THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY
Abel, Lionel
I want to take up here two difficult and related matters, forced on the attention of some of us at the outset of the Second World War, matters which, from the spring of 1940, we found we would...
...evil cannot both blend with the rest of the moral landscape and also stand out as completely separate from it...
...And it is one of these supporters—I shall refer to him as S.—who was involved in the event to which I have referred...
...My Chicago apartment was above one occupied by a German workman—I should say a skilled worker, though I never found out or tried to find out just what trade he was in—and I met him frequently in the hall as I was going up to my flat...
...And there was another difficulty...
...If the film is, indeed, as I claim it is, a trial of the judges and of the judgment they rendered, then how can it be a statement in favor of their judgment...
...She had once visited the Soviet Union and tried to smuggle a Russian typewriter into the country...
...448 social existence by death or imprisonment...
...How little this criterion can serve becomes apparent when we consider the attitude of the Trotskyists to the Second World War, in which they refused to participate on the side of the nations united against the Axis powers...
...And we must consider, too, that internationally the Soviet Union was far weaker in that period than it is today, also that the United States, before Vietnam and Watergate, was much stronger than it is now...
...Men who seem to be brave—there was one at least whose courage I personally witnessed—would retail with cheery fraternal chuckles at convivial mealtimes how many priests they had murdered, or how many 'fascists,' the latter being a very elastic term...
...But the Nazis did...
...And I think not even the Stalinists did this...
...You had drinks in the parlor car, played cards, enjoyed the time, and looked at your watch much less often than you do on an airplane run nowadays...
...The comparison I am making here between Senator Joseph McCarthy and JeanPaul Sartre is justified, I think, by other (and comparable policies) they followed...
...For evil, taken in this sense, has already been thoroughly banalized, being something not necessarily abhorrent, but something to which some other thing can reasonably be preferred...
...In fact the young woman, V., having passed every moral and technical test, and been judged politically reliable, was just on the point of leaving for Coyoacan to take up her duties in Trotsky's household...
...I remember how surprised I was at the phrase...
...After a pause he yielded, and said if we could meet in a place sufficiently deserted we might talk in the language of Shakespeare...
...And, finally, when I referred to the Trotskyists' "dark concepts" of history, I meant still another kind of criticism, the critique of what is clear by what is dim or vague, for in this case, the "dark concepts" they relied on came from their system and did not lie outside it...
...No doubt the Russian Communists under Stalin killed many more persons than did the Hitlerites...
...Here is a test not only of what you believe, but also of what you are...
...Ophuls, of course, denied that he had intended to give any such impression...
...There were two problems those of us interested in politics found difficult to deal with— intellectually and morally...
...Did we in fact become like the Hitlerites in defeating Hitler...
...At Nuremberg it was decided that genocide, the attempted extermination of some human collectivity—the Jews and the Gypsies were marked for extermination by the Nazis —is a crime against humanity...
...In fact the film is a trial of the judges and prosecutors at Nuremberg, rather than of those who were found guilty there...
...There is another American important in this film and associated with the prosecution as an assistant, General Telford Taylor...
...Serious consideration of the circumstances under which the use of force may be justified has been the subject of much thinking, but I myself know nothing better on the subject than an essay by the German literary critic Walter Benjamin: "Toward a Critique of Violence," in which the critic shows both sophistication and depth in treating one of the great questions of our time...
...But I found when I got to New York City that at Partisan Review, Philip Rahv, who had been politically influenced by Trotsky even as I had, thought this particular judgment of the Bolshevik leader absurd...
...What's wrong with that...
...Moreover, we thought of Germany as a country whose population was kept in line almost entirely by the police...
...When I referred to the need of socialists and leftists during the war to think "darkly," I had in mind their need to think outside of, or even against, some of the concepts to which they were committed...
...Whatever the behavior of the antifascist militiamen—and I would accept Simone Weil's description as accurate—they had not consciously formulated a set of ideological notions with the express aim of rendering whole groups of persons, whole collectivities even, valueless so that they could be killed...
...While separable, the two problems are of course related when understood at a certain depth, for both may require that because of the very strength of one's convictions, one break with some conviction by which one has hitherto been bound...
...Yet I argued with my Communist friend—he wasn't a friend, of course, being a Communist— except in the sense that he too wanted to argue about politics—in much these terms: I: "Do you mean to say you're going to vote for LaGuardia...
...But was this metaphysical reasoning all we could count on...
...I am not sure how responsible the filmmaker, Ophuls, is for the fact that if there is a hero in Memory of Justice, that hero is undoubtedly one of the accused Nazis, Air Marshal Goring...
...He had been investigating a very interesting young woman, fluent in Russian, who was then being considered by the SWP as a secretary for Leon Trotsky...
...With some alarm they said, "Read our interparty documents," and they gave me some...
...This notion of Gadamer's, which was not without influence on the Frankfurt Marxists, can surely be described as an acceptance of the need at times to "think darkly...
...The first had to do with the use of force so as to prevent or to forestall the use of force against us by others...
...I must note here for any reader who in the course of this narrative may have developed some concern for V. that she was neither kidnapped nor assassinated by S., and was at the last moment not accepted as a secretary for Leon Trotsky—her lack of skill with firearms was the reason for this...
...Well," said S., "that's what I brought you here to tell you...
...This committee, which Sidney Hook organized after the first of the Moscow trials, immediately became the object of Stalinist vituperation and attack...
...One member of the committee told me that his telephone rang every ten minutes from midnight until six in the morning for almost a week...
...There is no doubt that this is true, but she is also right in noting that adversaries of Hitler who tried to imitate him in this respect were never able to do so successfully...
...We used to walk up and down the Midway, arguing about the war, and the question I tried to answer could be formulated thus: Was there any help against Hitler except by way of Washington...
...The only intimation that some outcome of the war was possible other than victory for France and England came from Leon Trotsky...
...She was not interested in calling him names, but in understanding him...
...And since what was at issue during those years must still in some form or other remain before us, I shall try to go back and forth between the beginning of the Second World War—even to a few years before that—and the present time...
...Criminals though they certainly were, they can hardly be called criminals against humanity...
...When one considers further that one of the main charges at Nuremberg was the charge of crimes against humanity, the attribution of guilt for this to individuals becomes even more difficult and complicated...
