continued rise of communist in the soviet union and china. c-span recorded this event in 20913. 2013. ian buruma professor of human rights in journalist at bard college was educated in holland and japan. he's won several awards for his work among them the international erasmus prize and journalism award, publications he writes for in the new york review of books, new yorker, "new york times," and r.c. handleblog and the guardian, which recently published his highly learned and highly entertaining review of the british museum's current exhibition shunga, sex and pleasure in japanese art. also taming the gods, religion and democracy on three continents. murder in amsterdam, liberal europe and inventing japan 1863 to 1964. in the year 0, history of 1945, most of which he wrote while he was a fellow at the common center in 2011-12 to the series fellow, fellows, he was so productive, 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 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. "for it helps me to make sense of myself and indeed all of our lives in the long, dark shadow of what came before." the "wall street journal" called "year zero" remarkable in combination of magnificence and modesty and the financial times describes it elegant, humane, luminous. martin amos honored at the library lion published more than 20 books including several collections of stories and many novels among them money, london fields, times arrow, and most recently lionel, state of england. amos received the james tate black memorial prize for memoir experience and named one of the 50 greatest british writers since 1945 by the times, "london times" in 2008. 1945 seems to be a theme here tonight. 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 and then take a few questions from the audience. there are mics towards the front on by this sides. please, come up to the mic rather than try to speak from your chair. be and then they will sign books. so when they're finished speaking, please, let them get out to the table there to sign. please welcome ian buruma and martin ramos. [ applause ] >> well, first thing to be said, ian is that this is a tremendous book. very -- it's -- an amazing task of organizing a great view of your kaleidoscopic material, because the war -- 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. and -- it -- it was, apart from being uniquely devastating, 55 million dead. and many -- ruined city -- and all the devastation we know of, it was, it looks increasingly weird and grotesque, i think, some aspects of the war in that it wasn't blundered into like the it wasn't blundered into like the first world war. there was one man. the japanese experience is slightly different but can almost be considered separately. but one man brought this about. and shaped by the years that preceded it. and i've been spending recent years writing about this war ask wondering about it. and it was -- apart from being uniquely devastating, 55 million dead, and many a ruined city, and all of the devastation we know of, it was -- it looks increasingly weird and grotesque, i think, some of this -- some aspects of the war in that it wasn't blundered into like the first world war. 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 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 pedantic 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, 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 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 extermanist 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 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 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 like with other human beings, you also 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 war, they explained serbian violence against the muslims as saying these are ancient hatreds and they explode at a certain time. i don't think hatred is necessarily ancient even though there are myths that keep coming back and are manipulated by politicians and leaders be and so on, in order to put people up to violence. but i don't think there's such a thing as a smoldering hatred that suddenly like a volcano 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 own leaders as well as 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 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 deheroize the allies. and that usually goes along the 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 procreational 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 indies, so on, the 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, algeria. so who is sent to algeria, 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 adduces, 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 tyrannical in the white house. but the police are what stops violence, going back a couple of 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 schumann absolutely beautifully and read poems by goethe 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 religious 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 wehrmacht in poland and in russia who, you know, would go and kill everyone in a village and babi yar, 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 in 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. rajeef -- 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 apogee 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 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 humulus 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 konigsberg in east prussia, they were machine gunning mental patients to clear bed space for people 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 konigsberg 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 clear answer to, but it's a factor. >> yeah. >> as we sit here. >> very closely allied to what primo levy called literary lectu lecturery, when you would come to these horribly, 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 there was a sort of 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 nanking" 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 as the japanese are particularly cruel and barbaric. again, circumstances. how is it possible that an army behaved like that even though in the russo-japanese war in 1905 the japanese army was known for its discipline and how well it treated its p.o.w.s and 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 brutes and shoot them all. and i think that's what -- i don't think miele was an act of, 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 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 provincial 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 how ramified it all was. this is talking about yugoslavia. parties in several civil wars going on at the same time, fought along ethnic, political and religious lines. croatian catholics versus orthodox serbs versus muslim bosnians, versus communist palozans versus slovenian guardsmen 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 -- >> right. 