Would it have been possible to avert the onset of World War II, in which up to 75million people are estimated to have died? Or to prevent the annihilation of six million Jews, or the Romanies and homosexuals who were also butchered crudely and mercilessly by the Nazis? 

And if so, how might that have been done? What could have worked, that would not itself have triggered an explosion that might have ended up making matters even worse?
 
It is impossible to answer those questions definitively. Whatever we say can easily be dismissed as mere speculation. Which, of course, it is. And besides, what does it matter? What happened happened. Dwelling on the past serves little or no purpose.

Or so we are sometimes told. But the truth is different. Knowledge of the past can offer us a way of better understanding the threats of the present and where they might take us in the future.
 
We are in one of those moments now, where that is of immediate, dramatic importance.

VAULTS IN ROME

So how did it happen? There was a complex of factors involved in creating and shaping the bloody continuum that led to the beaches of Normandy on 6 June 1944.

But we can see, looking back, that the drift in Germany towards the most fanatical, belligerent, expansionist form of fascism took shape over almost a decade. During that time, a hateful ideology – that is, an ideology full of hate – was allowed to cement itself. It might have been challenged effectively anywhere along that road – but it wasn’t.

Those who could have acted decisively to oppose it didn’t. The proponents of Aryan superiority became progressively more emboldened. And as the Nazis took an increasingly aggressive line, all over Europe, leaders sat on their hands.

They can hardly have failed to notice that so many German people were becoming enthusiastic devotees of the poisonous ultra-Nationalist, supremacist dogma. Or that others were merely shrugging and carrying on, as if it was business as usual. Some Jewish citizens fled when they could. A minority of intellectuals, bohemians and liberals, meanwhile, felt compelled to hide their real feelings in fear and dread – and in the grim hope that somehow the good ship Germany would right itself in time. 

It didn’t. The persecution of Jews became normalised. Attacks went unpunished. Their properties were looted and stolen from them. Later, as the war progressed, they were forced into slave labour in concentration camps and sent to the gas chambers. Homosexuals were rounded up and slung in jail. Some were castrated. Evil flourished.
 
In 1938, Germany launched an offensive in Sudetenland, in the east of Czechoslovakia. In the Munich agreement of 30 September 1938, the UK, France and fascist Italy sold the pass by accepting the terms put forward by Hitler, allowing Germany to appropriate Sudetenland.
 
One of the most shameful aspects of the slide towards catastrophe – which unfolded on a level never dreamed of before, following Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 – was that the success of the Nazis’ appalling project was being observed with interest by other political groups across Europe, some of whom at least wondered might they apply the same blueprint. 

And then, of course, they did, in Italy, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and in Franco’s Spain. Fascism had its fans among Tories in the UK. As it did in Ireland, with the Roman Catholic-inspired Blueshirts, led by the former Commissioner of An Garda Síochána, Eoin O’Duffy, adopting the stiff-armed salute and going to fight for Franco in the Spanish Civil War.

The Nazi persecution of homosexuals during the 1930s was, of course, approved of by a variety of religious authorities, including the Vatican. For reasons that no rational person can justify, the churches were regarded as the ultimate authorities in relation to sex and sexuality. And they regarded sexual activities between men as a sinful abomination. The more aggressive the treatment meted out to gay men under Hitler’s regime, the better members of the clerical caste liked it. 

There are disagreements among historians about how well, or badly, Pope Pius XII behaved during the war, but – like the UK and France till they were left with no option – the Vatican took what advantage it could, and looked the other way a lot of the time, all the better to ensure that no one would come to loot the wealth stashed in the vaults in Rome.

Looking back on all of this, I thought of the great Jewish writer Paul Auster, who died last week of complications from lung cancer. More than anyone else I have ever read, he successfully conveyed the stark reality that none of us is ever fully in control of what happens to us in this world. We are all victims – if that is the right word – of the time, place and circumstances into which we are born.
 
But not only that. Our lives can turn on a sixpence if a despot comes to power, or a car swings around the nearest corner too fast and ploughs into the queue at a bus stop that we happen to be standing in. Or hits a wall, with a passenger onboard who is fatally injured.

Perversely, what this confirms is that nothing is pre-destined really. Everything can be changed by people doing the wrong thing – or the right. Luck plays a part. And bad luck even more so. One action can set off a chain, the end result of which can alter the course of history immeasurably, even thousands of miles away.
 
As the song says: “And so it goes, and so it goes, and so it goes, and so it goes / Where it started no one knows…”

NOTHING BUT HORROR

Which brings us back to the terrible present.

Since the bloody, sickening and unconscionably brutal incursion into Israel by Hamas on 7 October 2023, in which approximately 1,200 people were murdered and 240 were taken hostage, anyone with half a brain and a conscience has known that the Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu is engaged in a genocidal campaign designed to destroy the infrastructure of Gaza, level the buildings, render the land unusable and kill as many people as possible while absurdly claiming to uphold humanitarian law.

A despot is in power.