...And can one be punished in such drastic ways merely for expressing views...
...And you know what that program is...
...And this was the position taken by Leon Trotsky, though in fairness to him it must be said that he had only seen the beginnings of the war, whose nature he so misunderstood, and might have changed his view of it had he lived beyond August 1940, when he was assassinated...
...HI Once again, what is a crime against humanity...
...Now this was very like the question raised by radicals during the war: How could we defeat Hitler without becoming like the Hitlerites...
...443 One day he rang me up...
...Now I take it that genocide can hardly be an individual aim...
...But let us go back now to the Nazi leadership in the courtroom at Nuremberg as they are confronted with the filming of concentration camp atrocities...
...The film began at three o'clock and there was a dinner break at six...
...In line with these discoveries was another we made (also in 1947) when we read JeanPaul Sartre's essay Portrait of the AntiSemite...
...was he a murderer...
...And as I recall, too, Harold Rosenberg wrote something against it in Commentary...
...Clement Greenberg and Dwight MacDonald even argued in Partisan Review that to defeat the Nazis we would have to become like them, and in many important respects...
...Now giving power to Senator McCarthy was not, of course, the right way of countering Communist influence...
...Dostoevsky was anti-Semitic...
...Fundamentally, what can you do against such a person except put an end to his *But let me spell it out: Voltaire was anti-Semitic, and in favor of tolerance...
...Typical of this film, as of other efforts to involve the Western democracies in the evils they claimed to be combating, is the method of admitting differences between the democracies and the Axis, and then denying such differences by emphasizing similarities...
...the Nazis, on the other hand, clearly desired the deaths of all those dispatched in their annihilation camps, and of many more besides...
...The darkest and quietest street in the village, Greene Street just off West Broadway, a street too deserted to visit safely at night in the '50s, but in 1938 it seemed a safe place to divulge a secret...
...However, Memory of Justice does not make this distinction clearly, and we do have the impression at the film's end that the court at Nuremberg represented powers guilty of crimes like those the court was called upon to judge...
...Perhaps they would not have been so trusting of the "dark" concepts embodied in their philosophy of history if they had had a little more respect for natural rights and the existing laws they so often dismissed as bourgeois illusions...
...For in Telford Taylor one sees the inconsequentiality of intelligence, and this is what Europeans are prone to see even in intelligent Americans, whom they think of as not being concerned to follow where their intelligence would lead them if they allowed it to...
...Hitler was in fact defeated, and the states that won out against him are today more democratic in their structure than when they entered the war against him...
...Now Simone Weil, whom Conor Cruise O'Brien in the New York Review of Books has called nonpolitical, was one of the few intellectuals in the prewar period who showed some depth in assessing the stature of Hitler...
...In the winter of 1940, he published an article in Liberty magazine, in which he foresaw that in the spring of the year, the Danish, Dutch, Belgian, and even the French governments might be in London, in exile...
...This was from an ex-Stalinist, who had supported arguments equally as bad for the Moscow trials...
...What if V. is kidnapped...
...But such views, said Sartre, indicate the nature of the anti-Semite's project, which is, in fact, murder...
...But there was no explanation, however brilliant, as astonishing as the fact itself...
...deepened...
...As I got into the train, I heard the Chicago newsboys shouting: "Hitler pitching...
...I say it is a dark concept, because philosophy of history requires us to claim a knowledge of the future that in fact we do not have...
...Belloc and G. K. Chesterton had been anti-Semites...
...And I asked those in the office, most of whom I knew quite well, what their program was for France in view of Hitler's military success...
...If we did not fight against Hitler, we would be allowing him not only merely to assert and to strengthen, but to give at the very least a kind of proof that his views were right...
...It is an ideological aim, and there has to be a collective responsibility rather than individual guilt for the carrying out of such an aim...
...They might take her in a barrel to Moscow...
...The confessions of the accused had made it hard to defend them, and it was also difficult to defend Leon Trotsky, charged by the Soviet court with having been their teacher and the main organizer of their "counterrevolutionary" deeds...
...There are still some Trotskyists and exTrotskyists who to this day see nothing wrong with this judgment of the war, and have criticisms mainly for those in their ranks who did not continue to hold it...
...Now in fact there was no one else to vote for in that election, and it may be that LaGuardia was the best mayor New York City has ever had, or will have...
...Let us look at the Trotskyist program at the outset of the war, as it related to the values of natural right and to positive law...
...and also, "Woe to him through whom the offense cometh...
...He also accused the Trotskyists of counting on the capitalists to deal with Hitler while they themselves preserved their revolutionary purity by writing articles attacking all capitalist governments...
...Is there any definite conclusion we can state about force and the use of force...
...Associated with the Trotskyite group and yet very supercilious toward it, as well as toward all the other radical groups, extremely competent at all sorts of clandestine—how else shall I describe them?—operations, S. was an always interesting and resourceful personality on the extreme left, whom anyone with political problems that were difficult, dark or deep, liked to consult...
...There was one difficulty about her...
...The Nazi violence against the races they described as inferior was preached before the war began, and carried out during it...
...Petain catching...
...I must add, too, that one of the secretaries taken in her stead to Mexico, Sheldon Hart, was kidnapped by the Siqueiros group in their unsuccessful attack on Trotsky's villa and killed by them...
...But they never announced it as their intention to extirpate entire collectivities of human beings...
...During the '60s Hannah Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem, a review of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, which gave rise to a spirited and at times furious controversy in which I myself participated...
...The English Stalinist lawyer Pritt pointed out that if one rejected the verdict of the Soviet court, one was not merely saying that the accused were innocent, but also that their accusers were guilty of a frameup...
...But I think there is such a world...
...In his book he denounced this mad intoxication with death...
...In fact, their criticism was for the most part repeated by Susan Sontag from the platform of the Walnut Street Theatre, and Marcel Ophuls, seated next to Miss Sontag, was not able to meet the critique as formulated by her...
...First of all, what can those who refer to the "banality of evil" mean by "evil...
...When I was introduced to Sartre I had just read his essay, and I asked him, "Aren't you advocating the murder of anti-Semites...
...For my part, I could hardly think of doing anything worse than voting for a man who turned out to be the best mayor New York City has ever had...
...I would have to meet him outdoors, not in a public place, and it would have to be after dark...
