himself speaks

Can you stand another post about Sacha Baron Cohen? Good, ’cause you’re getting one. And you will be rewarded for your forbearance, because this time he speaks…as himself to Neil Strauss, for Rolling Stonel And he answers some questions:

“Borat essentially works as a tool,” Baron Cohen says. “By himself being anti-Semitic, he lets people lower their guard and expose their own prejudice, whether it’s anti-Semitism or an acceptance of anti-Semitism. ‘Throw the Jew Down the Well’ [a song performed at a country & western bar during Da Ali G Show] was a very controversial sketch, and some members of the Jewish community thought that it was actually going to encourage anti-Semitism. But to me it revealed something about that bar in Tucson. And the question is: Did it reveal that they were anti-Semitic? Perhaps. But maybe it just revealed that they were indifferent to anti-Semitism.

“I remember, when I was in university I studied history, and there was this one major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw. And his quote was, ‘The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference.’ I know it’s not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but I think it’s an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic.”

Yes, it’s true. Apathy, indifference, and lack of empathy are mankind’s worst enemies. It takes only a few evil people and a lot of indifferent ones—unwilling to stand up for what they believe is right, uninterested in the suffering of others, afraid to care—to create catastrophes like Nazism, Stalinism, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Cultural Revolution in China, the rape of the Balkans, and, yes, the theocracy of Iran and the thugocracy of Egypt, to name just a few.

Here I thought we’d learned these things in the 20th century, but apparently we haven’t. I’m glad Baron Cohen spoke out to explain what he’s up to: it doesn’t hurt the movie, and it helps spread the message: Don’t look away.