In an enraged world, where powerless people are poised, at the slightest provocation, to bite each other’s heads off, nuance disappears. The best explanation I heard of why this happens is the neuroscience of what happens in the insula (insular cortex) when people are angry. This important region of the brain, crucial to our emotional lives, lights up, apparently, whenever we are angry. When the insula is glowing with anger we simply can’t process nuance, can’t make distinctions, can’t make productive comparisons, can only see our anger. People who insist Trump is the worst president ever can quickly get mad enough to insist that fucking Trump is a better president than fucking Bernie Sanders would have been.
We attended a concert for peace at Temple Emmanuel a few months back. A couple of musicians we like very much were performing and it was touted as a concert for peace, Palestinian musicians making music with Israeli musicians. Outside the historic synagogue a small group of angry looking Jews were holding signs, behind a barricade, with a couple of NYC cops flanking them. The signs said this was an anti-Semitic event held by self-hating Jews. I crossed the street to ask what was up. Imagine my surprise to learn that I was about to be a dupe of fucking anti-Semites! I was informed that one of the concert’s sponsors, the New Israel Fund, supported terrorism against Israel.
This claim took me by surprise. I knew nothing about the New Israel fund, and asked how exactly these momzers [1] supported terrorism against Israel. “BDS”, I was told, the anti-Semitic plot to squeeze Israel to death economically so that the Arabs who claim to be Palestinians can overrun it. I felt like I was talking to Stephen Miller, the hatred coming off this one young man was palpable. I told them I’d check out the New Israel Fund, but that as far as I knew, from the artists in the show, I was pretty sure none of them are anti-Semites. My friend crossed the street and took me by the arm at this point. She led me away from the dozen or so protesters who continued to make a ruckus after we headed in to see the show.
For true believers, it suffices merely to have a rationale, a buzzword, to spit in the face of those who refuse to believe. In the case of these protesters, BDS is a tool for modern day Nazis and should be criminalized in America, the sooner the better. Full throated support for BDS is the same, to them, as opposing the criminalization of this specific form of non-violent political coercion. To these angry people, anyone who believes BDS should not be illegal supports BDS and intends to put a dagger through the heart of our beloved Jewish State. Easy peasy, no need for your fucking anti-Semitic nuance you self-hating fucker!
Here is the New Israel Fund’s position on BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction), from their website:
What is NIF’s position on boycott, divestment and sanctions?
The New Israel Fund is committed to strengthening democracy in Israel, supports freedom of speech and promotes non-violent means of expression of belief and conscience. We oppose any attempt to criminalize the legitimate expression of support for any non-violent strategy or tactic, including the global BDS movement which we do not ourselves support.
The NIF does oppose the global (or general) BDS movement, views the use of these tactics as counterproductive, and is concerned that segments of this movement seek to undermine the existence of the state of Israel as a Jewish homeland.
NIF will not fund global BDS activities against Israel nor support organizations that have global BDS programs.
However, NIF opposes the occupation and settlement activities. NIF will thus not exclude support for organizations that lawfully discourage the purchase of goods or use of services from settlements.
Complicated is hard, simple is so much easier. It’s no wonder that buzzwords and the wearing of different colored hats so often carry the day in human affairs.
Keeping the countless gnarly complications in mind, remembering contradictions, comparing everything to your own situation and remembering that while you may be lucky, many just like you are cursed… the endless nuance and supreme challenge of trying to remain fair-minded, pursuing justice, mindful of history’s famously slippery slopes, the dependable unreliability of history, of homo sapiens — it is exhausting just to map it out in a sprawling sentence.
Complicated is difficult, takes too much goddamned work to work your way through, there is no end to complicated. Simple is better, clearly.
Hence the soundbite. The tweet. Slogans. If your slogan does not parse well and fit on a hat, the marketing folks will nix it. A great ad is supremely simple. It hits some essential truth we recognize immediately. The best of them bring tears, so simple, so true! We should make that long distance call to the poignantly adorable child who misses us. Oh, God, it’s all so simple.
Except, of course, that it’s not at all simple. “What do you think of Bernie Sanders?” someone asks simply, though it’s not likely you dislike Sanders or what he stands for based on the way you talk. So, carefully, sensing a mine field as the first few critical comments about him fly around the table, you say: if we remove the personality and the things you just said from the equation and put all the actual issues his campaign raised on the table, I think we’d all agree about most of them. I got as far as the importance of addressing catastrophic climate change before the heavy guns were wheeled into place. Sanders is a self-hating Jew, he only uses his Jewishness for his own purposes, he hates Israel, supports BDS (Boycott, Divest and Sanction Israel) [1] One raises his voice to say he’d vote for Trump before he’d vote for the hypocrite Jew-hater Sanders.
Now everything is simpler, easier to understand. My reflexes were a tad too slow, though I know the right thing to do at a moment like this. It is time to get up from the table and start washing dishes, or at least to clam up. Perhaps sit on a nearby chair and play the ukulele a bit, as this little storm passes. All these options I hope to keep in mind should this kind of thing arise again any time soon. There is no point, no nuance that can be brought up once somebody is peeved enough to say Trump is a better choice than Bernie because Trump loves Israel and Bernie is a grumpy old Jewish Nazi.
Simple: Anyone critical of Israel’s long, often brutal, occupation, and the ticking time bomb of millions of encamped enemies living close by, generations of haters, many raised in hellish, hopeless poverty, many living in camps, literally, with state violence the only means of keeping a lid on the anger of now literally generations of these hopeless and dispossessed people — anti-Semite.
We can agree that Bibi Netanyahu is clearly not an exemplar of the highest Jewish values. He’s a putz, a schmuck, a much smarter Israeli Trump. Fine. Perhaps we can agree that the mildly racist Avigdor Lieberman, former extremist now Israeli Minister of Defense, and his party, to the right of Netanyahu’s right wing group, is not a legitimate force for de-escalating tensions in the seemingly eternal war between former neighbors.
But, let’s keep this simple. BDS, Boycott, Divest and Sanction, the same economic tactics used to exert enough pressure to bring down apartheid in South Africa, is plainly anti-Semitic. Any Jew who thinks it might be a legitimate tactic to employ is simply a Jew hater, end of story.
Sitting here calmly, reflecting dispassionately, it is beyond dispute that there are numerous issues involved in this particular issue of BDS. It equates Israel to the racist South African regime — not entirely fairly. This equation requires its own long, sober conversation. It involves uncomfortable levels of candor, perhaps, or tamping down an angry reflex to dismiss anything comparing Israeli military policies and THINGS THE FUCKING NAZIs used to do.
Breaking down doors at night, grabbing and torturing suspects, an off the books detention or killing when required, doing secret violence here and there to keep the opposition from organizing, or bulldozing an entire block of homes because a terrorist was harbored in one of those homes, or forced relocation, or whatever you want to bring up, are reminiscent of things ruthless armies of occupation routinely do. There is a much larger discussion to be had of the particulars of all these policies.