...He was quite willing to make the most drastic charges on the basis of the most ambiguous evidence...
...When Hitler's army broke through the French lines in April of 1940 I was living in Chicago...
...Trotsky had declared in the Militant that the democracies allied against Hitler would have to be supported, if in fact it was possible for them to defeat him...
...Simone says: "Yes, it is true that fear played some part in all this butchery...
...I said to him: "As it happens, I have a great deal of affection for V. How do you feel about her...
...During the early days of the McCarthy Committee hearings, they pointed to the fact that McCarthy was making a fool of Senator Stuart Symington, and that Roy Cohn had successfully replied to Welch's interrogations, which the press at that time even called "brutal...
...Something had to be done about the Communists, nationally as well as internationally...
...Postscript In referring to "dark concepts" and to "thinking darkly" I have not always had the same thing in mind...
...At seven, the showing was resumed and went on until about nine-thirty or ten, after which Marcel Ophuls and Susan Sontag appeared on the stage and answered questions from the audience...
...He related it to what he called the "lollipop" theory of revolution, putting his criticism thus: "The Trotskyists think that if they don't support this war, the workers, when it is over—but who knows when it will be over if the United States won't enter it, or who may be the winner of it—will realize that the Trotskyists did the right thing in opposing the war, and will give them the power as a reward, like a lollipop...
...Also, France, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Belgium, Holland, and the United States...
...In such cases, how is the matter to be judged...
...Wasn't Hitler the problem...
...This refusal was termed, after the war was over, "mad," by one of their own leaders, Max Schachtman...
...Not French," he said, "too many people understand it...
...For those who distrusted the Soviet courts, and who could not believe that Trotsky had conspired with Hitler, and who noted, too, that the judgment of the press was reflecting Stalinist opinion on the matter to an alarming degree, the time was a very difficult one...
...I said: "If they say they know V., she can deny it, she can give them the lie...
...In this letter she describes some of the events she had seen or heard of when she was in Spain...
...Okay then," he said, "Greene Street it is, this evening, after nine," and paused...
...He is certainly more sympathetic than Robert Jackson, and he does not seem unintelligent...
...What counts is the aim of utterly wiping out an entire group of humans...
...In those days, by the way, train travel from Chicago to New York was very pleasurable...
...he wanted to know...
...But there can be no doubt, for this observer at least, that the appearance of McCarthy on the scene and the growth of his power were properly read by the Soviet leaders as warnings of what they might expect if the split between Russia and the U.S...
...she had been detected, detained by the authorities, and then expelled...
...Now in response to questions from the audience, Marcel Ophuls remarked that while Nazi officials could be charged with guilt for inhuman actions—assuming of course that 452 such charges were proved—and he could support charges of guilt against Nazis as individuals, he was against any charge of collective responsibility for acts during the war that can only be described as mass executions and mass murders...
...I have considered Memory of Justice in so much detail because it expressed, with the vividness and force of modern film technique, some of the ways by which the political actions of the democracies during the Second World War can be shown to jibe with, rather than differ from, those of the Axis powers...
...There was no indication from his account that the defendants, as he perceived them, had been unduly harassed— defendants, mind you, whom Khrushchev, in his 1956 speech against Stalin, claimed had been made to confess by the method of "Beat...
...There are occasions when in the name of natural right it will be right to use force in unexpected ways and even against existing law...
...I do not believe that it is right, or can ever be right, to regard evil as "banal," no matter what processes are at work in society, for I do not think we can properly designate anything as evil unless we can point to an intent to do evil: An earthquake that took as many lives as went up in the smoke coming from the Nazi crematoria would not make us morally indignant, or cause us to indict the earth...
...But I found to my surprise that friends who had been or were hoping to remain Trotskyists in their general outlook 449 found some virtue in the Senator...
...The defeat of the French army was just a stunning surprise...
...And then he said, "And if they say they know V., that would connect them with the members of the Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky...
...It dealt with the Spanish Civil War, which was still going on...
...It will prove in many instances a "dark" concept, like the one I suggested Jean-Paul Sartre was relying on when he described the anti-Semite as a "murderer...
...One was Nathan Leites, who after the war assisted Harold Lasswell in Freudianizing American political theory, and the other was Edward Shils, the sociologist, then at the outset of his career...
...If this responsibility does not extend to the whole German nation, and I would agree with Marcel Ophuls that it does not, if responsibility for genocide does not extend to every single member of the Nazi party, and I would accept this judgment too, though I am less sure of it than of the qualification I have already made—yet certainly this responsibility covers the entire leadership of the Nazi party, which accepted Hitler's program for extirpating whole peoples, most specifically the Gypsies and the Jews...
...However, I do not think that those who have used the term "banality of evil" are referring to evil as so understood...
...Are you," I asked, "also in favor of mutinies in the British navy...
...If we tried to understand him, we might forgive him, and we should not forgive him, for he, said Sartre, is a murderer...
...The bombings of Dresden and of Hiroshima, he said, were war crimes rather than crimes against humanity...
...What about such matters as the taking and killing of hostages, supported by Trotsky in his Defense of Terrorism...
...If you call the anti-Semite a murderer, are you not asking for his execution...
...I must say they seemed to me a cheery lot at that moment of catastrophe...
...Recalling problem number one, I This is a chapter from a book Lionel Abel is just completing, entitled "The Intellectual Follies (1929-1979...
...One can only say here, "The offense must come...
...Could one support such positions and yet continue to make the criticisms of them one had previously made...
...For one thing," they said, "we would like to start some mutinies in the French army...
...Tenacity is a means, and a means often successfully relied on to arrive at satisfactory opinions...
...I suppose what we have here is a recognition of the biblical idea represented in the story of Noah, that every animal specie found on the earth has to be preserved...
...The hypothesis was not absurd...
...I stared at him and I noticed that his face was white and drawn...
...You know it as well as we do...
...I wanted to say—sometimes what you want to say seems very important—"We will, we, the Americans...
...My own feeling was that when once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than to kill...
...positive law tries to guarantee the justice of the goals aimed at by the legitimacy of the means employed...
...We have the same program," they said, "as we had before Hitler broke through...
...A lot of Germans are going to be killed in this war," I said in reply...