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 vichy regime would have never come to power if it hadn't been for 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 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-speaking flemish nationalists were deliberately enflamed against the french-speaking walloons. 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 ways, the problems go on, and the problems which had 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 vichy 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 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 went on there. the culture of mcarthur, the revamping of japan, root, ball and twig. the emperor had to confess he was human and not divine. >> 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, for a long time believed, it was prussian military spirit that all influenced this. of course, later we knew better. >> the prussians were the officers, the colonels -- >> who tried to assassinate hitler in 1944, 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 goethe and all that. there was a real culprit, the nazi, the ss, the gestapo. 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 would 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 censorship board -- it wasn't called the censorship board but 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 anecdotes, one -- well, one about what happened to your father and then that very nice epilogue to your book. >> 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 utrecht 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 hazing 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 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 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, raf at night, u.s. army 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 from hunger. >> vermin. >> vermin, fleas. in his case, he was particularly frightened. he said those that didn't have fleas didn't have lice, vice versa. he was nursed back to healin a 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 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 key word because i think there was yearning for some kind of normality and to go back to the world the way 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. finally 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 world 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 world 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 tactic 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 wuzzys 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 vindictive. then in japan it was even worse than that because the cities were made of wooden houses and they dropped phosphor 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 rebellions 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. 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 military exercise. it was purely about killing. >> 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 the soviets 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 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 still argued that they had to fight till the last man, woman and child. it was the only second time in his rein that the emperor stepped in. i'm sure he didn't do it after 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 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 majeure. 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 really. >> well -- >> no, the moral question. is there a moral difference between firebombing 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 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 wasn't immediately 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 would have to say gassing also kills a lot of people more quickly and efficiently than shooting them, but was there a moral distinction between the gas chambers and sending in people and shooting people in the neck? >> the gas chambers were a phenomenon because they probably would have got closed by just using bullets. gas was cheaper than bullets. >> but that's a practical consideration. >> 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 question ] >> i'm sorry? >> what about -- [ inaudible ] >> what about him? [ inaudible question ] >> well, no, i'm not saying all human beings are monsters. bonhoeffer 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 bonhoeffer was one of them. he stood up to the nazi regime. he paid with his life. he was an intensely decent and moral human being are as were others in germany. >> i'm trying to make the point that other -- [ inaudible ] >> 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 auschwitz about one in ten of the ss were monsters who clearly got the sexual satisfaction. >> yes. >> but, what, one in 1,000 were heroes in the prisoners? >> it's much more dangerous to be a moral hero in those circumstances. 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 primo levy said that "alone in berlin" was one of the best novels. >> i'm sorry, which novel? >> "alone in berlin" or as it's translated in the u.s. "every man dies alone." i wondered if you or ian had any information about the moral immigration of the author or the novel. >> i'm not entirely clear of what -- >> 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 the last book that he published after his death. he died a month before it was published. >> i couldn't finish that novel. i got about halfway through. he goes off on a huge red herring with the gestapo. and odd things like he has them wearing the star during the invasion of france, which is 1940, and the star didn't come in until september of '41. sort of wild inaccuracies of that kind. 