Tzvetan Todorov: Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. Arthur Denner and Abigail Pollak translation. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996.
In his account of the Spanish conquest of Mexico and the Caribbean, Todorov, a self-described moralist, deployed the instruments of ‘postmodernism’ to arraign the Spanish Crown and the Spanish Catholic Church. Upon examination, postmodernist instruments proved a weak reed. Serious moral critique needs more than ‘deconstruction’ in the service of ‘intersubjectivity.’ [1] By the time he turned to the Nazi genocide, Todorov may have reached the same conclusion, as he now engages in more straightforward moral reasoning, based on Kant—using a German against the Germans, as it were.
He begins not in Germany but in Poland, with books on the Warsaw Ghetto revolt of 1943, in which Jews attacked the Nazi occupiers, and the Warsaw Rising of 1944, when Poles attempted the same thing in an attempt to seize control of the city before the oncoming Red Army could take it. Both attempts failed, heroically.
Warsaw 1944 consists of interviews conducted by Jean-François Steiner with survivors of the Rising. “I was actually reading a reflection on heroism,” but “what exactly is heroism, I asked myself.” He associates heroism with the exercise of free will in defiance of “the status quo.” Further, the hero is an ‘idealist’ in the sense that he tends to believe that if he can dream it, he can do it. Poles fought the Nazis not for the sake of saving the people of Warsaw or Polish territory but in defense of “an abstraction called Poland” or, more accurately, an idealized person, for Poland conceived as the sister of the Blessed Virgin. More concretely, “it was not the Polish people who had to be saved but, rather, certain qualities of theirs: their will to freedom, their desire for independence, their national pride”—without which Poles would have risked, in the words of one resister, “a terrible moral collapse.” And not only Poland: the invading Russian communists threatened the West, civilization, humanity itself. Polish self-sacrifice can “stir the conscience of the world,” resisters believed. In Todorov’s estimation, “nothing less than the absolute can satisfy these heroic spirits.”
The cardinal virtues of heroes are fidelity and courage. The hero stands alone because “family and friends, by their very existence, make him vulnerable,” threatening to make his self-sacrifice a sacrifice of others. Before going to war, he must kiss them goodbye or bid them farewell with one last drink at the bar. He may well miscalculate. In Poland, the Soviet forces held back from supporting the rebel Poles, allowing the Germans to quell the insurrection at the price of 200,000 Polish lives, the deportation of 700,000 more, and the destruction of Warsaw, later rebuilt along the lines of the squalid, Soviet-style architecture which comported with a squalid, Soviet-style regime. But “for a Pole,” one survivor declares, “it is better to die than to be a coward,” and better to be dead than Red. Todorov doubts that such heroism can extend very far, since if everyone is dead, who will remain to live for Poland? He exaggerates somewhat, however, when he claims that “to the hero, death has more value than life” because one can attain the absolute, a humanly unrealizable ideal, only by dying. Rather, most of the Poles who rebelled regarded their sacrifice as a way, under the circumstances the only way, to Polish freedom. Still, it is true that at least one fictional hero, and not a Polish one, can cry, “Prize me no prizes, for my prize is death.” [2]
Todorov prefers the more cautious and (at least many times) saner route. After all, “one can act like a hero for fear of seeming a coward,” feeling “a particular kind of fear, the fear of being afraid,” along with the fear of being shamed by the heroic ones. Critics of the insurrectionists described them as suicides, men “who sought refuge in a glorious death because they didn’t have the courage to face the difficulties of life”—life, it must be added, under Soviet tyranny. Todorov stands for prudence, although he never uses the word: “One needs to anticipate the consequences of one’s decisions while keeping in mind the actual course of events, not merely what one wishes would happen.” If you would be a hero, emulate wily Odysseus instead of raging Achilles.
Todorov distrusts the hero’s Manicheanism. “In Warsaw of 1944, it was not simply the forces of good and evil that confronted each other but the Russians and the Germans, the Home Army and the People’s Army, the government in exile and the civilian population. In circumstances this complex, reaching the best solution—in this instance, unfortunately, merely the lesser evil—requires a careful consideration of all sides rather than unswerving loyalty to an ideal. The values of life are not absolute values: life is diverse, and every situation is heterogeneous. Choices are made not out of concession or cowardly compromise but from a recognition of this multiplicity.” The weakness of such prudential thought and action is that “it does not lend itself well to stories,” by which Todorov means the stories of heroism that inspire faithful and courageous action, which is needed (one should add) if prudence is not to devolve into mere pragmatism or self-interested calculation. The ideal may unrealizable but it serves as a standard, and quite possibly not a dispensable one.