At every stage and at every level of this nauseating, blood-soaked assault, Israel has engaged in a sustained campaign of lies, disinformation and propaganda. Time and again, as powerfully set out by Mehdi Hassan in The Guardian, and satirised by Jon Stewart in his Hidden Palestine routine, these lies have been slavishly parroted by the US President Joe Biden, and by US diplomats generally – as well as by a succession of grubbily dishonest European leaders.

With, it has to be said, the honourable exceptions of Ireland and Spain.

The US President and European Prime Ministers alike could – and should – have used every ounce of energy to prevent the massacre of 35,000 people of which Israel now stands guilty. They could – and should – have acted far more assertively to end the theft of land by Israeli land-robbers in the West Bank, which has been happening ‘round the clock, with the explicit backing of the Israeli Minister for Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, and the so-called National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Benjamin Netanyahu. Credit: Jolanda Flubacher

The same applies to every war crime the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (pictured), the government and army have committed in pursuit of what they have turned into an all-out war, including collective punishment of the civilian population; the deliberate and indiscriminate use of ‘dumb bombs’ to kill as many women and children as possible; targeting hospitals to destroy the Gaza medical teams’ capacity to treat the injured and the wounded; demolishing houses and homes, in what has been identified as a campaign of ‘domicide’; denying access to humanitarian aid and food shipments on the flimsiest pretext; engaging in policies designed to create a famine in Gaza – and so on and on and on.

And here’s the thing.

As during the build-up to World War II, the contagion is spreading. On the one hand, everywhere across what is called the West, young people are demanding a ceasefire. On the other, trust in Presidents, in politicians, in the institutions of State, in the diplomatic corps and in the police has collapsed. The nakedly dishonest and violently prejudiced exercising of power in support of a vicious, genocidal militarism has created a chasm that seems impossible to heal.

And so students are protesting, across America, in the UK, in Ireland and elsewhere against Israel's war on Gaza. They are demanding that universities and colleges cut their ties with institutions and companies in Israel. Their demands are righteous, well-founded and insistent. They have shown great courage – because that is what is needed, to challenge the prevailing, rampant hypocrisy. 

But it is in the response of the authorities elsewhere that we see the real parallels with Germany in the 1930s. It is crossing a red line, when vicious masked thugs are allowed to attack student protesters – and the police and security watch and do nothing, as happened in the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Elsewhere in the US, the police have been suborned into using extremely heavy-handed tactics to break up protests, and arrest over 1,600 students. Across the academic world, especially in America, to a thoroughly dispiriting extent, the college authorities have failed to uphold the principle of freedom of ideas and the right to protest.

At every stage the attempt is made to conflate opposition to the Israeli government with anti-semitism – an absurd charge, given that a significant number of Jews are openly and unambiguously active in the protests.
 
But the effect is that the college authorities are now positioning themselves as supporters of Israeli terrorism, as appeasers of a genocidal, apartheid regime and as a parody of what universities should really stand for – places where there is a commitment to the inter-related ideas of enquiry, debate, truth, knowledge, justice and accountability.
 
There may or may not have been a right time for Irish universities to engage in co-operative programmes with Israeli universities – but this is certainly not it. The boycott, divestment and sanctions movement is getting stronger all the time, and justifiably so. Right now, the vast majority in Israel seem to be utterly blind to the need to rein in the shocking excesses of the vicious ultra right-wing coalition which is keeping Netanyahu in power.

The right thing to do, and urgently, is to use every lever available to put pressure on those citizens, so that they exert the equivalent pressure on their own government and army. There are hundreds of thousands of people in Israel, as well as millions of Jews across the world, who feel nothing but horror at what is being done in their name. But they need to be given the fuel to bring others with them. 

Certainly to do nothing is to be complicit. And look at what that has produced to date. 

FASCISTS AND DESPOTS

In Ireland, at least, the message has got through, with Trinity College announcing that they are withdrawing their investment in companies in Israel that have appeared on a UN blacklist – specifically, three companies that are involved in illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
 
“We fully understand the driving force behind the encampment on our campus and we are in solidarity with the students in our horror at what is happening in Gaza,” a statement from Trinity College said. “We abhor and condemn all violence and war, including the atrocities of October 7th and the continuing ferocious and disproportionate onslaught in Gaza. The humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the dehumanisation of its people is obscene.”

It is a start, but the protesting students in the U.S. need to elicit a similar response.

Meanwhile, as I write, the word is that Hamas have accepted the ceasefire proposals put to them by Egypt and Qatar. But news flashes suggest that Israel is planning to proceed with the ground offensive in Rafah that – at this stage – the whole world has pleaded with them to avoid. The probability is that this will result in the further deliberate, devastating, destruction of everything that is needed to survive in Gaza; the direct loss of thousands more lives; and the acceleration of the famine that Israel has been cynically nurturing into existence.

Will they have killed 50,000 people before the world forces them to stop? 60,000? Or more? And if they continue on this genocidal arc, and the west fails to act as it should, what will the self-styled leaders of the free world be left with except a smashed moral compass and their integrity in tatters? And the door open to fascists and despots to drive the world to the brink again.

It should have happened many months ago, and if it happens the dead Palestinian children will not be around to see it – but it is better to do the right thing late than not to do it at all. We can’t turn the clock back. But, even amid the debris, we can learn from history...