^Nazi Rally
The text below is part of the incendiary introduction to Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones. It lays out a brilliant premise for the sprawling novel. A virtuoso piece of writing in itself, these pages set the scene for a book that is definitely worth reading, even if it only partially reaches some of its aims, although its ambition is so vast, even a proportionally minuscule level of attainment would assure (and does assure) something quite notable.
"Political philosophers have often pointed out that in
wartime, the citizen, the male citizen at least, loses one of his most basic
rights, his right to life; and this has been true ever since the French
Revolution and the invention of conscription, now almost a universally accepted
principle. But these same philosophers have rarely noted that the citizen in
question simultaneously loses another right, one just as basic and perhaps even
more vital for his conception of himself as a civilised human being: the right
not to kill. No one asks you for your opinion. In most cases the men standing
above the mass grave no more asked to be there than the one lying, dead or
dying, at the bottom of the pit. You might object that killing another soldier
in combat is not the same thing as killing an unarmed civilian; the laws of war
allow one but not the other; as does common morality. A good argument, in
theory, but one that takes no account of the conditions of the conflict in
question. The entirely arbitrary distinction established after the war between
“military operation” like those of any other conflict and the “atrocities”
carried out by a minority of sadists or psychopaths is, as I hope to
demonstrate, a soothing fantasy of the victors – the western victors, I should
specify, since the Soviets, despite all their rhetoric, have always understood
what was what: after May 1945, having tossed a few bones to the crowd, Stalin
couldn’t have cared less about some illusory “justice”; he wanted the hard
stuff, cash in hand, slaves an equipment to repair and rebuild, not remorse or
lamentations, for he knew just as well as we that the dead can’t hear our
crying, and that remorse has never put bread on the table. I am not pleading Befehlnotstand, the just-obeying-orders
so highly valued by our good German lawyers. What I did, I did with my eyes
open, believing that it was my duty and had to be done, disagreeable and
unpleasant as it may have been.. For that is what total war means: there is no
such thing as a civilian, and the only difference between a Jewish child gassed
or shot and the German child burned alive in an air raid is one of method; both
deaths were equally vain, neither of them shortened the war by so much as a
second; but in both cases, the man or men who killed them believed it was just
and necessary; and if they were wrong, who’s to blame? What I am saying holds
true even if you accept the artificial distinction between war and what the
Jewish lawyer Lemkin baptized genocide; for it should be noted that in our century
at least there has never yet been a genocide without a war, that genocide does
not exist outside of war, and that like war, it is a collective phenomenon:
genocide in its modern form is a process inflicted on the masses, by the
masses, for the masses. It is also, in the case in question, a process
segmented according to the demands of industrial method. Just as, according to
Marx, the worker is alienated from the product of his labour, in genocide or
total war in its modern form the perpetrator is alienated from the product of
his actions. This holds true even for the man who places a gun to the head of
another man and pulls the trigger. For the victim was led there by other men,
his death was decided on by yet others, and the shooter knows that he is only
the last link in a very long chain, and that he doesn’t have to ask himself any
more questions than does a member of a firing squad who in civilian life
executes a man duly sentenced under the law. The shooter knows that it’s chance
that has appointed him to shoot, his comrade to guard the cordon, and a third
man to drive the truck; at most he could try to change places with the guard or
the driver. Another example, taken from the abundant historical literature
rather than from my personal experience: the program for the destruction of
severely handicapped and mentally ill Germans, called the “euthanasia” or “T-4”
program, set up two years before the “Final Solution”. Here, the patients,
selected within the framework of a legal process, were welcomed in a building
by professional nurses, who registered them and undressed them; doctors
examined them and led them into a sealed room; a worker administered the gas;
others cleaned up; a policeman wrote up the death certificate. Questioned after
the war, each one of these people said: What, me, guilty? The nurse didn’t kill
anyone, she only undressed and calmed the patients, ordinary tasks in her
profession. The doctor didn’t kill
anyone, either, he merely confirmed a diagnosis according to criteria established
by higher authorities. The worker who opened the gas spigot, the man closest to
the actual act of murder in both time and space, was fulfilling a technical
function under the supervision of his superiors and doctors. The workers who
cleaned out the room were performing a necessary sanitary job – and a highly
repugnant one at that. The policeman was following his procedure, which is to
