Before going on, however, let me dispose of the obvious caveats. I don't mean by all of this to suggest a direct parallel between our time and Reck's, or between our would-be dictator and his real one. One of the more obvious differences between our two epochs, I suppose, would be that I am able to write all of this openly and publish it instantaneously for any obscure googling wanderer or NSA agent to find, with no legal repercussions, whereas Reck had to stow his mental torpedoes under the earth, as he tells us, in some unidentifiable patch of the woods of his estate, like the corpse of the Marquis de Sade. But I return again to what I said above as to mood and sensibility. I'd challenge anyone of humane leanings to pick up Reck in the summer of 2017 and not feel in some definite way that he is speaking to our time, and our plight.
Which mood and sensibility, by the way, are by no means as dour as one might have expected. I suppose that because of the book's name, the cover image of the NYRB Classics edition, the author's reputation as an arch-conservative who loathed every feature of modernity, and his evocative monosyllabic surname -- just one letter shy of Dreck -- that this would be an unrelentingly gloomy portrait. Instead, the writer exudes life. His is a fundamentally urbane and witty outlook, and indeed, one of the many things he hates about the Nazis is their complete humorlessness-- the literal-mindedness that comes with every despotism, because humor is how unthinkable thoughts always first begin to peek round the curtain. (Though Reck many times regrets the fact that internal resistance so often goes no further than joking: See the entry of July 2, 1944, e.g.)
As for Reck's conservatism, it is as capacious and cosmopolitan as everything else about his spirit, and is never held to on any point where it might start to get in the way of compassion. He has that "charitable inconsistency" that Samuel Butler called upon us all to show. Early in Reck's diary, e.g., in 1937, Reck cries out to the German intellectuals who have already gone into exile or been forced to become refugees - socialists and Communists and avant-gardists for the most part -- "I miss you, miss you even though [...] you were opponents of mine and politically on the other side -- oh, believe me, finally it is the lack of all opposition and any dissension whatsoever, and the deadly monotony that results, that makes life here so unbearable." (Rubens translation throughout.) Consistently in the diary, Reck is a Russophile, betraying no anti-Slavic prejudice. He even reads into the Bolshevik revolution a strange fulfillment of the Slavic destiny, and proclaims -- despite his predictable raving elsewhere against the "leveling" tendencies of modernity, etc. -- that Russia under Soviet rule is "like that blasphemer [...] who in Dostoevsky's words is closer to God than the sceptic."
Reck, as a conservative anti-fascist, even anticipates those intellectual insights as to the nature of fascist ideology and nationalism that would arrive much later in the mainstream academic community -- that cluster of ideas that have come to be known as the "Dialectic of Enlightenment." He recognizes that as much as the Nazis pose as "liquidators of the French Revolution," they are also in some sense a logical progression from it. "[I]sn't what we are enduring here simply a final consequences of 1789? Hasn't the bourgeoisie [...] shown itself to be a most unstable phenomenon?" he writes. Nationalism is the enemy of Enlightened cosmopolitanism -- but, like the later, it is only possible once the smaller-scale social ties that bind traditional societies have begun to unravel.
And finally -- this is Reck at his best -- he fiercely condemns Anti-Semitism. This is most reassuring of all, for one fears in reading the early pages of the diary that this will be an essentially self-pitying account of the life of the German intellectual under Nazi rule, performed without recognition that the relative privacy Reck still seems to enjoy, and the small acts of daily resistance -- piping in English radio stations, refusing to give the "Heil" greeting in public, throwing out the would-be expropriators of his estate -- are actually privileges for which others would have been sent to a concentration or death camp much sooner (Reck did eventually suffer arrest and end his life in Dachau, after being denounced to the Gestapo). This is not ultimately the case, however, as one reads on. Reck knows that others are suffering far worse persecutions than he is, and one of the most heart-wrenching passages in the book describes the denunciation of an elderly Jewish woman, shortly after the Kristallnacht, by a verminous character who wishes to steal her apartment, and succeeds. While Reck remains unaware of the full extent of the genocides being perpetrated in the final years of the war, meanwhile, he is appalled by the details that do filter back to him, including the massacres by machine gun of defenseless Jewish villagers on the Eastern Front. "And spectators hurried to the event [...]" Reck reports what he has been told: "young fellows [...] who also, nineteen or twenty years ago, were lying in cribs and gaily bubbling [...] Oh, degradation [...] oh, thin shell that separates us from the lost souls in whom Satan burns."