The Jewish Ghetto Rising occurred in a different set of circumstances. Here, Todorov avails himself of the account in Shielding the Flame, a conversation between survivor Marek Edelman and Hanna Krall. Although at the time Edelman thought of himself as heroic in the classic sense, he now saw that “All it was about, finally, was our not letting them slaughter us when our turn came.” The Warsaw Jews know they are going to be killed by the Nazis, so they might as well go down fighting, taking some of the enemy down with them. Todorov calls this second stance an instance of “ordinary virtue,” as distinguished from “heroic virtue.” Ordinary virtue vindicates human freedom. It is animated not so much by fidelity and courage as by a sense of “dignity,” the “capacity of the individual to remain a subject with a will,” confirming his “membership in the human race.” “For the hero, death eventually becomes a value and a goal, because it embodies the absolute better than life does. From the standpoint of the ordinary virtues, however, death is a means, not an end; it is the ultimate recourse of the individual who seeks to affirm his dignity.” Todorov thus partakes of the modern philosophy of freedom, regarding the free will rather than reason as the distinctively human characteristic. [3] The second anchor of ordinary virtue is “caring,” the attempt not only to respect oneself but to help others—not generalized or ‘abstract’ others (nation, civilization, humanity) but other individuals. Hiding the refugee, shielding the body of a child.
Why did the Polish Home Army not reinforce the Ghetto rebels? The Jewish witnesses ascribe this not only or even primarily to Polish anti-Semitism but to “the pro-Soviet position of the Jews,” many of them socialists but almost all of them (quite understandably) hating the Jew-hating Nazis more than the bourgeois-hating Soviets. For its part, the Home Army “was just as hostile to Stalin as it was to Hitler”—also understandably, as Stalin no less than Hitler intended to destroy Polish independence and subordinate the Poles in his empire. The Soviets acted the same way during the Warsaw Uprising, knowing that it “was directed as much against them as against the Germans.” Calling this “the logic of resentment,” Todorov asserts that in both instances “ideological conviction took precedence over concern for protecting human lives.” The problem with this argument is that the ideological convictions of the persons endangered, the persons calculatedly not helped, were themselves murderous. Jewish preference for Soviet tyranny as against Nazi tyranny remains readily understandable, but was it good for Poland (Jewish and non-Jewish alike)? Polish detestation of both enemy regimes was justifiable. This may be seen in the fact Todorov cites: “the anti-Soviet forces” in 1944 did not really threaten the Soviets. But the Soviets refrained from intervening because they wanted to weaken the Poles, the better to take over Poland in order to advance their ideological cause. That “the anti-Soviet Polish forces were not really threatened by the Jewish rebels” in 1943 is much more likely true, although the Poles surely would have been threatened had the Jewish rebels sided with the Reds, opening a dangerous second front after the Nazis had been defeated. And had Polish Jews welcomed the Soviets at the expense of the Poles (whom they had little reason to trust), who is to say that the Soviets would not have turned on them, once the Poles had been brought to heel?
Todorov’s prudential reasoning rests on more solid ground when he considers the logic of Warsaw Jews in rebelling. This was indeed “a sane reaction to a policy of systematic extermination”; “every day, the Nazi occupiers of Warsaw sent a trainload of victims”—most of them Jews—to the Treblinka concentration camp, “to be killed on arrival.” Warsaw Jews chose the manner of their deaths, being sure to die, one way or another. “The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto must be respected not so such because of its display of heroic virtues but because it was the right political answer to desperate circumstances.” Exactly so.
Aristotle would recommend against examining such an extreme circumstance in order to understand ordinary virtue. Todorov insists that one can learn about such virtue precisely when it is under the most pressure. “My intent is to use the extreme as an instrument, a sort of magnifying glass that can bring into better focus certain things that in the normal course of human affairs remain blurry.” One might go farther still: the egalitarianism of democracies lends itself to moral relativism, to blurriness in principle. Democrats incline to be ruled by their desires, by neither logos nor thumos.