All this is very uncomfortable terrain to negotiate, even among people who agree about most things in American politics, you have to walk through it very, very slowly, reassuring the other party of your good will at every step. Easier to just say Israel, eternally menaced by a world of haters, is justified no matter what or the equally emotional position that Israel is acting just like the fucking Nazis. The tic to view everything as a dichotomy blinds you to any truths that fall along that human gradient, seamlessly from black, to dark charcoal grey, to grey, to paler, mouse grey, to ash-colored grey, to white.
Truth is hard, true belief is easier. That ease is the reason so many still support their president, even as his policies are already starting to fuck them hard.
There are Israeli peace groups (example) working tirelessly against the right wing forces in Israel which have controlled the government, and the narrative, since a right wing religious fanatic murdered Itzhak Rabin more than twenty years ago. These right wing Israeli officials argue it’s perfectly fine, even restrained, to shoot protesters with live bullets if they come too close to the fence in Gaza. This policy is controversial and complicated, many difficult discussions can be had over whether it’s the best way for Israel to proceed toward any kind of peaceful resolution to the long conflict between Palestinians and Israel..
But, for the moment, let’s keep it simple, folks. Israel is a democracy and our greatest ally in the Middle East (along with Saudi Arabia, but why mention those publicly beheading motherfuckers?) Our U.N. ambassador applauded Israel’s restraint in killing and wounding so relatively few Palestinians in the recent outburst of mass ugliness between these enemy neighbors. Soon after her comments we [3] left the U.N. Human Rights Council who wouldn’t stop bitching about Israel’s use of deadly force against unarmed civilian protesters, even suggesting the shootings by sniper might constitute a war crime.
To cite but one example of the complexities involved. One Israeli peace group, The New Israel Fund, supports the right of people to use protest methods like BDS, or, more precisely, it opposes the proposed U.S. criminalization of BDS (their position is much more nuanced, New Israeli Fund actually explicitly OPPOSES BDS).
Yet to those Jews who seek to keep it simple at all costs, the New Israel Fund supports terrorism by opposing “pro-Israeli” laws to criminalize BDS, thereby supporting BDS and hatred of Israel. The New Israel Fund is a target of angry American Jews who believe Israelis who oppose their government’s extreme right wing tactics are traitors and anti-Semites, no better than Nazis, really. I actually heard this view expressed by a tiny gaggle of disgruntled protesters outside a Palestinian-Israeli peace concert we attended.
Keeping it simple: the New Israel Fund supports terrorism. Boom. End of story, synagogue hosting event is giving a forum to anti-Semites! The great David Broza, anti-Semite. Anyone looking for peace with the enemy– traitor!
The Israeli government’s moral position on the mass shootings at the Gaza-Israel fence is that it gave the Hamas-inspired protesters fair warning: come within this distance of the 37 mile long reinforced fence [2] and we will use deadly force. The warnings were dropped in the form of leaflets, plainly written in Arabic for anyone to read. Fair warning. Come near my fence and I will shoot you, even kill you. Still they came, protesting by the thousands, surging toward the hated fence, threatening to breach it and cause a bloodbath in Israel, whose right to exist they angrily deny.
The failing NY Times reported on the many Palestinian deaths, at least sixty, in the days around Ivanka and Jared’s photo op with Bibi Netanyahu as they cut the ribbon on the controversial U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. Palestinian and international sources give much higher numbers of dead and wounded at the Gaza fence. Easy enough to dismiss these numbers as fake news, anti-Israel propaganda, since it comes from people who have historically had a bloody ax to grind against Israel. Is there a number of medics shot that is justifiable? Is it legitimate to fire on medical personnel because they are aiding and abetting, by trying to save the lives of, those who surge toward the guns of their hated enemies?
It is so much easier to pick a side and just be on it than to try to consider all sides in an extremely complicated and intractable situation and take nuanced positions on a case by case basis. We can raise arguments about the Palestinian definition of refugees, as the Jerusalem Post apparently did recently. Simple, these fucks are not actual refugees, they just pretend to be victims under a definition they came up with. They can’t leave Gaza? Good for them! The simple view sees good guys and bad guys and good people stick with the good guys. Simple.
I was reminded, even sitting around a table with good friends, warm friends, people I love, all old friends who speak Hebrew and love Israel as much as I do, that some innocent questions are, to be simple about it, not innocent. Say the wrong thing and the conversation is over. Forget the fact that we all likely agree, to one extent or another, about the school to prison pipeline, intergenerational poverty going back directly to slavery, the fossil fuel industry-created denial of plainly observable climate catastrophes as part of a of pattern related to centuries of escalating human pollution, vast, escalating income inequality, the anti-democratic curse of concealing information of great public concern from the voting public, the recent gift of billions in tax breaks to the wealthiest, at the cost of cutting the social safety nets for the most vulnerable, our unforgivable and unaddressed national racism (we can pat ourselves on the back for banning the hateful word “nigger” and replacing it with the great neologism “n-word”, much less offensive!), the imminent dismantling of a woman’s federal right to choose to terminate an unwanted, or dangerous, pregnancy, the inevitable corruption of a democratic system where unlimited campaign money is “free speech” and dark money — if donated in a large enough pile — needn’t ever have its source exposed, as the recently rewritten law provides.
We did not get to this cruel president and his blundering administration by chance. The extremest, greediest billionaires found their donkey to ride to the promised land they’ve been dreaming of since the days of the John Birch Society. The Koch brothers’ wealthy, distant father was a founder of that society. The John Birchers were rich, paranoid men who suspected Dwight D. Eisenhower might be a secret Commie, or at least an unwitting dupe of the goddamned Commies. These canny billionaires built a national infrastructure over the last thirty years or more, methodically, think tank by think tank, state house by state house, created legislative/corporate partnerships, and finally, as the Kochs head toward their reward in heaven (both are old men now) their long-cherished dream has become reality for all of us. The cancerous chickens of our materialistic, profit-worshipping “libertarian” democracy have come home to roost.
It is a certain kind of torment to live in a world as inured to violence as our world is. Millions die violent, hopeless deaths, it’s just the way it is. Cherished principles are so easily tossed aside when policies are addressed directly to our terrors. THEY ARE GOING TO KILL US!!!! So we are morally justified in killing them first. THEY HATE US. Therefore, we can torture them, because if they hate us, fuck them, you know? They already hate us, so torture them, what are you being so squeamish about? They’d do the same to us, probably much worse.
At the same time, when we are calm, we can recognize that hate never conquers hate, that an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind, that we need our most creative, empathetic, ingenious solutions for intractable, historically violent problems, but those are just abstractions. All very exhausting abstractions!
BUILD THE WALL! BUILD THE WALL!!!! BUILD THE WALL!!!! Feels pretty good, actually.
[1] Not only is this a sticky factual issue, with many sources stating that Sanders actually opposes BDS, but there is a related and completely separate issue that is easily elided into “support for BDS”. Do you oppose a law criminalizing BDS? I do, vigorously. Do I support BDS? I don’t. What is Bernie’s position? Truly, I have no fucking idea, though it appears he doesn’t. I’m pretty sure he agrees that criminalizing selected nonviolent political expression is anti-democratic. Which in my book, makes Bernie Sanders no more an anti-Semite than I am– trying my best to live by my Jewish values, including dedication to protecting the weakest among us and not doing what is hateful to us to others.
