Vasily Grossman on good and evil

Vasily Grossman's novel Life and Fate was long delayed in its publication because of Soviet censorship but has come to be recognized as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Grossman was a complex and appealing intellectual. Born in 1905, he was raised in a secular Jewish family in Berdichev, Ukraine. He was educated as a chemical engineer, but his vocation was writing and literature. When Hitler's armies invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 Grossman became a war correspondent in the Red Army, and quickly emerged as one of the most active and popular observers of the chaos and murder of the German invasion throughout the war. He was present through much of the battle of Stalingrad, he was the first journalist to observe and write about the Treblinka death camp, and he maintained extensive notebooks recording his experiences and observations throughout the war and genocide. Alexandra Popoff's biography Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century offers a masterful account of his life and writings. Grossman began Life and Fate in the 1950s and completed it for publication in 1960. However, the manuscript and supporting materials were confiscated ("arrested") by the KGB and the novel was not published until 1980 (in Switzerland) -- sixteen years after Grossman's death.

The novel is riveting and complex. It represents an important piece of literary creation, a contribution to the history of the Holocaust and the German-Soviet war, and a prolonged critique of Stalinism. What is of special interest on this day in February, 2022 -- today, the first day of Russia's inexcusable and criminal aggressive war against Grossman's homeland, the Ukraine -- is Grossman's willingness to occasionally put the narrative aside and engage in philosophical-historical reflection. One such moment is in part 2, chapter 15, where Grossman presents a series of striking ideas about the nature of good and evil in history.

The theory is presented in a convoluted way. The old Bolshevik Mikhail Mostovskoy is a prisoner in a German concentration camp, and is brought for interrogation or conversation with Liss, a high Gestapo officer and student of Hegel. Liss has an unusual and surprising thesis to discuss with Mostovskoy: that both the Nazi officer and the loyal Bolshevik are involved in the same business -- service to an insane leader and a totalitarian ideology. Liss argues that the ideologies are remarkably similar. And secretly, Mostovskoy has come to see that the Soviet system is not so different from the Nazi system. He muses:

With all the strength of his soul, with all his revolutionary passion, he would have to hate the camps, the Lubyanka, bloodstained Yezhov, Yagoda, Beria! More than that ...! He would have to hate Stalin and his dictatorship! More than that! He would have to condemn Lenin ...! That was the edge of the abyss. (399)

The discussion of good and evil in this chapter is conveyed through the semi-coherent writings of another prisoner, the holy fool Ikonnikov. It is Ikonnikov whose shabby document on scraps of paper reflects on the history of good and evil. But the main lines of the view are Grossman's.

So what is the substance of this conception? To begin, the Ikonnikov manuscript rejects the idea that good and evil can be defined in general religious or philosophical terms. Religious doctrines in particular have given rise to great suffering, and Ikonnikov denies that religious figures or texts give humanity a true understanding of good and evil. He also denies that "good" is a universal concept, as perhaps a philosopher might hold:

People struggling for their particular good always attempt to dress it up as a universal good. They say: my good coincides with the universal good; my good is essential not only to me but to everyone; in achieving my good, I serve the universal good. (405)

Many books have been written about the nature of good and evil and the struggle between them ... There is a deep and undeniable sadness in all this: whenever we see the dawn of an eternal good that will never be overcome by evil -- an evil that is itself eternal but will never succeed in overcoming good -- whenever we see this dawn, the blood of old people and children is always shed. Not only men, but even God himself is powerless to lessen this evil. (406)

And most pertinent, Ikonnikov (and Grossman) link this critique of "universal theory of the good" to the evils of Soviet actions in the 1930s in Ukraine:

I have seen the unshakeable strength of the idea of social good that was born in my own country. I saw this struggle during the period of general collectivization and again in 1937. I saw people being annihilated in the name of an idea of good as fine and humane as the ideal of Christianity. I saw whole villages dying of hunger; I saw peasant children dying in the snows of Siberia; I saw trains bound for Siberia with hundreds and thousands of men and women from Moscow, Leningrad and every city in Russia -- men and women who had been declared enemies of a great and bright idea of social good. This idea was something fine and noble -- yet it killed some without mercy, crippled the lives of others, and separated wives from husbands and children from fathers. (406-407)

Here Ikonnikov refers to the Holodomor, the terror and purges, and the Gulag -- all created by the deliberate purposes of the Soviet state. It is the utopian ideas of Marxist communism, and the grim realities of the Holodomor, the Stalinist terror, and the Gulag that Grossman is bringing into focus through Ikonnikov. Utopian socialism led to the Holodomor, the NKVD, and the Gulag -- all in pursuit of "socialism in one country." (No wonder the book was "arrested" in 1962; it is surprising that Grossman himself was not shot on the grounds of this passage alone.)

Here, the critique -- whether of religion or of Communism or of Nazism -- is a thorough rejection of the notion of sacrificing human beings to an idea or a future utopia.

Where do we find "good", then, if not in universal principles of religion or philosophy or utopian doctrine? Ikonnikov is very clear about this question: good is found in the concrete actions of ordinary human beings. Ikonnikov's and Grossman's conception of the good is particular to human beings as they exist in specific times and places; it is not adherence to a set of principles, visions of the future, or prescriptions for the ultimate "good" of society. Good is found in concrete humanity in its particular historical circumstances.

Yes, as well as this terrible Good with a capital 'G', there is everyday human kindness. The kindness of an old woman carrying a piece of bread to a prisoner, the kindness of a soldier allowing a wounded enemy to drink from his water-flask, the kindness of youth towards age, the kindness of a peasant hiding an old Jew in his loft. The kindness of a prison guard who risks his own liberty to pass on letters written by a prisoner not to his ideological comrades, but to his wife and mother. (407-408)

And what is "kindness", the constant refrain of Grossman's optimism about the future? It is the simple human fact of compassion, the fact that human beings are often able to recognize the reality and the humanity of others around them, and to see that human reality as a concrete impulse to action. It is --

The private kindness of one individual towards another; a petty, thoughtless kindness; an unwitnessed kindness. Something we could call senseless kindness. A kindness outside any system of social or religious good. (408)

This kindness, this stupid kindness, is what is most truly human in a human being. It is what sets man apart, the highest achievement of his soul. No, it says, life is not evil! This kindness is both senseless and wordless. It is instinctive, blind. (409)

But Mostovskoy the disillusioned Bolshevik is not persuaded by Ikonnikov:

Yes, the man who had written this was unhinged. The ruin of a feeble spirit! The preacher declares that the heavens are empty ... He sees life as a war of everything against everything. And then at the end he starts tinkling the same old bells, praising the kindness of old women and hoping to extinguish a world-wide conflagration with an enema syringe. What trash! (410)

So whose view of good and evil is this -- the holy fool or Grossman himself? I believe it is Grossman's view, or at least an important part of his view. The theme of kindness is very deep in Grossman, and it is fundamental to his humanism and his faith in the future. Take this vignette from "The Old Teacher":

Then six-year-old Katya, the daughter of Weissman, the lieutenant who had been killed, came up to him in her torn dress, shuffling along in galoshes that were falling off her dirty, scratched little feet. Offering him a cold, sour pancake, she said, “Eat, teacher!”

He took the pancake and began to eat it, looking at the little girl’s thin face. As he ate, there was a sudden hush in the yard. Everyone—the old women, the big-breasted young women who could no longer remember their husbands, the one-legged lieutenant Voronenko lying on a mattress under a tree—was looking at the old man and the little girl. Rosenthal dropped his book and did not try to pick it up—he was looking at the little girl’s huge eyes, which were intently, even greedily, watching him as he ate. Once again he felt the urge to understand a wonder that never ceased to amaze him: human kindness. Perhaps the answer was there in the child’s eyes. But her eyes must have been too dark, or maybe what got in the way were his own tears—once again he saw nothing and understood nothing. (The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays)

And later, when the Jews of the village are being forced to the ravine to be slaughtered, the old teacher and the girl Katya are united again:

“How can I comfort her? How can I deceive her?” the old man wondered, gripped by a feeling of infinite sorrow. At this last minute too, there would be no one to support him, no one to say what he had longed all his life to hear— the words he had desired more than all the wisdom of books about the great thoughts and labors of man.

The little girl turned toward him. Her face was calm; it was the pale face of an adult, a face full of tolerant compassion. And in a sudden silence he heard her voice.