...Looking his most mysterious, he then told me something he expected me to know, but which I did not (I had missed the New York Times story): A Mr...
...a secretary for Trotsky was also supposed to be a guard...
...I say have to be distinguished, but many do not feel the necessity of this, as can be seen from Marcel Ophuls's latest film Memory of Justice, which I want to discuss in some detail...
...Bernanos thought that fear had caused all these useless cruelties...
...But to support a war such as the United States and its allies were to wage meant giving one's support to the very ideological positons most of the intellectuals I knew had always opposed: capitalism, militarism, nationalism...
...How could this have happened...
...Others advocated a declaration of war against the Soviets unless they relinquished their military hold on Eastern Europe...
...In other words, the tenacity of your antiliberal opponent forces a certain degree of antiliberalism on you...
...I found him socially agreeable and always liked to see him...
...Unfortunately the only one entirely willing to take on himself the task was Senator Joseph McCarthy...
...Here the answer has to be qualified...
...Whatever the political objectives of the senator, such tactics could hardly be endorsed morally, and they often led to the severest consequences: blighted careers and ruined lives...
...could they have been called murderers...
...Here Benjamin holds that " . . . one must find a point of view external to the philosophy of positive law, and also external to that of natural right...
...The prediction that we would become like them made at the outset of the war by groups and individuals who thought their interest served in opposing it was, however, scarcely noted as proved or disproved once the war was over—or at least not in the years immediately following it...
...he will perhaps also not be able to understand his own potential for crime...
...I suggested that the CP official might have called her in order to dissuade her from going to Mexico...
...And one last point in this connection about the "banality of evil...
...And at this time it became possible to compare the bombings of Germany, as well as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings of Japan, with the mass violence of the Nazis, even with their organization of murder camps...
...Then, in April 1940 the Germans began their assault on the Western Front...
...I'll bet you've met someone else about this right here on Greene Street...
...But his way of expressing himself is even more likely to induce a distrust of Americans, and in fact of what might be called the American spirit, than the heavy-handed moralism and downright stupidity of Jackson...
...Can a single individual commit a crime against humanity...
...Now according to this view of modern times, it was not at all necessary for the Nazi leaders to have been especially morbid or malignant in their political goals for them to have set up the murder camps that so scandalized the West...
...I said to him, "don't tell me I'm the only one you've talked to about this...
...For example, Jean-Paul Sartre, who pilloried the United States for yielding to McCarthyism, saw nothing objectionable in the charge made by the Communists in 1952 that the United States was guilty of using germ warfare in Korea: admitting that the charge was unsupported by any kind of evidence, Sartre nonetheless reproached French workingmen for not having supported Communist demonstrations at which the charge was made...
...Now in one respect Sartre was certainly correct...
...Among the 445 reasons he gave for the possibility of a Nazi victory was the disciplined population of Germany...
...One had to learn to think all over again, and this some of our best intellectuals refused to do...
...here I stopped, faced him, and I think I raised my voice: "What are you talking about...
...Where did he suggest...
...But if she was politically reliable, why did this matter...
...Trotsky did not believe that the democratic powers could defeat Hitler, and this was one of the main justifications he gave to his followers for not supporting the war effort of the United States...
...They did not even admit to seeing a real problem...
...The next time I met him in the hallway he said to me: "You know I killed many Frenchmen in the First World War...
...This was in fact their crime, and this crime is hardly even alluded to in any direct way during the five or six hours of Marcel Ophuls's film...
...I think they have in mind what Kant meant by evil— radical evil, evil as such...
...There were other supporters of Trotsky less interested in philosophy than Delmore, and more interested in action...
...Let me try to respond here on both these points...
...And after such knowledge, what forgiveness...
...So our actions and the acts of the Nazis, even when equally violent, have to be distinguished morally...
...The answer came: "He is a problem the French army has been unable to deal with...
...The very fact that we knew V. and had some liking for her, which made the suggestion of a crime against her all the more odious, also made the action contemplated seem the more important...
...So then an act aiming at genocide is a crime against humanity, no matter how many or how few the actual victims...
...Finally, those of us who supported Trotsky did not know how to meet the argument that, after all, the defendants in the Moscow court had in fact confessed...
...Edmund Wilson even compared Sartre, on the strength of the essay, to Voltaire, but his judgment here is wide of the mark, for in many ways the attitude of the new French writer, as will be seen, was quite the opposite of Voltaire's.* What Sartre had to say about the anti-Semite was very simply that he was a murderer and not someone with a set of opinions that could be discussed and argued about, analyzed as true or false...
...What concerns me here is only one of her ideas, but it is the idea she herself singled out as the main contribution of her book, the idea of the "banality of evil...
...And we all tried to think up brilliant explanations as to why they had confessed...
...No doubt the possibility that this may happen exists...
...And then Americans became aware of Communist penetration of the unions, schools, the press, Hollywood, and even the armed forces...
...These events, though they never reached the utter ignominy described by Bernanos, suffice to show, she says, that a certain atmosphere reigned equally in the two camps...
...442 American intellectuals, by now suspicious of Stalinist justice, had formed a committee that sent John Dewey with several other politically nonaligned intellectuals—mainly labor journalists—to Mexico to question Trotsky, so as to make some independent assessment of his guilt or innocence...
...But surely they accomplished this not as individuals, but as Nazis, as supporters of an ideology that justified, precisely, the exclusion of certain collectivities from valuation as human beings...
...In any case, General Telford Taylor strikes one as inadequate to the Nuremberg Trials and it is on him that the camera is most often fixed...
...I shouted at him, "We've indicated...
...What did astonish them now was what they themselves, under his command, had done...
...If I was depressed by the victory of Hitler, my working-class German neighbor evidently was not...
...At the outset of hostilities, Trotsky had described the conflict as a continuation or prolongation of World War I. His judgment on this matter was backed by both factions of the Trotskyist movement, which had split into Schachtmanite and Cannonite wings...
...On the University of Chicago campus I knew two persons who thought the Trotskyist political line on the war ridiculous and said so openly...
...Positive law could be denied where it went counter to the interests, as understood by the Trotskyists, of the proletariat...
...Sartre had asserted in his essay that we should not think clearly about the anti-Semite...
...Our press had built up the impregnability of the Maginot Line and the strategic thinking of the French and British...