[2] The fence is actually two parallel barriers built by the Israelis: a formidable one of barbed-wire within Gaza and a 10-foot-high metal “smart fence” packed with surveillance sensors along the Israel demarcation line. A restricted buffer zone as wide as 300 yards is between them. Israel has warned that people in the zone without authorization risk being subjected to deadly force.
“The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error. The assumption of infallibility, moreover, is based not so much on superior intelligence as on the correct interpretation of the essentially reliable forces in history or nature, forces which neither defeat nor ruin can prove wrong because they’re bound to assert themselves in the long run. Mass leaders in power have one concern, which overrules all utilitarian considerations– to make their predictions come true.”
– Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
You can call this unending need to be unendingly infallible the hallmark of every overbearingly toxic type: the blowhard, petty tyrants of all stripes, bullies, unrepentant jackasses, stern overseers, vengeful teachers, viciously demanding bosses, bullied weaklings who grow up to get — and abuse– any measure of authority over others, small time authoritarians of every kind. The rule for infallibility is simple: never admit an error.
It is not that hard to insist on your own infallibility, if you are prepared to pay the cost to be the boss. For one thing, there is always somebody to blame: a liar who has it in for you, a thousand liars, a million liars, petty, mean bastards, the corrupt, the jealous, the weak, losers, insubordinate subordinates, traitors, leakers, blabber mouths, disloyal assholes, elites who claim they’re better than you are– hah! The list is limited only by your own infallible imagination.
Hannah Arendt makes this observation about mass leaders like Hitler and Stalin, the main subjects of part three of her treatise on totalitarianism. It is obvious, once pointed out, that every tyrant insists on his infallibility. Hitler was a great case– if Germany lost the war of aggression he started, and imbecilically prosecuted, overruling his generals and shouting that he was the smartest man in every room, until German defeat was a certainty, well– it only fulfilled his prediction that if the German Volk was weak that they deserved, every last one of them, to die. In the end he ordered German boys to man the barricades as the vengeful, brutal Red Army closed in on his bunker in Berlin. Every last German must die, because they had let their infallible selfless Fuhrer down. Nothing more he could do, he poisoned his idiot girlfriend, after hastily marrying her, shot his beloved dog and turned the gun on himself.
Which brings to mind the same thought I have every time some sick fuck kills a bunch of people and then “turns the gun on himself.” The thought: why didn’t he fucking turn the gun on himself BEFORE he murdered all those people? Makes me want to holler, although, of course, hollering doesn’t help much.
Another example Arendt gives of this infallibility/prophecy pathology is Hitler thundering to the Reichstag in 1939 that if international Jewry insists on forcing Germany into another world war, it will result in the annihilation of the “Jewish race”. You see how this prophecy business works among the infallible?
I’ve really got nothing more to add on this note, except to say that it appears those who most desperately claim to be to infallible are weak, vain, stupid, insecure, resentful, entitled, incompetent, jealous, petty, vindictive, hopelessly inferior feeling, empty, blindly hating, shallow, incurious, uninformed (yet supremely opinionated), envious, grasping, self-ignorant, desperate, persecuted, vicious types. Very fine people, fine people, no doubt, the finest people, if you know what I’m saying, but heaven help the nation that falls under the power of one of these headstrong, never wrong creatures.
An audiobook of an excellent writer’s work, read by an expressive, intelligent reader is a wonderful thing. The audiobook of Eichmann in Jerusalem, read by the great Wanda McCaddon, is a fantastic aural read. I’d say Wanda’s reading is like a great translation of the original [1]. It is certainly “value added” and I’m sure Hannah Arendt would agree.
Listening to an audiobook requires a certain concentration, which can be improved with practice. Listening carefully is not something most people ever practice, we’re in a hurry, yo, get to the fucking point, did you hear… oh, sorry, were you still not getting to the point? I heard… wait, I thought you were done, were going to say the same thing you always say, are we still talking about that? — etc.
Wanda McCaddon read a line by Hannah Arendt that caused me to make a note to find the quote in Chapter IX of Eichmann in Jerusalem. It seemed to explain a lot. Why did the other countries of the world not help the Jews during the mass murder that went on for several years? Most of them did little or nothing to help (outside of Denmark) and looking back after most of one’s family has been murdered, like an Armenian after the slaughter by the Turks, it’s natural to feel betrayed, ask ‘what the fuck?’
Arendt writes (and it turns out to be merely a passing parenthetical), leaving aside the prevalent (though not Nazi level) anti-Semitism in Europe:
(As though those tightly organized European nation-states would have reacted any differently if any other group of foreigners had suddenly descended upon them in hordes– penniless, passportless, unable to speak the language of the country!)
How much light does this short observation shed on the worldwide refugee crisis the world is in the middle of today?
The United States refuels Saudi bombers in the air over Yemen so that our monarchist radical Islamic fundamentalist allies can continue bombing the towns and cities below. The Saudi planes and the bombs are made in the USA. We participate directly in creating the humanitarian crisis that has caused untold numbers of Yemeni civilians to flee their war-torn, cholera plagued country. When they flee the war that we are daily helping Saudi Arabia wage we make a new law: NO YEMENIS!!! None, no reason needs to be given, the great Oz has spoken.
The Koch brother’s boy, current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, releases an official State Department boast on International Refugee Day about how America has always been the world’s greatest supporter of those fleeing war and oppression. He mentions a dollar amount we’ve given, the rough equivalent of a dime, or maybe three cents, and says no other country has done more since the end of World War Two.
A few days later a highly partisan 5-4 Supreme Court vote comes down, along strict party lines, upholding President Turd’s Muslim Ban, er…”travel ban”. Under no circumstances (unless perhaps they are rich and doing business with one of the president’s businesses) will anyone from Yemen or several other Muslim countries be allowed to come to the United States.
USA! USA!!!!!
[1] I am a great admirer of Isaac Babel’s writing. I put Babel’s writing in a class with Sam Cooke’s singing, Django’s guitar playing, Meryl Streep’s acting. I read Babel in English, of course, I know and love the 1955 translation (long out of print) by Walter Morison.
I was once told by a Russian poet that Isaac Babel’s Russian is “untranslatable”. I have always loved the Walter Morison translations, which this Russian poet told me captured Babel’s Russian surprisingly well. When I see other translations I am often struck by their clumsiness, the way they are nothing like the Babel I love.
Here is an excellent discussion, leavened by wryness, of the challenges of translating Babel’s Russian into English. I tip my cap to this writer, well done!
Here is the first article on the challenge of translating Babel I found, which struck me as great at the time. I thought it contained a section of Morison’s masterful rendering of Babel’s Guy de Maupassant (though the notes in the book I love apparently attributed the translation to Raymond Rosenthal and Waclaw Soski) It appears the author of the article linked above thought he was up to the challenge of improving this flowing translation. I say no, but, alas, am too lazy to rewrite the whole piece. To cut straight to the immortal passages in the beautiful translation I first read, skip to the last paragraphs of this post. Scroll to the double space above “Here, sorry about that.”