“Teacher,” she said, “don’t look that way, it will frighten you.” And, like a mother, she covered his eyes with the palms of her hands. (The Road)

A similar compassion and love for the particular human beings who died there is found in the closing lines of "The Hell of Treblinka":

Great is the power of true humanity. Humanity does not die until man dies. And when we see a brief but terrifying period of history, a period during which beasts triumph over human beings, the man being killed by the beast retains to his last breath his strength of spirit, clarity of thought, and passionate love. And the beast that triumphantly kills the man remains a beast. This immortality of spiritual strength is a somber martyrdom—the triumph of a dying man over a living beast. It was this, during the darkest days of 1942, that brought about the beginning of reason’s victory over bestial madness, the victory of good over evil, of light over darkness, of the forces of progress over the forces of reaction. A terrible dawn over a field of blood and tears, over an ocean of suffering—a dawn breaking amid the cries of dying mothers and infants, amid the death rattles of the aged.

The beasts and the beasts’ philosophy seemed to portend the sunset of Europe, the sunset of the world, but the red was not the red of a sunset, it was the red blood of humanity—a humanity that was dying yet achieving victory through its death. People remained people. They did not accept the morality and laws of Fascism. They fought it in all ways they could; they fought it by dying as human beings. (The Road)

It is Grossman, then, not simply the holy fool Ikonnikov, who finds enduring value chiefly in ordinary human compassion and kindness. This is the thrust of the closing lines of Ikonnikov's scraps of paper. And this is the heart of Grossman's concrete, intuitive humanism.

Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer. (Life and Fate, 410)

Atrocious and evil -- Russian aggressive war in Ukraine

The moment has come, after months of insistent, indignant jabber from Vladimir Putin that he has no intention of invading Ukraine: Russian forces have invaded Ukraine across a broad front.

This act by Vladimir Putin and his military is atrocious in precisely the way that Adolph Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939 was atrocious. In fact, Putin's playbook is very similar to Hitler's playbook: spurious claims about ancestral rights to territory, phony claims about provocative attacks by Poland (1939) and Ukraine (2022), defiant histrionics to the world about Russia's right to the territory of Ukraine. This is an atrocity for a fundamental reason: it involves attack against a non-aggressor nation, it is unprovoked, it will undoubtedly lead to massive suffering, dislocation, and death of innocent Ukrainian citizens. Putin demonstrates that he -- and now the country for which he is unopposed dictator -- have complete disregard for international law, the rights and dignity of non-combatants, and the legal and moral importance of sovereignty.

The point deserves to be underlined: Putin is a dictator, and contemporary Russia is a dictatorship. Independent critics are imprisoned, persecuted, and assassinated; political organizations that dissent from Putin's rule are suppressed; and ordinary citizens are intimidated. Even oligarchs are treated harshly if they fail to support Putin's regime.

And what about Ukraine? Ukraine's history since 1920 is a story of vast suffering, much of it at the hands of Russians and the Soviet regime. The mass and deliberate starvation campaign conducted by Stalin in 1931-33, the Holodomor (link), led to the deaths of perhaps four million Ukrainian villagers during the famine years. Stalin's campaign of terror against his own people took a major toll on Ukrainians before and after World War II. The dictatorship of Soviet rule was harsh and unforgotten in Ukraine today. The devastation and death toll of fighting and Holocaust in 1941-43 in Ukraine against invading Nazi armies and Einsatzgruppen led to over a million deaths of Ukraine's Jewish population, and vast military and prisoner-of-war casualties. Kiev itself was the site of the largest single site of mass killings of the Ukrainian Jewish population, Babi Yar. To be aware that once again, artillery fire, air strikes, and missiles are in the skies of Ukraine is unbearably sad for the Ukrainian people and for everyone who cares about peace and human wellbeing.

The great Ukrainian writer Vasily Grossman, citizen of Berdichev, had greater wisdom, even as he witnessed the atrocities of Nazi extermination of the Jews of eastern Europe, the defense of Stalingrad, and the eventual defeat of the Nazi regime. In Life and Fate he wrote:

I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil, struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer. (Life and Fate, Part II, chapter 15)

Grossman never surrendered his belief in freedom, peace, and the dignity of the individual human being -- even as he witnessed the atrocities of the Gulag, the anti-Semitic campaigns of the 1950s, and the reckless and despotic behavior of the Soviet dictatorship.

Putin's decision is the act of an international outlaw and cannot be forgiven. Massive, enduring, and punishing sanctions must be the response of the rest of the world. And perhaps Ukrainians can take some hope from the anthem of their countryman: "evil will never conquer".

How to think about deliberate social change

What is involved in trying to create a better world? That is: what is involved in being an activist, a reformer, a radical, a revolutionary, or – for that matter – a reactionary? And how do the various forms of knowledge provided by areas of research in the social sciences play into this question? Is reforming the social world more like dreaming or more like building a cabinet?

This is an interesting set of questions for several reasons. One has to do with a very basic and crucial human feature – our capacity for rational-intentional manipulation of our various environments. Marx (and Hegel) put this feature of human capacity at the center of a rich conception of human “species being” – homo faber, the human tool-user, the creator through intelligent labor. The essence of “labor” is the use of one’s skills and knowledge to transform materials into objects that satisfy our needs, wants, and aesthetic values. And we would like to suppose that we can use our intelligence, our abilities to cooperate, and our practical skills at building social institutions, to construct a better world.

When we put this question in terms of transformation of the material world, we are talking about technology. We are led into a reflection on the knowledge provided by the natural sciences and the ways in which these forms of knowledge permit human beings to transform and build the natural environment; we are led to the disciplines of craftsmanship and technology. We are led to a consideration of practical intelligence and the artful transformation of nature. But what about purposive social change? How should we use knowledge and intelligence to bring about a better social world?

An important preliminary question is the scope of the possible: to what extent can we remake either the natural world or the social world? On the side of the natural world, the answer is fairly clear; humanity has thoroughly transformed the surface of the earth through its use of technology and scientific knowledge. (What is less clear is whether we have done so in ways that serve our collective interests, and whether unanticipated consequences have often derailed the benefits we sought.) An aircraft is the result of an integrated design process; a city is the result of a combination of plans, designs, accidents, and uncoordinated choices. So an aircraft is a much more intentional artifact than a city.

In the realm of the social world, the evidence is less clear when it comes to intentional transformation. There is ample evidence of social change, of course; but to what extent is that purposive or intentional social change? To what extent, perhaps, is largescale social change more like an ecological system than a building designed by an architect; more the result of many small and often unintended interventions rather than the result of a blueprint?

We can also ask the question: what sorts of things are we thinking to change, when we yearn for change? Here are several important possibilities: basic social structures; intermediate institutions; patterns of human behavior; mentalities and forms of social consciousness; social practices; and patterns of exploitation and domination.

So where do the social sciences come in when we consider the project of social reform? There are at least three locations within this story:

• in the theory of the present (why does contemporary America embody racial inequalities? What are the current social mechanisms?);
• in the theory of an ideal future (description of feasible institutions that produce equality); and
• in the theory of a strategy of change (description of feasible actions that can be taken over time leading to the establishment of new social arrangements).

What this comes down to is three rather different applications of the empirical and theoretical findings of the social sciences. First, the social sciences can provide the basis for a causal-institutional analysis of the way that the current system works. Second, the social sciences can allow us to “test” the viability of an institutional change and a new set of institutions, to try to estimate the way that these new institutions will function. This is a bit like simulating the behavior of a new device under a set of test conditions. Third, the social sciences can provide an inventory of a large number of mechanisms and processes of change – protest, demonstrations, armed struggle, lobbying, public relations campaigns, … This application permits us to attempt to evaluate the credibility of a proposed strategy of change.

So how should we think about purposive social change – especially change in the direction of novelty, systemic change, and large change of behavior and mentality? Careful reflection on the nature of the social suggests that social arrangements and processes are always conditioned by contingency, heterogeneity, and plasticity; so there are no “iron laws of history,” no general theories that tell us how social processes work. Instead, good social science theories shed light on specific, mid-level social mechanisms and processes – very ably described by McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly in Dynamics of Contention. So we can forget about the social sciences providing a general “physics” or “mechanics” that might provide a blueprint for social design – as our understanding of the natural sciences does in fact permit in the design of material technologies. Instead, we can derive from the various areas of the social sciences some pragmatic rules of thumb about how mid-level social processes work.

