Je-m'en-foutisme

 Lion Feuchtwanger's The Devil in France—his memoir of internment and flight from wartime France, as the country was being invaded by the Nazis in 1940—invites obvious comparison with Arthur Koestler's Scum of the Earth. Both books were written by cultured and lettered men, speaking multiple languages, of impeccable anti-fascist convictions, who found themselves locked up and treated as "enemy aliens" at the start of the war. Both books cover much the same period and events:

France's paradoxical wartime internment of German anti-fascist refugees (even as France was being overrun by these refugees's worst enemy); the fall of the prewar government and its replacement with the collaborationist Vichy regime, which promised to hand the German refugees over to the invading Nazis in the notorious nineteenth clause of its armistice agreement; and the refugees' subsequent desperate efforts to escape from a country that—overnight—had become enemy territory. 

Both books are stirring human documents that make for vital reading in our present political context—when our own government is carrying out the mass detention of immigrants and refugees in the United States, and relying more and more overtly, with each passing day, on quasi-fascist rhetoric of racial purity and ethnic cleansing to defend its policies. 

Both books also indelibly portray the incompetence and stupidity of French officialdom—the pervasive cynicism and indifference to the forms of legality or the fate of the individual that made the mass internment policy possible. E.E. Cummings, during his own tragicomic entanglement with French bureaucracy that led to his imprisonment during the First World War, memorably writes (in The Enormous Room) of "the tentacles of that sly and beaming polyp, le gouvernement français."

That same monster, that same many-armed octopus, that same vast, blind mechanism that runs roughshod over people, not because it wishes them ill, but purely because it does not bother to look where it is going, is what Feuchtwanger means by the "Devil in France." He defines this creature further as the "devil of Untidiness, of Unthoughtfulness [...] the very Devil to whom the French have given the motto, 'je m'en fous'—'I don't give a damn.'"

Koestler too writes of this epidemic of je-m'en-foutisme in wartime France. But whereas Feuchtwanger confines its evils to the ranks of officialdom, Koestler saw it as indicative of a much more pervasive social nemesis. When people he spoke to sought to account for France's collapse in the face of German aggression, he writes, they made "[n]o attempt to discriminate, to discover political motive-patterns; everything is merde and pourriture, one ubiquitous, all-embracing conspiracy of betrayal." 

Koestler saw this as the real reason France had given up in the face of Hitler: a nihilistic attitude to all political ideals; a contempt for democracy; a blockheaded conviction that all politicians are the same and that one government is as good, or as bad, as another—whether democratic or dictatorial. 

Here is one of several interesting and perhaps significant points of divergence between Koestler's and Feuchtwanger's books. Koestler's is essentially a much darker and more pessimistic account of the same events. Much of his book is devoted to his disillusionment with "the masses" and their political understanding of events; whereas Feuchtwanger appears to retain his belief in the fundamental goodness of the French workers and peasants—as well as in the ultimate triumph of his cause. 

The same popular cynicism that Koestler portrays as politically sterile and useless—perhaps even as lending itself to the defeatism and fascist collaborationism that soon took control of France—Feuchtwanger reinterprets (at least when he is speaking of the masses, as opposed to the bureaucrats) in a sympathetic light, as revealing that the people could see through the lies of the warmongers. 

Speaking of the French guards at his internment camp, he writes: "They were skeptical in general, having no faith in their government and regarding the whole war as a swindle designed solely to make a few rich men still richer. They thought of themselves not as soldiers, but as poor devils who like us had been caught in the wheels of a stupid machine. [...] Without much to-do on the point those Germans and Frenchmen knew very well that they were stewing in the same pot." 

This contrast in analysis between Koestler and Feuchtwanger may have been due partly to a difference in temperament. But it may also have been due to a difference in political loyalties. 

Feuchtwanger's account—though it is an utterly riveting narrative told with great gusto, humanity, and clarity—is much weaker than Koestler's when it comes to political analysis of the overall situation. Much of Koestler's book, after all, is given over to a discussion of the extraordinary betrayal that Stalin committed against the anti-fascist cause, when he signed his pact in blood with Hitler in 1939, and proceeded to start carving up continental Europe between the two dictators. 

