Extremism. Just by reading such a word various thoughts may come to mind. One might think of an ideology, maybe, linked to a violent form of conflict, but do you know how extremism expresses itself? Can we become extremists? What can be considered extremism?
The inciting of public opinion, the idol-like leader, the persecution of minorities, the destruction of symbols of the past, are not exclusive tactics of religious extremism. Political movements with drastic views also employ them as part of an extremist political agenda, to take or to keep political power. While God might still be invoked in some cases, the factor of union is no longer religious, although it never stops being ethereal. Either way, in the end, the masses are hurdled to the outskirts of what are the usual social norms, without even realising the atrocities they are compliant with. History is populated with numerous examples and art has been either depicting the atrocities of their consequences or glorifying their achievements.
But no artistic medium has done more for truthfully portraying the reality of this conflicts than photography in the last century. The sense of truthfulness it carries when gazed upon, the empathy it generates from the realness of the human being portrayed, not an idealised version in paint but a scientific process at play, has done tremendously to alert the whole world to an ongoing crisis. Most importantly, it has kept alive and tangible the memories of the terrible political conflicts the world has, since then, seen. We cannot learn from our mistakes if we do not remember them. Past conflicts, where extremism roared high, can be easily denied, dismissed and repeated as most people today can’t understand the implications because they have no experience to compare it to. The death of each innocent would truly have been in vain if more victims fall again for exactly the same reason.
If there has been a memory bravely kept alive, it has to be the Holocaust. Its denial is even illegal in 16 European countries and Israel, as well as condemnable in many others.
It is quite normal for it to be the first example to cross your mind when political extremism is in discussion, but …
Waiting For Hitler (1938-09-30) by FPGGetty Images
Did you think of him?
The thing is it was never just a single man, even the Nazi Regime’s trademark antisemitic ideals were long present in the world and resurfacing in those territories before Mein Kampf was even written. A huge machinery drove IIWW and the holocaust. From the councillors, to the soldiers, the special forces, the European leaders to the cheering crowds and those who understood the obscenity behind it but remained silent. For it cannot be forgotten that the Nazi party didn’t highjack power, they were voted in by the people. The question is, wouldn’t we act the same in such dire situations? If we lived in extreme poverty and someone gave us work to do, bread to eat and a target for our discontentment and hatred, wouldn’t we trust them to also give us the promised better world? Would we care for its cost?
Nazi Charity (1933-11-19) by FPGGetty Images
The lessons are simple: promises to desperate and broken people move mountains;
Henlein Nazi Rally (1938-05) by Margaret Bourke-WhiteLIFE Photo Collection
and evil is made up of thousands of variables, it is never brought just by one person.
New Jersey, United States, A memorial plaque to the victims of the Holocaust.Yad Vashem
The cost was haunting: about 75 million people dead, 50 to 55 of those civilians and 6 million Jews, two thirds of the European Jewish population.
Jewish people have, in fact, been the target of segregation by various cultures for an extremely long period of time. From ancient to contemporary times. From the frequent massacres in medieval France to the discrimination under Muslim rule. From the 14th and 15th century’s persecutions and massacres in the Iberian Peninsula to the Holocaust in the 20th century. But why have jewish people been discriminated against so many times, so fervently? The answer may lie in the dedication and loyalty they have towards their unique and notorious religion, which differentiated them culturally from the general society, making them stand out. Always a better scapegoat than something camouflaged in the masses.
Millions would perish during the IIWW for the sole reason of being seen as less than human, an inferior race, whose presence in german territory was the origin of the decay of their culture. Although Jews were the main target, every other minority suffered as well. Slavs (ethnic poles and soviet citizens), Roma people, those considered mental or physical sick and incurable, communists, Jehovah’s witnesses, homosexual men, ...
Germany, Side-by-side profiles of a stereotyped Jew and an Aryan woman.Yad Vashem
Anyone who didn’t fit in the Third Reich’s ideal of a German citizen, the perfect Aryan.