How does this help to answer our question? Because we can use the open-ended totality of the learning that research in the social sciences has made possible about how the social world actually works, to help guide our thinking as we think about social reform and social change. We can attempt to mentally model the way that new institutions would work. We can attempt to foresee some of the glitches that will arise as we undertake a process of extended social reform. We are forced to be humble: prediction is very limited, there are always confounding factors that we haven’t incorporated into our mental models, and contingency runs deep. But we can make a start at evaluating a change strategy – the likely features of functioning that a given institutional design will display; the failures that may arise as a process of communication or coordination is undertaken; and the forms of corruption, weakness of the will, freeriding, and gaming that we can expect in any large process of social change.

A good example worth considering is the inadequate efforts that were undertaken towards reform of the financial industry following the 2008 financial crisis. These efforts were not highly successful, for several identifiable reasons: industry capture of the process, inadequate understanding of complex interactions among rules and regulatory institutions, and failure to anticipate innovative strategies to circumvent the rules. But equally difficult questions arise every kind of social reform – the design of a new set of tenure procedures in a university, the design of a system of regulation to end disparate use of force by US police departments against racial minorities, or the design of single-payer health insurance system.

Several ideas seem to come to the top out of these reflections.

(1) Designing social change is difficult, in part, because it requires us to imagine and create social arrangements that don’t yet exist. So we have to exert our analytical and empirical intelligence to try to estimate the way these arrangements might work – and how ordinary people might live within them. Are they feasible? And do they produce the intended social effects?

(2) The social sciences set some loose limits on our reasoning as we think about both systems and pathways; but social science will never permit precise calculations about the future. There is a very broad range of possible outcomes for almost any social intervention.

(3) The kinds of atrociously bad outcomes that twentieth-century “modernizing projects” have led to have occurred as a result of aggressive and misplaced confidence in social theories and models. This is a deeply important lesson. There is a very wide gap between theory and reality. Marxism and neoliberal purism alike have created enormous human suffering in the past century.

(4) This being recognized, social innovators ought to be risk-aware: take small steps, evaluate, examine; and proceed further. Just as designers of nuclear power plants need to design for worst-case scenarios and soft landings, so social innovators should be cautious as they push forward their reforms.

(5) All these cautions properly acknowledged, we have no choice but to attempt to create a better social future for humanity. And this means respecting the constraints of democracy even as we struggle for substantively better social arrangements.

(Here are several earlier discussions relevant to this topic; link, link, link, link.)

A topology of political theories?

We sometimes think of political philosophies as falling on a spectrum from left to right. Bernie Sanders is on the left and Greg Abbott is on the right. Our mental map might perhaps look something like this:

(Please note that the graphs are easier to see if the reader clicks the image and views the full-resolution image.)

However, a moment's reflection shows that this scheme doesn't really work. There isn't a single dimension along which these various political philosophies can be arranged. Anarchism isn't just further out on the same dimension as liberal constitutionalism; rather, it highlights a different set of moral concerns altogether. Communitarianism is a complex of values that appeals, in different ways, to both progressives and conservatives. Is communitarianism a left-leaning or a right-leaning philosophical position?

We might say as a form of shorthand that classical liberalism gives highest priority to the rights and freedoms of individual citizens; classical conservatism gives highest priority to the continuity of traditional social and political values and relationships; socialism gives priority to bringing about the end of economic domination of one group by another (equality); and fascism gives priority to ideological purity and state control of society. This shorthand gives a sense of the multi-polar nature of political philosophy. 

Consider a handful of fundamental values or themes that have motivated important schools of political philosophy -- for example, the values of liberty, equality, community, state supremacy, and ideological unity. How do the eleven political philosophies mentioned on the left-right spectrum above relate to those values? Here is an impressionistic graphic that perhaps sheds some light on the "space" of political philosophy. The core values of liberty and equality do a reasonably good job of differentiating between the "left" end of the spectrum from the right end. The values of ideological supremacy and state supremacy capture theories at both extremes: communism in the Stalinist mode and fascism. The value of community seems to be invoked in theories on both the left and right halves of the spectrum.

Can we do even better? We might consider placing political philosophies on a more notional graph that flags each political theory with a tag for the values it incorporates. This might look something like this:

This graph gives a greater sense of the nuances and divisions that distinguish the various political philosophies mentioned here; some are more similar to others because they share more of the "tags" that characterize them, and yet they differ in incommensurable ways. Here again, the left-right spectrum doesn't work well; rather, there is a multi-dimensional scattering of political philosophies across the values of equality, liberty, tradition, state domination, etc. Communism and fascism wind up looking like cousins, not extremes at opposite ends of the spectrum.

It should be possible to incorporate the relationships indicated in the preceding graph into a network graph among the eleven political theories mentioned here. The graph might look something like this:

This graph is still impressionistic, but it has a credible logic to it. It seems to capture real affinities among a range of political philosophies. And, most interestingly, it seems to give rise to a very different arrangement of views across conceptual space. The centrist views on this scheme are social democracy and civic humanism, whereas the extreme views are totalitarianism and populism, as well as libertarianism and anarchism.

Having spent several hours exploring different ways of "graphing" the space of political philosophies, I'm inclined to think that this is a useful tool for exploring the underlying commitments of various political theories. The multiple values and fundamental questions posed by Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Marx, Hayek, or Nietzsche do not reduce to a simple set of propositions. But by examining the cross-connections that exist among these various theories we can see both areas of consensus and difference among the theories. And we can see why the theories associated with totalitarianism, fascism, and communism, are so fundamentally unacceptable to a broad range of political thinkers. They are incompatible with the values of individual rights and liberties, the value of human equality, and the aspiration to human progress.

Factions, insurrections, and the Federalist Papers

Sometimes political philosophers think of the The Federalist Papers as fairly minor contributions to the history of political theory -- time-bound, parochial, and written by colonial bumpkins who couldn't really hold a candle to Locke or Hobbes. When addressed at all, they are often used simply as evidence about the "original intent" of various constitutional provisions in the US Constitution (link). Now that I've included several of the papers in a course I'm currently teaching on modern political thought, however, I've come to a new appreciation of what Madison, Hamilton, and Jay were attempting to accomplish -- in contrast to Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau. And I have gained a new appreciation of their sophistication as political philosophers and theorists. Most strikingly, I've seen today something that was invisible in the 1960s: how some of the work is enormously relevant on the assault to democracy we are currently experiencing from the far right in the United States.

The approach taken by the writers of the Federalist Papers is one of psychological realism. They want to design political institutions that work for citizens as they actually behave, not as we would wish them to behave. Here is a fine statement of their approach in FP 51, offered in their analysis of the institutional idea of "separation of powers" in government:

But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department, the necessary constitutional means, and personal motives, to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defence must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man, must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. (FP 51: 268-269)

One of the key problems that Madison and Hamilton confront, in a very serious way, is that of "faction". We might think of this problem in a fairly trivial way: "I say potato, you say potahto". We're different. But what they have in mind is much more critical to the health and stability of a democracy than that. It has to do with groups that potentially endanger the survival of the republic itself, and the liberties of the citizens who make it up. Madison opens No. 10 with these words:

Among the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed union, none deserves to be more accurately developed, than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. (FP 10: 42)

Madison and Hamilton hope that they and their colleagues in institution-building in 1787 will be able to design governance arrangements that reduce the dangers of "faction" to the viability of the emerging American democracy.

By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community. (FP 10: 43)

It is worth observing that a faction is not simply a group united by a shared set of preferences -- citizens who advocate for a new public park in a city, say -- but rather a group that advocates for actions that are "adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community". Ku Klux Klan activists in Alabama in the 1950s who sought to intimidate African-American men and women from exercising their rights to vote would be a faction; so would a group that seeks to undermine a community's ability to prevent the spread of polio among its children.

Why do factions and inter-group conflict arise? Madison (and Hamilton) approach the problem of politics realistically; and that means that they take human beings as they find them, not as we would wish them to be. Moreover, this is true both for citizens and leaders. Here is an extended passage:

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them every where brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders, ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions, whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other, than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind, to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions, and excite their most violent conflicts. (FP 10: 43)

Madison notes that it is impossible to prevent the occurrence of factions and the conflicts they create; individuals are not fully rational, just, or self-controlled.