In the knowledge and face of such horrors, you may ask, shouldn't Reck have done more? Shouldn't he have taken up arms, or at least left the country when he still could? Did not the truly good Germans all go into exile at the earliest opportunity, if they had not already been banished, recognizing that it would be impossible to co-exist with the regime without countless daily acts of complicity? Reck's response to this has a certain nobility, even if it is not the final word on the subject. He maintains that it required greater courage to stay, in the belly of the beast. "[W]ill you be able to understand that flight into civilisation was more comfortable than remaining at the dangerous outpost," he writes, "an illegal watcher among the barbarians?" This is essentially the answer Anna Akhmatova gave to those who lodged the same criticism against her-- another intellectual under totalitarian rule who chose to physically remain, and who was forced to write her most damning works in secret, even as her mind never bent to the regime. Her defense of her choice was made in even stronger terms, however: "I am not of those who left their country/ For wolves to tear it limb from limb." (Thomas trans.)
As for why he did not resist the regime with something more than just secret words and private thoughts, Reck feels the weight of this criticism too. It plainly troubles his mind. But he has, again, a fairly compelling answer -- namely, that Great Britain and France and the United States and all the others fighting their war against Hitler did not act to stop him when they had all the military advantages on their side. "[Y]ou will not be able to make the whole nation, in extenso, responsible for a regime which you -- yes, you -- have strengthened. You have broken our internal resistance through political lethargy, and you are nevertheless demanding of an unarmed people that they do what you, with your mighty armies [...] do not dare." This he writes in March of 1938.
What Reck turns to instead of armed resistance, therefore, is that which is always the final defense of the powerless -- a private and silent hatred. A hatred conveyed in singeing words that were hidden away from view. Which may sound like not a lot. No one's life was saved, after all, at least not in Reck's lifetime, by these words that no one could read, and these thoughts that no one could hear. Yet I would challenge anyone who thinks Reck's actions were futile to read his Diary and see if they come away still feeling that. Reck unsettles permanently, to my mind, the belief that rage is always meaningless - still more the belief that hatred is always an unholy and injurious emotion. Reck's hatred is positively religious. It has an Old Testament quality to it. It is the wrath of the God of Amos, the one who said "I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me." (NIV). Reck's hatred of Hitler is a kind of prayer, a litany, and it is one of the most sacred that has ever been uttered. It is a hatred that re-focuses his consciousness on the work that has to be done. A hatred that is uttered five times daily, like turning to Mecca. Apostrophizing to his exiled contemporaries again, Reck asks, "Will you be able to grasp what it has meant to spend these long years with heart filled with hate, hate at lying down, and hate at rising[?]." And, in August 1939, speaking now to the absent presence of Hitler: "I have hated you in every hour that has gone by, I hate you so that I would happily give my life for your death, and happily go to my own doom if only I could witness yours [...] Let no one deprecate this, nor fool himself about the power of such hatred. [...] Hate is the father of action. The way out of our defiled and desecrated house is through the command to hate Satan. Only so will we earn the right to search in the darkness for the way of love."
It is here, in the presence of this divine fury, that one most begins to feel the kinship of one's own time to that of Reck. Again, this is not because we are the same. Trump is not Hitler, and our society has not become Nazi Germany. But in our powerlessness, in our dependence in the last resort on this same loathing, we are Reck and he is us.
Of course, we are not every inch as powerless as Reck, not by quite some measure. We have some functioning checks and balances in our society that still occasionally halt Trump's designs. The courts have so far proven to stand a little ways ahead of the beast of public opinion, and to be less susceptible to the manipulations of demagogy. Reck, the detester of bourgeois "mass man" (he has clearly been reading Ortega y Gasset and cites the latter many times -- though, as in the case of Ortega and Wilhelm Reich, his references to "little men" and "mass men" should not be taken to deprecate any particular social class, still less the proletariat --whom Reck openly admires-- but rather the generalized and essential kitschiness of the fascist aesthetic) and the would-be aristocrat (we learn from Richard Evans' afterward in the NYRB Classics edition that his claims in this regard are actually rather suspect), would no doubt be pleased by this (does not Tocqueville declare that the judiciary will be the last hold-out of aristocratic mores in a democratic society?) But there are limits to the resistance that even the bench can provide to the will of the executive branch, particularly in matters of immigration and foreign policy, where Trump's worst intentions tend to turn anyways, and where the weight of jurisprudential tradition stressing "plenary power" etc. has left this branch of government most hamstrung as a line of defense. I have the sense too, that in the media's relentless nitpicking over Trump's choice of words on every occasion, they are trivializing legitimate criticism of him and making it appear ridiculous, and -- however unintentionally -- obscuring the real damage he is able to do by his actions.
