Anti-fascist Book Club: March

I’ve gotten a little behind on this project. For one thing, I’ve been busy setting up a Daily Action team for Indivisible Tacoma; for another, the book I planned to read in April, Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, is completely checked out at every library to which I have access. I think I’m going to have to switch around and read A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James. And I’m going to have to read Rules for Radicals, and also Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which I planned to read in June, whenever I can get off the hold list instead of thinking I’m going to be able to acquire them at the beginning of a particular month.

Anyway, Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil, by Hannah Arendt. This was a tough read. Not stylistically, but emotionally. The relentless march of death in every place Eichmann touched, the cheerfulness with which the Nazis undertook their murders, even the awkwardness and failures of the trial itself — the hardest part about reading about these things was how easily I could see the ordinary machinery of life at work, making genocide happen. It turns out mass murderers are very ordinary men. They’re bureaucrats, trying to perfect the systems they use, dealing with contradictory orders from their superiors and people who want to take credit for work they haven’t done and lack of supplies and shifting terrain and challenges they’re not trained for. They’re just trying their best. They’re killing people, in the same way you might try to set up a small business.

One thing that stuck out to me was how a large part of Eichmann’s fearsomeness was his incorruptibility. In jurisdictions where the Nazis or local fascists were corruptible, it was possible for people to escape them. The rich, at least, could bribe them, perhaps some people could use social pressure or blackmail or some other kind of leverage to escape. But Eichmann was an idealist. He believed in his work, and insisted that his offices not allow the taking of bribes or the changing of plans based on opportunities for personal profit. And because of this, many, many people died.

It doesn’t seem fair, that idealism could be warped this way. But it’s something I try to always keep in mind: strict adherence to any abstract principle is less moral than bending to the humanity of the people in front of you.

The other thing that I have thought a lot about after reading this book is the way desperate activists facing genocide under the Nazis relied heavily on the use of privileged categories to try to wedge through salvation for at least a few of their people. So pro-Jewish activists would petition the government not to forcibly expel Jews who had converted to Christianity and been baptized, or who had married a non-Jew, or who had served in the military during World War I. They created these classes of exceptions to the anti-Jewish laws and fought for special treatment for those classes specifically, whether that meant they went to Thereisenstadt, the concentration camp used as a model to convince the Red Cross and international observers that conditions in the camps weren’t so bad, or whether they were allowed to emigrate, or even granted exemptions to the orders sending Jews to concentration camps.

Activists fighting the Trump administration are doing the exact same thing, right now. Just today I received action alerts asking me to do this. For example, there is a campaign asking me to call/email a state prosecutor’s office asking them to drop a deportation order against a particular undocumented immigrant who was brought to the US as a child and who hasn’t committed a crime other than leaving the country and then re-entering. DREAMers, the argument goes, are ‘virtuous’ undocumented immigrants — blameless — and so we should treat them as a special case.

Also today, I wrote out my experience with health care at the VA, to be used in a campaign that draws on the stories of veterans with service-connected disabilities to defend the VA from threats of privatization. Veterans, after all, are a special class of people in the US, and we should be sure that even if the population as a whole has no chance of accessing socialized healthcare that veterans have the assurance that our federally-run single-payer healthcare system will never be dismantled.

Is this tactic effective? Yeah, I think so, for certain definitions of effective. Is it moral? I’m not sure what I think, but Arendt doesn’t think so:

(p.117) The acceptance of privileged categories — German Jews as against Polish Jews, war veterans and decorated Jews as against ordinary Jews, families whose ancestors were German-born as against recently naturalized citizens, etc — had been the beginning of the moral collapse of respectable Jewish society. …up to the very end… they helped put to rest certain uneasiness among the German population: only Polish Jews were deported, only people who had shirked military service, and so on.

What was morally so disastrous in the acceptance of these privileged categories was that everyone who demanded to have an “exception” made in his case implicitly recognized the rule, but this point, apparently, was never grasped by these “good men,” Jewish and Gentile, who busied themselves about all those “special cases”… [but] this implicit recognition of the rule, which spelled death for all non-special cases, must have been very obvious to those who were engaged in the business of murder. They must have felt, at least, that by being asked to make exceptions, and by occasionally granting them, and thus earning gratitude, they had convinced their opponents of the lawfulness of what they were doing.

…In Germany today, this notion of “prominent” Jews has not yet been forgotten. While the veterans and other privileged groups are no longer mentioned, the fate of “famous” Jews is still deplored at the expense of all others. There are more than a few people, especially among the cultural elite, who still publically regret the fact that Germany sent Einstein packing, without realizing that it was a much greater crime to kill little Hans Cohn from around the corner, even though he was no genius.