Isaac Babel deserves his own post (and now, a few hours later, he has it), but here is Babel’s wonderful, laconic description of translating, of writing. This is possibly the best short description ever written about what we do when wrestling our thoughts into the best possible language (it comes after the other translator’s introduction of the story for context) (emphasis mine):
Babel himself was a translator from French and Yiddish. One of his best-known stories, “Guy de Maupassant,” is ostensibly about translation. Its narrator, a fictional Babel, has been hired by Raisa Berndersky, a rich Jewish Petersburg society wife, to help her with her attempts at translating Maupassant:
In her translation there was no trace of Maupassant’s free-flowing phrases with their drawn-out breath of passion. Mrs. Bendersky’s writing was tediously correct, lifeless and loud, the way Jews used to write Russian back in the day. I took the manuscript home with me…and spent all night hacking a path through someone else’s translation (*). The work was not as bad as it sounds. A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a barely discernible twist. The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm. You need to turn it once, but not twice. In the morning, I brought back the corrected manuscript. Raïsa wasn’t lying when she told me of her passion for Maupassant. She sat motionless, her hands clasped as I read it to her: these satin hands melted to the floor, her forehead went pale, and the lace between her bound breasts strained and trembled. “How did you do that?” So then I started talking about style, about an army of words, an army in which all manner of weapons come into play. No steel can pierce the human heart as cold as a period placed just right. She listened, her head bowed, her painted lips parted. A black light glowed in her lacquered hair, smoothly pressed and parted. Her legs, with their strong tender calves, were bathed in stockings and splayed wide on the carpet.
No, wait just a minute. This is not Morison’s translation, (or Raymond Rosenthal and Waclaw Soski’s) you treacherous fellow you. I get it now, you think you have improved on the “Morison” translation, made it more faithful to Babel’s writing, to the actual Russian words he chose. You haven’t, and I know this even though I don’t know a word of Russian. It is in the flow, the music of the language, the rhythm. Morison, the year before I was born, translated the phrase you style “hacking a path through somebody else’s translation” as “hacking my way through the tangled undergrowth of her prose” as far as I recall, I don’t have the tattered out-of-print paperback with me here at the farm. But compare those two phrases. Why would Babel have written the dry first phrase when the second is so full of flavor?
Now I see many small brutalities, inflicted no doubt, and without a sense of irony (especially considering the story itself, the passage about the subtle art of translation!) in the interest of making the translation more accurate, more tediously correct, if I may borrow your phrase for Raisa Bendersky’s stilted, painstaking, tuneless translation. I know that translation is a fine art, a very difficult art, no doubt, a kind of intoxicating dance (when working with something like Babel’s uniquely delicious prose). But sometimes you simply need to leave a fine translation alone.
“How did you do that?” with only the tiniest, almost imperceptible, turn of the warm lever, is inferior, and far less immediate, than Morison’s/Rosenthal’s & Soski’s breathless “How did you do it?”.
And fuck, the last line of the story, which made my young spine tingle and filled me with a longing to some day write a line like that, has been changed too! And not for the better, it ends the transcendent story rather flatly. It is rendered:
My heart felt tight. I was brushed by a premonition of the truth.
Nothing like the icy fingers grasping his heart as he has a premonition .. wait, I have found the original line, on-line:
My heart contracted as the foreboding of some essential truth touched me with light fingers.
Another great line, butchered also, damn it, made clumsy and clunky, along with the bit about needing to turn the lever once, not twice. The proof, if it was needed, that some phrases don’t need the lever turned at all. You took this:
No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.
and believe you’ve improved it, with only one turn of the lever, to this:
No steel can pierce the human heart as cold as a period placed just right.
Dunce!
Goddamn it, you fucker. Might be more accurate as a strict translation from the Russian, maybe the Russian word for “cold” is in there, “pierce” may be closer to the Russian than its close synonym “stab”, but for god’s sake, read the two lines in English.
Here, sorry about that. I mentioned I don’t have my moth-eaten copy of Babel with me. Read this, from the original translation, I found it in an old email I sent a friend in 2014. Observe the way it flows, without a word wasted:
I took the manuscript with me, and in Kazantsev’s attic, among my sleeping friends, spent the night cutting my way through the tangled undergrowth of her prose. It was not such dull work as it might seem. A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a slight, an almost invisible twist. The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm, and you can only turn it once, not twice.
Next morning I took back the corrected manuscript. Raisa wasn’t lying when she told me that Maupassant was her sole passion. She sat motionless, her hands clasped, as I read it to her. Her satin hands drooped to the floor, her forehead paled, and the lace between her constricted breasts danced and heaved.
“How did you do it?”
I began to speak of style, of the army of words, of the army in which all kinds of weapons may come into play. No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place. She listened with her head down and her painted lips half open. In her hair, pressed smooth, divided by a parting and looking like patent leather, shone a dark gleam. Her legs in tight-fitting stockings, with their strong, soft calves, were planted wide apart on the carpet.
The maid, glancing to the side with her petrified wanton eyes, brought in breakfast on a tray.
One point I didn’t hammer home in the post I wrote the other day is the ease with which false equivalencies are made. I didn’t mean to imply that there is equal validity to both sides of our current political impasse or that everything can be made better by polite compromise. Is there room to compromise over who is right, climate scientists who link the catastrophic climate events now very common to the warming of the oceans due to man-made pollution and the oil industry think tanks who insist we must be skeptical of these claims because unprecedented wild fires, hundred year storms, floods, droughts, earthquakes, deadly heat waves etc. sometimes just happen, by sheer coincidence, many times a year?
There is a lucrative advertising-driven industry based on false equivalencies that makes it virtually impossible for most people to get past their bitter partisan differences for the sake of seriously analyzing a larger problem. Partisanship drives commerce, whether it’s the sports team you root for or the political team. The CEO of the company that owns CBS made some comment mildly critical of the bully, then one of a dozen Republican presidential candidates, who went on to become our current president, then he smiled and said how good this stirrer of shit was for the corporate bottom line: viewer eyeballs and advertising dollars.
Only people of good will and good faith can sit down together and have a larger discussion that doesn’t degenerate into the dogmatic defense of their personal and political biases. People of good will and good faith are out there in significant numbers, but our commercialized political system has made such individuals rare in the public sphere. The public debate we get to see is conducted by hard-nosed partisans who fight each other in a way that makes powerless viewers tune in to fume. It is much easier to put on a blue hat, or a red one, and chant. It is everybody’s right to chant, but not all chants are created equal.
My mother asked me, when I was ten or so, something that struck me as a profound question. “Can you admire a great artist if you find out he’s a Nazi?” In other words, can you separate the art work from the deep personal beliefs of the person who created it? To my ten year-old mind this was a puzzler. Being a great artist was very important to me at ten, I had a grandmother who convinced me it was crucial for me to become a world famous artist. Her first cousin was world famous plaster casting sculptor George Segal. Somewhere I have a letter from Georgik, received shortly after my lone visit to his farm studio, seething, in tiny controlled handwriting, at my monstrous attitude toward the fucking rich, people he called the most generous in the world. They’d certainly been most generous to him.