Amidst all the other horrendous news last week, for one, Trump slipped in another poison pill that was little noticed by the U.S. media, but which will have a disastrous impact on innocent people's lives. The administration announced that it was terminating the "parole" option under the Obama administration's Central American Minors (CAM) refugee program. This meant that U.S. embassies in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras promptly issued declarations to the nearly three thousand refugee children who had already received conditional approval for parole but had not yet traveled that their offers were rescinded. These are, as advocates pointed out, people whom the U.S. government itself has already acknowledged are in danger. This meant that thousands of children who had already placed themselves at extreme risk, who had drawn attention to themselves from their persecutors by applying and interviewing over the course of months or up to a year for this program, had the rug pulled out from under them at the final hour. It is an unspeakable cruelty. And this alongside news that the administration is arresting parents of unaccompanied refugee children on "human trafficking" charges if they have paid a smuggler to bring their kids across the border to safety, even though cartels now control every crossing and this is often the only way to reach safety (all the more so, if the administration is now cutting off in-country parole programs as well), and many similar stories.
In the face of these actions, the judiciary is powerless, even if it would want to resist. The letter of the law is on Trump's side (and we know that the letter killeth). The executive branch has the authority to engage in these acts, and it makes all of us who enjoy the status of "citizen" of this country complicit every time it does so. In the deportation case of Andres Magana Ortiz, a father who had spent decades in Hawaii as an undocumented non-citizen and become a pillar of the community, Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote, in denying Ortiz a hearing from the federal courts, that ICE was operating within its authority, and that he from the bench could do nothing to stop it. His brief ruling is a cry from the heart that could stand as a passage from a twenty-first century "diary of a man in despair."
"We are unable to prevent Magana Ortiz’s removal, yet it is contrary to the values of this nation and its legal system. Indeed, the government’s decision to remove Magana Ortiz diminishes not only our country but our courts, which are supposedly dedicated to the pursuit of justice. Magana Ortiz and his family are in truth not the only victims. Among the others are judges who, forced to participate in such inhumane acts, suffer a loss of dignity and humanity as well. I concur as a judge, but as a citizen I do not."This is what Reck must have experienced, from his quiet estate -- though he must have felt it a hundred times more keenly -- knowing that innocent people were being guillotined and gassed and machine-gunned in his name as a "German citizen," and that he knew of no way to prevent it outside of offering himself up for martyrdom. And indeed, he was aware that martyrdom was an option. He writes with extraordinary tenderness and admiration of Hans and Sophie Scholl, for instance, who willingly went to death in their early twenties for the sake of non-violent resistance. And indeed, Reck would eventually be murdered by the regime as well -- just more slowly than the Scholls, in a concentration camp. But he does not directly follow the Scholls' lead.
All we can say is that it is hard for any of us who still breathe and walk about in freedom to pass judgment on a person for not handing himself over more quickly to the executioner. I'd challenge anyone to read Reck's passages on the Nazi "Summary Courts," or the guillotines and dissecting rooms that awaited their victims, and not come away at once realizing that they would be defeated and silenced by that terror as well; that the description on the page itself is enough to turn the blood cold and make the body limp. Joan Didion, in Salvador, describes a meal she shared in the Central American country at the height of the civil war -- and amid the worst period of political murders that were being committed largely by the regime the U.S. government supported. She and her husband were eating outdoors, where they witnessed a man with a rifle creeping behind by a car nearby. For a moment, she thought that she was going to be the regime's next victim of assassination (it had already killed four American nuns not long before). "I did not forget the sensation," she writes, "of having been in a single instant demoralized, undone, humiliated by fear, which is what I meant when I said that I came to understand in El Salvador the mechanism of terror."