If the impulse and the opportunity be suffered to coincide, we well know, that neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an adequate control. They are not found to be such on the injustice and violence of individuals, and lose their efficacy in proportion to the number combined together; that is, in proportion as their efficacy becomes needful.(FP 10: 46)

And likewise, rulers are not angels either:

It is in vain to say, that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good. Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm: nor, in many cases, can such an adjustment be made at all, without taking into view indirect and remote considerations, which will rarely prevail over the immediate interest which one party may find in disregarding the rights of another, or the good of the whole. (FP 10: 45)

But Madison believes that appropriate institutional arrangements can minimize the bad effects of ordinary citizens exercising their passions and their interests. One such arrangement that serves as a buffer to the hazards of factions is representative government, or what he refers to as a republic. Political decisions no longer depend on the direct votes of citizens, but instead emerge from a decision-making process involving their elected representatives. He believes that the elected representatives will be more moderate than the factions of the public and "more consonant to the public good" (46). But, realist that he is, he also realizes that there may be a process of faction formation within the government itself:

Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests of the people. (FP 10: 47)

We seem to have examples of both hazards to democracy in contemporary US politics: a substantial minority of citizens who come together with the goal of attacking legitimate public institutions (public health departments and school boards, for example) and legislators "of sinister design" who gain the votes of their districts and then act out of ideological and personal self-interest. Madison confirmed that this was a possibility in 1787, but he thought it unlikely as the electorate grew larger.

In the next place, as each representative will be chosen by a greater number of citizens in the large than in the small republic, it will be more difficult for unworthy candidates to practise with success the vicious arts, by which elections are too often carried; and the suffrages of the people being more free, will be more likely to centre in men who possess the most attractive merit, and the most diffusive and established characters. (FP 10: 47)

Finally, Madison believed that the plurality of states within the Federal republic would be a buffer against extremism in the legislature:

The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular states, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other states: a religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it, must secure the national councils against any danger from that source: a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the union, than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire state. (FP 10: 48)

Both of these replies suggests a confidence in something like the "wisdom of the crowd"; but both are refuted by the politics of the recent past. "Factious leaders" have gained national followings, with adherents in multiple states. And multitudes of voters and citizens have been swept up into populist fantasies leading them to support policies and candidates who advocate those fantasies. Right-wing populism, fueled by conspiracy theories and social media, seems to have swamped democratic republicanism.

Madison and Hamilton were asking the right questions: How can we design democratic political institutions that are resilient in the face of ordinary men and women, extremist factions, and unscrupulous leaders? Perhaps there are good answers to these questions that haven't yet been explored. But unhappily, Madison and Hamilton did not themselves arrive at a convincing solution.

Alexander Herzen's radical liberalism

image: Meissonier, Massacre during June Days, 1848, Paris

Alexander Herzen's From the Other Shore (1850) is an exceptionally important example of an intelligent observer trying to make sense of the social, economic, and political changes of the nineteenth century. And Isaiah Berlin's introduction is profound. (Here is an online version of the book; link.)

Herzen's writings represented an almost unique combination of political perspectives. He was sympathetic to revolutionary activism by anarchists like Bakunin and Kropotkin, as well as revolutionary socialists in London and Paris and the radical workers of Paris in 1848. He was fervently opposed to the old oppressive order of Europe, whether the rule of the Czar and landed aristocracy in Russia or the dominant bourgeois order of wealth and poverty in France and Germany. And he was passionately committed to the principle of individual liberty. We might say that he was a revolutionary anti-Czarist liberal republican -- which sounds like a very contradictory bundle of political ideas. But the contradiction may be only apparent; it is the contradiction between revolution and liberty. As the revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have unfolded, they have generally sacrificed liberty for the collectivist goals of revolution. But is a post-authoritarian, post-bourgeois regime in Europe necessarily indifferent to individual liberties? Or is it possible to imagine a genuinely egalitarian liberal social democracy, with strong constitutional protections of individual rights and liberties? If so, that seems to be the political idea that fits best with Herzen's political writings.

Here is Herzen's liberal principle:

The liberty of the individual is the greatest thing of all, it is on this and on this alone that the true will of the people can develop. Man must respect liberty in himself, and he must esteem it in himself no less than in his neighbour, than in the entire nation. (From the Other Shore, author's introduction, 12)

Here is his revolutionary anti-authoritarian commitment:

The state forms of France and other European countries are in their essence compatible with neither liberty, equality nor fraternity. If any of these ideas were realized, it would be the repudiation of contemporary European life; it would be its death. No constitution, no government is in a position to give feudal and monarchical countries true freedom and equality without annihilating everything feudal and monarchical in them. European life, Christian and aristocratic, has moulded our civilization, our notions, our ways of life. It cannot exist without a Christian and aristocratic environment. (From the Other Shore, Year LVII of the Republic, 62)

Here is a passage on the June days of Paris 1848 that captures his sympathy for the workers:

I listened to the thunder and the tocsin and gazed avidly at this panorama of Paris; it was as though I was taking my leave of it. At that moment I loved Paris passionately. It was my last tribute to the great town; after the June days it grew hateful to me. On the other side of the river barricades were being raised in all the streets and alleys. I can still see the gloomy faces of the men dragging stones; women and children were helping them. A young student from the Polytechnic climbed up on to an apparently completed barricade, planted the banner and started singing the Marseillaise in a soft, sad, solemn voice; all the workers joined in and the chorus of this great song, resounding from behind the stones of the barricades, gripped one's soul. . . . The tocsin was still tolling. Meanwhile, the artillery clattered across the bridge and General Bedeau standing there raised his field-glasses to inspect the enemy positions. . . . (From the Other Shore, After the Storm, 46)

And here is an alternative vision of work without wage labor -- cooperatives -- based on his understanding of the peasant commune in Russia:

There are a number of such artels—builders, carpenters and other sorts of artisans—each consisting of several hundred people drawn from different communes, who come together for a given period of time, for a year for instance, and so form a group. When the year is up, the workers share out the produce on the basis of the work they have done, in each case abiding by the general decision. The police have not so far had the satisfaction of being able to interfere in these arrangements. The association, I must emphasize, generally holds itself responsible for all the workers who comprise it. (From the Other Shore, The Russian People and Socialism, 184)

Finally, Herzen has a healthy distrust of "ideology", or purely philosophical theories of an ideal future for which all present human wellbeing must be sacrificed. Against Trotsky, Lenin, and Mao, Herzen mistrusted grand ideological goals and favored a process of social change that permitted ordinary human beings to exercise their freedoms as society changed. Berlin emphasizes this point in his introduction.

It is, in the main, a frontal attack upon the doctrine at that time preached by almost every left-wing orator in Europe (with the notable exception of Proudhon and a handful of anarchists to whom no one listened), about the sacred human duty of offering up oneself—or others—upon the altar of some great moral or political cause—some absolute principle or ‘collective noun’ capable of stirring strong emotion, like Nationality, or Democracy, or Equality, or Humanity, or Progress. For Herzen these are merely modern versions of ancient religions which demanded human sacrifice, faiths which spring from some irrational belief (rooted in theology or metaphysics) in the existence of vast and menacing powers, once the objects of blind religious worship, then, with the decay of primitive faith, degraded to becoming terms of political rhetoric. The dogmas of such religions declare that mere invocation of certain formulae, certain symbols, render what would normally be regarded as crimes or lunacies—murder, torture, the humiliation of defenceless human bodies—not only permissible, but often laudable. (From the Other Shore, Berlin introduction, xv)

Here is Herzen on "progress" in "Before the Storm":

‘You are quite right when you speak of nature, but it seems to me that you have forgotten that throughout all the changes and confusions of history there runs a single red thread binding it into one aim. This thread—is progress, or perhaps you do not acknowledge progress?’

‘Progress is the inalienable quality of uninterrupted conscious development: it consists in a retentive memory and the physiological perfection of man through social life.’

‘Is it possible that in all this you do not see a goal?’

