ inaudible ] >> yes. again, i don't think that if circumstances -- if you have a government or if you -- well, a government or an occupation or whatever it is that works on people's basic instincts, i don't think -- 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 the moral heroes. the moral heroes are probably even rarer. and even if the worst circumstances, you will have moral heroes and von herfer was one of them. he stood up to the nazi regime. he paid with his life. he was an intently decent and moral human being are as were others in germany. >> i'm trying to make the point that other -- >> that determines whether you're going to be a monster or a hero? yes. that may be true, but again, i think what -- 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. there wasn't much heroism in germany. and, you know, people -- there are many more monsters than there are heroes, i'm sure of that. they said -- >> yes. >> in the camps, in our auschwitz about one in ten of the ss were monsters who clearly got the sexual satisfaction. >> yes. >> one in what -- >> it's much more dangerous to be a moral hero. to be a monster is easy. >> the real heroes don't -- that's -- a minor consideration to the real hero. >> absolutely. >> the moral hero. >> absolutely. >> on that same point you mentioned george steiner and primo levy and he said one of the best novels -- >> what novels? >> "alone in berlin" or as it's translated in the u.s. "every man dies alone." i wondered if you or ian hadmy information about the moral of the author or the -- >> i'm not entirely clear what the -- >> of that novel? >> yes, of that novel. he was considered to be part of inner immigration, so more or less 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. he didn't say he was a hero but he was able to kind of give voice to what germans experienced during the war. >> when was that published "alone in berlin"? >> it was published in 2010 by penguin in the uk. it was published in 1947. it was published a month before his death. >> i couldn't finish that novel. i got about halfway through. he goes off on a huge red herring with the gueestoppo. he has them wearing the star during the invasion of france, and the star didn't come in until september of '41. why all the inaccuracies? but the writing of that book was very courageous. have you seen that -- the diary of a man in despair" with absolutely scathing, hate-filled, very intelligent reaction to the nazi rule. not a day-by-day diary but little chunks that he hid ten feet deep in his garden, but just to put pen to paper was dep in his garden. just put pen to paper is heroic. >> like the diaries of victor klemper. the linguistic's professor? a heroic day-by-day account. >> i don't know if heroic is quite the word, but a fascinating one. the question of integration is a very important one. of course, not every system allows that. the difference between, i think, nazi germany, unless you were jewish, in which case you were doomed. if you were a non-jewish german, inter-immigrations with a possibility. you didn't stick your neck out, you tended your roses, and you would survive. under mao, this was absolutely impossible, or stalin. you had to actively anticipate and voice your enthusiasm. and you couldn't just withdraw and row treat, and so on. it wasn't an option. >> thank you. >> i want to look -- my question is about japan. the japanese government is becoming more and more right wing and also the 1945 commemoration 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 blamed 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 alcoholic. 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 japan that 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 it was as easy as you have depicted. were there not more than a score, perhaps, as many of 30 active plots against hitler the most famous of which in 44. but there were 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 up 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 -- 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 -- 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 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 contemplate. and he says that is what topped people, not the physical courage necessarily but the shame. >> thank you. 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