As “the extreme of our political life, modern tyranny or “totalitarianism” puts the now-characteristic European regime of democratic republicanism into sharper relief. Totalitarianism’s animating sentiment is terror, the sentiment modern liberalism, beginning with Hobbes, seeks to guard against. In both the totalitarian regime as a whole and its concentration camps in particular, the enforced confinement under pain of death, the reign of secrecy, the strict social hierarchy (in the name of egalitarianism), “the implication of everyone in the functioning of the machine,” the “corruption of the soul under constraint,” and the “constant presence of violence and death” all serve the intention of ruling by means of terror.
Todorov is a moralist, but hardly a self-righteous one. On the contrary, “any reflection of mine on the subject of the extreme that did not implicate me personally and draw on my own experiences was likely to be a futile exercise.” He had himself lived in Bulgaria, under a communist regime in the Soviet empire, until his mid-twenties. This “gave me my first intimate encounter with political evil, but as something done by me, not to me.” Like the subjects of tyranny everywhere, he too had walked the walk laid out by the regime in “mute acceptance of the status quo.” “For this interpretation of the lessons of totalitarianism and the camps, I alone will be responsible.”
In the extreme circumstances within these extremist regimes—heroic in their own perverse way, aiming at the realization of such unrealizable if malignant ideals as racial purity or worldwide communalism—in the concentration camps, many victims struggled only to survive, abandoning all moral convictions. But others did not. “Matters of conscience are not at all rare in extreme situations, and their very existence attests to the possibility of choice, and thus of moral life”; the regime or way of life of the camps did not obey “only the law of the jungle,” as much as its rulers wanted it to. Free will continued to exert itself, and with it the ordinary virtues. The tyrants organized the camps in particular and their regimes in general according to “the principle that the behavior of the individual depends not on his own will but on the conditions surrounding him, that life is a war of all against all, that morality is no more than a superficial convention.” Marx and Nietzsche alike had subscribed to such moral fatalism, and even some of the survivors of the camps continued to think they were right. But on the contrary, the endurance of ordinary moral virtue in the camps proves “that moral reaction are spontaneous, omnipresent, and eradicable only with the greatest violence.” Hobbes’s state of nature is not natural but must instead be forced upon us. “Except under extreme constraint, human beings are prompted, among other things, to communicate with one another, to help one another, and to distinguish good from evil.” The ordinary virtues remain the middle ground between the desire for self-preservation at any cost and the heroic choice of death at the expense of life. It isn’t so much that “moral life was superior in the camps” but that “it was more visible and thus more telling there.” “I examine both sides of moral life—the virtues, ordinary and heroic, and the vices, ordinary and monstrous. Finally, I attempt to analyze our responses in the face of evil.”
Todorov identifies the ideal of the hero as excellence—seen in Achilles, who embodies “the model of heroic perfection,” but not so much for the purpose of the war, which is to avenge the theft of Helen by the Trojans. Physical strength, physical and moral courage, and energy comprise this ideal; glory is its reward—a name that will not die when the hero does. For Achilles, “the choice is between a life without glory and a glorious death.” In “choosing death over life,” he elevates himself above ordinary mortals, who cringe at the prospect of dying. The Christian equivalent of the hero is the saint, a person of “spiritual strength” who, “like the hero, rejects compromise.” Todorov goes too far in claiming that the saint’s love of God “leav[es] no room” in his heart “for a comparable love of his fellowman.” If Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend tells us of saints who push family members aside in order to martyr themselves, it does so because de Voragine would inspire us, too, to love both God and children; his saints set an example for their children as well as for us. Combining the heroism of the ‘ancients’ with the saintliness of the Christians, the knight of the Middle Ages lived by the code of chivalry, indeed “a very different model from that of Achilles” but still animated by “the aristocratic virtues and the concept of honor.”
Against all of these high-toned human types we see Benjamin Franklin. “With the triumph in Europe of the ideology of individualism toward the end of the eighteenth century, the heroic model falls rapidly out of favor,” replaced by the man who “aspire[s] to personal happiness or even, quite simply, to a life of pleasure.” Less impressive examples than Franklin include such fictional characters as Julien Sorel and Emma Bovary, figures who have, as Todorov drily remarks, “little in common with Achilles and Antigone.” “For the world of the Greek heroes is the opposite of modern democracy.”
