Atrocities

 In a luminous book of essays, Marguerite Yourcenar turns at one point to the work of a partisan of the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion, who depicted with unequalled zeal and outrage the martyrdom and persecution of the Huguenot Protestants in the age of the Counter-Reformation. Yourcenar—an incredibly gifted essayist, it turns out, though she is better known for her novels—cites a number of the well-chosen images the poet used to stir the indignation and awaken the pity of his readers. 

In depicting an auto-da-fé, for instance, of which his fellow Protestants or like heretics were the presumed victims, he dwells on the resemblance between the victims' ordeals and that of Calvary—of the humiliations and tortures to which they were subject, so like the crown of thorns, even as they are persecuted in the supposed name of the Christian faith. He culminates in a depiction of the callous hypocrisy of the executioners, who—in a final parody of official "mercy"—offer their victims a choice between craven submission—which earns them the prize of instantaneous strangulation—or continued resistance, for which the penalty is the far more painful death by burning at the stake.

We seem to find in these passages—as transmitted through Yourcenar—a glimpse of proto-modern conscience. We are tempted to read it as a kind of human rights document, evincing a hatred of religious intolerance, persecution, and the spectacle of human cruelty in all its forms.

 But Yourcenar then injects a note of weary caution, hard won from the ideological bloodbaths and crusades of her own—the twentieth—century. It is "natural, too," she notes, "that the poet should pass over in silence the iniquities and legal barbarities committed in the reign of [the Protestant monarchs of Europe,] human and partisan nature being what they are." (Howard trans.) In other words, our Huguenot poet was appalled at the cruelties inflicted by the Catholic church, but—perhaps unsurprisingly— unmoved by the no less bloody persecution endured by Catholics under Protestant governments. 

What Yourcenar here calls partisanship is much the same thing Orwell would dub "nationalism," using his own expanded definition of the term. As he wrote in 1945, "The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." Instead of shaking our heads at the one-sided moral outrage of a sixteenth-century Protestant, therefore, chalking it up to the unavailability of universal definitions of human rights at the time, we should have no trouble seeing in it—with a moment's reflection—a far more widespread human tendency that has continued to our modern age. 

The image of the martyr choosing death by burning, after all, doesn't only conjure images from the distant and benighted past. I also think of the unforgettably vivid closing scenes of André Malraux's 1933 novel, Man's Fate, in which the Soviet agent Katov has been captured alongside members of the Chinese Communist Party, in the course of the vicious purge conducted by the Kuomintang after a failed uprising in Shanghai. Katov, like a handful of other agents involved in clandestine work that carries the risk of capture and torture, carries with him at all times a capsule of cyanide—offering the promise of a relatively swift death, should he fall into the enemy's hands. 

As Kuomintang executioners work their way through the prisoners, and reports trickle out that the victims are being bundled into steam boilers, Katov has to weigh the option of death by burning or death by poisoning at his own hands. While the latter is plainly to be preferred, he takes pity on the younger agents next to him, who are terrified at the prospect that awaits them. He therefore offers them his cyanide capsules, choosing for himself the infinitely worse fate as an act of heroic revolutionary solidarity. He is, in brief, in much the same position as the Huguenot loyalist who, offered death by strangulation in exchange for a renunciation of the faith, chooses instead to face the stake. 

Malraux's account is a partisan one, though—as partisan as any sixteenth century Protestant writing about the iniquities of the Catholic Church. He is not wrong or inaccurate in his depiction of Kuomintang atrocities; no more than the early modern poet was not wrong in denouncing the atrocities of the Inquisition. But both share the same defect of Orwell's nationalism. They cannot seem to contemplate the possibility that their own chosen side of the conflict might be capable of similar crimes. 

In Malraux's telling of the Chinese Civil War, the temporary alliance between the CCP and the Kuomintang broke down due primarily to the perfidy of the latter. They are in effect bought out by Western colonial interests, as he portrays it, who warn the Kuomintang leadership that the wealth of most of their generals is tied up in banks who lend to peasant smallholders. The colonial interests prey on their fear of a potential Communist-inspired agrarian reform that would cancel significant amounts of debt, driving many landlords and banks out of business and ultimately affecting the pocketbooks of the Nationalist generals themselves. They therefore turn on their former allies for the most base and self-interested reasons. 

In fairness, Malraux does attribute a share of blame for the crisis to Soviet and Comintern leadership, who try to suppress a spontaneous popular revolt for the sake of what they incorrectly assess to be the more sound and far-sighted policy. The author clearly blames Moscow for urging the CCP to withhold support for peasant demands for land reform and debt relief—and even to participate in Kuomintang suppression of these uprisings in the countryside—for the sake of maintaining good relations, and sees in this the original sin that betrayed the revolution. 

He also depicts Soviet representatives in Shanghai—if not explicitly breaking the truce with the Kuomintang themselves—as nonetheless tacitly greenlighting an assassination plot against Chiang Kai-shek through a kind of "will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" maneuver. 