Anyway, after living in the world long enough I no longer have any doubt about the correct answer to that now obvious question: if a Nazi produces great art work he’s still a Nazi and fuck him and his fucking art work. My friend and mentor Florence, a great artist and a lifelong political activist, told me the same thing the last time I saw her. It’s kind of obvious, really. Art is personal and also political. Picture the curator or gallery owner:
“Look at the unmatched delicacy of these watercolors, the subtle gradations in shade and color, the beautiful control of the brush, the bravura treatment of the sky, the sea. The way the pigment is deployed perfectly for the luminous effect…”
You say: and look at the great artist in his SS uniform, impeccable, looking so self-possessed as he points to the right and the left, sending people to slave labor or the gas chamber. Also done with great style and an almost unmatched delicacy. You can tell the man is an artist. A great Nazi artist. As for these breathtaking watercolors, they should be neatly, respectfully rolled and delicately shoved up his war criminal ass, along with the brushes and his other painting supplies.
Harsh? Perhaps. The point is that, although we routinely deny it here, our life choices are both personal and political. Compromise is not possible on certain matters. At one time most Americans thought it proper to tolerate the institution of slavery. It was unthinkable to imagine dismantling that great money-making machine that had created so much wealth, prosperity, that charmingly genteel way of life. The Abolitionists were often thought of as extremists, maniacs, hysterics. History now takes another view of them, since they now seem to have clearly been on the right moral side of the terrible issue. The issue, racially based human slavery, and chattel slavery at that, was a great controversy at one time.
I dare say even those who cheer and chant for our current overbearer-in-chief would hesitate to scream their approval of a proposal to reintroduce race-based chattel slavery in America, no matter how enthusiastically they love the school-to-prison pipeline, privatized for-profit prisons, free enterprise, freedom, the free market, no matter how passionately they believe in the vague goal of Making America Great Again. Maybe I am giving the crowd at a shallow, adulation-craving celebrity megalomaniac’s rally too much credit, but I feel it would only be a few, at least at first, chanting: Chain them up! Chain them up!!!!!
Which is not to say, of course, that many of them might not feel that choking anger, and fear, and in some shameful place in their angry, frightened hearts they might not wish for the good old days when those contentious matters were simply settled law.
Now we have right-wing partisans, salivating at the prospect of a 6-3 Conservative Supreme Court for the rest of my lifetime, calling the famous Roe v. Wade ruling, making the right to choose abortion a Constitutional right for women, the modern Dred Scott case, a ruling that held that a black person, once a slave, was always a fucking slave anywhere in the U.S.A. for purposes of the Fugitive Slave Act. Within a few years of Dred Scott Americans would be spilling each other’s blood in rivers to settle the question once and for all.
Another Civil War over the question of a twelve year-old rape victim’s right not to be forced to carry the rapist’s baby to term? I don’t imagine so, but I also have no doubt that the merciless application of the abstract principle that “life begins at conception” does not quite cover the entire moral landscape of the argument over a woman’s right to choose an abortion, if she must. Those who believe that abortion is murder, period, will not be convinced that mercy is ever involved in the issue, since it would be condoning murder, something no moral person would ever do.
Ronald Reagan, either quipping or already demented, said “the right to life ends at birth”. Funny, Ronnie. Also true. The proponents of banning abortion seldom provide for the lives of the sacred, unwanted little souls they are insisting have every right to be born. Once born, of course, you’re on your own, motherfucker, this is America, bitch, nobody owes you jack shit.
Oversimplification? Take the question of a medically complicated pregnancy that threatens the life of the mother. If the fetus continues to grow in the womb the mother will die. Still murder to spare the mother’s life by terminating the pregnancy?
Let’s ask God. Isn’t it true, God, that there is no justice without mercy?
God informs me that He was driven to despair by man’s misuse of free will. Broke His heart, He said He’s done with these motherfuckers, particularly the ones who insist they are righteously killing in His name. We’re on our own down here.
I thought this article was a pretty good discussion of the dilemma we citizens face in an increasingly tribal nation, presided over by a blustering, supremely entitled imbecile who has only one trick: attacking people who make him feel stupid or inadequate. Wait, he has two other tricks: shameless self-promotion and doubling down. If you make a bad bet, double it. The alternative, admitting error, is unthinkable. How can your brand be infallible if you admit making a mistake? It is important to be the most important and the very best person in the world. Period. End of story. Make America Great Again, bitches.
Pardon all the Nazi stuff recently, I really couldn’t tell you why I am suddenly thinking about it so often (could be reading Hannah Arendt’s fantastic Eichmann in Jerusalem, I guess). Here’s a nice bit for your consideration, the devil, as always, in the details:
The Gestapo had the authority to arrest citizens on the suspicion that they might commit a crime, and the definition of a crime was at their discretion. The Gestapo Law, passed in 1936, gave police the right to act extra-legally. This led to the sweeping use of Schutzhaft—”protective custody”, a euphemism for the power to imprison people without judicial proceedings.[52] The courts were not allowed to investigate or interfere. The Gestapo was considered to be acting legally as long as it was carrying out the leadership’s will. People were arrested arbitrarily, sent to concentration camps, or killed.[44]
Of course, it’s always problematic to make comparisons between current events and infamous low points in human history, no matter how emotionally vexing those current events may be. I call for an end (until it becomes undeniable, at which point I’ll be unable to post calls for anything) to the comparisons of brutal policymakers to Nazis or other totalitarian regimes.
Taking young children from their mothers’ arms is not the same, clearly, as wrenching a baby from the mother and smashing a rifle butt against its tiny head. Putting a crying child in a cage for indefinite detention is not anywhere near as horrific as putting a child in a gas chamber. You can’t even fairly compare those two things, caging and murdering. So calling a government policy that dehumanizes certain classes of children and designates them for this kind of inhumane treatment “Nazi-like” sounds like hyperbole and is easily enough dismissed by the hard pragmatists who believe that this kind of harsh, tough, zero-tolerance policy that makes parents pay a brutally high price, their connection with their children, will deter desperate people from coming to our borders.
It is easy to condemn this sort of policy as the terroristic tactic of people consumed by unreasoning hatred of the objects of their policy. The people coming to the US southern border are portrayed by proponents of these harsh policies as criminals, rapists, terrorists, a hoard posing untold dangers to our eternally threatened nation, incredible dangers, unbelievably bad dangers, really dangerous dangers. That many of them are running from terrors directly produced by, say, our own imbecilic ninety year selective drug prohibition regime, our eternal War on Drugs, is beside the point. Those violent drug gangs are the problem, not the ongoing American law enforcement idiocy that has only produced a massively lucrative product for these increasingly violent foreign (and domestic) criminals to peddle.
Fleeing gang violence, says our tiny, racist top law enforcement official, is no longer grounds for political asylum, it’s your goddamn problem, deal with it, you brown, non-English speaking losers. Neither is fleeing a spouse who beats the living shit out of you and threatens to kill you. Nothing to see here! No longer America’s role, to provide a haven for women and children who will otherwise be killed in their home countries, or teenagers facing death if they refuse to join a drug cartel’s street gang.