Todorov identifies “two ideological models” which “preside over the sphere of human interactions” today: public figures will point to military careers, fine ’causes’ fought for in war or in peace—heroic virtues for the middle class; in the private sphere, the ordinary virtues—including but not restricted to what are now called ‘family values’—constitute the ordinary virtues of life lived in the quotidian. Although Todorov has deprecated the heroic virtues, he recognizes that they have their place, as when a war really is just. “From the minute it became clear that there was no other way to contain Hitler, going to war against him became the right choice,” and in such a war, “I prefer Churchill to Chamberlain, de Gaulle to Daladier.” But since “war is not the continuation of peace by other means,” and “the fact that many people believe otherwise is one of the major proofs that the history of the world does not obey the laws of progress,” “sending heroes into retirement once the war is over may be less an expression of ingratitude than a mark of lucidity.” Oddly, he gives Churchill and de Gaulle as examples of such sensible conduct: “left in power” after World War Two, “they might have become dangerous.” In fact, both returned to power after the war, Churchill not dangerous but ineffective, probably a bit too old for the job, de Gaulle not dangerous but (for the most part) beneficial, the founder of the Fifth Republic. At any rate, he prefers the heroism of Sacha Pechersky, the Odysseus-like leader of an escape from a Nazi extermination camp, and the saintliness of Father Maximilian Kolbe, who offered himself as a substitute for a man designated for death by starvation in Auschwitz. “Sometimes, heroic behavior” has been “subordinated to the welfare of real human beings.” Todorov is more comfortable with the defense of persons than with the defense of England or of France, while continuing to respect the defenders of England and France.
With respect to the ordinary virtues of dignity and caring, totalitarian regimes seek to eradicate both. “We decide how long you stay alive and when you die, and not you!” the guards shouted at the prisoners in the camps. They sought to sever the connection between the dignity of human freedom and the dignity of actions supporting freely chosen moral principles. In this sense, then, the ‘philosophy’ of modern tyranny counters the modern philosophy of freedom. Something more than freedom alone suffices to make a conviction moral, however. While it is true that the Nazi, too, may act “in accordance with his convictions,” his convictions themselves are rotten. “Moral behavior requires more than harmony between acts and ideals; it requires also that those ideals not work against the good of humanity.”
Caring in the camps sometimes took horrifying forms, as when nurses killed newborn children to save the mothers from execution by the Nazis for the ‘crime’ of giving birth (the children would have been murdered, anyway). Women generally “survived the camps better than men did” because caring was the virtue tradition had instilled in them. “The women were more practical, more likely to help one another than were the men,” whereas “the men were more likely to deaden themselves, to become hard and indifferent, to turn on one another.” Todorov distinguishes caring from solidarity, which he associates with caring only for ‘one’s own’—family, friends, countrymen. In this way, he separates politics, the realm of solidarity, from morality, the realm of caring for human beings as such. With caring, “the choice is made according to criteria other than nationality, profession, or political persuasion; each person who is cared for is deserving in an of him- or herself.” Nor is caring charity, which cares even for those one does not know, one who can never reciprocate the gesture. Nor is caring sacrificial, as heroism or charity can be: “the giver can hope to receive benefits in return, should the roles be reversed.” Caring entails mutuality in a way that heroism and charity do not.
Todorov knows that moral life consists of more than sentiments alone, whether heroic, saintly, or ‘ordinary.’ There is also the life of the mind, whether it aims at the search for truth, the search for the beautiful, or both. Even in a concentration camp, one might seek out the truth “not simply because it can help one survive or because it can help others fight a hateful system but because unearthing the truth is an end in itself.” In law, in philosophy, and in religion alike, there is merit in being a witness. “This is the paradox: stories of evil can create good” because “to observe, to remember, and to pass on to others what one has seen is already to take a stand against inhumanity,” “one way of remaining human and, for that reason,” to commit “an act with a moral dimension.” It is of course true that the single-minded pursuit of the life of the mind can go wrong, as in the seriocomic example of Todorov’s father, whom Todorov suspects of welcoming the Communists’ takeover of Bulgaria because, as a librarian, this would mean “the modernization of Bulgaria’s libraries.” At least the old man’s purpose wasn’t harmful in itself, as everyone is familiar with Werner von Braun’s rocket science in the service of Nazi Germany. In such extreme cases, Rousseau’s well-known complaints about the corrupting influence of the arts and letters actually make some sense.