‘Quite the opposite, I see here only a consequence. If progress is the end, for whom are we working? Who is this Moloch who, as the toilers approach him, instead of rewarding them, only recedes, and as a consolation to the exhausted, doomed multitudes crying “morituri te salutant”, can give back only the mocking answer that after their death all will be beautiful on earth. Do you truly wish to condemn all human beings alive to-day to the sad role of caryatids supporting a floor for others some day to dance on. . . or of wretched galley slaves, up to their knees in mud, dragging a barge filled with some mysterious treasure and with the humble words “progress in the future” inscribed on its bows? Those who are exhausted fall in their tracks; others, with fresh forces take up the ropes; but there remains, as you said yourself, as much ahead as there was at the beginning, because progress is infinite. This alone should serve as a warning to people: an end that is infinitely remote is not an end, but, if you like, a trap; an end must be nearer—it ought to be, at the very least, the labourer's wage, or pleasure in the work done. (From the Other Shore, Before the Storm, 36-37)

The new society, if it is to conform to these disparate values, must accomplish several different social goods:

• respect liberty and equal dignity of all individuals;
• secure the human needs of everyone -- workers, engineers, poets, and owners of property;
• be democratic, not autocratic.

Was there any place on the planet in 1850 that satisfied these different structural features? There certainly was not -- not Britain, not Switzerland, not the United States. Is there a society on the planet today that satisfies them? Perhaps there is; it is called Finland.

Thomas Carlyle on government and England's poor

Thomas Carlyle was an acerbic conservative social thinker, given to assuming the fundamental legitimacy of social and political hierarchies and hostile to democracy. A re-reading of Chartism (1839) shows that he also possessed a white-hot anger at England's indifference to the conditions of the poor, and he raged against Parliament, which whistled while catastrophe loomed. In its own way there is as much anger at England's injustice and cruelty to its working people here as is found in Engels's more or less contemporary The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) (link). In Chartism Carlyle takes on the 1834 Poor Law Act and the draconian version of laissez-faire that these policies imposed (link), and he interprets the Charter movement as a natural and predictable response to social and political indifference to the conditions of working people. In some passages he sounds a bit like E.P. Thompson himself, in The Making of the English Working Class, when he writes about the need for dignity and justice for working people.

What is the underlying view that Carlyle seems to have in mind? It is not a call for more charity to the poor, more noblesse oblige. Rather, it is a call for a system of government that effectively confronts the pressing problem in the first decade of the nineteenth century, of the conditions of the English poor. He is scathing at the inability of Parliament to adequately formulate and assess the problem, and he is contemptuous of the solution offered in the form of new Poor Laws.

Carlyle's conservatism emerges fully when he advances his own views of governing, which is the primary thrust of the pamphlet. Carlyle is full of ironic disdain and contempt for the irrelevance of Parliament in the first part of the nineteenth century; whereas he admires the rule of the strong man with a unified will. Carlyle's prescription to the task of addressing the hopeless condition of the poor in England is a return to wise but absolute government.

What are all popular commotions and maddest bellowings, from Peterloo to the Place-de-Greve itself? Bellowings, inarticulate cries as of dumb creatures in rage and pain; to the ear of wisdom they are inarticulate prayers: " Guide me, govern me! I am mad, and miserable, and cannot guide myself!" Surely of all 'rights of man,' this right of the ignorant man to be guided by the wiser, to be, gently or forcibly, held in the true course by him, the indisputablest. (52)

In effect Carlyle sides with Hobbes against Locke or Jefferson: the sovereign will find it in his or her interest to rule strongly but wisely, and with laws that protect the important interests of the people.

How can-do, if we will well interpret it, unites itself with shall-do among mortals; how strength acts ever as the right-arm of justice; how might and right, so frightfully discrepant at first, are ever in the long-run one and the same, — is a cheering consideration, which always in the black tempestuous vortices of this world's history, will shine out on us, like an everlasting polar star. (39)

This view may be thought to serve as a rejoinder to the critics of Hobbes who hold that the sovereign will do no more than exploit and oppress his or her "sheep"; Carlyle argues that it is not in the interest of the sovereign to do so, and rule based solely on coercion is doomed to end in short order.

Of conquest we may say that it never yet went by brute force and compulsion; conquest of that kind does not endure. Conquest, along with power of compulsion, an essential universally in human society, must bring benefit along with it or men, of the ordinary strength of men, will fling it out. The strong man, what is he if we will consider? The wise man; the man with the gift of method, of faithfulness and valour, all of which are of the basis of wisdom; who has insight into what is what, into what will follow out of what, the eye to see and the hand to do; who is fit to administer, to direct, and guidingly command : he is the strong man. His muscles and bones are no stronger than ours but his soul stronger, his soul is wiser, clearer,— is better and nobler, for that is, has been, and ever will be the root of all clearness worthy of such name. (39)

Over the fullness of time, then, Carlyle seems to assert that might and right converge; the "strong man" who survives will be the wise man. "His soul is wiser, clearer -- is better and nobler". And Carlyle appears to believe that this is part of the "natural" order.

But what assures Carlyle that in the long run, the rulers will respect and support the dignity and wellbeing of the "lower classes"? It is the rage and violence that is produced by a widespread feeling of injustice and unfair treatment that he believes is apparent in the violence of the Chartist movement or the French Revolution. Oppressive or negligent rule leads to its own overthrow by enraged masses. For Carlyle the French Revolution was mindless terror -- and a stark historical lesson to rulers. The lesson is simple: they must rule wisely, or the terror awaits them.

He also takes it as an axiom that the poor -- that is, the great majority of the English population -- cannot govern themselves; the demand for universal suffrage is hooted off the stage. Democracy is a ludicrous ideal for Carlyle. The inarticulate, suffering poor can demand only to be governed well by their superiors. Even more explicitly:

Democracy, we are well aware, what is called ' self-government' of the multitude by the multitude, is in words the thing everywhere passionately clamoured for at present. Democracy makes rapid progress in these latter times, and ever more rapid, in a perilous accelerative ratio; towards democracy, and that only, the progress of things is everywhere tending as to the final goal and winning-post. So think, so clamour the multitudes everywhere. (53)

But: "Democracy never yet, that we heard of, was able to accomplish much work, beyond that same cancelling of itself" (59). "Napoleon was not president of a republic Cromwell tried hard to rule in that way, but found that he could not. These, 'the armed soldiers of democracy,' had to chain democracy under their feet, and become despots over it before they could work out the earnest obscure purpose of democracy itself!" (54).

In particular, Carlyle writes again and again that the underclass cannot rationally articulate its needs or make a rational plan for progress. For Carlyle, the underclasses are incapable of subtle or nuanced analysis of the causes of their condition, or of possible reforms that realistically could address their condition.

Dingy dumb millions, grimed with dust and sweat, with darkness, rage and sorrow, stood round these men, saying, or struggling as they could to say: " Behold, our lot is unfair ; our life is not whole but sick; we cannot live under injustice; go ye and get us justice!" For whether the poor operative clamoured for Time-bill, Factory-bill, Corn-bill, for or against whatever bill, this was what he meant. (91-92)

Moreover, they live in a world that is naturally stratified between superior and inferior:

Recognised or not recognised, a man has his superiors, a regular hierarchy above him; extending up, degree above degree; to Heaven itself and God the Maker, who made His world not for anarchy but for rule and order! (94)

His view of the radical leaders who claim to speak for the underclasses is equally severe: they are cynical opportunists.

There is a class of revolutionists named Girondins, whose fate in history is remarkable enough! Men who rebel, and urge the Lower Classes to rebel, ought to have other than Formulas to go upon. Men who discern in the misery of the toiling complaining millions not misery, but only a raw-material which can be wrought upon, and traded in, for one's own poor hidebound theories and egoisms; to whom millions of living fellow-creatures, with beating hearts in their bosoms, beating, suffering, hoping, are 'masses,' mere 'explosive masses for blowing down Bastilles with,' for voting at hustings for us: such men are of the questionable species! (93)

And as for the issue of the day, the Charter -- the Charter is nonsense, simply an enraged bellow of pain and a demand for relief. The Chartist movement is one of violence, burning, and murder. Carlyle rejects entirely the idea that the underclasses might formulate their own diagnosis of the ills of their society, or a plan for addressing those ills.

