In 1993, Steven Spielberg made two blockbuster movies, both based on existing published books. The first was Jurassic Park, based on a book by Michael Crichton, in which he became the first director to depart from the only established method of moving a monster on the big screen (stop motion), which had been laid down 60 years previously with King Kong in 1933, and thereby the first to have monsters produced exclusively by a computer. He showed us prehistory using the technology of the future.
The second film Spielberg made in 1993 also revisited certain monster techniques that had been established 60 years previously, in 1933. It was based on a book by Thomas Keneally, and it won Spielberg an Oscar. In fact it won Oscars for just about every technology that went into the film, and yet, this time, Spielberg depicted a far more recent past, and this time in a raw, unretouched, horrifying reality that told the audience that, even that which was, of necessity, faked, was representative of fact, such that it emptied our souls of comprehension and brought tears welling to our eyes: Schindler’s List. What fundamentally distinguished the books Jurassic Park and Schindler’s Ark was that one told a tale of terrifying fantasy, the other was a terrifying act of faith. There was no tomfoolery among the actors and crew on the set for Schindler’s List, for they all worked with a sense of devotion to a higher calling: to tell a definitive story of a people’s immense suffering at the hands of evil; an act of faith that called on the faith of all faiths to join in united condemnation.
The little girl in red.
Much has been debated around the weaponisation of the Holocaust by members of the worldwide Zionist community (and anti-semites), some of whom are accused of appropriating the suffering of their forebears in order to claim immunity for their own acts, even acts of hatred and evil towards other peoples. None of the current controversies surrounding political acts, acts of violence, war crimes, fake news, spin, legality, propriety or justification surrounding such acts takes away one iota from the horror depicted by Spielberg’s film.
Wildly successful as the film was (making a profit of 300 million dollars), it was not made first and foremost in order to generate revenue. Spielberg in fact put off making the film until he himself, as a Jew, would be in a frame of mind to be able to deal with the topic, especially since a businessman who had owned Jews as slaves would be his film’s hero and protagonist—a good Nazi (don’t forget, that was the proposition that evoked widespread scepticism and misfooted every last one of us back when the film came out).
It was the advancing years of the Los Angeles Holocaust survivor, Poldek Pfefferberg, who had himself been one of Oskar Schindler’s wards, that finally impelled Spielberg, despite the hard work still required on Jurassic Park, to embark upon the filming of Schindler’s List. It took a great deal of Pfefferberg persuading Keneally to write the book, a great deal of persuasion by Keneally to get filmmakers interested in telling his story, and ten years before Spielberg was ready to put the rights bought when the book was published onto celluloid. It is almost as if this story really didn’t want to be told.
If, by any chance, you haven’t seen the movie, I recommend that you do. And, if you have, I recommend that you see it again: there is no inappropriate time for us to remind ourselves of how absolutely awful we can be to one another. Believe me, the potential for evil resides in every one of us. Besides the film’s historical narrative, its prime theme is precisely that: the fact that the ability for good to triumph over evil lies in the hands of ordinary men and women, if we but realised it.
In one of the film’s more philosophical scenes, Schindler and the German officer Göth are sitting late one night with a drink and a packet or two of cigarettes, discussing what is the nature of power. “Power,” says Schindler, “is when we have every justification to kill, and we don’t.”
In the essay below, I tried to get to grips with what that means.
In particular: what is a justification to kill?
Elsewhere, I have argued that objectivity is notoriously impossible to achieve. At various junctures, I have drawn on the example of a court of law determining truth in a case before it. Naturally, an impartial forum must reach its judgment objectively, and yet the two standards that courts apply (balance of probabilities and beyond reasonable doubt) never quite achieve a standard of absolute objectivity. Courts don’t find objective truth; they find enough truth. Enough for their purposes. Enough as is within their powers of comprehension (and it is by their rules of evidence that they exclude ab initio what they cannot comprehend).
It’s therefore conceivable that justification to kill here should be construed as being justification within the evaluation of him who kills (or, as the case may be, forbears from killing), rather than the judgment of him who observes the killing, or its forbearance.
Armed with that observation, we could rephrase Schindler’s line as “Power is when we consider we have every justification to kill, and we don’t.”
That resolves the objectivity/subjectivity conundrum inherent in Schindler’s line, but it throws up another conundrum, one that Göth himself encounters later in the film. He puts this wisdom of Schindler’s into practice by checking his initial reaction of wanting to punish a concentration camp inmate, and instead raising a fingered blessing, such as would a priest or the Lord Jesus, and uttering the words, “I pardon you.”