Recurring to history, the Nazi Regime traced a plan to ensure that racial balance was restituted, adapting segregationist policies used throughout the centuries.
The Ghetto’s concept, a walled quarter with access control, had also been around for long.
Even the 15th century practice of burning cultural and artistic objects was brought back, fueling fires with books related to Judaism.
As for the Third Reich’s “Final Solution to the Jewish question”, the annihilation of Jewish people and other minorities, is a plan entirely constructed by the Nazi Regime’s highest patents. The creation of camps with the purpose of being effective at killing large numbers of people in a short period of time would be the accepted solution.
If the train ride didn’t kill you, ...
A drawing of the Theresienstadt Ghetto by Leo Haas, 1943-1968.Yad Vashem
If the inhumane conditions, the starvation or the forced labour didn’t kill you, ...
Buchenwald Victims (1945-04-13) by Margaret Bourke-WhiteLIFE Photo Collection
20 excruciating minutes in a gas chamber would.
Prisoners At Buchenwald Concentration Camp, Germany, c. 1943. (1943-01-01) by Getty ImagesGetty Images
About 20 million people were incarcerated in concentration camps all over Germany-occupied Europe.
More than 10 million people died there.
Just in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp alone, the death toll is estimated to be more than a million.
Too Weak To Walk (1945-04-01) by KeystoneGetty Images
How many families broken, how many childhoods lost, how many loves never felt, how many children unborn...
Belsen Extermination Camp (1945-04-20) by George RodgerLIFE Photo Collection
How many lives…
The loss of lives is as haunting in armed conflict. As we have seen, it is essentially an extremist tactic of responding to a conflict. No matter how necessary the employment of warfare is deemed to be, more often than not, such necessity is more idealised to serve someone else’s interest than a real threat to the people. Expansion, pillaging, retribution, … No matter the motivations, the result in armed conflict, whomever wins, whatever is won, always is the death of people which didn’t directly contribute or instigate it, of innocents.
De kindermoord te Bethlehem (ca. 1514 - ca. 1527) by Dente, MarcoRijksmuseum
Just as the popular biblical theme, the Massacre of the Innocents, doesn’t let us forget. A theme artists have been depicting for centuries.
De kindermoord te Bethlehem (1715 - 1740) by Magnasco, AlessandroRijksmuseum
Creating beauties to behold but horrors to comprehend.
Present in the New Testament, the Massacre of the Innocents portrays the killing of every male baby, under two years-old, in Bethlehem by King Herod of Judea's command.
The Magi Before Herod; The Adoration of the Magi; The Dream of the Magi; The Presentation in the Temple (about 1250–1260) by UnknownThe J. Paul Getty Museum
The decision came from the magi’s prophecy that the King of the Jews had been born. Such was Herod’s obsession with his throne and his power that even a baby seemed a reasonable threat. Christ would escape to Egypt, countless other children would not and violently die.
The Massacre of the Innocents, with architectural facades at left and right, an oval composition (17th century) by Jacques CallotThe Metropolitan Museum of Art
Countless mothers would weep and mourn.
The Massacre of the Innocents (1591) by Cornelisz van Haarlem, CornelisMauritshuis
The theme underlies something quite relevant in armed conflict, the justification, however plausible, matters little for those suffering the consequences of violence. The loss of life is no less horrible.
Yet, much has changed when it comes to armed conflict in the last century - it became deathlier. The evolution of weaponry during the World Wars would make armed conflict much more lethal, namely the development of aerial warfare. A single weapon would become capable of taking more than seventy thousand lives on impact, killing hundred thousand more in the following months. Yes, you thought it right, the nuclear bomb.
LIFE Photo Collection
Even during the tests of the very first atomic bomb, it was noted as “the most terrible thing ever discovered”.
Atomic Bomb Test (1945-09) by Fritz GoroLIFE Photo Collection
Yet, President Harry Truman also stated “it can be made useful” and so it was, twice.