We do not have such excuses. We are not faced with outright terror for speaking out. Why, then, is it still so easy and tempting to fall silent? Why can one still -- in contrast to everything one promised one would do -- slip into accepting Trump as normal, or even forgetting he is there. I admit I tuned out and checked out for the most part this summer. Even when Trump was throwing tantrums about North Korea, and the fate of whole societies suddenly seemed to hang in the balance, I only turned half an eye. Even when James Mattis issued his warning to the North Korean regime that the attacks it was considering "would lead to the end of its regime and the destruction of its people." Did the United States government really just threaten to repay a missile attack on Gaum -- appalling as that would be -- with an atomic genocide of an entire country, I hazily thought? Did this administration just suggest that it was willing to destroy all of North Korea in a vast holocaust, men, women and children, and did none of us notice or care? Even then, I say, it still seemed unreal, and far away.
We do this -- as most Germans did, most Germans who were not like Reck -- because it is too painful and exhausting to maintain the degree of hatred he did. It is too much of an emotional strain. As Masha Gessen warned us all -- back at the very beginning of all this -- "[I[n the face of the impulse to normalize, it is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock. This will lead people to call you unreasonable and hysterical, and to accuse you of overreacting. It is no fun to be the only hysterical person in the room. Prepare yourself."
Among the many sacrifices that Reck ultimately made for the sake of quietly resisting Hitler -- including ultimately of his own life -- this internal psychic sacrifice may be one of the greatest. He maintained his capacity for shock -- or at least, for outrage and disgust. He maintained his hatred even though it is toxic to the soul. "I have no other weapon against you but this curse, I know that it withers the heart of him who utters it," writes Reck. This is his way of putting himself on the pyre. He bears the psychic cost that distorts his personality so that future generations will not have to. It is the sacrifice that Brecht was referring to, in his "To those Born Later," when he wrote:
Hatred, even of meanness
Contorts the features.
Anger, even against injustice
Makes the voice hoarse. Oh, we
Who wanted to prepare the ground for friendliness
Could not ourselves be friendly. (Group trans.)
There has been a great deal of ink spilled from the moment the election results were announced last November -- most of it coming from liberals themselves -- on the subject of how liberals need to learn how to "reach out," to be more understanding and tolerant of the opposing side. I see the strength of that when it concerns the relatively weak -- when it has to do, say, with seeing the humanity in the lost young people who wander into detestable alt-right ideologies, say, and even into acts of violence. And toward Trump himself, the forgiveness can come once he is no longer in a position to harm others. But toward his government so long as it is in power, what is needed above all is not less, but more wrath. The wrath that won't let one drift off into purposelessness and complacency and acceptance. The hate that can melt iron bars. The holy hatred of Friedrich Reck.
Trump, again, has not committed Hitler's crimes. But in Reck's description of the latter's character, it is hard not to draw the mental analogies between the pair. Reck portrays Hitler -- whom he met on a handful of occasions -- as a moral infant -- someone who throws objects at his underlings when he is upset -- someone who is obsequious toward anyone with more power than himself and tyrannical toward anyone with less. He is a backstabber, a betrayer. At the core of his bottomless hunger for power and control, says Reck, is self-loathing. He is contemptibly insecure, a man who promptly uses any strength he obtains to harm those weaker than himself, revealing in the act his own profound weakness -- weakness of character, weakness of self.
Donald Trump, who has not yet managed to maneuver himself into a position in the world from which he could live out all of his fantasies -- though he has achieved many, many more of them than any of us would have thought possible -- has much the same deadly combination of personality traits. He has the same maudlin self-pity, the same essential lack of core and conscience. Cornel West has described him as representing the ultimate "gangster-ization of American politics." Reck imagines Hitler, in the final years of the war, living out in his bunker the "restless, painful nights of [...] the sentimental gangster." Go and read that leaked transcript of Trump's call with the Australian prime minister. The one in which he accuses the latter of using a refugee swap to turn the United States into "the dumping ground for the rest of the world"; the one in which he actually says, in learning of Australia's notorious off-shore detention centers for asylum seekers, "That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am"; the one in which he predictably obsesses over how the deal will affect him and his popularity, and spares not a single thought for any of the human lives in Nauru and Manus Island and Central America that will depend on his decision. That is a man that one can recognize well from Reck's description of the German dictator. "I got the impression," writes Reck of an early encounter with Hitler, "of basic stupidity. [...] the kind of stupidity which equates statesmanship with cheating at a horse trade."
