The Holocaust on YouTube

Yesterday, in a marathon 4 hour successful attempt at study evasion, I sat and watched almost endless videos on YouTube.

It was Holocaust Day - something I always remember because it's my brother Richard's birthday, and besides, we have a grandparent of Jewish lineage.

After watching God knows how many music videos, and a handful of entertaining home-made ones (I can certainly recommend Bride has Massive Hair Wig Out), I remembered it was Holocaust Day. Unusually there seemed nothing on the TV to commemorate it, so I searched for original footage on YouTube.

I found, without much difficulty, a series of videos called Nazi death camps : Cruel British footage of liberations. These clips each had a huge warning about the shocking nature of the material, how it was completely unedited, and this seemed to be borne out by the comments on the first page.

It's 8:45 long, longer than I'd usually tolerate on YouTube, and I prepared for some seriously shocking stuff. It showed the British liberation of Bergen-Belsen in Spring 1945. The thousands of emaciated corpses that awaited the liberators must have been shocking and unforgettable. However, 62 years on, to anyone who's ever watched a documentary or read about the Holocaust, it's nothing that hasn't been exposed thousands of times before.

[I'm running the risk of sounding jaded here, so I should emphasise that the Holocaust never ever should lose the capacity to shock, and indeed it hasn't. See the powerful novel Fugitive Pieces for further details. ]

So for me, easily the most fascinating material wasn't the video, but in fact the comments. So far, there are 144 comments on the first clip of the series alone. It was surprising how many nazi-sympathetic postings there were. Dare I say how refreshing it is to have uncensored access to these idiots? It's only by exposing this stuff to the oxygen of rationale to comments such as "Sieg HeiL, Sieg HeiL, fuck all jews!!" that these backward ideas will finally die.

But the stuff that shocks me again and again is something rather different. Am I alone in finding mundane responses to events such as (and not excluding) the Holocaust almost intolerably inappropriate? Is "How cruel" a comment more suitable for an incident of playground bullying than for one of the most barbaric episodes of human history? My friend Carolyn and I went to see the excellent film The Pianist a few years ago at the Mac, an arts centre in Birmingham. The scene where nazis throw an old man out of a first floor window in the Warsaw Ghetto was greated by tutting from a number of audience members! I struggle to think of a greater insult to the victims. Tutting is a response I would expect to receive if I dropped litter in the street.

In If this is a man, Primo Levi notes that if the Holocaust had continued, then over time a completely new vocabulary would have had to develop. Because the word "cold" doesn't really come close to describing spending a winter in Poland in the open air wearing only a thin shirt. And hunger is what we feel when we've skipped a meal, and to a concentration camp inhabitant would have been something of an enviable condition.

But enough of diversionary tactics such as genocide and mass suffering. It's time to do my marketing homework.

A blog wouldn't be a blog without some self-referentialism

This morning my friends Kevin and Kathy in Manchester sent my husband Dave an email saying "Word has reached us that your blog-hating wife has set up a blog."

Obviously, in the past few days, since setting up Traffic Light Musing amid a level of self-publicity that friends and family alike have come to expect from me, I've been reflecting upon the whole nature of blogging afresh, as an "insider", as it were.

The World in 2007, published by The Economist, contains an article on Web 2.0 entitled When the hype dies down. It predicts that in 2007, the Web 2.0 hype will abate and meanwhile "the rest of the world - people who may be hearing the words "blog" "wiki" and "podcast" for the first time - will begin to use the new media as they become simple and ubiquitous..." As an aside, the whole point of blog software is surely that it is simple in its essence - taking the complexity out of creating a web content and simplifying stuff like adding graphics and so on..

Back to the main thrust, as an outsider, I made the mistake of seeing blogging as an atomised activity, like a diary. But now that I'm a blogger myself, I see clearly how sociable blogging really is. Since starting my own blog, I'm much more likely to engage in other people's blogs such as my colleague Nadeem's. Instead of being an inward introverted activity, it's just a novel form of communication. Actually, I hardly know Nadeem, as he's fairly new at Talis, and we work on different teams. However, I have insights about his beliefs and thought processes through reading his blog that I would never have obtained from office small-talk, or more arguably, from a personal website.

