Yesterday, I attended a Holocaust remembrance service marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. My daughter was one of five readers who appeared on stage with a survivor whom she had met, interviewed, and honored in a short presentation. Prior to the survivor's stories, other teenagers read the names of relatives who had died in the camps. The roster of the dead went on and on. Each teenager took his or her turn; even after all of them were finished, each took the stage again. It was, in my experience, one of the best efforts to capture the magnitude of the Holocaust.
The reading of the names created a long, quiet interval in which to think. I've been reading about Nazism, World War II, and the Holocaust my whole life, but I still have plenty to ponder in these moments. Maybe there will be a final historical verdict on the tragic fulcrum of 20th century history, Hitler's rise to power, his death in the bunker, and everything that happened in between. Still, I don't think anyone should ever assume they have the final answers.
I spent a lot of this time recalling the first-hand accounts of life inside the Third Reich. Generals and soldiers, Nazi doctors and Einstazgruppen killers, housewives and factory workers, camp survivors and partisans—anyone interested can re-live Nazism through the ample accounts of its adherents, bystanders, and victims.
Without venturing to explain Hitler's rise to power or the Holocaust, I'll say this much: the common landscape among all these accounts is of a nation gone mad. I don't mean insane in the sense of losing all sense of reason or moral responsibility. Instead, the national insanity of the Third Reich turned reason towards horrific ends, such as the industrialization of genocide. It also mutated morality into something perverse, a belief that, in klilling the Jews, Germans were merely defending themselves.
Obviously, reason and morality had their limits in Hitler's Germany. The belief in the Jewish conspiracy against the Aryan race proved impervious to rebuttal. Any sources of challenge to Nazi racial politics—for example, doctors and scientists—were either crushed or subverted. Hitler knew; that's all that mattered for the Nazi enthusiast.
Morality, too, sometimes made itself know, if only by its shadow. One of the speakers at last night's remembrance was an American GI whose all-black tank unit, the 761st Battalion, liberated Mathausen and its satellite camps. He recalled his unit deploying in anticipation of a German counterattack on the camps, which (unlike other battles) never came. If memory serves, the Germans never counterattacked to recapture their death and labor camps. Once in the hands of the Allies, there was no point in further defense of what many of them knew was a monstrous crime.
Nazism left its stamp on modern history in many ways, including our collective impression of politics. Before World War II, most scholars of politics and government focused their attention on laws and constitutions. Their contributions, they believed, would be the improvement of legislation, constitutions, and legal precedents.
The collapse of the Weimar Republic, whose constitution was believed by many to be a best in the world, ended that version of political science. The thesis that, if you devise the most effective formal structures of government, reasonable people will embrace them, suddenly became a dangerous illusion.
The rise of fascism demonstrated that, in the real world, unreason is a powerful force, often capable of overpowering reason. In response, political scientists embraced theories of the unconscious, group psychology, the isolation and vulnerability of individuals in a "mass society," the power of atavistic symbols—anything that could help explain the role of unreason in politics generally, and (always in the background) the Third Reich specifically.
We are, perhaps, living in an age that needs a fresh reminder of the power of unreason. The Kerry campaign, for example, had a strategy based on some version of, "Aha! I got you there!" All they had to do, they believed, was point out the obvious failures of the Bush Administration in foreign policy, and George Bush and Dick Cheney would clutch their chests and fall down. Or, at the very least, the veil would lift from the eyes of their supporters, and the election would be all but won.
Obviously, to respect the power of unreason isn't license to abandon reason. People of differing opinions can have productive discussions about counterterrorism, the war in Iraq, and other foreign policy issues. Many settings for these discussions—the shouting matches in the broadcast media, the increasingly Balkanized opinion journals, and so forth—make it hard to have these discussions.
What Democratic Party leaders didn't understand in 2004 was that they were moving from forum to forum in which this kind of reasoned dialogue was impossible. They also failed to harness the less rational elements of politics in their own cause. People need more than just the measured words of policy technocrats; they need to feel excited to be part of something. While the Republicans have used to great effect the tools of mass mobilization, the Democrats have turned into the party of "checkbook politics," constantly asking for contributions, involving no one in the face-to-face politics that binds people together, reinforces their common sense of purpose, and gives them something to do other than sit and watch.
In other words, unreason isn't always bad. It's a major part of the mystery of good and evil. Why did some people, at great personal risk, hide Jews from the Nazis? Why did some people prove to be eager participants in the torture and execution of concentration camp prisoners? There are always angels and monsters among us, as Gaetano Mosca pointed out. They're as much part of daily life as of politics. For the majority in the middle, the urge to do good or evil is inherent in human nature, waiting to be inspired by the angels or monsters.
Somewhere, the Democrats lost the ability to speak simply and compellingly about these issues, ceding all discussions of religion and morality to what started as a small faction of Republicans. Take, for example, the position of people who are not religious. My wife and daughter go to church; I don't. None of us think the worse of each other for our different choices. I don't believe in God, but I do believe in the inherent possibility of good in people. I also believe in the duty to encourage that goodness, and the patience needed for people to take hold of it. I've never thought you needed to believe in a supernatural entity to be a moral person, nor do I distrust the morals and ethics of people who do believe in gods or God. In fact, I think I may enjoy a fairly easy time of accepting the goodness of all believers and unbelievers alike, since I don't have to puzzle over which representation of the divine is closer to the absolute truth. I feel neither morally inferior or superior. I do feel faith in the original sense used in the New Testament, the compulsion to do good. I acknowledge that faith in others, having known angelic souls who attend church or temple, and those who never do.
I'm distressed, therefore, to see American politicians do an absolutely terrible job of defending people like me. It wasn't hard to write the words you read in the previous paragraph, and it would be easy for any politician to speak them. In spite of the ugliness in American politics directed against "the ungodly," the Democrats have failed both to defend and inspire—and not just on this particular point.
But I've wandered far from where I started, the Holocaust remembrance last night. The phrase, "Never again," appeared only once—but, of course, it didn't need to be uttered more than that. Those two words have accumulated enormous moral power for Jews and gentiles, so you only need to invoke them once. You don't have to conclude that a society has already descended into Nazi-level depravity for them to have resonance, nor do you need to demonstrate that we're on an express train to another Auschwitz. Our simple responsibility is, once we find ourselves wandering into even the periphery of that blasted moral landscape, we turn back.
For me, Never again has always implied several more specific admonitions, including (but by no means limited to) the following:
- Don't stand by while your society goes mad.
- Don't use injustices—the Treaty of Versailles, 9/11—as excuses for collective bad behavior.
- Don't revel in some ugly, clannish sense of superiority.
- As soon as you find yourself trying to be creative in the cruelty applied to your supposed enemies, stop what you're doing immediately.
- As soon as you hear yourself saying that the facts don't matter, stop what you're doing immediately.
- Before you start trying to remake human nature through the brute application of power, stop what you're doing immediately.
- The moment you catch yourself calling someone a traitor for criticizing the powers that be, stop what you're doing immediately.
If the phrase Never again meant, Don't kill millions of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, communists, and other undesirables in the heart of Europe, it would be facile to the point of uselessness. Never again is a warning to stop the train of events that lead to something like the Holocaust—and, too, the tragedies that fall far short of that horror.
