On Evil

 

 I had recently read and then had reread Anne Michaels’s novel, Fugitive Pieces, a story on one level about the connections between the trauma suffered as a result of the Nazi execution of the Holocaust and the long-term effect of that trauma on memory. Memory is the basis of our subjectivity: it is what we know. The two narrators, Jakob Beer and Ben, struggle to construct a life after the attempt by the Nazis to eradicate the world of Jews. The Nazis had murdered Jakob’s parents and his sister, Bella, who they had first kidnapped in the aftermath of their murderous raid; Jakob survived only by burying himself in the mud and had been rescued by the geologist Athos, who then hid the child, Jakob, under his coat and as if pregnant with child carried him before to safety in Zakynthos, Greece. But the effect of this trauma has left Jakob feeling lost. He remembers: of his sister Jakob can say only, “I had no choice but to imagine her face,” but the memory is fleeting and painful. Of himself he says, “I was like the men in Athos’s stories, who set their courses before the invention of longitude and never quite know where they were . . . They looked at the stars and knew they were missing information.” And Ben, the narrator of the second half of the novel is the son of Holocaust survivors for whom the experience in the camps organized not only future their lives but that of their son. Ben says, “ . . . that history only goes into remission, while it continues to grow in you until you’re silted up and can’t move. And you disappear into a piece of music, a chest of drawers, perhaps a hospital record or two, and you slip away, forsaken even by those who claimed to love you most.’” Ironically, Ben had discovered that the Nazis had murdered two children of his parents, and that his name is not really a name but a title and a means of maintaining some emotional distance should the Nazis come again: in English ‘ben’ is not a diminutive of Benjamin but in Hebrew means only ‘son of’. For both Jakob and Ben, the experience of the Holocaust has shaped their lives and their memories and sometimes in ways of which they are only partially aware.I think that their silences reflect this buried knowledge. 

In my contemporary world, the Nazis have become a daily presence. Only this week in this edition of the New York Review of Books there is a review article about three recent books concerning the rise and acceptance of Hitler and the Nazis in Germany in the decline of the Weimar Republic.  Over the almost forty years that I have subscribed to this and other journals there have been a regular progress of reviews regarding books and films addressing the Nazi regime and the Holocaust. I had grown up during the 1950s and 1960s in total silence regarding the Holocaust, a non-recognition of it—my parents never raised the issue, ever—and I do not remember an single reference  of it during my high school or college education. We worried then about Ethan Frome but not Anne Frank. I suspect this silence, this absence of the Shoah in my consciousness has had its effect nonetheless. I have since consumed whatever was available to me regarding it. There exists at least one entire bookshelf in my home that focuses on the Nazis and the events of the Holocaust and its long-term effects and repercussions. I have screened a great number of films, both documentary and fictional, that depict the events of those horrible years and the consequences of it for its victims. I have read the novels. And I consume the articles in the journals. In my mind and in my cultures, there seems to be an insatiable hunger for news and analyses concerning Nazi Germany, its ideologies and activities. The Holocaust has become an almost daily subject of talk, and the Nazis have become for our culture the embodiment of evil.

            And so I was intrigued by Mary Midgley’s observation in her essay “The Problem of Natural Evil.” She offers an interesting perspective on the issue of the Nazis and evil. For her the Nazis and its collaborators were evil, no doubt. Midgley acknowledges that evil is powerful because the destruction it performs has no positive aim in it; it is simply anti-life, a refusal of life. Terry Eagleton had argued that evil is the death-drive turned outward. I accept this idea. Evil exists, Eagleton writes, as “an unbearable sense of non-being which must be taken out on another.” Daniel Deronda, in George Eliot’s eponymous novel, too, refers to evil as a denial of life. Daniel says to Gwendolyn Harleth, who fears that her inaction led to her husband drowning death and makes her, thus, a murderer; Deronda says to her, “Within ourselves our evil will is momentous, and sooner or later it works its way outside us—it may be in the vitiation that breeds evil acts—but also may be in the self-abhorrence that stings us into better striving  . . . No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.” In our Western world the implementation of the mass murder of Europe’s Jews has come to represent not mere wickedness or immorality but the substance of ultimate evil. Hannah Arendt was wrong to think that Eichmann had no motives at all: “he merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing.” I believe that this attribution to him of ignorance has been revealed as false. He later admitted to a friendly listener, "To be frank with you, had we killed all of them, the ten point three million [European Jews], I would be happy and say, 'All right, we managed to destroy an enemy.' This is not a man without motives depicted here in his words. Rather, they were a clear expression of evil: a denial of life without cause. 

            Now Mary Midgely does not deny this evil of the Nazis; rather she suggests that the contemporary focus so exclusively on the Nazis, this attribution of ultimate evil to the Nazi regime can therefore encourage wishful thinking that suggests with the defeat of them that evil has been  eliminated. And more, the obsessive focus on the Nazis can, Midgely avers, “turn out to be yet one more way of missing their successors—who do not need to be spiritually bankrupt to this extent to be genuinely dangerous—and of inflating mere ordinary opponents to Nazi status.” Alain Finkielkraut writes, “The world has seen other genocides since the war. Only vanity would claim moral privilege or a monopoly on extermination for the Jews, for in this domain the Nazis were precursors rather than exceptions to the rule.” What Midgley and Finkielkraut are arguing is that to turn the Nazis into the ultimate epitome of evil, the primary exemplar of evil, is a way to avoid recognizing others who are also life-deniers, or a belief that allows us to contemptuously define those who disagree with us as Nazis or fascists.

            And this leads me to Donald Trump who I believe to be a contemporary embodiment of this life-denying evil. Charles Savage has written in the New York Times, “Donald Trump says he’d deploy the U.S. military on domestic soil, including to suppress protests he deems riots, patrol Democratic-run cities he deems crime dens and hunt for undocumented immigrants. The strongman tactics would carry profound implications for individual rights and constraints on federal power.” And what would those actions be in service to except the assumption of absolute power to eliminate perceived political enemies and those perceived to be disloyal, but includes the country’s immigrants that includes Melania and her family. He has already made public his threats. Trump claims that immigrants are animals. Again, from the New York Times and again directly quoting Trump: “They let — I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country. When they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” He continued, “They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America, not just to three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world. They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.” About whom is he speaking? Trump’s words are a denial of life. He has transformed human beings into venomous substances that must be eliminated. They are animals who must be contained, at best. The language mirrors that of the Nazis. That is what the Nazis said as they exterminated Europe’s Jews and Gypsies, and Disabled. And I recall that Hitler’s first plan was to rid Europe of Jews was by mass deportation. Later he took to murdering them.

            Of course, Trump is not the only one who accuses the immigrant of being less than human: Trump has his minions and like him they are very dangerous. They are life deniers. They murder and destroy and sometimes do so with impunity. And election day is Tuesday, November 5, and this embodiment of Evil could be elected President of the United States.