We cannot underestimate the vital role that terrorism and the threat of violent physical force plays in human affairs. By terrorism and violent force, I refer to the routinized violence threatened or visited on citizens by states, by nations and coalitions of nations. This state violence causes the vast majority of deaths by terrorism (though it is rarely referred to as terrorism, for obvious reasons). Deadly violence, and the terrifying threat of its instant deployment, and more recently fear of non-government terrorism, and the need for extreme measures to protect the populace from Terror with a capital T, is always used by the status quo to maintain order and to influence political relations.
The old debate over who is the terrorist is now all the rage, in our terrified of terror Post-9-11 world. Those illegal Mexicans, Guatemalans and Hondurans are TERRORISTS, we are told by American law enforcement. The protesters in Gaza, every one of them according to the Israeli Minister of Defense, down to the medics and members of the international press: TERRORISTS! When you’re fighting terror, the gloves must come off, obviously.
The I.C.E. agents who forcibly take the kids from their potential terrorist parents are only protecting law abiding citizens from criminals and terrorists, the worst of the worst, shameless terrorists using their own babies as human shields! Those terrorists in Gaza? We have every right to kill as many as we need to in order to make them stop hating our freedom! Israeli leaders, particularly the extreme nationalistic right wing ones, are fond of reminding the world that Israel is the region’s only real democracy. Therefore any means needed will be employed to defend it from haters, including opening fire on unarmed protesters, with special bullets designed to do maximum damage on impact.
The moral battle is won by the most skilled story-tellers, the people who can make us empathize the most with their point of view. With that in mind, Israeli lawmakers are considering a law making it illegal to photograph Israeli soldiers in a way that could potentially harm Israeli military morale. Showing a photo of an Israeli soldier cuffing a belligerent Palestinian teenager could really harm the morale of the sorely tested Israeli army. Five years in prison for the photographer who has caused this harm to Israeli democracy, ten if the photograph, according to the law, undermines the security of the state. They are voting on this important measure as I type these words. Nothing to see here!
The motto of every great democracy– Nothing to see here! Criminalize those who take pictures of things that are nobody’s business, merely the democratic sausage we all love being made. We are no slouches in this department, here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. Dubya Bush’s daddy made it illegal to photograph and broadcast images of the coffins of dead American soldiers. How bad was it for morale to see, day after day, those dead Americans coming home from war zones?! No more of that shit, citizens of a democracy do not need that kind of incredibly depressing shit, it only creates prejudice. It sets our people against lawful war as the solution to every business-related foreign problem our leaders seek to solve by violent means.
Recently our perpetually petulant president withdrew the U.S. from the the Human Rights Council in the United Nations. Who needs fake fucking Human Rights from a bunch of self-righteous loser hypocrites? This sudden departure from the council did not come out of nowhere. First the council unfairly condemned Israel for having snipers shoot countless protesters, killing scores, hospitalizing thousands. Next they attacked us directly! The UN Council on Human Rights is poised to release a report about the extent and conditions of extreme poverty in the United States.
“It’s patently ridiculous for the United Nations to examine poverty in America,” U.S. Ambassador Haley Barber said in response to the Special Rapporteur’s report. Fair enough, Ms. Barber, if you say so. Just because the U.S. has vast numbers of citizens, an estimated 5.3 million (out of 40 million in poverty), living in desperate Third World type poverty is none of anyone’s damn business. Making a big deal about falling American life expectancy, an infant mortality rate as high as in many very poor countries, America’s informed choice not to recognize the human rights of children, outrageous meddling! It is no business of a bunch of Socialist America haters to “impartially” investigate and write preposterous, hateful, patently ridiculous reports about us. They’re our fucking poor people and we’ll deal with those selfish parasites, including the 13 million so-called children in poverty, as we fucking see fit, Sir. We’ve got your Human Rights Council right here (grab crotch), bitches!
It’s not right to call them Nazis, I’ll be the first to remind you. Assholes, yes, vicious assholes, sure, but Nazis… not quite yet. Still, this administration is taking steady, consistent steps toward a kind of American authoritarianism. The destruction of critical thought is the first thing that must be achieved, to allow incoherent partisan buzzwords to carry every argument.
Think of the incoherent messages about this policy of taking children from their parents, the citing of biblical scripture to justify it, the denials about the policy, the indignant objection to cages being referred to as cages, the blaming of Democrats for the policy, the sudden reversal of the policy by executive order. None of that really matters, if we are really ready for the end of our democracy. The silencing of all thoughtful criticism leads to the acceptance of incoherent narratives. This process is crucial for anyone seeking absolute control over a population. Silence the critics and you’re most of the way home. The lying media, enemy of the people, knows this too. Those bastards need to be made to fall into line, by hook or by crook.
Once the possibility of coherent public discussion is eliminated, the rest is pretty much downhill for any motherfucker, already in the highest position in our government, who would become Supreme Leader. The test of American democracy is upon us all. The good news is that’s its a pass/fail exam, which is also, sadly, the bad news.
As I am currently delving deeply into Hannah Arendt’s deep Eichmann in Jerusalem, it is hard for me to see any government policy that dehumanizes selected humans as unrelated to the larger Nazi worldview and purpose. You dehumanize unworthy humans who you can then treat viciously, blame whoever you like for your own deliberate brutality, heck, blame the dehumanized themselves, wait for any outcry to die down, then do whatever the hell you want to the sons and daughters of bitches. Hitler 101, straight up.
So it won’t do for me to get emotionally involved here, any more than I already am. I offer this one bit, from Diane’s piece, two immoral administration spokespeople indecently citing the words of Jesus in a bland attempt to justify their boss’s inhumane, unChristlike purposes:
Sessions, who continues to vigorously defend the policy he pushed for internally, freely acknowledges that Bush and Obama did not interpret the law the same way that Trump is doing now. “The previous administration wouldn’t prosecute illegal aliens who entered the country with children,” he said last Thursday in Fort Wayne, Ind. “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes.” (Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended using religion to justify the policy. “I can say that it is very biblical to enforce the law,” the White House press secretary told reporters that afternoon.)
I can say, without hesitation or need to qualify it in any way, that Adolf Eichmann and his ilk would have been equally comfortable with the quoted scripture about obedience to authority. A moral duty to accept the dictates of a human governor as expressions of God’s law … Jesus Christ. It may be many things, but it sure as hell ain’t democracy.
I now refer you to Diane Ravitch’s well-done post, which is here.
And, after reading the piece, I salute Laura Bush [1] and Melania. You go! Expressions of the best American impulses, rather than the most petulant, vicious, extortionate and politically cynical.
[1] From Laura Bush’s editorial:
Recently, Colleen Kraft, who heads the American Academy of Pediatrics, visited a shelter run by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement. She reported that while there were beds, toys, crayons, a playground and diaper changes, the people working at the shelter had been instructed not to pick up or touch the children to comfort them. Imagine not being able to pick up a child who is not yet out of diapers.
I’ve got to write and post this quickly, my internet has been out all day so far, as it was most of yesterday, only winking back on a few minutes ago during a long call with Spectrum tech support. While on hold I learned, and passed on to Ron, the good-natured Spectrum rep, that Tom Rutledge, the great and important CEO of Spectrum’s parent company, a guy who made $98.5 million in 2016 when his outfit bought Time Warner Cable, is still refusing to negotiate with the technicians union, IBEW local No. 3, an outfit whose strike is in its second year.