Neither is the history of Chartism mysterious in these times; especially if that of Radicalism be looked at. All along, for the last five-and-twenty years, it was curious to note how the internal discontent of England struggled to find vent for itself through any orifice: the poor patient, all sick from centre to surface, complains now of this member, now of that;— corn-laws, currency-laws, free-trade, protection, want of free-trade: the poor patient tossing from side to side, seeking a sound side to lie on, finds none. This Doctor says, it is the liver; that other, it is the lungs, the head, the heart, defective transpiration in the skin. A thoroughgoing Doctor of eminence said, it was rotten boroughs; the want of extended suffrage to destroy rotten boroughs. From of old, the English patient himself had a continually recurring notion that this was it. The English people are used to suffrage ; it is their panacea for all that goes wrong with them ; they have a fixed-idea of suffrage. (90)

Moreover, rebellion is always wrong, because:

No man is justified in resisting by word or deed the Authority he lives under, for a light cause, be such Authority what it may. Obedience, little as many may consider that side of the matter, is the primary duty of man. No man but is bound indefeasibly, with all force of obligation, to obey. (93-94)

With an intriguing sleight of hand, Carlyle maintains that democracy and laissez-faire are one and the same; both amount to a "do-nothing" approach to government. Democracy cannot rule wisely, as the principle of "laissez-faire" cannot guide social and economic life.

So who should rule in England? Carlyle makes his preferences clear; and it is a preference for the feudal past, where feudal lords governed their bonded workers and farmers. It is the aristocracy that must take up the responsibility of governing -- the aristocracy must lead and govern.

Yet we do say that the old Aristocracy were the governors of the Lower Classes, the guides of the Lower Classes; and even, at bottom, that they existed as an Aristocracy because they were found adequate for that. Not by Charity-Balls and Soup-Kitchens; not so; far otherwise! But it was their happiness that, in struggling for their own objects, they had to govern the Lower Classes, even in this sense of governing. For, in one word. Cash Payment had not then grown to be the universal sole nexus of man to man; it was something other than money that the high then expected from the low, and could not live without getting from the low. (58)

This is the passage where the "cash nexus" phrase originates. And the passage appears to express one of Carlyle's fundamental beliefs -- that a harmonious society depends upon strands of loyalty, trust, and commitment between unequals -- not simply impersonal economic relationships.

We might say that the political theory expressed in Chartism amounts to only a handful of assertions:

1. The poor are suffering enormously under current conditions in England. They are both severely impoverished and treated unfairly.
2. The poor are naturally inferior to the aristocracy and are incapable of rational political thought.
3. The current system of government (Parliament) is incapable of perceiving the crisis, let alone addressing it with intelligent policies.
4. England is in crisis because of these facts.
5. Only authoritarian, unified government by a natural aristocracy will have the insight and wisdom to remedy England's crisis.

It is interesting to recall that Engels, and later Marx, Bakunin, and Kropotkin, would agree with premises 1, 3, and 4, but disagree fundamentally with 2 and 5. It is also interesting to observe that Carlyle's conservatism (authoritarianism, really) became a branch-line in the coming century of conflict over "the social question", with social democrats and revolutionary socialists defining the main contenders for a program of progress. And Carlyle's political views do not line up with other forms of conservatism in the twentieth century very closely either -- whether fascist ideology or the persistence of English laissez-faire conservatism grounded in pre-Keynesian political economy. Carlyle was sui generis.

Silence about the Holocaust after 1945

Image: Holocaust memorial at Camp Westerbork, The Netherlands

Each of the great evils of the twentieth century -- the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Gulag -- was shrouded in silence and concealment for decades after information became available to the world. In the case of the Gulag, the Soviet government exercised great effort to keep the facts of the prison camp system quiet, and the Communist parties of Western Europe minimized or obfuscated the facts that were publicly available. (Anne Applebaum documents much of this shameful record of secrecy and obfuscation in Gulag: A History.) A similar story of secrecy and lies can be told about the Holodomor.

Most inexcusable is the silence that greeted the facts of the Final Solution after the end of hostilities in 1945. The evidence of mass killing was everywhere -- extermination camps, burial pits in Poland and Ukraine, first-person observations, the writings of contemporary observers like Vasily Grossman, and the Nuremberg trials. And yet there was little public recognition or discussion of the magnitude of the evil committed by the Nazi extermination plan, and their national collaborators, until the 1960s and 1970s.

Stimulated by discussions beginning in 1988 in Michigan at the first Holocaust Memorial Center in the United States, a group of scholars undertook to write a set of country studies on the reception of the Holocaust across Europe, North America, and Japan. The results are presented in a massive 1996 volume edited by David Wyman, The World Reacts to the Holocaust, which is highly relevant for our project of "confronting evil in history". Most of the countries surveyed in this volume did not confront history honestly; rather, they constructed more comfortable narratives that minimized the involvement of their own citizens in the Holocaust, and sometimes minimized and "normalized" the mass killings of Jews themselves. In his introduction David Wyman writes that during the 1950s "the most difficult and sensitive questions about the Holocaust had barely been raised. These issues included ... questions about the guilt of the German people, complicity and collaboration in the countries under German occupation, the failure of non-Jews to attempt to save their Jewish neighbors, and the very limited rescue efforts on the part of the outside world. Nor were these issues confronted during the 1950s; instead, in that decade the Holocaust all but disappeared from public consciousness in most of the world" (xix).

Here is the table of contents and list of countries studied:

The book demonstrates an important feature of Holocaust history -- the fact that much of the killing, and many of the documents, took place in Eastern Europe, in countries that came under Soviet control during and after the war. The Soviet government was slow to make available to the public records and documents that could provide a reasonably full understanding of the Holocaust in Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Estonia, and Poland. Wyman writes, "Until the later 1980s these [Soviet bloc] countries all followed the Soviet Union's approach to the Holocaust: they universalized it and forced it into a Communist ideological mold. The destruction of the Jews was seen as merely a small part of racist fascism's murder of millions of Eastern European civilians" (xxi).

A number of the essays make the point that media events played an important role in Western European and North American countries in bringing awareness of the Holocaust to a broad audience. These include the US television series Holocaust (1978), Marcel Ophuls' two-part French documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), and Claude Lanzmann's French documentary film Shoah (1985).

Here I will provide highlights from three of the country studies, to give a sense of the depth and detail of the essays. There is still much to be learned about the Holocaust and the way that various publics and governments have been willing to face the truth about their pasts honestly.

France, David Weinberg

David Weinberg's article on documents the French government's desire to "sanitize" the history of the Vichy years and the circumstances of the deportation of sixty to seventy thousand Jews from France to Nazi extermination camps. The issue of return of spoliated property -- homes, businesses, other forms of pre-war wealth -- was highly contentious in France in the postwar years. Further, thousands of Jewish children had been separated from their parents, and the task of reuniting families was both logistically and socially difficult. But most significant was the political interest that postwar governments had in concealing or distorting the collaboration that had occurred during the German occupation and the Vichy regime. "For much of the early postwar period the tragic events surrounding French involvement in the Final Solution were masked by governmental concerns with reconstruction and reconciliation.... The result was the gradual emergence of a national myth that viewed the overwhelming majority of Frenchmen during World War II as resisters to Nazism and portrayed the Vichy regime as an aberration whose traitorous deeds resulted from the venality and fanaticism of a crazed few" (18). One result was a resurgence of the far right in France: "Government amnesties brought many collaborators back to France after years in exile, and in the early fifties there was a noticeable increase in neo-fascist and neo-Nazi activity on the part of the extreme Right" (19). Weinberg also documents a resurgence of anti-Semitism in French society and politics in the 1950s. He describes the highly convoluted development of French political culture during the 1960s and 1970s, in which anti-colonialism converged to some degree with anti-Zionist, or anti-Israel, sentiment among activist youth. An important event in shifting French public awareness of the Holocaust and the Vichy years was the capture and trial in 1983 of Klaus Barbie, the chief of the Gestapo in Lyons and the prime mover in the deportation of French Jews. Barbie was also a notorious murderer of captured members of the Resistance (including Marc Bloch). Preparations for trial created a great deal of debate in France, and Barbie was eventually convicted and sentenced to life in prison, dying in prison in 1991. (Here is a detailed treatment of the Barbie trial; link.) Weinberg closes on a pessimistic note: French leaders as recently as Mitterrand preferred to remain silent about the crimes and collaborations of the Vichy years (35), and there has not yet been a clear and honest reckoning of the war years.

