All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing. Words misattributed to Edmund Burke but irrefutable whoever said them. It's easy to do nothing.
At the weekend we took a delivery of logs from a local farm. Ideal to stave off the cold in what might yet be a cold winter. The log man arrived in his pick up truck and dumped the load on our drive. It was a swift and efficient operation.
My daughter was clearly impressed by this and praised the log man's truck to him. But he was not at all happy with his new vehicle.
Ever since taking delivery of this truck, he said, he has suffered abuse. Assuming him to be a gypsy or traveller, he has been sworn at, shouted at and even ejected from a supermarket car park, something he now intends to take up with the supermarket's head office. He didn't even make it inside the shop. "Two men in suits came out and asked me to leave", he complained. "I'll never shop there again."
The log man was experiencing first hand the kind of discrimination that many communities must suffer on a daily basis. But it was not so much the behaviour that appeared to hurt - it was the fact that others would look on approvingly or at the very least, quietly, whilst others screamed "gypo" in his direction.
The Pianist
A couple of weeks ago I re-watched Polanski's film, The Pianist. The link between the Jewish experience and that of our log man's trials was clear. Germany went from having a "normal" culture where there was a degree of tolerance of other communities to one where decent people were prepared to look the other way whilst those amongst them were abused and in time, murdered in broad daylight.
If Hans Fallada's fictional account of Nazi Germany is to be believed (Alone in Berlin), then not all Germans were comfortable with the rise of the Third Reich. But the persecution of the Jews surely demonstrates the enabling nature of tacit assent. Whether out of fear or the power of crowds, many said nothing.
Where we tolerate blatant discrimination, then surely we are complicit. Those who looked on and nodded whilst the log man was ejected from the supermarket car park were surely equally culpable. Those who yelled "gypo" at him certainly were.
The most insidious thing about such racism or at the very least blatant discrimination is its casual nature. It is throwaway hate. Lord Victor Adebowale said recently on Desert Island Discs of his time as a street sweeper. "I learned that cruelty can be very casual...You do get to see how people behave around each other and what they do when they think no-one's looking - and how they treat people who they think are inconsequential."
Poor behaviour is often incredibly polite. We had a taste of this a few months back when walking around a nearby beauty spot. A group of pleasant people approached us to ask that we sign a petition preserving, as they put it, the local area. These were well-mannered, well-dressed, and likeable people. They showed us a map of the surroundings and in the course of the next few minutes, it became clear that they didn't want a traveller camp to be given planning permission near them. They were intent upon whipping up objections.
It was not just that they dressed up discrimination in pleasantries. That was predictable enough. It was that they assumed that we would be complicit in this act. It was the sense that "people like us" do not like people like them.
Such assumptions are seductive. So many of us want to be liked and included that we can allow ourselves to ignore or tolerate behaviours that are, in reality, deeply offensive. It is not comfortable to reject the pleas of nice people but to do otherwise is to engage in discrimination. It can be easy to go along with racist jokes by not laughing and by shuffling uneasily. But saying nothing doesn't address this problem.
So if you're in a car park when someone in a white pick up truck is abused or challenged, you might well be tempted to ignore it or just go about your business. Or you might choose to report them for discriminatory behaviour.
Standing by and doing nothing means that you are really doing quite a lot.
But nothing helpful.