Against such a personality, hatred -- or still better, contempt -- is actually a more potent weapon than one may think. Reck warns us not to underestimate its power. This is because contempt, ridicule, and hatred are the one thing that dictators really fear, because they are the last form of resistance that cannot be quashed by sheer force. The mind cannot be enslaved, even if the body can. The ally of all insurrectionaries, wrote Wordsworth, is the "unconquerable mind." No dictator, however many people they may kill or disappear in the dead of night -- as the Kim regime in North Korea has done -- for insufficient displays of grief over the death of a "dear leader," can actually force anyone to love them; still less to admire them. And yet, this is the one thing, in all their murders and mayhem, that they actually want. To deny it to them is to win a private victory daily against the impossible project of tyranny -- the dream of absolute control that is always at last chimerical. It is how we maintain that quality that the would-be dictator most envies and resents in us -- namely, the fact that we are not him. While he -- poor fool -- is.
I obviously agree with much of this, but many of the things that seem to most bother you about Trump are actually more general features of American conservatism and/or American politics more generally. The parole cancellation you mention is horrifying, but I suspect any Republican administration coming in after the party's post-Great Recession anti-immigrant turn would have done the same (given her comments about Central American children, Hillary Clinton might have done it too). As for Mattis's comments on North Korea, they roughly echo something Bill Clinton said during the first North Korean nuclear crisis, and in any case just make explicit the (abhorrent) logic of nuclear deterrence. To my mind, the distinctively awful things about Trump are: (1) his willingness to take victimization of specific minority groups from subtext to text (see,e.g., the travel ban); (2) his contempt for the impersonal rule of law as manifested in the demanding of loyalty oaths from subordinates and the criticism of those who fail to show personal loyalty to him (as in his attacks on Jeff Sessions); (3) much more explicit appeals to white-identity politics than Republicans made pre-Trump; (4) his willingness to openly celebrate violence and show contempt for the weak and marginalized (as in his mocking of the disabled reporter and recent praise for police brutality) and (5) his complete incompetence. (I assume you agree; I just wanted to enumerate what I take to be distinctively Trumpian instead of merely pointing out that you didn't do so here.)
ReplyDeleteI would also be interested in your thoughts on how your praise of hatred here interacts with you anti-retributivism. There seems to be a prima facie tension there, one I also struggle with.
Thanks Ajay -- I really like your list of five things. I hope I can pillage from it (with credit) for future posts. The examples of bad Trump actions I gave above were the most recent examples of his general contempt for human rights, etc. that came to mind for me, but I agree they aren't necessarily the most distinctively awful. I was mostly trying to illustrate those moments lately where I and others have felt particularly powerless to prevent executive branch actions that are unjust, but technically lawful. But these on their own don't quite capture the distinctive quality of the problem with this administration. I feel that ultimately the most dangerous thing about Trump is simply his lack of a recognizable moral compass, and his unresponsiveness to motivations that fall under the heading of "conscience." This leads him to do a range of terrible things, some of which are things that other politicians might well do as well, others of which are all his own.
ReplyDeleteAs for the hatred/retribution question, I suppose there's no contradiction, per se, in simply maintaining that one should hate the Trump administration while it has the power to harm others and pity it when it doesn't -- and indeed, I really don't want to "punish" Trump or take revenge in any way, I just want him out of office and no longer in a position to do so much damage. But I agree that there's a tension in practice between maintaining a certain degree of constant rage and then expecting that at some point that is all going to melt away and be replaced by compassion. I haven't fully worked out my thoughts and feelings about this -- partly because I don't think there's ever been a public figure that I detested quite as much on a personal level as Donald Trump. This is a new experience for me. But I think that Orwell quote I'm fond of about revenge still basically captures my attitude: "Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also." Reck says exactly the same thing, actually, toward the end of the Diary. "Today, I know that no such thing as 'revenge.' More on that in a future post, perhaps.