I just came from a powerful film. Waltz with Bashir is Israeli Ari Folman’s animated film on the 1982 Israeli march on Beirut and the Christian Phalangist massacre of Palestinians. This is not one to take your kids to. The animation is rough and shadowy like a graphic novel and switches back and forth between Ari trying to reattach lost memories of the massacre, which he has forgotten, and the present. He knows he was there and he has strange memories of himself walking through the ocean to a beach where flares are lighting up a bombed out city.
He knows that these memories can’t be right because he was never near the ocean. In the film, he visits other people who were there with him at the massacre—for him a hidden enigma of psyche he is trying to reconstruct. They do not remember things he remembers. His memories are confused and dream-like. At one point a psychiatrist friend points out that he had been to the ‘ocean’ before: the massacre. A kind of oceanic swamping. Ari’s parents had been in Auschwitz and he grew up with the horrors and atrocities committed by the Nazis as vivid stories told and retold by his parents. The memories of his Army days have been masked, the therapist suggests, because, suddenly, with these family remembrances as part of his childhood, and the backdrop of his life, he confronts a similar horror in the massacre. As a young man he marks the horror of his parents stories reenacted in Beirut, except he is watching from the other side, watching as the Israeli Army he’s a part of does nothing while Palestinians are slaughtered by the Christian Phalangists. It broke his mind and his memories where rewritten and edited to avoid a shattering of self. But the movie portrayed well the fear that seems to attend these kinds of tragedies. The fear that drives people do anything to maintain certain separations and maintain certain boundaries between themselves and certain others.
We see it in our own history—the fear of those culpable in Southern Utah of the arrival of the US Army and a wagon train from Arkansans, a fear driving otherwise ordinary people to kill men, woman, and children in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The fear in the people of Illinois as Mormons scooped up property and block voted under the direction of their leaders, leading them to drive out the Mormons and killing their prophets.
Fear it seems is used as a justification for harm again and again when certain perceived boundaries are transgressed. Boundaries maintained by fear seem vulnerable to the kinds of distortions that often turn into great harm and tragedy. Harm against the others we fear are transgressing these margins. When fear is used to maintain boundaries whether they are physical, moral, or cultural, those who are perceived outside the circle of ‘us’ are deemed other and can be stripped of their rights and their right to humanity.
To the Nazis it was a fear of the Jews. They were not part of the master race and they might marry their daughters and sons. They were perceived as being responsible for the collapse economic systems and stealing jobs from good Germans. The Jews were transgressing cultural boundaries that had to be maintained at all costs. Even at the cost of being involved in a holocaust.
There is a dignity that belongs to every human. We have a responsibility to respect that dignity and strive to put away these kinds of fears. Anytime fear is used to maintain a boundary, it seems without question great harm is the result. Both to the feared and the fearful.
Of course, there are boundaries that should be maintained (say, the criminally violent and their victims), but the point I took from this movie is that when fear is the weapon used to maintain those boundaries, then they are maintained at too high a cost. Fear of the other—that they are somehow transgressing our spaces seems to be at the heart of some of humanity’s worst and most poisonous behavior. What boundaries of fear are we setting up? Who are you afraid of?