Poland, Michael Steinlauf

Poland's postwar history was determined by the imposition of a Soviet-style Communist regime. Returning Jews were unwelcome in Poland, in large part because of conflict over spoliated properties. Numerous pogroms took place in the first two years following the end of the war, including the shocking pogrom at Kielce that resulted in the murder of at least 42 people (112). (Steinlauf gives some credence to the possibility that the NKVD may have deliberately provoked the violence at Kielce.) Steinlauf describes 1956 as an important turning point in Polish political history, the "Polish road to socialism", resulting in an anti-Stalinist regime that was more pragmatic than its predecessors. But this change of regime also permitted a resurgence of anti-Semitic attitudes in society and within political elites. Largescale emigration from Poland to Israel and other countries took place, reflecting the conviction by the Jewish population that Poland would never be a welcoming home for them. The Communist government -- before and after the change of orientation in 1956 -- continued to ignore the Nazi extermination of Jews in favor of "Poles and citizens of other nationalities". "Under Communism, Auschwitz became a monument to internationalism that commemorated the 'resistance and martyrdom' of 'Poles and citizens of other nationalities,' In consultation with the International Auschwitz Committee, a group of survivors and relatives of victims dominated by veterans of the largely Communist Auschwitz underground, barracks in the original work cam were turned over to twenty countries for use as 'national pavilions.' One of these structures became a 'Jewish pavilion'" (117). Every part of this story represents denial: denial of the Jewish identities of the victims, erasure of the Nazi extermination goals of the camp, and inflation of the number of victims in order to suggest that comparable numbers of "Poles, Russian prisoners of war, and other non-Jews" were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. "Auschwitz could thereby emerge as the central symbol of Polish martyrdom, but within an inclusive internationalist framework" (117). Even the monument at Treblinka, where only Jews were killed and which is specific about the Jewish identities of the victims there, was publicly described in Poland as "800,000 citizens of European nations" (119).

This pattern of Soviet obfuscation resulted in a national narrative "whose effect was to marginalize, or 'ghettoize,' its subject" (120). Poland's political history between 1956 and 1989 was complex and contentious, and anti-Semitism played a recurring role. 1968 manifested a student movement in Poland, state repression, and a serious official intensification of anti-Semitic actions and policies, in the form of an anti-Zionist campaign. (This is the period when Bauman and Kolakowski were force to leave Poland; link, link.) The period of the Solidarity movement, according to Steinlauf, produced greater honesty and openness about the tragedy of the extermination of the majority of Poland's Jewish population. Steinlauf quotes an especially interesting literary exchange between Czesław Miłosz and the literary critic Jan Błoński, concerning Miłosz's poem about the Warsaw ghetto "A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto"; (link): "Błoński explained that Poles had blocked the memory of this part of their history because 'when we consider the past, we want to derive moral advantage from it ... we want to be completely clean. We want to be also -- and only -- victims.' ... Błoński suggested that the only remedy was to see the past fully, without defensiveness, and then to 'acknowledge our own guilt, and ask for forgiveness'" (139).

Steinlauf depicts the period in Poland from 1989 to the mid-1990s as one in which the situation has improved. There is a greater willingness to speak openly about anti-Semitism in Poland -- past and present. Historical memorials have been corrected to more accurately reflect the overwhelming majority of Jews killed in Sobibor and Treblinka (144). And Steinlauf records the decision by the Polish government in 1990 to correct the inscriptions at Auschwitz, replacing reference to "four million people" murdered at Auschwitz with this passage:

Let this place remain for eternity as a cry of despair and a warning to humanity. About one and a half million men, women, children and infants, mainly Jews from different countries of Europe, were murdered here. The world was silent. Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1940-1945. (145)

Steinlauf concludes his article with these hopeful words (in 1996): "Half a century after witnessing the Holocaust, Poles are freely confronting the memory of the experience for the first time. It is far too soon, however, to speculate about the meaning of this confrontation. It will gradually assume a coherent form only in the decades to come" (145). The final qualification is prophetic, since in the past decade Poland has seen nationalist politicians and legislators seeking to -- once again -- silence honest acknowledgement of Polish responsibility during the time of the Holocaust.

Lithuania, Dov Levin

Dov Levin notes that the culpability of Lithuanians in the Final Solution is deep. Even before the German invasion began, murderous pogroms occurred in many communities in Lithuania. "Unlike the pogroms in Russia and Ukraine at the turn of the century, which had been organized mainly by the anti-Semitic and archconservative political vigilantes known as the Black Hundreds, in Lithuania, especially in the smaller towns, Jews were actually murdered by former neighbors, classmates, and customers" (333). Only days before the German invasion a massacre in Kaunas (Slobodka) of 1200 men, women, and children was undertaken by "armed Lithuanians who called themselves partisans". 2000 more Jews were murdered in the same place in the next few days (333). After the arrival of German forces and Einsatzgruppe A, "Lithuanians were soon accepted ... as auxiliaries attached to German units" (333). 90% of Lithuania's Jews perished by the end of the Holocaust in Lithuania, the majority before December 1941.

Following the retreat of the German forces from Lithuania following the battle of Stalingrad, the Soviet Union re-established control over Lithuania. It enforced its party line concerning the Holocaust, especially concerning the deaths of Jews, emphasizing "innocent Soviet citizens" rather than Jews as the primary victims. A quantity of documentary evidence was collected by the Jewish State Museum in Vilnius, but the museum was only permitted to operate for four years. Upon closure its valuable materials and documents were stored in a variety of places, including "book depositories of the Lithuanian SSR, where it was inaccessible to scholars and other interested persons" (338). Soviet authorities soon became unwilling to pursue complaints about stolen property, collaborators, and other crimes that had occurred during the German occupation (337). "Although many war criminals were eventually arrested and tried, the authorities generally avoided dwelling on the widespread nature of Lithuanian wartime collaboration with the enemy" (339). Levin observes that conditions for the surviving or returning Jewish community improved in the post-Stalin period, and there was an increase in publication of books and articles about the experience of the Nazi period in the 1960s and 1970s (340). However, diaspora Lithuanian communities began a campaign of obfuscation concerning Lithuanian responsibility for the killings of Jews (342). Within Lithuania the situation was different, according to Levin; "by the end of 1987 and early 1988, articles began to appear in the Lithuanian press ... severely criticizing past sins of both omission and commission in reference to the memory of the Holocaust" (343). After the collapse of Communist rule in Lithuania the Supreme Council of the Lithuanian Republic issued a statement in May 1990 signed by President Landsbergis, according to which the Supreme Council "unreservedly condemn[ed] the genocide committed against the Jewish people during the years of the Hitlerite occupation in Lithuania and state[d] with sorrow that among the henchmen who served the occupying power there were also citizens of Lithuania" (345). Levin notes the subsequent emergence of extreme anti-Semitic nationalists in Lithuania. He also highlights several important themes or myths that have taken hold in Lithuania that have the effect of misleading the current generation about the grim realities of the past: idealization of the past concerning Jewish-Lithuanian relations; symmetry between Jewish and Lithuanian behavior during World War II; tendentious exaggeration or distortion of proportions; reciprocity in punishment of war criminals; and euphoria about the present and utopian optimism for the future (347). 

Assessment

These are just three of the fascinating country cases included in The World Reacts to the Holocaust. Every essay contains material that will be surprising to the non-specialist. There are common themes, however. Both in the Soviet bloc and in Western Europe there is a residual level of anti-Semitism that expresses itself periodically. In all parts of Europe there have been political and nationalistic reasons for concealing or obfuscating the past -- for the sake of national unity, for the sake of economic progress, for a desire to move on. And yet each case makes it clear that no country can thrive if it is unwilling to honestly examine its past, to reckon with the inexcusable things that its citizens have done in prior decades, and to commit to a process of recognition, acknowledgement, and sorrow for the murders and atrocities committed in its name. Finally, it is important to recall that each of these narratives ends in the early 1990s. Much has happened in European politics that has given new force to right-wing nationalism, populism, and anti-Semitism that makes the overall cautious optimism of the volume quite uncertain. It would be highly interesting to see followup articles on these countries to see how things have developed in the twenty-six years since the volume was first published.

(A few examples of poetry relevant to the question of remembrance of the Holocaust are collected in a separate post; link. Powerful and evocative poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (Russia), Wim Ramaker (Netherlands), Czesław Miłosz (Poland), and Vasily Grossman (Ukraine) are provided there.) 