Koestler's book is partly a more despairing one, then, because it seemed for a time that the anti-fascist refugees in France truly had no one willing to defend them. The Soviet Union had completely sold them out to their mortal enemies. France had collapsed with scarcely a fight and had handed to reigns of government to Hitler-friendly collaborationists. At the time he was writing, only Britain appeared to be mounting any serious resistance to Nazi aggression. 

Feuchtwanger, meanwhile, scarcely mentions these events. In the entire book, there is not one word of criticism of the Hitler-Stalin pact and the extraordinary betrayal it represented. To be fair, there is no excessive praise of Stalin either (apart from a short passage wherein Feuchtwanger absolves the Soviet dictator of some of the more outlandish rumors circulating against him). Rather, Feuchtwanger appears to want to preserve a delicate silence around the whole subject. 

Why? I have a theory as to why. Koestler, at the time he wrote Scum of the Earth, was already known to have broken publicly with the Communist Party. Whereas Feuchtwanger was in a different position. 

The epilogue to the book explains that Feuchtwanger's escape from Europe was ultimately facilitated by the Unitarian Service Committee and the direct intervention of Eleanor Roosevelt. Waitstill Sharp, a Unitarian minister, personally accompanied Feuchtwanger on his trans-Atlantic voyage to America. But it was not Sharp who interceded personally with the First Lady, but rather—according to Marta Feuchtwanger's account—Stephen Fritchman, another Unitarian minister in Los Angeles. 

And knowing what I do about Fritchman, I cannot imagine him exerting himself on behalf of anyone who was not considered ideologically correct in the eyes of the Soviet Union. (These are the facts of political favoritism (at best, triage) that complicate somewhat our heroic image of the wartime clandestine rescue efforts.)

Perhaps Feuchtwanger, then, in 1941, still felt constrained politically in what he could say—lest he displease his Stalinist hosts. Or, perhaps, he was himself genuinely committed at this point to the Soviet cause. 

Either way, the result is that one can see him at times trying to bend his narrative to serve the Communist Party line. Traces of the official Soviet position—which had flip-flopped overnight from backing militant resistance to fascism, to dismissing the fight against Hitler as an "imperialist war" in which the "bourgeois" democracies deserved no better fate than the fascist dictatorships—can perhaps be discerned behind Feuchtwanger's line about the "whole war" being "a swindle." 

Koestler, meanwhile, adopted a much more intellectually honest and intelligent position. He was able to see the obvious paradox in watching Communist Party–aligned anti-fascist refugees in France suddenly pivot overnight to supporting the Hitler-Stalin pact. Yet, in the ideological madness of a totalitarian mentality, it was Koestler who found himself treated as politically suspect, by many of his fellow anti-fascist internees, for his refusal to go along with this travesty.

He recalls one sadly revealing episode, in Scum of the Earth, when he overheard some German Communist Party members—men who themselves had escaped concentration camps, and whom Hitler's thugs would doubtless torture and line up against the wall if they ever got their hands on them—denouncing Koestler for his criticism of the Hitler-Stalin alliance. "Is he anti-fascist?" one of them asks. "Even that, comrade, is doubtful," the other replies. 

Such are the contortions of the truth that are possible to the "captive mind." The correct "anti-fascist" line was twisted from supporting French resistance to the Nazis to suddenly praying for their defeat. (The Communist line would then, of course, switch back again a year later—but only because Hitler had violated his agreement with Stalin by invading the Soviet Union.)

Feuchtwanger, then, as highly as I praise his memoir as a literary work, does not acquit himself as well as Koestler did, in terms of the latter's ability and willingness to tell the hard truth about the political situation—even if it came at the cost of some friendships and alliances. I do not denounce Feuchtwanger for this, though—for, as I say, I do not fully know the circumstances of his escape and how much it depended on his being willing to make nice with those who were still in Stalin's camp. 

That said, Feuchtwanger's political analysis is crystal-clear and highly relevant from a contemporary perspective on one key point: namely, the utter oxymoronic absurdity of the fact that France insisted on capturing German anti-fascist refugees and imprisoning them during the war—instead of enlisting their support in the struggle against their shared enemy. Feuchtwanger rightly denounces this internment policy as the betrayal of hospitality—and of logic—that it was. 