In considering the heroic/aristocratic, intellectual/philosophic, and democratic/’ordinary’ virtues, Todorov ranks them not according to the ‘postmodernist’ categories he once upheld, but in terms of the categorical imperative. Unlike the other virtues, “caring is by its very definition coincident with the moral stance that hold other people to be ends in themselves, whereas for the life of the mind this engagement with others is optional, and when dignity is at stake, the subject’s welfare can be an altogether extraneous issue.” He thus distinguishes “the morality of sympathy” from “the morality of principles.” A principle abstracts from the particulars, something “by definition universal,” but sympathy “is a sentiment one feels as a direct result of someone else’s experience,” whether it takes the form of compassion at the sight of suffering or of “vicarious joy” at the sight of another’s triumph. The quest for justice is a quest to act in accordance with a principle or perhaps a set of rules. The ‘social justice warrior’ may in practice rescue people or run them over with a truck. Indeed, moralism, as distinct from morality, “consists of practicing justice without virtue, of simply invoking moral principles without feeling that they apply to oneself,” of demanding justice without being just. “To say that one is in favor of morality is not a moral act; most of the time it merely signifies conformity or a desire to live at peace with one’s conscience.” Subscribing to morality is like subscribing to a magazine; it doesn’t mean that you read it. Unlike principles, “action cannot be generalized.” It always affects specific persons and things.
And so, it’s easy “to denounce slavery” when and where it no longer exists. “There is nothing moral in speaking out against slavery today; all it proves is that I’m in step with my society’s ideology or else don’t want to find myself on the wrong side of the barricades,” and “something very similar can be said about condemnations of racism, although that would not have been the case in 1936 in Germany.” When pursuing justice, one does well to think less of one’s moral perfection, more of what is right for the others. Moral perfection in matters of justice may at most number among the side effects.
What can happen when ordinary people, with their ordinary virtues, find themselves plunged into the extreme condition established by the extreme regime, modern tyranny—the concentration camp? “In the literature of the concentration camp, evil is the main character.” Arendt was right: the evil of the camps was indeed “banal” in one sense. The guards were mostly not sadistic or fanatical; “they followed the rules.” In the words of Vasily Grossman, “The new state did not even require servants—just clerks.” “To call this evil banal is not to trivialize it; precisely what made this evil so dangerous was that it was so easy, that no exceptional human qualities were required for it to come into being.” Its very enormity was possible only because its component parts were small, easily assembled and maintained. The ordinary virtues had been countered by ordinary vices, by what one writer calls “the cold, systematic manner of the military ‘categorical imperative.'” To explain the camps, one needs not a psychological but a political explanation, an account of the regime that established them. “The societal trait that allows such crimes to be carried out is totalitarianism, the only attribute that Nazi Germany shares with the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, and China.” The human beings within those regimes were “no different from any others; what sets them apart is the political regime under which they lived.”
The characteristics specific to that regime are: identifying ‘regime enemies’ not only in foreign countries but ‘from within,’ whether it be the race enemy of the Nazis or the class enemy of the Communists; establishing the state as “the custodian of the society’s ultimate aims”; and (consequently) establishing state rule over “the totality of the individual’s social existence.” The enemies held up by modern tyrannies are not simply critics but “absolute” enemies, “embodiment[s] of evil,” elements against whom one is said to have a moral obligation not merely to criticize but to make war against. By “making itself the sole arbiter of which ends are to be pursued,” the totalitarian regime enables its subjects to “take comfort in being relieved of personal responsibility for their decisions” while “demand[ing] that [they] restrict themselves in thought and deed to instrumentality,” treating “every action as a means to something else rather than an end in itself.” This enables ordinary people to pervert their ordinary virtues to the service of evil ends. The concentration camp guards “were not deprived of a moral sensibility but provided with a new one.” A regime change always does that, for evil or for good. Todorov recalls that in Bulgaria the exercise of ordinary virtues at home and among friend seemed an escape from “totalitarian control over at least one part of our lives,” but in doing so Bulgarians gave “the state free rein to regulate our social existence, which is to say, our lives as a whole.” “We were consolidating the power of the regime itself.”