So if The Economist is right, we'll soon be able to communicate routinely at a new level of depth with pretty much everyone.

Mud blood and poppycock

I've just finished reading a great book on World War One called Mud blood and poppycock. The author, Gordon Corrigan, with an entire career in the upper echelons of the armed forces behind him, sets out to destroy a number of the persistent myths of WW1 in a robustly argumentative but persuasive style.

Most memorably, he challenges the idea of there having been a "lost generation", arguing that, in fact, both German and French fatalities were significantly higher. He has a raft of statistics to support his argument, for example for every 12 men mobilised, only 1 was killed. He suggests that the reason for this perceived "lost generation" is the way that Britain mobilised troops i.e. usually by geographical location, so The Battle of The Somme, for example, will have produced a concentrated number of casualties in specific communities.

This really surprised me. But not so much as his contention that it was not the generals who were to blame for unnecessary bloodshed. Rather, the meddling politicians of the era, especially Lloyd George, had more blood on their hands than history admits. The most memorable scene from Blackadder Goes Forth, for me, was the scene on the eve of the battle, where a group of NCOs are standing around a map of the battlefield with tin soldiers arranged, and one of them simply picks up a pan and brush and sweeps all the soldiers into the dustbin. This seems to resonate with people. But a few years ago, I read The Wipers Times, a series of satirical journals produced in the trenches, and I was struck how much criticism was meted out to Lloyd George compared to the military leaders.

This was a good read, though quite hard work as there's quite a lot of military detail, and I particularly enjoyed the occasional lapse into military vernacular such as a soldier's biggest fear being the loss of his "wedding tackle"!! How quaint.

Five things - ok it's my turn

Here are five things that you might not know about me. On the other hand, you might already know them, given that I have a marked tendency to go on and on about stuff...

1. Let's go for the jugular and start with the most dramatic one. In early 1990, I got held up by gunpoint in a pub in the West End. It's a great story.

2. I owe my marital status to a bet. I won £30 AND a future husband!

3. My favourite form of stressbusting is to read lesbian detective novels. I love them.

4. I once had plastic surgery (ok so most of you already know that).

5. I am an ex-page three girl! When I was a baby my photo appeared on page three of the Sun, on the letters page!

So there you go.

Disintermediation of political parties?

I'm reading the Lyons Review of Local Government "National prosperity, local choice and civic engagement" at the moment. It's a fairly seminal document, and a lot of the ideas contained within it were destined to reappear in the Local Government White Paper "Strong and prosperous communities", published in October 2006.

Both the Lyons Review and subsequently the White Paper, are concerned with levels of civic engagement in British society. They both reference the problem of low turn-out rates in local government elections.

But an interesting thing happened to me this week. Within the space of 24 hours, I received two completely separate emails, each asking me to sign the Petition Against The Road Tax on the Number 10 website. I duly signed. It seemed quite popular - in fact the TV news that night reported that a phenomenal 253,000 have signed it so far. I also signed the petition to get rid of British Summertime. It seems that, in spite of all that we say about political apathy in the post-cold war period, people still have opinions about particular interests, and want to make a difference if they can find a way of doing so.

So is the problem, in fact, political parties? That would seem to make sense, given the broad detachment from big ideas that is characteristic of post-Cold War intellectual life. Let's say that political parties have traditional been about a recognition of collective social interests and a formulation of over-arching ideas that meet those interests.

In a fragmented society that no longer believes in either broad social groupings or big ideas, could electronic petitions, and other micro-forms of consultation, in fact be the way forward for modern democracies? Not forever, I hope. I like to think that humanity will one day find it in itself to put the traumas of the 20th century behind it, and rehabilitate the Big Idea. But for the time being, it keeps the grey cells active, and maybe maintains the idea that people can make a difference.

To be honest, I don't even know whether or not it's a good thing. That's not the point of this entry. But that might be where things are headed. After all, librarians have to cope with disintermediation, so why shouldn't politicians feel some of the pain?