I You We Them: Journeys Beyond Evil: The Desk Killer in History and Today

Description

A landmark historical investigation into crimes against humanity and the nature of evil that is over two decades in the making. ‘The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.’ Hannah Arendt I You We Them is a study of the psychology of some of the least visible perpetrators of crimes against humanity, the ‘desk killers’ who ordered and directed some of the worst atrocities of the last two hundred years. It is also an exploration of corporate responsibility and personal culpability today, connecting the bureaucratic blindness that created desk killing to the same moral myopia that exists now in the calm, clean offices of global capitalism. It is a journal of discovery, based on decades of research, interviews with hundreds of participants, and extensive first-hand experience. It encompasses extended investigations into a number of specific cases, moving from the brutalities of Empire to the scorched oil fields of the Niger Delta, from the industrial complex of Auschwitz to the empty sites of the Bosnian *; bearing witness, recording, and attempting to understand. It is a synthesis of history, reportage and memoir, a sustained meditation on the nature of responsibility and injustice, and a book that will change the way we think about our past, present and future. Gretton raises profoundly unsettling questions about the capacity for doing evil that exists within all of us, and the ways in which the distancing effect of technology allows perpetrators to avoid thinking about the consequences of their actions. * Irish Times * A complex and exceptional book. Gretton’s determination to bear witness so long after the events themselves does not diminish the power of his story. On the contrary his decision to make it personal intensifies the impact… The book highlights how society in general is susceptible to a form of collective amnesia, a wish not to confront the troubling details in its past. John Berger observed that “the role of capitalism is to destroy history… to orientate all effort and imagination to that which is about to occur”. Dan Gretton’s profound moral effort in this book is a massive bulwark against that possibility and a * that the truth will be heard. * New Statesman * Not since Gitta Sereny’s vast script of Into That Darkness arrived on my desk have I read anything so disturbing as the early draft of Dan Gretton’s book. I was shaken to the core by his brilliant treatment of the Wannsee meeting… The book seemed to be humming with life… much more alive than anything I’ve read for ages… I’m certainly grateful for having been given the chance to read this amazing work. A book of extraordinary importance and urgency – we need this book now. For its determined, passionate, and vulnerable seeking; for its insistence on what matters. Climate catastrophe tells us the reach of the desk killer has never been greater. We must take the hope and political will in this book as our own: forged in darkness and therefore – inextinguishable. Great books never occur out of a desire for greatness, but often out of a possessed persistence in the face of a chosen and immensely difficult task. This is such a book. In it, through it, a century speaks to us – not with the thunderous voice of History, but in the intimate voice of a sequence of confessions. — John Berger