This explains not only why most Jews didn’t revolt against the Nazis—they were a minority trapped among Germans who were hostile or indifferent to their calamity—but also why “a billion Chinese [are] not in revolt right now.” “Once the totalitarian system is in place, the vast majority of the population—people like you and me—are at risk of becoming accomplices in its crimes,” “fall[ing] into behaviors they understand are evil.” We “prefer to forget Kolyma and Auschwitz…because we fear discovering that the evil of the camps is not alien to the human race” or, more uncomfortably, to ourselves. “Evil is not accidental; it is always there at hand, ready to manifest itself. All it needs to emerge is for us to do nothing.”
What of the persons ruling in the regime? On the lower level, “there was no guard who was wicked through and through,” as all “seemed subject to constant shifts in attitude and temperament,” cruel one moment, kind the next. This suggests no mental illness, no clinical ‘split personality,’ but rather the absence of the rule of reason—an absence itself the effect of the overall regime, founded upon pseudoscience and animated by terror. True, as everyone has noticed, a guard might torture a prisoner while listening to Bach—people “with university educations could be every bit as cruel as the illiterate”—but “a sense of morals” is hardly “something one learns at universities.” And again, famously, many of the guards were good ‘family men.’ “My impression is that these individuals needed to fragment their lives in this way so that no spontaneous feelings of pity might hinder them in their ‘work,’ and also so that their admirable private lives might serve as a counterweight, at least in their own minds, for the things that may have troubled them about their professional activities.” At the top of the regime, Todorov remarks, Lenin was the same way, a man of “sensitivity, delicacy, gentleness, courtesy” with those he did not deem his ‘class enemies.’ Even Stalin is said to have had his jovial side and Hitler loved his dog. In Germany, “it was up to the Führer to decide an objective, and for everyone else to mind his or her own area of expertise. This is the totalitarian subject’s standard way of thinking.” Each person concerned himself “with only one small link in a vast chain and seeing their task as a purely technical problem.” The bureaucratic structure of the totalitarian state gave institutional form to this way of life, reinforcing “this absence of feelings of responsibility” and the workings of conscience. James Madison emphasized exactly the critical importance of responsibility in government, holding up the American regime as reformed by the 1787 Constitutional Convention as a model of a set of institutions that enforce strict responsibility upon the persons who occupy public offices. Hitler’s regime, all of the modern tyrannies, aim at exactly the opposite effect: Give your soul to me and get on with your assigned tasks. It is easy to see why so many Nazis regarded themselves as innocent of all wrongdoing. And insofar as the republics have given themselves over to bureaucratic rule, one sees some of the same moral effects.
Chief of those effects is depersonalization. Crucify not your body for the sake of the souls of others; crucify your soul for the sake of the nation, or of communism. “Totalitarian doctrines can thus properly be called antihumanist,” anti-Kantian. Do not act as if a person be used as an end in itself, but always as a mere means. “Far more than any sadistic or primitive instincts, it is depersonalization, of the other and of oneself, that is responsible for totalitarian evil.” In this sense, the policy of stripping prisoners naked and starving them was a way not only of subordinating the prisoners but of getting the guards to treat them like animals. Similarly, give them numbers to replace their names; kill them en masse, not in small groups or individually; identify them in terms of some impersonal category (‘Jews,’ ‘kulaks’); herd them into gas chambers, so as not to see them die. Hitler wished that Germany had a religion like the Japanese “who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good,” or Islam, which “would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity.”
I was only following orders, was the famous excuse. “Someone who only follows orders is no longer a person. The originality of totalitarian crime resides precisely in this possibility.” As the Nazi governor-general of Poland phrased it, “Act in such a way that if the Führer knew of your action he would approve it.” Hitler is your new god. On the Soviet side, Pravda means ‘truth’; if the newspaper Pravda says so, it must be true. The truth is spoken into reality, parodying the Book of Genesis. Husbands and wives believed the ‘Word’ of the ruling Party more than they believed the testimony and character of their spouses. Joined with bureaucratic compartmentalization, ideological indoctrination transformed persons so much “that they could suspend their usual responses to fellow human beings.” And although Nazis and Communists alike valorized honor and loyalty in words, “what the totalitarian regime calls loyalty is really nothing other than the ordinary vice of submission.” Courage? “Totalitarian pseudoheroes know only one form of sacrifice, that of others, while they themselves take pride in having enough fortitude to watch the ordeals of their victims without trembling!” Hitler knew it, too, “never miss[ing] an occasion” to sneer at old-fashioned Prussian rectitude and to scorn the chivalric tradition. The tyrant is no aristocrat but a ‘democrat’ in the Tocquevillian sense, one who intends to level all others beneath himself and his ruling ‘apparatus.’