If Malraux is not therefore a simplistic partisan of the Comintern and the Soviet Union, however, his faith in the frontline Communist agents and assassins and saboteurs seems absolute. He does not seriously doubt for an instant that their cause is just, that the violence they inflict is wholly merited and proportionate to the wrongs they and the Chinese people have endured. When one character's wife and child are slaughtered by government agents in retaliation for his involvement in the Communist cause, for instance, Malraux portrays it as a kind of revolutionary liberation that allows the man at last to participate fully and with righteous self-justification in the struggle: "Now, he too could kill!" (Chevalier trans.) 

And given that Malraux traces the original sin of Comintern betrayal to their unwillingness to back peasant uprisings, one suspects he would not strenuously object to the horrific violence, public massacres and executions that the victorious Chinese Communists would later inflict on uncountable thousands of so-called "landlords" throughout the country—oftentimes people barely richer than the peasants for whose sake the Communist Party was ostensibly taking revenge. 

As martyrology, Malraux's novel is riveting and emotionally convincing; but so too, from Yourcenar's telling, were the works of the Huguenot poet. This does not mean either work necessarily takes a stand against all persecution, or takes the side of all victims of persecution. As Susan Sontag importantly points out in the opening of her Regarding the Pain of Others, knowledge of or indignation at the sight of atrocity does not necessarily lead to a horror of violence and atrocity in a general sense. Indeed, it may often have the opposite effect. It may steel the conviction of the partisan in the justness and rightness of their cause. And, worse, it may lead to the infliction of further atrocities in retaliation, based on morally false notions of revenge and collective punishment. 

The great works of martyrology—however effective they may be as either art or propaganda—have rarely led people to a more general and abstract condemnation of human violence and cruelty in any form. Instead, they have tended to shore up the prior convictions of partisans. The image of Kuomintang agents shoveling Communists into steam boilers has entered the lexicon of modern political martyrology (as we shall see shortly); but the no less horrific atrocities the Chinese Communist Party leadership inflicted against so-called "landlords" (and is still inflicting to this day, let it be noted, against Uyghur ethnic minorities, dissidents, and others), has largely vanished from memory, with only more recent revisionist historians, such as Frank Dikötter, revisiting these crimes with any sympathy for the dead. 

Since we have been making the comparison in this essay between religious massacres and the political persecutions of Shanghai, it is fitting that we include a quotation from Graham Greene's The Comedians. The Communist Dr. Philipot—clearly the character who enjoys the most of the author's sympathies—notes in one passage that "Chiang-kai-shek, the heroic defender of Formosa, fed us, you remember, into the boilers of railway-engines." Philipot has just made the comparison to the persecution of Catholics around the world, saying that they, like Communists, are always among the first to fall under the persecuting mania of dictatorial regimes. 

What strikes one as odd about this passage is not only that it is a comparison few avowed Marxists would make themselves, if they were not being marionetted by Greene, but also its naked partisanship. Those of us without confessional or ideological stake in the matter can immediately see that, as often as Catholics were persecuted in the twentieth century, the Church itself was also openly allied with several dictatorships, including Fascist ones, who persecuted so many other people; and as many times as Communists were massacred or fed into boilers, they also massacred others, and perhaps—all told—in greater numbers, though such quantifying of atrocity is always beside the point in the end. 

Of course, Greene was in reality aware of all this. He was himself the author of the great principle of the "virtue of disloyalty," which invited the intellectual to always take the side of whichever party or cause is presently out of power—to side with Protestants in Catholic countries and Catholics in Protestant ones, Communists in capitalist countries, and vice versa, and so on. But in speaking through a fictional Communist who is most decidedly out of power in his own political context of Duvalierist Haiti, Greene allows himself a bit of special pleading. In speaking of the boilers of Shanghai and the Kuomintang atrocities, he is indulging in martyrology in much the same spirit as Malraux. 

Is it possible to have a martyrology for all martyrs; that takes the side of victims of all persecutions by all powers, regardless of their ideological or confessional affiliation? The modern human rights movement of course attempts something like this. They seek to report and accurately document the atrocities that human beings visit on one another, not for the sake of inspiring commitment to any one side or cause, but in order to inspire opposition to atrocity itself. 

This is a surely a worthy endeavor, and one I believe in enough to have devoted my professional life to it. But it is also fraught with peril. To document atrocity is always not only to invite a general condemnation of cruelty and an avowal of universal human rights; it is also to furnish material to partisans. And thus, so many of our partisan disagreements become a game of quoting atrocities at each other, as if one could ever justify or excuse another. 

The solution is plainly not to deprive people of all knowledge of atrocity, in an effort to deny partisans the material they feed on to confirm them in their righteousness. Doing so would plainly violate the principle of human agency and autonomy, and it would in any event prove impossible: the first glimpse of atrocity to peek through would thus rouse all the more indignation and sense of conviction on the part of partisans for being the only one they knew. So, the answer is plainly to level in the opposite directly. To try to acquaint people with a knowledge of the universality of atrocity. To make the world understand that there is no cause, no party, no nation, no government so pure it is incapable of engaging in it. 

And so the cause that must win our only final loyalty should be the cause of abolishing atrocity itself. Except that so many atrocities have been committed in the name of ending atrocity... and at once we are on our guard again, and should be so, for this is a task that demands unceasing vigilance.