...In his essay, Benjamin points out that there are two ways of judging violence...
...Incidentally, the young woman had been personally close to some of the more important members of the Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky...
...Sartre was pro-Semitic, and favored intolerance toward anti-Semites...
...But once again, what was wrong with 447 Trotsky's view of the war...
...What language...
...I have heard at least one person say, though I doubt that it was seriously meant, that he was ready to throw the bomb which would destroy the race...
...It seemed almost impossible to declare Stalin guilty unless one had previously decided not merely on Trotsky's innocence but also on the correctness of his political position, a position held only by the Trotskyists...
...It came down to this: There was no way to defeat the Nazis other than by armed struggle, which enabled the democracies to use the weapons of fraud and mass violence, which the Nazis hoped to monopolize, and which, without going to war, the democracies could not have called upon...
...And when I said that Sartre was urging us to think "darkly" about the anti-Semite, I had in mind the kind of acceptance of blindness advocated by HansGeorg Gadamer, who warned us not to be prejudiced against our prejudices...
...Now, can mass executions, mass murders, be properly attributed to individuals...
...It became painful to read journals like the New Republic and the Nation, and, in view of Walter Duranty's coverage of the trials, it became almost as painful to read the then respectably bourgeois New York Times...
...One can only defend such actions by relying entirely on 455 what I have called "dark" concepts, and while concepts of that sort cannot be totally excluded, it is certainly best not to rest one's whole case on them when one is about to commit a violent deed or to urge it on others, or when one refuses to participate in acts of violence that the rest of society finds necessary...
...I must say neither value was especially honored by the Trotskyists...
...I was very shaken, too, and finally I said to S., "I think you should discuss this with someone else...
...Or asking, at least, that he be sentenced to prison for life...
...But by the '60s, when the moral judgments made during and directly after the war, having lost much of their urgency, lost some of their force, actions of the United States and its allies during the war became again subject to criticism...
...From which it can be seen why force often has to be employed...
...I: "I guess I wouldn't know what to do...
...According to Miss Arendt, modern civilization has set in motion forces that regularly transform the unusually evil into the regularity of the humdrum, so that the evil as such is often not even remarked...
...How wrong I was about this I only knew after the Nazi breakthrough, for after that the sounds of Deutschland fiber Alles and of the Horst Wessel Song broke through into my own apartment and occupied it even as the Nazis were marching on Paris...
...He writes: If natural law can only judge each existing right by the criticism of its goals, then positive law can only judge a right in the process of establishing itself by the criticism of its means...
...At times one could see that they were appalled at the sickening details of what was in fact their own agreed-upon program toward resisters to Hitler and most especially toward the Jews...
...I think it was more talked about than any other intellectual effort of that period...
...For if one's opponent thought he was wrong, or if he were not tenacious in thinking himself right, he might not call upon force, and one would not have to call upon force to defeat him...
...I was even told at the time by an Italian newspaperman, enlisted in the American army, who had been with the first American division to contact the Russian forces along the Elbe, that if the American government then had insisted on Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe, Stalin would have yielded at once...
...After some talk with Rahv, I went directly 446 to the offices of the Cannonite Trotskyists at Thirteenth Street and University Place...
...The policy advocated by the senator toward Communists and those suspected of communism was not so unlike that advocated by Sartre toward the anti-Semites...
...This idea is supposed to describe a process for which no particular social group in modern times is responsible, and by means of which actions that in past 450 times would have been considered unusual for their malignant intent are converted into the most banal happenings...
...Unfortunately for those who have employed the term, and fortunately for humanity, radical evil can never be banalized, for if this could happen, that which was evil would cease to be radical...
...S. looked about him, made sure that we were quite alone, and then told me these facts: V., just on the point of leaving for Mexico, had been telephoned by a ranking member of the Communist party, who had asked to interview her...
...Thus it was very hard to argue with those who spoke or wrote against the accused...
...And I particularly enjoyed his air of secrecy when on occasion he dropped in on me, for I never knew exactly why he had come...
...Thus we are told that Noah took two of each specie, male and female, with him into the ark...
...Bukharin and Rykov were about to stand in the prisoners' dock, even as had Radek, Pyatakov, Zinoviev, Kamenev before them, also other Bolshevik leaders, judged guilty in the first two trials...
...We had thought of the German people as harried, terrified, rebellious...
...I was at the time quite unable to make this kind of choice...
...Witness the fate of the Trotskyist movement after World War II...
...On the other hand, Benjamin insisted, any such use of force in the denial of existing law can only be defended if it aims at founding some new law...
...In any case, the Communists came to power in the European countries through which the Red Army passed and where it remained...
...The brutality of concentration camp officials, even of the murder-camp experts, was directed against those they were assigned to torture or kill...
...If this is, indeed, what they mean by evil, then there is surely nothing alarming, surprising, or in any way objectionable about the notion of the "banality of evil...
...War made the peoples of the democratic nations militaristic enough and efficient enough to defeat the Nazis, but yet politically distinguishable from the Nazis in their support for free institutions...
...Are those people you're counting on...
...Any artistic treatment of the event is entitled to question that decision...
...If we didn't like her we'd have no right at all to think along the lines we've indicated...
...Beat...
...We meet some of the master criminals and we see exhibits of their cruelty, but we are never informed in moral-political terms of what it is they did...
...And the senator from Wisconsin was asking: How could we deal with such unprincipled opponents as the Communists if we ourselves insisted on being principled...
...Surely a concept that is self-refuting should be distinguished from "thinking darkly" and "dark concepts," even as not seeing anything at all should be distinguished from looking at something, if only through a glass, darkly...
...The very purpose of the whole struggle is soon lost in an atmosphere of this sort...
...I met him at about nine on Greene Street and he told me what was on his mind...
...he asked sarcastically, "the dead Polacks...
...But the weak point of some liberal attacks on McCarthy was the claim that there was no problem, that he was the problem in fact, and not communism, in those areas of American life where it had become strong...
...Hitlerism had been defeated, but the Communists, with whom we had been allied, were, with the aid of the Soviet armies, coming to power in the states of Eastern Europe...
...It is hard to see how...
...And then he was silent...
...Even today it is difficult to write with full objectivity of Senator McCarthy...