record each death and certify that it has taken place without any violation of
the laws in force. So who is guilty? Everyone, or no one? Why should the worker
assigned to the gas chamber be guiltier than the worker assigned to the
boilers, the garden, the vehicles? The same goes for every facet of this
immense enterprise. The railway signalman, for instance, is he guilty of the
death of the jews he shunted toward the camp? He is a railway employee who has
been doing the same job for twenty years, he shunts trains according to a
schedule, their cargo is none of his business. It’s not his fault if these Jews
are being transported from point A, across his switches, to Point B, where they
are to be killed. But this signalman plays a crucial role in the work of
extermination: without him, the train of Jews cannot reach Point B. The same
goes for the Civil Servant in charge of requisitioning apartments for air raid
victims, the printer who prepares the deportation notices, the contractor who
sells concrete or barbed wire to the SS, the supply officer who delivers
gasoline to an SP Teilkommando, and God up above, who permits all this. Of
course, you can establish relatively precise degrees of legal responsibility,
which allow you to condemn some while leaving all the rest to their own
conscience, assuming they have one; its even easier when the laws get written
after the fact, as at Nurenberg. But even then they were sloppy. Why hang
Streicher, the impotent yokel, but not the sinister von dem Bach-Zelewski? Why
hang my superior Rudolf Brandt, and not his superior Wolff? Why hang the
interior minister Frick and not his subordinate Stuckart, who did all his work
for him? A lucky man, that Stuckart, who only stained his hands with ink, never
with blood. Once again, let us be clear: I am not trying to say I am not guilty
of this or that. I am guilty, you’re not, fine. But you should be able to admit
to yourselves that you might also have done what I did. With less zeal,
perhaps, but perhaps also with less despair, in any case one way or another. I
think I am allowed to conclude, as a fact established by modern history, that
everyone, or nearly everyone, in a given set of circumstances, does what he is
told to do; and, pardon me, but there’s not much chance that you’re the
exception, any more than I was. If you were born in a country or at a time not
only when nobody comes to kill your wife and your children, but also nobody
comes to ask you to kill the wives and children of others, then render thanks
to God and go in peace. But always keep this thought in mind: you might be
luckier than I, but you’re not a better person. Because if you have the
arrogance to think you are, that’s just where the danger begins. We like to
contrast the state, totalitarian or not, with the ordinary man, the insect or
trembling reed. But then we forget that the State is made up of individuals,
all more or less ordinary, each one with his life, his story, the sequence of
accidents that led him one day to end up on the right side of the gun or the
sheet of paper while others ended up on the wrong side. This path is very
rarely the result of any choice, or even of personal predilection. The victims,
in the vast majority of cases, were not tortured or killed because they were
good any more than their executioners tormented them because they were evil. It
would be a little naïve to think that way; allow me to suggest you spend a
little time in a bureaucracy, even the Red Cross, if you need convincing.
Stalin, by the way, conducted an eloquent demonstration of my argument, by
transforming each generation of executioners into the victims of the following
generation, without ever running out of volunteers. Yet the machinery of State
is made of the same crumbling agglomeration of sand as what it crushes, grain
by grain. It exists because everyone –even, down to the last minute, its
victims- agrees that it must exist. Without the Hosses, the Eichmanns, The
Godlidzes, the Vishinskys, but also without the railway signalmen, the concrete
manufacturers, and the government accountants, a Stalin or a Hitler is nothing
but a wineskin bloated with hatred and impotent terror. To state that the vast
majority of the managers of the extermination processes were neither sadists
nor sociopaths is now a commonplace. There were of course sadists and
psychopaths among them, as in all wars, and these men did commit unspeakable atrocities,
that’s true. It is also true that the SS could have stepped up its efforts to
keep these people under control, even if it actually did more in that line than
most people realise. And that’s not easy: just ask the American generals what a
hard time they had of it in Vietnam, with their junkies and their rapists,
smoking dope and fragging their officers. But that’s not the problem. There are
psychopaths everywhere, all the time. Our quiet suburbs are crawling with paedophiles
and maniacs, our homeless shelters are packed with raving megalomaniacs; and
some of them do indeed become a problem, they kill two, three, ten, even fifty
people –and then the very same State that would without batting an eye send
them to war crushes them like a blood-swollen mosquito. These sick men are
nothing. But the ordinary men that make up the state –especially in unstable
times- now there’s the real danger. The real danger for mankind is me, you. And
if you’re not convinced of this, don’t bother to read further. You’ll
understand nothing and you’ll get angry with little profit for you or me."