I learned last week that Residents of a small part of Notting Hill paid more in capital gains tax in 2020 than the populations of Manchester, Liverpool and Newcastle combined, according to tax records.
I have spent a fair amount of my life living in Notting Hill - my father worked in a greengrocer’s there - and although I have never been wealthy, this really brought home to me the depth of inequality which I have made myself comfortable with.
I couldn’t help connecting up the experience with going, last week, to see the film, ‘The Zone of Interest’ which depicts the comfortable family life of the Hoss family just outside the walls of Auschwitz. I was also uncomfortably reminded of my visit to see the London production of ‘Cabaret’ which is likewise about living in a condition of denial, during the rise of the Nazis.
The Hoss family are not only materially comfortable, but they are morally comfortable - sure in their sense that the fact thousand are being murdered outside their walls have nothing to do with them, or if it does have something to do with them, then it is justifiable.
It is really no different from 17th century slaveowners thoughtlessly justifying the transporation of slaves, or the sending of children down the mines in the 19th century. Our capacity for wilful moral blindness it appears is limitless and very much not confined to mid century Germany.
But this not just a matter for the past. The uncomfortable feeling that the Zone of Interest gave me, is that in many ways , I was part of that criminally indifferent German family - and always have been. Because I - we - live in a state of denial. I have to. I don’t belive I could survive psychologically if I didn’t.
It’s true in this country we no longer subscribe to slavery and colonialism, and of course we oppose genocide. But in a highly connected post-colonal world, who are ‘we’ any more? As concepts of nationhood collapse under the aegis of globalisation, and an interconnected world, it seems everyone now is my neighbour. And that may sounds just peachy, until you realise that your neighbours are in dire straits and you are doing nothing at all about it. Not even thinking about it much, probably - like the Hoss family.
Is the suffering of our neighbours - the Gazans, or the Jews, or the Ukrainians, or the population of many of the countires where there is desperate poverty and the cruellest of exploitation - any different to the suffering of the slaves or children our society turned their backs on, when there was something as distinctive as a national society? In a globalised world, aren’t we all guilty
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