Poetry in remembrance of the Shoah

Theodor Adorno wrote that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." But there are good reasons not to agree with Adorno. There is a body of powerful, respectful, and penetrating poetry that has been written in reflection upon the Holocaust. And these works are another valid way for non-participants in the evils of the Holocaust to be brought to understand, respect, and reflect upon the suffering that occurred. Consider the beautiful, sorrowful, and indicting poem written by Yevgeny Yevtushenko in 1961, "Babi Yar". Yevtushenko helps the reader to mourn and recognize these children, women, and men who were murdered at Babi Yar. And he points a finger of accusation against the continuing anti-Semitism rampant in the Soviet Union in which he lived. Wim Ramaker's powerful elegy for the thousands of Dutch Jews who departed from Westerbork in The Netherlands to the extermination camps of Poland is equally powerful. And Czesław Miłosz's poem "A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto" helps the reader to feel and think about the human loss and suffering that occurred in Warsaw and throughout Poland. Vasily Grossman was not a poet; but some of his passages in "Ukraine Without Jews" and "The Hell of Treblinka" are deeply poetic and expressive of a profound emotion that helps the reader to experience the depth of what has been lost. 

BABI YAR
Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Kiev, Ukraine 

No monument stands over Babi Yar.
A drop sheer as a crude gravestone.
I am afraid.
Today I am as old in years
as all the Jewish people.
Now I seem to be
a Jew.
Here I plod through ancient Egypt.
Here I perish crucified on the cross,
and to this day I bear the scars of nails.
I seem to be
Dreyfus.
The Philistine
is both informer and judge.
I am behind bars.
Beset on every side.
Hounded,
spat on,
slandered.

Squealing, dainty ladies in flounced Brussels lace
stick their parasols into my face.
I seem to be then
a young boy in Byelostok.
Blood runs, spilling over the floors.
The barroom rabble-rousers
give off a stench of vodka and onion.
A boot kicks me aside, helpless.
In vain I plead with these pogrom bullies.
While they jeer and shout,
'Beat the Yids. Save Russia!'
Some grain-marketer beats up my mother.

O my Russian people!
I know
you
are international to the core.
But those with unclean hands
have often made a jingle of your purest name.
I know the goodness of my land.
How vile these antisemites—
without a qualm
they pompously called themselves
the Union of the Russian People!

I seem to be
Anne Frank
transparent
as a branch in April.
And I love.
And have no need of phrases.
My need
is that we gaze into each other.
How little we can see
or smell!
We are denied the leaves,
we are denied the sky.
Yet we can do so much—
tenderly
embrace each other in a darkened room.
They're coming here?
Be not afraid. Those are the booming
sounds of spring:
spring is coming here.
Come then to me.
Quick, give me your lips.
Are they smashing down the door?
No, it's the ice breaking . . .
The wild grasses rustle over Babi Yar.
The trees look ominous,
like judges.
Here all things scream silently,
and, baring my head,
slowly I feel myself
turning grey.
And I myself
am one massive, soundless scream
above the thousand thousand buried here.
I am
each old man
here shot dead.
I am
every child
here shot dead.
Nothing in me
shall ever forget!
The 'Internationale,' let it
thunder
when the last antisemite on earth
is buried for ever.
In my blood there is no Jewish blood.
In their callous rage, all antisemites
must hate me now as a Jew.
For that reason
I am a true Russian!

------------

Westerbork, debarkation point for Dutch Jews

Wim Ramakar

Sta een ogenblik stil: Monumentenboek 1940/1945

The Netherlands

Who dares to raise his voice here?

Departure point of a whole people:

with known destination left for Auschwitz,

Sobibor, Theresienstadt, Bergen-Belsen, Kosel ...

And nobody saved them

To be sure there was much waving when they passed by

A gesture that always touched the deported deeply

but nobody shifted the point to life,

or changed the track

Scores of trains have left from here,

according to schedule

often Tuesdays,

exactly on time, 

because no one was allowed to die too late

Stand for a moment ...

now the point of departure and arrival have almost caught up with 

each other

Here left a whole people:

more than one hundred and two thousand Jewish fellow citizens, 

children, mothers, fathers,

fathers, mothers, children

and also babies and those old of days

were gassed, shot, burned alive,

beaten to death, hanged

while we waved

At last the rails are shifted

of sadness twisted

and at the place where they were readied for their journey

stand telescopes

to amplify their silent whispering in the universe

and to wave again

when they wave.

------------

A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto

Czesław Miłosz

Warsaw, Poland

Bees build around red liver,

Ants build around black bone.

It has begun: the tearing, the trampling on silks,

It has begun: the breaking of glass, wood, copper, nickel, silver, foam

Of gypsum, iron sheets, violin strings, trumpets, leaves, balls, crystals.

Poof! Phosphorescent fire from yellow walls

Engulfs animal and human hair.

Bees build around the honeycomb of lungs,

Ants build around white bone.

Torn is paper, rubber, linen, leather, flax,

Fiber, fabrics, cellulose, snakeskin, wire.

The roof and the wall collapse in flame and heat seizes the foundations.

Now there is only the earth, sandy, trodden down,

With one leafless tree.

Slowly, boring a tunnel, a guardian mole makes his way,

With a small red lamp fastened to his forehead.

He touches buried bodies, counts them, pushes on,

He distinguishes human ashes by their luminous vapor,

The ashes of each man by a different part of the spectrum.

Bees build around a red trace.

Ants build around the place left by my body.

I am afraid, so afraid of the guardian mole.

He has swollen eyelids, like a Patriarch

Who has sat much in the light of candles

Reading the great book of the species.

What will I tell him, I, a Jew of the New Testament,

Waiting two thousand years for the second coming of Jesus?

My broken body will deliver me to his sight

And he will count me among the helpers of death:

The uncircumcised.

------------

Ukraine without Jews

Vasily Grossman

Ukraine

When our forces enter the villages of Left-bank Ukraine under a volley of fire and the din of hand grenades, domestic geese rise up into the air. Flapping their enormous white wings, they circle above peasant huts, above lakes covered in water lilies, above fields and gardens.

There is something worrisome and strange in the heavy, arduous flight, and the sharp, alarming and sorrowful cries of these domestic birds. It is as if they are calling the soldiers of the Red Army to witness heartbreaking and frightening images of life, as if they are rejoicing at the arrival of our forces, simultaneously weeping with joy and lamenting, screaming of great losses, and of the tears and blood that have aged and salted the soil of Ukraine.

...

And it occurred to me that just as Kozary is silent, so too are the Jews in Ukraine silent. In Ukraine there are no Jews. Nowhere—not in Poltava, Kharkov, Kremenchug, Borispol, not in Iagotin. You will not see the black, tear-filled eyes of a little girl, you will not hear the sorrowful drawling voice of an old woman, you will not glimpse the swarthy face of a hungry child in a single city or a single one of hundreds of thousands of shtetls.

Stillness. Silence. A people has been murdered. Murdered are elderly artisans, well-known masters of trades: tailors, hatmakers, shoemakers, tinsmiths, jewellers, housepainters, furriers, bookbinders; murdered are workers: porters, mechanics, electricians, carpenters, furnace workers, locksmiths; murdered are wagon drivers, tractor drivers, chauffeurs, cabinet makers; murdered are millers, bakers, pastry chefs, cooks; murdered are doctors, therapists, dentists, surgeons, gynecologists; murdered are experts in bacteriology and biochemistry, directors of university clinics, teachers of history, algebra, trigonometry; murdered are lecturers, department assistants, candidates and doctors of science; murdered are engineers, metallurgists, bridge builders, architects, ship builders; murdered are pavers, agronomists, field-crop growers, land surveyors; murdered are accountants, bookkeepers, store merchants, suppliers, managers, secretaries, night guards; murdered are teachers, dressmakers; murdered are grandmothers who could mend stockings and bake delicious bread, who could cook chicken soup and make strudel with walnuts and apples; and murdered are grandmothers who didn’t know how to do anything except love their children and grandchildren; murdered are women who were faithful to their husbands, and murdered are frivolous women; murdered are beautiful young women, serious students and happy schoolgirls; murdered are girls who were unattractive and foolish; murdered are hunchbacks; murdered are singers; murdered are blind people; murdered are deaf and mute people; murdered are violinists and pianists; murdered are three- year-old and two-year-old children; murdered are eighty-year-old elders who had cataracts in their dimmed eyes, cold transparent fingers and quiet, rustling voices like parchment; murdered are crying newborns who were greedily sucking at their mothers’ breasts until their final moments. All are murdered, many hundreds of thousands, millions of people.

The people have been murdered, trampled in the earth.