Rutledge, in fairness to him and his principled refusal to negotiate with the lawfully constituted technicians’ union, is probably bitter at the vast drop in his income. He made a mere $7,800,000 last year and his ungrateful technicians are bitching about giving up certain features of their health plan, retirement benefits and things like that. It’s hard to blame Rutledge for being so intractable, unless you are the kind of person who is harsh to complete assholes.
Ron had no idea Spectrum technicians in New York were on strike, though he’d heard of vandalism in NYC. I explained the difference between vandalism and acts of skilled sabotage by workers whose rights under the National Labor Relations Act seemed to be being violated. I explained to him that in the old days workers who accepted bad pay to cross a picket line and break a strike were called bad names, including scabs, and that I was reluctant to let a strike breaking technician into my apartment to check a modem that doesn’t seem to be faulty, as it is currently working.
Ron agreed the problem was not the modem, since it is getting a fine signal at the moment. The problem could be in the “drop”, the box that splits off from the “node” for delivery into individual buildings. The node serves 248 modems in my area, the drop might serve a dozen in my building. There was no way for him to monitor activity on my “drop”, though only 10 of 248 modems on my node are currently offline. If you are wondering why I don’t just switch to an ISP that is not so fucked up, I will tell you.
We have two ISPs in most of New York City, Spectrum (a branch of Charter, who bought the franchise from Time Warner Cable a few years back) and Verizon. Both ISP giants provide substandard internet service, intermittent service, and, because the free competition we hear so much about only involves two giants in our free market, they are free to set whatever prices it pleases them to set for whatever service they see fit to provide. I currently pay $50 a month for intermittent internet service from Spectrum, having grown tired of no service and repeated lies from Verizon. Ron was somehow able to give me a double credit today for the hours last night into today that I had no service: a generous $3.33.
I have to contact the technicians’ union, IBEW local # 3 and get the latest on their strike against Spectrum, the internet provider with the handsomely compensated CEO, a chap who made over $100 million the last two years. This wealthy titan will not negotiate with the union. He does not believe in unions. If he had his way, workers would not be paid at all. Think of how much more money he could make if all those wasted technician salaries, vacation days, health benefits, pension contributions were saved, clawed back, put into his tax-free investment portfolio!
I need to contact the IBEW and offer to help them publicize their strike. They ran a great online ad a few months back, very compelling, but not a public word since. Almost nobody knows about the status of the strike that strikebreaker CEO Tom Rutledge is doing his best to make go away. I wonder how many are still on strike after more than a year, like Jewish children making a strong moral case to a Nazi. I want to support the union and I need the striking workers, if possible, to exempt my home from their sabotage of Spectrum’s never perfect, now never worse, service.
Spectrum told me yesterday that my modem is defective, that, for once, there is no outage in my area, on my node. They will need to send scab technicians over to inspect it all, the modem, the interior connection, outside connectivity at the “drop”, issues relating to the entire node, etc. They gave me a generous $1.67 credit yesterday for a day without internet service (this outage must last, according to corporate policy, at least four consecutive hours to qualify for the refund). The modem I was assured yesterday must be broken, after hours of no service with no outages reported, is delivering a signal again now. Ron assured me today it is very unlikely to be the modem.
Shades of the old runaround from Spectrum’s fellow duopolist ISP Verizon, who told me for months that there was a technical problem with my line and that they were working on it, that a technical team would contact me the following day. I was never contacted. The problem was not with my line, it was with the entire Verizon network, which was off-line for many months as they switched their network from copper wire to fiber. This required digging up streets, getting permits, burying fiberoptic cable, it took many months. A call to Verizon was the same bullshit, month after month. A complete lie. The technical team will call you tomorrow, we have no idea why you have no service, now about that huge bill you keep refusing to pay…
If your only business is making profit, it would behoove you to lie if you might lose the bulk of your customers during the months they will have no service. What self-respecting American business would admit something that would undoubtedly cause an exodus of customers? Verizon billed me, month after month, for service I had not been receiving. According to them, no refund was due until I paid in full. They were demanding hundreds of dollars by the end. Would it seem petty of me to call them Nazi motherfuckers? Sure it would, they are just an American business trying to keep the lights on so that all Americans can enjoy a brighter day!
post-script:
The modern world, my friends, where every war must be fought by propagandists who specialize in branding, messaging and targeted marketing, sometimes brings us, just fucking bullshit.
Pull up the IBEW information on their long-running strike against Charter/Spectrum, and here you go:
You can read about the neo-liberal asshole NYS Governor’s battle with the mega-corporation, complete with mealy mouthed almost-threats and a hint at support for a striking union that is a key political support group. We have to go to Crain’s, in May 2018, for any kind of update on this shit?
I’m listening to Wanda McCaddon’s superb reading of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem again. I’d missed a lot in my first listening. It is a fascinating book, particularly if you feel any urgency to learn about the progression and functioning of a totalitarian regime. Arendt’s 1964 book is as good a single volume history of the Nazi period as any I’ve seen. I’m looking forward to hearing Wanda McCaddon’s reading of Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, on hold at the library.
Arendt provides, among other things, a wealth of detail about the structure and day to day functioning of the Thousand Year Reich. I just heard a bit that sent me dashing to the book, (also on loan from the library) and finding page 148, where Arendt discusses the role of Nazi lawyers in crafting laws that made all kinds of cruel and murderous practices perfectly legal and provided a sturdy legal defense to any post-war charges. When I say Nazi lawyers [1] I mean that all lawyers in the Third Reich were required to be Nazi party members in good standing, I am also talking about Nazi judges, of course, every single one of them, up to supremely loyal Nazi Supreme Court judges, accountable only to the Fuhrer’s will.
As every self-respecting dictator demands: the supreme leader’s word is law. In Nazi Germany Hitler’s every command had the force of law, Fuhrerworte haben Gesetzeskraft (Arendt, 148). Even so, in certain cases, like codifying his command for the Final Solution, teams of expert Nazi lawyers got to work. That particular secretly spoken order for the physical destruction of European Jews and other undesirables, “was followed by a huge shower of regulations and directives, all drafted by expert lawyers and legal advisers, not by mere administrators.” (Arendt, 149).
Under Nazi law as crafted by the most learned Nazi lawyers (and it is now known that the Nazis studied the racial laws and practices of the American south [2] ), there was a strong “state action” defense Nazi state actors could raise if they were prosecuted, in the event the Nazis lost the war, for things like mass-murder. The old Nuremberg Defense was heard over and over during those trials: “I was only following orders.” This “state action” defense argument contends that any act done in one’s official state duty cannot be prosecuted as a crime. Blood curdling capital crimes would have to be excused, under this theory, if executed under this principle of international law.
