In reply • • .
Sir: On the whole I believe that journalists should be prepared to take the kind of criticism which they themselves dish out, and I have not therefore replied until now to the letters commenting on my article on the film Holocaust. As the weeks have gone by, however, it seems your readers have been presented with such an increasingly distorted view of what I was trying to say that I hope I may be permitted to set the record straight.
Far from 'helping to prepare another Auschwitz', as one of your correspondents was kind enough to suggest last week, I was in fact trying to penetrate as honestly as I could to the pyschological roots of all racial prejudice. I took it for granted that readers of the Spectator would scarcely need argument to convince them that the Nazi crimes against the Jews and other racial groups constituted an offence against humanity only perhaps equalled by the atrocities of Stalin's Russia. I went on, however, to explore the extent to which that dangerous tendency of groups of human beings to talk in terms of human values and absolute morality, while unconsciously only seeing those moral imperatives as attaching to relations within their own group, is wellnigh universal.
Where I have obviously got into trouble is in suggesting, in my references to Moses and Mr Begin, that on occasion even Jews have shown symptoms of this tendency (as have the Christian Church, Englishmen, Americans and any group you like to think of). To suggest that Jews alone in the world have not displayed that psychological tendency is absurd, and! was deeply grateful to Mr George Edinger for his letter last week supporting that -point. Obviously it would be ludicrous to go on to equate all instances of this kind of 'group-think' with the excesses of Nazism. But the point I was trying to make was that so soon as any group sees itself in some special moral position vis-a-vis history or divine dispensation, we may look out for the dangers of a blind self-righteousness creeping in, leading to a vicious circle of similar reactions from others, and potentially to the most alarming consequences.
As for Holocaust, I would just like to repeat that the reason why the film provoked me to tears of shock and anger was not that I do not wish the younger generation to be made familiar with the facts of that terrible time. On the contrary, I am all for us being reminded of the facts in ways commensurate with the almost unimaginable inhumanity that prevailed in Hitler's Europe between 1933 and 1945. What I and a great many others found shocking was that these facts could be fictionalised in such a cheap, loose and sentimental manner as to demean the most tragic theme of our lifetime to the level of an unholy marriage between entertainment and propaganda.
Christopher Booker London NW3
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