The camera catches the incredulous look of wonderment on the face of the fortunate recipient of the pardon. And on Göth’s own face ... it is as though the man has just tasted some exotic dish for the first time and can’t quite decide whether it is to his entire taste or whether he would really rather spit it out. As later transpires, Göth’s forbearance is of short duration, and it becomes clear that it is not, on balance, to his taste at all.
In the moment in which Schindler utters his view on what power is, it is to the audience as if Schindler himself, who has lavished great gifts and delicacies on the German command in order to ingratiate himself to them, and thereby be given his choice of workers for his pots and pans factory, holds some ethereal power over the German officer. Clearly Göth likes and, in a certain measure, respects Schindler; at least he likes his anchovies. And Göth is impressed enough by the intellect of this man Schindler to not immediately dismiss what are, on the face of it, contestable truisms.
In Göth’s case, the power that is wielded is the power to command troops, to inflict punishment and to decide over matters of life and death. The prospect of his ever being held to account for the manner in which he exercises this power is distant to non-existent. Within his own microcosm, Göth’s power is as absolute as the French King Louis XIV’s was.
There is many a microcosm in which no end of hierarchies bestow power on individuals in today’s world, which, if they do it responsibly, set boundaries and parameters within which the power is to be exercised. In legal terms, predominantly in the commercial world, we call it intra vires. There are broad principles that apply in the running of a corporation: the directors must act in the interests of the company (a concept that itself is subject to great discussion), within the restrictions imposed by law, and for the purposes contractually set down in the articles of association. The things that directors might potentially do in order to pander to the desires of the shareholdership are not per se permitted if they run counter to these overarching principles, unless, of course, the shareholders exercise their prerogative and explicitly charge the directors to act in the desired fashion. The only problem there, is that manoeuvres and machinations that do in fact pander to the stockholders are difficult to set down in the articles, since they frequently fall foul of what is lawful and, unfortunately, the companies register is a public document.
Yesterday, the UK’s Post Office Horizon scandal took some interesting turns. If you’re not familiar with the story, Horizon is an accounting software developed by Fujitsu and purchased for installation in the Post Office’s many sub-post office branches around the UK in 1999. The Post Office is a private company, but is owned entirely by the UK government. Over time, accounting discrepancies were found to exist between what sub-postmasters believed they had entered into the system and what the system recorded as their figures. These discrepancies amounted to many thousands of pounds, and the Post Office, under a somewhat arcane prerogative, raised criminal prosecutions for fraud and theft against the supposedly guilty operatives, some of whom were sent to prison and all of whom had to cough up money they simply did not have or, indeed, owe. It has now transpired that there were faults in the software and a public inquiry is ongoing to determine the extent of the injustice meted out to over 800 postmasters across a period of over 20 years. This is a big story: their campaigner, Mr Alan Bates, has meanwhile been made a knight of the realm.
The head of the trade union representing postmasters in their relations with the Post Office was accused at the inquiry of taking the Post Office’s shilling (which is a euphemism for acting in a certain fashion in recognition of being financially beholden to another party). The story is reported here: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jun/21/former-post-office-operators-leader-denies-betraying-his-membership. Mr George Thomson denies that he failed in his representation of the postmasters.
Likewise, there was a denial from the CEO of the Fujitsu ICT company, Mr Richard Christou, that what he believes is a good accounting software system should have been cast in such a poor light (he says he’s aggrieved by the problems encountered at the Post Office). You can read that one here: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jun/19/ex-fujitsu-executive-says-he-feels-aggrieved-by-damage-done-to-horizons-reputation.
Ms Paula Vennells, the CEO who headed up the Post Office over some of the period in which the problems arose, told the inquiry she loved the Post Office, claiming that IT executives and legal counsel had let her down. That titbit of blame-shifting is to be found here: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/may/24/paula-vennells-names-five-executives-she-blames-over-post-office-scandal.
When the Post Office were prosecuting a postmaster in 2006 and obtained a witness statement from an operative at Fujitsu for that purpose, they asked for it to be redrafted to take out suggestions that there were faults in the software. Mr Graham Ward denies that the suggested edits to that draft witness statement were in any way a cover-up. That little morsel of disingenuousness is to be found here: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jun/20/post-office-investigator-horizon-failure-draft-witness-statement-edits-inquiry.
The Post Office case is, of course, a great litany of accusations, although there have been stern words spoken about this national corporation’s actions over quarter of a century, including by the Prime Minister. However, the elephant in the room would appear to be a cover-up. And, with the inquiry ongoing under the chairmanship of Welsh judge Sir Wyn Williams, one cannot help but gain the impression that certain parties are endeavouring in their testimony to now cover up the cover-up. Sir Wyn will write his report in due course and it is to be hoped that it will be acted upon to the letter and, privately, I hope it blasts the Post Office into the middle of next week.
