No more precise documentation, now truth has gone missing in war

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. However, instead of honouring the collaboration between the Western Allies and the Red Army in the face of horror, we find ourselves consumed in  gory propaganda and controversies arising from both the Ukraine and Middle East conflicts.

In mid-1944, Soviet troops arrived at the Majdanek concentration and extermination camp, situated in modern day Poland near the Ukraine border. Built in 1941, it was the first to be discovered by the Red Army. The last SS had left after evacuating most of the prisoners, destroying documents and setting fire to the buildings. Some of the gas chambers, crematoria and barracks still remain.

The discovery of the Majdanek camp marks a turning point in the Allies’ understanding of the Nazi horror. By observing the piles of corpses, bags of hair, crematorium ovens and bones, as well as the state of any survivors remaining at the camp who had not been executed by the SS, nor taken by force on macabre “marches to the West”, the Soviets came to grasp the scale and systematisation of the extermination camps.

Faced with such horror, the reaction was to document these atrocities through written records, photos, films and interviews with survivors. It was also a matter of understanding, reconstituting, documenting as precisely as possible the scale and systematic industrial extermination of entire populations: Jews, gypsies, communists, prisoners of war, homosexuals or simple dissidents.

It was from Majdanek and the mobilisation of Soviet operators, photographers, journalists, writers, filmmakers, but also the judicial branches of the Allied armies, that two main processes were put in place: documentation and dissemination.

In the days following the discovery of the Majdanek Concentration Camp, the Soviets also invited American, English and other journalists and photographers to the scene. The material of human barbarity was used for purposes of propaganda and motivation, further reinforcing the feeling of correctness of the Allied struggle and sacrifices. The Nazi regime had to be completely destroyed.

As the documentation from the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, USA, indicates “posterity will be indefinitely indebted to the Red Army (… )”, while tribute is also due to the pioneers who braved the intense emotion for the posterity of humanity: “The works of Ford and Simonov were truly momentous. They grappled, visually and through the written word, with a genocide, before ‘genocide,’ as a word and concept (it was only coined by Rafael Lemkin in 1944), really existed.”

This systematic documentation greatly helped all the Allied forces during their subsequent discoveries of other concentration and extermination camps. The horror sank further into the unspeakable as Soviet troops arrived at Auschwitz and the Allies arrived at Bergen Belsen, Dachau and Ravensburg.

Back then, the atrocities of wars as well as massacres against civilians were the subject of precise although terrifying documentation. Today, wars and massacres are almost filmed in real time by their actors themselves. Not much is systematically compiled, disseminated, or analysed of all of this “evidence” or “documents”. It is as if the propaganda acts in real time without prior or further reasoning.

Back then, documentation also involved the emotions and experiences of the protagonists, in order to understand the psychological dimensions of the horror. Today, pieces of evidence are dehumanised, without any reflection or depth, or worse yet, they are staged, reconstructed or made up from scratch for propaganda purposes.

Of the two elements mentioned above — documentation and dissemination — only one has remained: dissemination. All that matters is the appearance, the images and the control of the narrative. Reality itself and, above all, the human reality of inhumane situations, does not seem to interest too many, especially in the West.

Two main problems arise in the way that we deal with horror nowadays. On the one hand, the sheer quantity of appalling images and videos that we are faced with almost renders us insensitive to what we see. We have gotten so used to acts of unthinkable cruelty and perversion that we are not shocked by them anymore.

On the other hand, due to the fact that anything in our time can be very persuasively fabricated we can no longer be confident that what we see is true in the first place – therefore nothing at all is 100 per cent believable anymore. To remember the 2016 Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year: Indeed we live in a “post-truth” age.

Of course, even in times when systematic and precise documentation makes the case for international judiciary processes, the information brought forward has always been in tune with the viewpoint of the winners, as we have witnessed in Nuremberg, or Bosnia, and even in Rwanda.

But in today’s wars the truth seems to have gone completely missing, blurred and distorted by the selectivity of material used by all sides. In both the Ukraine and Middle East conflicts, all parties claim to be the winners and their supporters truly believe that they are. This results in a complete derailment of discourse and an obliteration of truth and reality.

We have therefore become comfortably numb. Nihilism seems to have taken over our Western representations of the world to the point where we almost no longer care about massacres and deaths in industrial quantities. Some genocides we protest and others we dismiss. Neither do we object to restrictions of our liberties. We only take sides and consume their material at face value.

In a time when AI seems to generate an artificial reality, the 80th anniversary of the discovery of the most appalling industrial human extermination machine should encourage us to return to our human values, our memory and our links with others, rather than confining ourselves into propagandist polemics and insensitivity.

No, not everything is justifiable, neither by obedience, nor by pecuniary interests, nor even by threepenny sci-fi utopias fuelled by post-human delusions.