Brandenburg Gate (1966-05-01) by John WatermanGetty Images
Afterwards, the world stood still for decades. The major political players developed the haunting technology to extremes.
The Atomic Apocalypse – Day of the Dead (1980/1989)British Museum
The rest of the humanity feared the end of the world with the dropping of another bomb. The nuclear apocalypse.
The atomic bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the only ones ever used in an armed conflict. The aftermath, with a total toll of more than 200 000 deaths in a population of little more than 300 000, terrorised the world. Eighty percent of the population of Hiroshima were civilians.
The attack happened early in a week morning. Has the lone USA plane cruised over Hiroshima, the people in the city came to watch it stroll. A single plane represented little danger, airstrikes were then intense and formed by various aircrafts. The bomb Enola Gay carried, “Little Boy”, took 43 seconds to explode and produced a radiant heat as warm as the sun’s surface.
Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Devastation (1945-09) by Bernard HoffmanLIFE Photo Collection
The nearest people burned to nothing, only their atomic shadows left behind.
Nagasaki (1945-09) by Bernard HoffmanLIFE Photo Collection
Everything else caught on fire, raging intensely for hours on end.
Hiroshima-Nagasaki Fours Years - Also Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (1949-10-10) by Carl MydansLIFE Photo Collection
Survivors were badly burned, partly carbonised even, aside the levels of radiation they were exposed to during the black rains that followed.
Hiroshima-Nagasaki Fours Years - Also Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (1949-10-10) by Carl MydansLIFE Photo Collection
Cancer, premature birth, malformed babies were now a possibility in their future.
By Alfred EisenstaedtLIFE Photo Collection
The future of 126 000 common men, women and children.
The truth is, no matter how the bombs shocked the world and how that terror still linger on, the political potencies all over the world saw the nuclear weaponry as a shield. If the enemies feared you would drop a nuclear bomb on them, they wouldn’t attack you. Nuclear weaponry tests still detonated 428 megatons of nuclear material in the atmosphere until the late 1990’s. The USA developed the hydrogen bomb less than a decade later, a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Soviet Union would take it to the extreme, with a 50 megaton hydrogen bomb, “Tsar Bomba”, vaporising everything in a 10 km radius with a shockwave of hundreds of kilometres . By 1986, the USA had almost 24000 nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union had almost the double.
LIFE Photo Collection
Nowadays, eight nations provenly have nuclear weapons: USA, Russian Federation, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan and North Korea. The nuclear threat, while almost unknown to the younger generations, is still present and a complete denuclearisation of the world seems far away.
A Wounded Soldier and His Comrade (1916) by Théophile Alexandre SteinlenNational Gallery of Art, Washington DC
EXHIBITION COORDINATORS:: Lúcia Rosas (FLUP/CITCEM) & Maria Leonor Botelho (FLUP/CITCEM)
CURATORSHIP: Laura Fabíola Esteves Pereira (CITCEM), Lúcia Rosas (FLUP/CITCEM) & Maria Leonor Botelho (FLUP/CITCEM)
TEXTS: Laura Fabíola Esteves Pereira (CITCEM)
PRODUCTION AND ORGANIZATION: DCTP/FLUP, CITCEM/FLUP & American Corners Portugal
SPONSORS: Embaixada dos Estados Unidos da América em Portugal / US Embassy Portugal ACP - American Corners Portugal
IMAGE CREDITS:
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum
Belvedere
British Museum
DDR Museum
Fondazione Cariplo
Freer and Sackler Galleries
Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino
Getty Images
Kunsthistoriches Museum Wien
Leopold Museum
LIFE Photo Collection
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Mafra National Palace
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest
Museo Correr
Museo de San Marco, Florence
National Azulejo Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
National Museum of Contemporary Art - Museu do Chiado
National Museum Soares dos Reis
Palace National of Ajuda
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Rijksmuseum
Royal Ontario Museum
The Art Institute of Chicago
The J. Paul Getty Museum
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
The National Gallery, London
The Walters Art Museum
Van Gogh Museum
Yad Vashem
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