So, what does this all have to do with Amon Göth and Oskar Schindler? Well, what Schindler doesn’t clarify during that night of drinking and cigarettes, and what Göth somehow doesn’t seem to comprehend, is what is meant with the word power.
Students of Newtonian physics know what power is, the joules, horses and watt-not that it is measured in, and what it can do and what it can’t. And these directors of companies, they know what power is. It’s the Latin word vis, from which vires (genitive plural) comes. It’s what they’re told explicitly, and what they are to understand implicitly, about what it is they are and are not allowed to do in the context of the office they perform. Policemen and soldiers know what power is. They often express it as fire power, or power of restraint, destructive power. The bore of an artillery gun’s muzzle, whether or not a rifle will automatically reload or whether it must be manually loaded, and the thickness of the armour plating that the projectile will pierce in order to attain its target. These are all things we express in terms of power.
Our all-too-common conception of power is the ability to impose our will on another and, what’s more, get away with it. We assume that God, if He exists, should be able to impose His will on us, being a supreme being and all as He is and, if He doesn’t do so for some reason, then, He doesn’t exist. Either that, or being dirty rotten scoundrels is exactly what God wants us to be, so why change? Since God, as we all know, moves in mysterious ways, it’ll come as no surprise that God doesn’t exercise power in the sense of Howitzers, but, rather, in terms of love. Unlike guns, used to take things like life and property, love is given; only ever given. Politicians exercise power in order to please enough people to stay in office till the next election. But God’s love would keep everyone in life, let alone office, for the rest of all time. If that’s not power …
In our more esoteric mortal situations, we learn that love can also be powerful in relationships. The bonds of marriage, and the ability of infatuation to set heartbeats fluttering. The ability of one’s love for another to endure through thick and thin. All these things are described as the power of love, and they are palpable if intangible, these powers are. Their effect is far less to decide a corporate policy or where to point a gun, and far more the expression of will, deep within an individual’s psyche, having a definite but indefinable effect on others within his or her sphere of contact.
The first take on power is the ability to constrain another party to our will, or the ability to act wantonly, but without ever having to render account for such actings. The second is the power to effect a reaction within another party without measures of enforcement or constraint, and whether such reactions are procured by means in which the force brought to bear is not apparent to the observer or, in fact, are tantamount to a physical constraint can remain a matter of discussion.
What Schindler was talking about was neither of these interpretations. What he was alluding to was power such as was lacking in the Post Office as it engineered the outrages that will forever more be known as the Horizon scandal. Amon Göth would, you need have no doubt in your mind, have shot dead every last postmaster accused of financial impropriety had he been a member of the Post Office’s management (he shot his own architect, after all). Had he been a sub-postmaster—a strange notion to conjure, as a stalwart, upright member of his local community—he might well have shot dead the entire board of Post Office Limited, including Ms Vennells. It was the Göth approach to problem solving. Attractive in some comic-book way that such a proposition is, it stretches our conceptions of perverse action to the limits of the ridiculous. Nevertheless, it would be a brave man who wagered that the corps of the SS included no one who had worked for the German post office.
A man like Amon Göth would have offered no recompense for any accusation of injustice. What he did was just: that was his own justification, and he needed no one else’s. If ever the actings of our armies and police forces, those in political life, or the excesses of our corporations, should devolve to a state in which they who act decide themselves that their act is just and therefore justified, and they therefore need render account to nobody for what they have done, then we shall at that point, if no sooner, have reverted to the state of the world depicted in the film Schindler’s List. For that reason, if no other, we should all now view it once again. There are places where that state is already so.
Elsewhere, or at least so I believe, that is a state that can yet be averted. By realising what Oskar Schindler means by power in that scene, or at least what he ought to mean. Not physical power over others, and not psychological power over them, either. It is not the power to pardon the guilty for their putative crimes. No, it is power over oneself.
The power to recognise one’s own injustice and to act to stop it, independent of being obliged to acknowledge its error by the higher forces of law and order. The power to take cognisance of one’s own fault and to ask for forgiveness. It is the power to question one’s acts before they become irreversible. It is the power of answerability to one’s own conscience, the power of honesty to oneself, the power of insight in seeing oneself as others should, the power not to take one’s own shilling. It is the power of self-control. And the more one is invested with power over others, the harder it becomes to exercise power over oneself. What Schindler in the end means is that power corrupts, so exercise it on yourself before it corrupts you absolutely.
No excuses, no cover-ups, no excesses, no wanton exercise of prerogative. Power is when you know that you can, if you want to, justify your act with any means at all, but when you know that it is wrong and, without being forced to, therefore desist in it. For, if we cannot control ourselves, somewhere there is a power that will drag us back into line.