...Members of the committee were regularly awakened in the middle of the night by telephone calls demanding they give no further assistance to an enterprise that "hurts socialism and helps fascism...
...He: "I've done much worse things politically...
...0 phuls's Memory of Justice occasioned much controversy when it was first shown and is now being presented for special performances, sometimes for a single evening, in various theaters around the country...
...The main criticism of Rosenberg, Rabinowitz, and Sontag was this: The introduction of film shots of the aerial bombardments by the American air force in Vietnam, of the bombing of Dresden by the British, and of the atom bomb exploding over Hiroshima tended to give the impression that the enemies of Hitler had committed crimes like his...
...Now to charge Stalin with frameup at that point in time, one had to have already made a pejorative judgment of the Soviet state, something few liberals had done or were prepared to do...
...Moreover, someone had to warn a rather complacent America of that period about the penetration of the Communists into American institutions...
...Doesn't Eisenhower want power...
...Then he said, "there to meet with Macbeth," and hung up...
...We do not require of a question profoundly put that it be an answer too, but only that what it asks be asked probingly and fundamentally...
...To be sure, there is a difference between slandering individuals and slandering a great national state, which can hardly be destroyed by false charges...
...And if he hoped his political activity would some day become professional, in actual fact it never did...
...On the other hand, insane though their policy may have been, they had no alternative but to persevere in it, for the ideology they held required them to place the deliverances of the philosophy of history far above those of natural right and of positive law...
...The explanation for this peculiar fact is perhaps best made by Simone Weil, who died during the war, before the Allied victory and the setting-up of the Nuremberg tribunal...
...For the prospect of committing a crime to further a cause in which you deeply believe is a very exciting one...
...S. thought the Russians might very well try to use them as links between Trotsky and the defendants in the Third Moscow Trial...
...When they were arrested, no less a personage than Alger Hiss, according to Allen Weinstein's Perjury, took it upon himself to inform the Soviet military intelligence that the United States would remain passive no matter what happened to the Robinsons...
...Note that the number of persons killed or whose death was projected is not a factor here...
...Hitler is dead, and he can no longer strike their imagination with the goals he had proclaimed, as he had done in life...
...But the matter to which I am referring here, if it is to be understood at all by others at this point in time, requires a certain background of fact...
...Certainly one should not require of a film such as Memory of Justice that it make a statement in favor of the Nuremberg decisions...
...And you think," I said, "that mutinies in the French army will terrify Hitler?' "Not at first," they granted, "but if these mutinies spread, he might have to face mutiny in his own ranks...
...Some would say, "So he wants power...
...He did give me an answer...
...A Catholic writer, a royalist, an admirer of the reactionary Drumont, he should have been sympathetic to the revolt of the Spanish generals against a republican government...
...The emotions his career excited, the passions he himself deliberately inflamed in his often talented anti-Communist orations, his tactic of sullying by accusation, and when necessary (to his purpose) by slander, have made of the senator a figure toward whom one can hardly take a neutral stance...
...And he couldn't tell me in English, we would have to communicate in some other language...
...On this point, Trotsky, like the intellectuals he influenced, was certainly in error...
...Robinson," as we know today, was Ewald, a Latvian Communist agent...
...No," said S., "that's not it...
...Also, the reader may ask, "Can one think clearly about 'thinking darkly...
...So everything considered, the argument of the liberals was a strong one, and it finally prevailed with the top brass of the Republican party, which staged the Senate hearings on the McCarthy Committee, and destroyed the senator's power from then on...
...But why...
...But without such a lethal instrument, how could a single—individual— act be described as a crime against humanity...
...I prefer all of them to Hitler...
...They certainly knew how to keep one awake all night...
...If subjective idealism were correct, the Stalinists would be in the right, and we would be lost...
...But I wanted to know more directly what people of my general persuasion were saying in New York, and I made a trip there just to find out...
...But it is from the darkness that the future comes...
...As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill...
...If justice is a criterion of goals aimed at, conformity to law is a criterion of means employed...
...And there was another difficulty for Trotsky's defenders...
...As they watch these films, we see them aided only by their own devices of imagination, reflection, and justification...
...Did they also commit crimes against humanity...
...The real issue, then, is whether Marcel Ophuls's film is sufficiently insightful in its questioning of the decision reached at Nuremberg...
...Such actions are purely nihilistic or utilitarian and cannot be defended, and the work in which Trotsky tried to defend them is the very poorest of his writings...
...He had been called back during the purge and had brought his wife, an American citizen, evidently placing his hope for safety in this American connection...
...444 He: "You're right about what you think I am thinking...
...The American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, however frightful in their effects, had, after all, the pprpose of bringing the slaughter to an end...
...it would be much truer to say of him that he was a revolutionary without a profession...
...The liberals don't...
...And of course, if radical evil, evil as such, could indeed be banalized, there would certainly be something astonishing about the process, something to justify a great deal of intellectual commotion...
...I don't think I know it quite as well as you do...
...I showed my surprise...
...Many of my best friends simply would not face it honestly...
...Can they mean what rationalists, such as Leibnitz, meant by "evil"—that which is less valuable or valid than something else, which happens to be equally possible...
...But I wish we could talk either in Chinese or Malay, because this is something that is very dangerous to talk about in English...
...I quote from Simone de Petremont's Simone Weil, A Life: A new book by Bernanos, Les Grands Cimetieres sous la lune, had just been published...
...I've been thinking...
...Moreover, the third trial was to be covered by Walter Duranty, whom the Trotskyists called the GPU journalist of the New York Times, and whom the Stalinists described as the one honest voice of the bourgeois press...
...All I can recall of it now is that it was very complicated and did not satisfy me...
...The year was 1938, it was March, and the third of the Moscow show trials was just about to take place...
...And looking at me suspiciously someone said, "Maybe, like the liberals, you prefer England to Hitler...
...I wrote an essay against Sartre's essay for Dwight Macdonald's Politics...
...I: "I hope you're not thinking what I think you're thinking...
...But the point that Sartre made in his essay remains with us as a problem to be considered after all the arguments and all the polemics: Suppose someone asserts that it is right to kill members of a certain group and holds tenaciously to this opinion, argues for it, tries to spread it, will not admit himself mistaken in holding it...
...We had the atomic bomb and the Soviet Union did not, and some intellectuals, like Bertrand Russell, even advocated the use of the bomb against Russia...