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 10 feet deep in his garden. >> like viktor klemper. a linguistics professor. kind of a heroic day-by-day account. >> it's a fascinating one. but your question over inner immigration is a very important one because of course not every system allows that. the difference i think between actually nazi germany, unless you were jewish, in which case you were doomed. but if you were a non-jewish german in nazi germany or in most fascist states, inner immigration was a possibility. you didn't stick your neck out. you kept quiet. you tended your roses. and you would survive. under mao this was absolutely impossible. or stalin. you had to actively participate and voice your enthusiasm and you couldn't just withdraw and retreat and so on. it wasn't an option. >> thank you. >> my question is about japan. currently japanese government is becoming more and more right wing and also 1945 commemorates the beginning of the nuclear war, so to speak. and now japanese government tried to sell the nuclear industries. what do you think about that? >> this is a long way from 1945, although not entirely. let's leave the nuclear question aside for a minute. the right wing nature of the current prime minister does go back to 1945. and part of the reeducation of japan in 1945, '46, '47, was that the americans wrote, as you well know, wrote a new constitution. and because the war was blamed on militarism, it was a pacifist constitution. and most japanese were perfectly content -- >> proud of it. >> proud of it even. but some japanese nationalists felt this was robbing japan of its sovereignty. if you can't use military force in any -- under any circumstances in foreign policy then you have to leave it up to somebody 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 mainstream in japan, and especially the left, used the argument against revision of the constitution by saying look, japan is as it were a bit like an alcoholic. you can't start waving a drink under its nose because it will go back to its bad ways, look what happened in nanking and manila and so on. we should never be tempted again. as long as that argument is used, the nationalist revisionists, the right, will say well, every country has wars in its 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. that's the attitude of the current prime minister. and what's disturbing about it is that history has become so polarized and politicized in japan that nobody's talking about -- nobody attempts to find the truth anymore, it's all about what political agenda you have and that determines your view of the war rather than facing it coolly a lly and squas the germans have learned how to do. late, but they learned. >> i think they learned. >> yeah. >> 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 as 30 active plots against hitler the most famous of which was shtaufenberg in '44 but were there not many, many others and were there not military groups, religious groups, and other groups of people who did not care for hitler and many of whom actively worked against them? for example, alan dulles and military intelligence were cooperating very, very closely. but anglo-saxon -- or anglo-american historians seem not to realize that. is that in fact true? >> the only institution that stood up to hitler effectively was the army. i think the army just -- all the opposition in the army melted after france. in the summer of 1940. no one believed that he could conquer france in the way he had proposed. and he did it, and it did look like a miracle. and even some very sound and good people like james helmut van malke said just for a couple of weeks or so i thought, well, he's a bit rough around the edges but look at this. france, the historical enemy. but once the army came aboard, that was the end of the opposition. >> and he got rid of generals very quickly who didn't go along with him. so there were indeed people in germany who opposed him in the '30s. but the use of terror was very effective. so it took more and more courage to oppose him openly became almost impossible. so yes -- >> once he was in power. >> once he was in power. and there were 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 -- i don't think it's anglo-american prejudice to say there was not -- there was not much in the way of real organized opposition. there was some. there were opposition groups here and there in the army elsewhere. but not much. >> but the people -- i mean, when the assassination attempt, the colonels plot, failed he had the nation behind him still. >> and most germans did okay. as long as you weren't jewish. and until people got badly bombed. they were better than people in occupied countries. life wasn't all that bad. i mean, it was oppressive. but it took a huge amount of courage to actively resist it. and i don't think there was a huge amount of it. >> van malke goes into this. 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 to death torture, and you had to withstand that because naming no names. and it's not very accessible to us. but it was a very german thing that in the occupied countries any criminal could die like a martyr. but in germany it was arranged so that any martyr would die like a criminal. you wouldn't be celebrated after your death. your wife would turn your photograph around, your parents wok wouldn't talk to you, your children would be told -- >> that doesn't matter after you're dead. >> no. but it's a sort of ignominy that a german would find very difficult to contemplate. and van malke says that was what actually stopped people, it's not the physical courage, it was the shame. [ applause ] >> thank you. >> thanks very much. you're watching american history tv. every weekend on c-span 3 explore our nation's past. c-span 3. created by america's cable television companies as a public service to brought to you today by your television provider. following more than four years of world war, 51 countries joined forces on october 24th, 1945 to create the united nations in hopes of preventing future wars and promoting peace and just worldwide. up next we feature films on the u.n.'s 75th anniversary.

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