"And anyway," he says, "who profits from it, after all? -- as I recall the 'Expert' once asking. I maintain there was some problem here, some obstacle, some mistake, some breakdown. A word, a sign, a glimmering of appreciation now and again, nothing more, just a scintilla, might have proved more efficacious, for me at any rate. For what malice do we have to bear against one another at the individual level, when one thinks about it?" (Wilkinson trans.)By the "Expert" he means a character earlier in the novel, who -- even at the gates of Auschwitz, where those destined for the slow death of the work camps are being separated from those sent immediately to the gas chamber -- is still convinced that he only needs to explain his case to the guards in order to be set free; that they will see reason -- appreciate his usefulness -- if only he can have a word with them, man to man.
I cannot help but be put in mind of this passage when I read the cover story of this month's Atlantic, which describes in part a man named "Jack," who is a refugee from Mauritania without legal status and living in the United States. He has received warnings from the local ICE office that he may soon be deported. Jack reportedly described what he intends to say to the arresting ICE agents, should that day ever come:
“I will tell them that I know I did the wrong thing. I came here without papers. But look at me. I’ve never broken a law. Fine, deport the guys who have committed a crime. I will say, ‘Look. It’s me, Jack.’ I will joke with them and let them know I’m not a threat. When I talk to them reasonably, they will relax. (Franklin Foer, "How Trump Radicalized ICE")All of which is to say that sometimes what strikes one most about human cruelty is not how awful it is. Sometimes what strikes one most is how pointless cruelty is. How needless. How useless. How futile. So much so that it is impossible to believe at times it is actually happening. (And this too perhaps is the secret of the psychology of denialism -- Georg later in the novel encounters an incipient denialist, after his camp has been liberated. "Did you actually see the gas chambers?" the latter presses.)
Back in early May -- shortly after the Trump administration formalized its "zero tolerance" policy toward asylum seekers, Masha Gessen published a widely circulated essay describing deliberate family separation as a form of state terror. In the process, she memorably cited Anna Akhmatova's poem Requiem, written about the disappearance and incarceration of her son by the Soviet secret police, and told from her perspective as a mother waiting in front of the prison where he was being held, pleading for the right to see him.
I didn't appreciate the full force of the comparison, however, until at work I saw a video created by one of our partner organizations. It was of two mothers whose children had been abducted from them at the border by U.S. authorities. Each had begun a private vigil in front of the facility where their children were held, and they refused to leave until the doors were opened.
And I remembered the lines of Akhmatova:
And if ever in this country they should want
To build me a monument
I consent to that honor,
But only on condition that they
Erect it not on the sea-shore where I was born:
My last links there were broken long ago, [...]
But here, where I stood for three hundred hours
And where they never, never opened the doors for me. (Thomas trans.)
It is hard not to be at all reminded of twentieth century totalitarianisms when one contemplates our present situation. Harder still not to be reminded of their irrationality. Their illogic. Their absurdity.
The alternative to cruelty is so simple. To behave not as solider or captor or beast, but as friend.
Some think that it can't be as simple as that. They think there must be some reason for it all, behind the inanity. Behind the madness. They think that perhaps this administration is acting under the impetus of tragic necessity, or something like it. It goes too far, to be sure, but perhaps it is responding to the real challenge -- as one Vanity Fair writer would have us believe -- of a United States that is losing a shared ethno-cultural identity, and is therefore becoming less of a "family" and a "home."
It is hard to imagine a more pathetically lost soul than someone who thinks they have made or preserved a "family" for themselves by separating a parent from her child. Or who believes they have protected their "home" by deporting another man -- like "Jack" -- from his.
This, surely, is the last laugh of alienation. The final joke that anomie plays on itself.
The pseudo-clever efforts to "understand" Trumpism from without are not exercises in empathy. They are drawings of the veil over the stark and basic moral choice that confronts every human being when they meet a stranger: whether they are going to respond with kindness or with hate.
I quote from one other mind forged in the catastrophes of the last Eastern European century, that of Wislawa Szymborska (Cavanaugh and Baránczak trans.):
Some people flee some other people.
In some country under a sun
and some clouds. [...]
Someone will come at them, only when and who,
in how many shapes, with what intentions.
If he has a choice,
Maybe he won't be the enemy
And will let them live some sort of life.
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