...And so, in a period of political radicalism such as the '30s, he became a political radical...
...They were in a position in which it was just as reasonable to follow an insane policy as it was for others outside their movement to urge them to break with it...
...I want to take up here two difficult and related matters, forced on the attention of some of us at the outset of the Second World War, matters which, from the spring of 1940, we found we would have to confront again and again...
...Trotsky's was the only voice that spoke of them as disciplined...
...We can predict, we can prophesy, we can guess what the future will bring out of the darkness...
...But he had been appalled by the regime of terror that the fascists had established in Majorca, and the great number of senseless executions that had taken place on that island, where nothing could justify such 453 severe measures...
...If one judges—as do I—that McCarthy was a political opportunist without deep conviction of any kind, then surely he must have been presented with a historic occasion especially suited for exploiting the particular convictions he claimed to hold...
...And that is why he had to be fought with whatever weapons there were at hand and alongside whoever was prepared to fight against him...
...Is this notion, which it appears that many intellectuals and writers find so attractive, still another instance of "dark thinking...
...In addition, there has been at least a certain trend toward democratization within the Soviet Union...
...it may be 454 looked at from the standpoint of natural law and also from the standpoint of positive law...
...Beat...
...For the purpose can only be defined in terms of the public good, of the welfare of men—and men have become valueless...
...but where I was, it did not appear to play the large part you assign to it...
...Curiously enough, during those days the ones who defended Senator McCarthy, at least in private conversations, were often former radicals, ex-Stalinists or Trotskyists...
...They had created an atmosphere in which whole collectivities became valueless and were consequently killable...
...When the Communists seized the government of Czechoslovakia, murdering in the process Thomas Masaryk, the son of that republic's founding father (they said he had commited suicide—but their story is not supported by any fact, and is quite unbelievable), and when with this development in Eastern Europe it was revealed that Karl Fuchs had transferred knowledge he had obtained in working on the atom bomb project to the Russians, the stage was set for the entrance onto the national political scene of Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin...
...One can barely consider going to war in modern times without accepting the necessity to do many evil things, and after a war is concluded, it is always possible for a list to be made of all the wrongdoings of those who justified it...
...Yet, to make war in 1941, if one was a socialist, one had to learn to think darkly...
...Some were ordered to resign at once from the committee, and warned of further harassment if they did not...
...An American hunter who killed the last remaining buffalo would be punished as an enemy of nature, though for this crime no one yet has devised a satisfactory penalty...
...Compared with him, the American prosecutor, Robert Jackson, cuts the figure of a rather dull, self-righteous, nottoobright American, whereas the Nazi air marshal is subtle, unexpectedly candid, Mephistophelean, disturbing, and profound...
...The justification for using force was made (indirectly to be sure) by Charles Saunders Pierce when he pointed out that there is more than one way of fixing a belief, one way being to hold perseveringly to whatever belief one has already held...
...I mean to speak to both these problems directly, but first of all I want to describe occasions when it seemed they could not be resolved...
...And who's going to kill them...
...He: "I haven't said a thing...
...But this particular trip I took was not for pleasure, but to find some expression of political authority, and I thought I might find it in New York...
...The liberals were quite right if one concentrated entirely, as some did, on the havoc McCarthy was causing in the school system and among our career diplomats...
...Simone felt impelled to write to him about the analogous experience she had had on the opposite side...
...Hitler was not in the courtroom at Nuremberg to astonish them as he had while he lived...
...Can we come to any definite conclusion after these varied recollections and observations...
...I really felt quite sorry for S. at that moment, and also strangely exhilarated...
...And in other historical periods, men noted for their anti-Semitism could hardly be called murderers...
...456...
...Disciplined...
...We had been walking up and down the dark of Greene Street...
...He: "Oughtn't we to think of what we can do to keep something of that sort from happening...
...He suggests that only the philosophy of history can supply such a criterion...
...I said I didn't expect this to happen...
...And if it should happen," S. came back at me, "you wouldn't know what to do...
...It is difficult, of course, to distinguish "dark thinking" from bad thinking or even nonthinking, but I shall try to make this distinction as clearly as I can...
...He: "Oh, she's adorable, delightful...
...am brought back to a circumstance I was caught in just before the war began, and which I can understand better now than I could while it was unfolding, which is not true in all such cases...
...Equipped with a doomsday instrument, a single individual, alienated from his fellows, could no doubt destroy them and himself, and certainly this would be a crime against humanity, though if successful there would be no one left to describe it in those terms...
...One ex-Trotskyist said to me: "The world the liberals are defending is gone forever and Senator McCarthy knows it...
...He spoke English with a heavy German accent and I assumed he had emigrated from Germany out of distaste for the Hitler government...
...And if Miss Arendt did not herself point up the British bombings of Dresden and Leipzig, the American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as operations morally equivalent to the setting up of human crematoria, many of her supporters did...
...We did not desire the death of a single Japanese victim of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings...
...And among the accusers there was Comrade Stalin...
...I think it was not generally realized to what extent the mass of the German people supported Hitler...
...But how is it that he, certainly sensible and very well informed, could support a policy on such an important matter, which after the war he himself would designate as mad...
...Delmore Schwartz said to me one day, "I guess if there were no such thing as an objective world, the Stalinists would have their way...
...And one of the things she said about him was this: "He strikes directly at the imagination...
...I was suspicious by then of the Trotskyist political line, but I was not yet ready to discard it...
...Can one say the same for the antifascists in the Aragon militia with which Simone Weil found herself in the Spanish Civil War...
...One of the very striking revelations of the film, and perhaps it is a revelation that only the film medium could make this powerfully, for on the screen we see the faces of the principals themselves, is the genuine astonishment of some of the Nazi leaders at the evidence of the concentration camp horrors they all certainly knew about, and each in his own way had a certain responsibility for...
...In the middle '30s, I remember arguing with a Communist against supporting LaGuardia for mayor of New York City...
...He had reported the first two trials to be normal in appearance, orderly, and in thorough accordance with Soviet law...
...What Harold Rosenberg had said violently Miss Sontag repeated sweetly, and what Miss Rabinowitz had said angrily Miss Sontag stated as if motivated by the most earnest friendship, and thus Marcel Ophuls was not able to call upon the anger that had served him rather well in replying to Harold Rosenberg in the New York Review of Books...