"The French not only refused any co-operation from us German anti-Fascists," he writes, "they locked us up." (Abbott trans.) Later, he adds: "They knew very well that [...] we were friends of France who had come to France with full trust in French hospitality, warmly welcomed by the French people [...] natural allies in the war on Hitler. [...] To intern so many people who had beyond any doubt proved themselves bitter enemies of the Nazis was a stupid, revolting farce." 

He adds later in the book, though, that he came to see this as perhaps less of a paradox than it had first appeared. What seemed at first like a self-contradiction in the heart of French policy came to look more like a consistent program, masterminded by elements in the French government who had secretly favored Hitler's cause all along and were planning already for his victory. 

Koestler likewise was appalled by the self-defeating inanity of the French government devoting time and resources to imprisoning anti-fascist refugees in degrading conditions, when many of them would gladly have carried a rifle on behalf of France to defend it from the invading Nazis. (Would the Stalinists, though, at a time when the Soviet government was calling on party members in democratic countries to sabotage the war effort? That, comrade, is what is really "doubtful.")

Much the same madness is on display today in our own government's policy toward asylum-seekers and refugees. 

For all Trump's bellicose rhetoric internationally, after all, his treatment of people who have actually resisted and fled U.S. adversaries abroad is absolutely disgraceful. The reports of conditions inside U.S. detention sites—where people are often forced to sleep twenty-to-a-room; crowded shoulder to shoulder with no ability to lie down—sound uncannily like the state of affairs in the French concentration camps on the eve of Hitler's victory, as Koestler and Feuchtwanger describe them. 

The Trump administration positioned itself for a time as the worst enemy of the Maduro government in Venezuela, for instance. But at the same time, it was imprisoning, abducting, torturing and deporting Venezuelan dissidents who managed to reach what they falsely believed would be safety on our shores—not to mention routinely vilifying these same asylum-seekers in practically every public statement they made. 

They have meted out the same cruel and unjustifiable treatment to Iranian refugees, Cuban refugees, Nicaraguan refugees, Nigerian refugees, Afghani refugees—even as Trump positions himself as a critic of all of those governments too. 

It's the same maddening paradox that Koestler and Feuchtwanger observed. Can the U.S. government really not see that all of these people would gladly be our friends, if only we let them—that they came here to defect from and escape the despotic regimes that have captured their home countries? 

There was even a Chinese refugee, Guan Heng, who managed to reach U.S. borders after conducting a secret mission of courageous human rights reporting, at extraordinary personal risk, to make undercover recordings of the Chinese regime's Uighur detention camps. He is a hero by any measure. But when he reached what he took to be safety in the United States—Trump's government at first slated him for deportation (they later dropped this cruel plan, but only after enormous public outcry). 

Here, as in the case of wartime France, one can begin to suspect—with Feuchtwanger—that what appears at first like self-contradiction may actually be a matter of all-too consistent policy. 

Trump talked a big game about opposing Maduro, after all—but as soon as he kidnapped the latter from office, he immediately made nice with the remnants of his authoritarian regime. He has similarly flip-flopped on the Iranian regime, as noted in the previous post. And he has made no secret of his personal admiration for the authoritarian despots running Russia, China, and North Korea. 

Perhaps all of this persecution that refugees from these regimes are having to endure in the United States reflects the fact that Trump is actually ideologically aligned with the authoritarians they fled—just as the defeatist and collaborationist French government revealed, within months of Hitler's invasion, that they were actually much happier to work with him than with the anti-fascist refugees who had come to their country seeking asylum. 

Indeed, most of Trump's latest bullying and sabre-rattling has—insanely—been directed against our democratic allies in Europe, rather than our supposed authoritarian adversaries. (Viz. the immediate crisis in Greenland, which Trump wants to illegally seize.)

Perhaps, increasingly, we are already living in a defeatist and collaborationist America. A Vichy America. 

It is this fundamental parallel with our time that makes Feuchtwanger's account of his internment essential reading today. The Popular Front–era divisions within the Old Left have receded into relative insignificance today (though I still think it's obvious to any rational person that Koestler had the better of the argument). 

What remains ever-relevant in the book, meanwhile, is that Feuchtwanger and the other refugees were Hitler's first victims; yet instead of welcoming them, democratic countries treated them as enemies. 

Let us please stop making the same mistake today.