If all that need be done to permit such a regime to emerge is to do nothing, what shall one do? Democratic regimes in the ordinary, non-Tocquevillian sense—democratic and commercial republics—do help. They foster “ideological pluralism,” lessening the danger of “fanatical indoctrination.” Religious conviction, too, can thwart ideology, although Todorov draws the line at Christian pacifism. He cites the example of the Dutch pacifist, Etty Hillesum, who acted under “two imperatives: forswear hatred of the enemy and fight evil in oneself rather than in others—that is, with moral, not political means.” If I see “no resemblance” between myself and my enemy, I am “destined to resemble [my] enemy.” While such “moral action can perhaps be more effective than we think” (he cites some impressive but limited examples), “there are times when taking up arms is the only appropriate responses,” as when “Hitler’s armies are streaming across borders.” “In fighting Hitler (and hence for justice) we are not imitating him: he is fighting for injustice.” Indeed, “might a position like Hillesum’s even facilitate the spread of evil”? True, Jesus tells us that His Kingdom is not of this world, that His followers will join Him in it, someday. But while we remain in this world, we need the prudence of serpents as much as the innocence of doves. “The most effective barrier to the political fact of totalitarianism is itself political: an active democracy concerned with both individual freedom and the advancement of the common good, tolerant of criticism and transformation from within but at the same time intransigent toward democracy’s real enemies.” Moral actions are indispensable for the maintenance of republics, but republic give moral intentions freedom of action.
Resistance to tyranny in combat carries moral risks. “If the only change is that those who were hunted become the hunters, then the new kingdom,” the regime that emerges after the war “will not be so new after all.” (This was precisely the problem de Gaulle addressed, successfully, and is the theme of one of Churchill’s best books, The Aftermath.) “Persecuting the persecutors does not erase the debt; the debt in fact is increased.” Here again, the very justice Todorov had said is no virtue returns, as he tells his readers, “Take a stand against evil and fight it out of a sense of justice, not hatred.” When it comes to postwar trials begin by distinguishing “between legal guilt and moral responsibilities,” between those who “actually committed the crimes and who alone are properly the concern of the judicial system” and “the passive spectators who are responsible at most for not coming to the aid of those in danger and thus who need answer not to the courts but to history or their own consciences” or, one might add, to God. True, under totalitarianism “all are involved in maintaining the status quo and thus all are responsible,” but “at the same time, all are subjugated and act under constraint.” When regime “pressures are truly great, our judgment of the individual must take them into account.” As for the criminals, the main thing is to delay judgment, whether stern or lenient, until the truth of the accused’s conduct has been fully brought out. “There is a vast difference between leniency and concealing the truth”; as the great jurist Francisco de Vitoria understood, “justice is not just a question of meting out punishment” but “also involves bringing the truth to light.”
Those whose business it is to bring the truth to light bear a unique responsibility. Heidegger, Schmitt, Jünger, Benn: “one cannot ignore the role, and hence the responsibility, of certain currents of thought in the rise of totalitarian regimes,” such currents as “anti-universalism” (i.e., exalting one race, class, or nation above all others), “hyper-determinism” (the claim that ‘race’ or ‘class’ or ‘gender’ or, animating them all, ‘History’ determines character and conduct), and “conflictualism” (the exaltation of warfare as ‘the supreme law of life”). Todorov engages in no ‘more-virtuous-than-they’ finger-pointing, here. “If I had stayed in Bulgaria, I would have spent the next thirty years writing half-truths,” inasmuch as “one of the most striking characteristics of totalitarian regimes” is that “everyone becomes an accomplice,” everyone “both inmate and guard, victim and executioner.”