...He could not have been as unnecessary to the American political process as some of his opponents claim he was, or, I submit, he would not have had even the limited success he enjoyed for the period when his power was felt in the State Department, in Congress, in Hollywood, in the universities, and finally in the Army, which did not fail to retaliate, and in a way fatal to McCarthy's aims...
...I haven't indicated anything...
...Thus I cannot accept Marcel Ophuls's statement— he made it from the platform in Phila451 delphia—that he was for the assizes at Nuremberg and in favor of the judgment rendered there...
...But, on the other hand, it is simply not the case, as some liberals have claimed in their recollections of the period, that there was no justification whatever for the positions Senator McCarthy took, for instance his claim that there was Communist influence in many areas of American life...
...natural right they often regarded as a bourgeois shibboleth insofar as they had accepted Trotsky's In Defense of Terrorism, which justified even the shooting of hostages...
...But, on the other hand, Sartre was not writing just about anti-Semitism in the 20th century, but about anti-Semitism as such...
...Having rejected the more or less clear concepts by which violent actions may be judged, they relied entirely on a "dark" concept with the results we know...
...Don't drag this out," I begged him...
...S. was one of those remarkable people with culture, talent, and intelligence who have never been forced, by some special skill, by luck or by poverty, to make the choice of a profession...
...It is clear," he countered "that you don't understand the GPU...
...What if there is a contradiction—there often is—between the means that natural rights regard as legitimate, in view of the goal aimed at, and the rejection of these means by positive law, insofar as they are violent...
...Anyone who has never been associated with a movement for a cause he has judged to be great will perhaps not be able to understand this...
...Ophuls's film has many faults, some of which were properly pointed up by Harold Rosenberg in the New York Review of Books and by Dorothy Rabinowitz in Commentary...
...Of course, this was just a presumption, and there is no way of testing whether or not it was true...
...Of course," they said, "we are just as much against the British Empire as we are against Hitler...
...I think that those who have used the term "banality of evil" have an intuitive sense of its unintelligibility, and the fact that they cannot understand this concept may be precisely what makes it so attractive to them...
...The second problem we faced in those days had to do with the necessity to support powers and policies judged dangerous or evil, in order to overcome powers or policies we judged to be still more dangerous, and more evil...
...The beginning of the Second World War, especially the victory of the Nazis in the Battle of France, presented this issue to us in the most drastic way...
...In fact I would say she was one of the few intellectuals who wrote as an intellectual about Hitler, and not as a partisan...
...A disciplined population...
...But I couldn't say this, for at that time I was still committed to the Trotskyist view that under no circumstances should one support a capitalist government, even against Hitler...
...To act, whatever your commitment to clarity, you may have to begin to think darkly...
...Natural right tries to justify means by the justice of the goals aimed at...
...And then I saw a way out...
...Only a collectivity can organize collective murder...
...I replied with some vigor, "Yes, I prefer England to Hitler...
...But these lists of errors, evils, mistakes, and vile actions that the presses continue to bring forth hardly help us to resolve the difficulty of the problem I mentioned at the start, or suggest any way of dealing with it: What general criteria are there for justifying force and especially "force to the uttermost," for that is what one must exert in modern war...
...What if V. isn't here to deny what the Robinsons say...
...The one value they called upon in denouncing the support of the Allied war effort by liberals they derived precisely from their philosophy of history, which, it can be seen now, clearly had misinformed them about what the results of the war would be...
...On the other hand, there is this incontestable fact: many of those who objected to Senator McCarthy's actions saw nothing objectionable in such tactics when pursued by the left...
...There are events one understands fully when one is dans le coup, and to whose understanding reflection afterward can add very little...
...On April 23, 1977, I went to Philadelphia to see the film, which was being given a single showing at the Walnut Street Theatre...
...As it turned out, he had...
...or at least they encourage the killer with approving smiles...
...Here again, I find some of Simone Weirs ideas illuminating...
...I must say that at this sort of operation the Communists were expert...
...Robinson— the husband, S. thought, was a Soviet agent, and, as it turned out, he was—who had gone to Russia from the West Coast in 1937, had been arrested by the Soviet authorities and were being detained...
...All the same, the willingness to back slogans one knows to be false is hardly better, morally speaking, than the making of accusations against persons without regard for their truth...
...but I shall not call him a professional revolutionary...
...II After the war, too, many of these questions remained unresolved...
...What Pierce's view maintains is that no one is finally wrong until he is defeated, and from this it follows that it is often only in battle that there can be adjudication of the right and of the wrong...
...I recall saying in reply, "Just state it for me, please...
...And in fact even to this day, anyone who destroys the last member of a still-existing specie is subject to punishment...
...But I do not want here to go again over the arguments that were hurled between those who disagreed about the meaning and validity of Miss Arendt's discussion of Eichmann...
...With whom...
...There was something urgent, and he could not tell me about it over the telephone...
...Bernanos, who had lived in Majorca, had seen what had happened on the Franco side of the war...
...Those of us who had been at the extreme left of the radical movement found it particularly difficult to deal with a situation in which the only alternatives seemed victory for the Nazis and nazism, or support—and real support—for the British and American war machines...
...I would hold to the notions Benjamin has advanced...
...I haven't agreed to anything...
...Perhaps philosophy of history can supply a criterion, but it will not be a clear criterion...
...Or the Frenchmen we've taken prisoner...
...Simone Weil's observations here surely make clear just what it was that the Nazis did that could be called a crime against humanity...
...AntiSemitism, at least since the First World War, has been connected with mass murder...
...I replied, "In some other foreign language, I won't understand you...
...and Mrs...
...Hitler was the reason they had not seen, and could not have seen, the concentration camp details with the horror they have for us...
...the second with the need we felt to support powers or policies we had in the past opposed, so as to act more effectively against other powers, other policies, to which, for reasons of principle, we had come to stand in even greater opposition...
...One has only to think of the vast changes in the British Empire, now a commonwealth, and in the United States...
...What disturbed many left-wingers and also liberals about Senator McCarthy's tactics was his evident disregard for accuracy to fact in making his wholesale accusations...
...The effect of the essay was quite sensational...
Vol. 28 • September 1981 • No. 4