American law often grants the same exemptions to Americans acting under command of the United States of America, particularly in time of war. Think of the second Bush administration’s secret torture memos that preemptively legalized illegal acts and the immunizing of private mercenaries for all acts committed in liberating Iraq from a modern-day Hitler, etc. Certain unspeakable acts, like machine gunning civilians from a helicopter, and then strafing the rescue van, or prying American bullets out of civilians accidentally killed in a raid, might be hard to justify under any theory. These were the kinds of hard cases shrewd Nazi lawyers were prepared to defend under the “state actor” theory, a potentially useful defense for war criminals or those who may, arguably, have committed “crimes against humanity”.
The idea of a novel legal concept like a “crime against humanity” was sneered at by Nazi lawmakers when they worked in a legal system that made the systematic murder of certain “stateless” civilians fully lawful (enemies of the state were commonly branded “stateless” for purposes of avoiding liability for hostile state action.)
Gassing a room full of naked men, women and children, for example. You’d think that would be a cut and dried murder qualifying you for a death sentence if convicted. Premeditated murder like that would likely be a tough rap to beat in virtually any courtroom in the world. But the Nazis rewrote the legal norms of Germany, turning them upside down [3] and writing new laws to circumvent all existing law, and after the war, allowing defense lawyers to argue matters of post-Hitler international law at the Nuremberg Trails and later during the Eichmann Trail. Eichmann’s lawyer argued unsuccessfully that since Eichmann was a German citizen only a German court had the jurisdiction to prosecute him. The West German government in 1961 wanted nothing to do with a trial against a Nazi (for one thing, other prominent former Nazis were in high positions in that government. The Germans were only too happy to let the Jewish State have the headache of trying Eichmann. Eichmann’s defense, beyond his state actor status, is that he himself was no murderer, let alone a mass-murder, but a minor functionary who simply did lawful things under lawful orders from his lawful superiors. A point Arendt does not dismiss — his being personally squeamish– though she ends her book stating that she would hang him based purely on the conviction that we should not have to share the earth with somebody like Eichmann.
The Nazis performed this revolution in law with an army of the best, brightest and most ambitious Nazi lawyers, without ever abolishing the liberal Weimar Constitution. All that was needed to make that blueprint for democratic document work perfectly for the Nazis was a terrifying national emergency that required the immediate activation of special powers, and a quick yes/no vote in the Reichstag for an Enabling Act. The emergency powers the Nazis seized were all legal and perfectly constitutional under the Weimar Constitution, leaving aside the troubling fact that the Nazis themselves almost undoubtedly arranged for the terrifying national emergency, the torching of Reichstag, the German Parliament. Everything the Nazis did during the endless twelve year national emergency had been done with a brazen Nazi veneer of perfect legality under existing democratic law in Germany. The early years in power were spent crafting timeless laws for the Thousand Year Reich.
Sadly, when you think of justice as basic fairness, there is often a law, even in non-totalitarian societies, specifically created to allow things neither just nor fair, that can be cited in defense of terrible acts [4]. The best lawyer will make the strongest possible case for a particular section of that particular law prevailing over all other laws, all squishy moral considerations. Eichmann was accused of mass murder. Eichmann insisted that he had never murdered even a single person, hated bloodshed, so how could he possibly be culpable for jack shit under any law, since he was simply lawfully doing his lawful job the whole time?
Nazi lawyers were busy in those final days destroying incriminating legal documents and tightening up laws with an eye toward shoring up arguments that that arguably criminal acts done under state law could only be prosecuted by state officials. This is the same practice racist Americans used for generations, under the doctrine of States’ Rights, to ensure that local lynchings remained basically lawful activities, to be decided by local juries of people who knew the murderers to be damned good people who wouldn’t have done that kind of thing without a damned good reason. Under almost any law you can cite, there are grotesque specifics the lawyer can argue to try to get the client off the hook. It’s no mystery, really, that in Nazi Germany Nazi lawyers supervised the drafting of every important law.
Or course, law is not the only way people are kept in line. Controversial laws often come last, after the groundwork has been laid by the behaviors and attitudes tolerated and eventually applauded by the citizens. This is the reason propaganda is so important, to sew the seeds of the beliefs necessary to promulgate laws that, in other situations, may not seem just, fair or humane. The Nazis understood this keenly and taught future generations of politicians exactly how it should be done. The lessons have been well-learned and the battle for hearts and minds is being constantly waged by monied partisans on every side of every issue. Life for the person on the street often changes long before the new laws are put into effect, or even drafted.
You live in a place where people who are too loud in their dissent will be politely asked to shut the fuck up. Many times people get the hint, pick up the social cues and move someplace where they don’t have to argue politics all the time. Particularly after a few people who won’t shut up are made examples of.
But say you have the odd, perverse partisan, living in the same place for many years, unwilling or unable to relocate. His new neighbors all support the candidate he hates, and that candidate wins the national election. The loud-mouthed opinionated fellow simply won’t shut up about his stinking opinion that the new leader is a Nazi.
There are ways to make this person shut up. Perfectly legal ones, or at least perfectly reasonable, acceptable ones. And if they are not strictly legal at the moment, but everybody involved goes along with current, extra-legal methods until better laws can be passed that will make complete assholes like this shut the hell up under penalty of law, well… call us pishers!
[1] The lawyers in Germany were the first profession to fully and voluntarily Nazify, followed closely, if memory serves, by German doctors. (Robert J. Lifton, The Nazi Doctors)
The requirement that every lawyer must be a loyal Nazi was essential to the creation and administration of the Nazi State. In programmer parlance: Nazi in, Nazi out.
[2] The States’ Rights argument here is based largely on the right of a sovereign state to make and prosecute its own civil and criminal laws. If an American state decides it is illegal for blacks and whites to marry each other, end of story. If a state decides that sometimes an uppity black person needs to be taught a violent lesson to keep the others in line, so be it. Those two racist state laws were later abolished, the first by a Supreme Court decision finding the law unconstitutional, the second by a series of Supreme Court decisions and the enforcement of a longstanding federal law to punish racially motivated terrorism, but it took more than a century. A dark century of vicious racism at law, state law.
[3] Think of the cunning, lawyerly rebranding of commonly understood tortures as mere methods of “enhanced interrogation”. Imagine John Yoo, the Korean-American Bush-Cheney loyalist who drafted the secret torture memo (along with a fuck named Bybee, later promoted to federal judge for life), not as a tenured professor of Constitutional Law at Berkeley, but as a perp on a water-board, being forced, under enhanced interrogation, to explain his actual thought process while writing that infernal legal justification for acts we had signed treaties to prevent, acts illegal under American law, the Nazi motherfucker.
[4] The current, highly controversial, American policy is to have U.S. border agents pluck the children of asylum seekers from their parents’ arms and throw the kids into prisons for children. About 2,000 so far, under this balls-to-the-walls administration. All perfectly legal, to hear the supporters of this policy tell it. It is a form of brutal deterrence calculated to slow down the flood of people coming to our borders seeking asylum. Sanctioned by Jesus Christ himself, as spoken by Paul (commanding all of Christ’s followers to never question the law, apparently– obedience to government authority being the highest spiritual calling of righteous Christians), according to our pious, God-fearing, scripture quoting racist Attorney General. Another guy I’d pay to watch sputtering on a water-board any time he refuses to honestly answer a simple question.
gratuitousblahg 