Nor should those still further removed from direct responsibility for tyrants’ crimes exonerate themselves. The peoples conquered by the Nazis during the Second World War and those conquered by the Soviets afterwards at times “show[ed] a marked complacency toward what was taking place on their soil.” The French, for example, who provided a safe haven from Communism, “ought to be grateful to Eichmann and his colleagues for having chosen Poland as their extermination ground.” Had they chosen France as the site for the camps, “we might have learned yet again that, as Napoleon said, the word impossible is not French.” Those countries that did shelter Jews (Denmark and Bulgaria) or at least did not turn them over to the Nazis (Greece, Yugoslavia) combined “the absence of deep-seated anti-Semitism in the population” with “the willingness of a few politicians to make courageous decisions and stand by them.” As for the citizens of the free countries that remained unconquered, they did very little to oppose the tyrants in the years before the world war. “News of the Nazi death camps leaked out early on,” and “there was never any lack of information” about the Soviet gulags, “even as early as the 1920s.” Shamefully, both Great Britain and the United States feared that Hitler might expel ‘his’ Jews instead of killing them, throwing them onto their own shores. And of course, one must not discount the fear of war, both in the aftermath of the First World War and in the aftermath of the Second. Too, there was no shortage of intellectual and journalistic apologists for the tyrants, especially for the Communists. Men like Albert Camus, who “dared to mention a network of concentration camps as the very foundation of a presumably Socialist system, were vilified and ostracized by their colleagues.” In all, “most onlookers, whether close or distant, let events take their course.” “They knew what was happening and could have helped but did not.”
It being “beyond human strength” to “take upon ourselves all the suffering in the world, ceasing to sleep peacefully so long as there remains somewhere in the world even the slightest trace of injustice,” we will need to confine ourselves to more modest efforts. One of these is to listen to the witnesses of modern tyranny, “so that the truth can be established,” but more than that to understand: “Our memory of the camps should become an instrument that informs our capacity to analyze the present,” to “recognize our own image in the caricature reflected back at us by the camps, regardless of how much this mirror deforms and how painful the recognition is,” a recognition that “contains lessons for us, who think we live in a completely different world.” It isn’t completely different, since human nature hasn’t changed and since tyranny is still with us, as seen in China and ‘post-Communist’ Russia.
Does such understanding preclude just judgment? “I couldn’t disagree more. If I try to understand a murderer, it is not to absolve him but to prevent others from repeating his crime.” The law is impersonal, justice framing good laws an abstraction, but “the impersonality of the law must not lead to the depersonalization of those it condemns.” We cannot not judge. It is rather to judge without falling into the Manichean wrong of ignoring or excusing the evil in ourselves. There is telling or witnessing; there is understanding; there is judging. None of them can be sacrificed if we are to acknowledge our responsibility, which is to say our humanity morally understood. Whereas in his book on the conquistadors Todorov confined morality to ‘intersubjectivity’ and deprecated teleology, he now sees that we need both. Not only are moral judgments “not arbitrary,” they “can be argued rationally,” with reason the human guide toward “seek[ing] the good of specific individuals” in action and not only in words. “Morality cannot ‘disappear’ without a radical mutation of the human species,” one that removes its capacity to reason and to care for the good of one another. As a modern liberal, wary of statist tyranny, Todorov doubts that morality in his strict sense can be had in political life, which he confines to the establishment and increase of a just framework for moral life. Nor can philosophy make us moral, being an act of “reflection on morality, which is a search for truth more than a search for goodness” (he includes his own book in this category). Again, like politics, philosophy can lend itself to a moral way of life.
What does modern tyranny or totalitarianism, in its extremism, teach? It teaches that “a code of ordinary moral values and virtues, one commensurate with our times, can indeed be based on the recognition that it is as easy to do good as to do evil.” The “banality of evil” seen in the Nazis finds its counter in “the banality of good.” We need neither imitate saints nor fear monsters, as “both the dangers and the means with which to neutralize them are all around us.”
Notes
- See “Spanish Conquistadors Through a ‘Postmodernist’ Lens,” on this website.
- As Lancelot declaims in Tennyson’s The Idylls of the King.
- See “The Effects of the Philosophy of Freedom on Modern Tyranny” and “The Critique of Rationalism in the Philosophy of Freedom,” on this website.
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