While I was thinking about collective guilt and innocence -- I gave up

There’s a question that has been bothering me for as long as I can remember. I can’t quite tell it straight. It has to do with the causes with which we associate ourselves, and the extent to which we will go to justify the means employed to achieve the objectives of said causes. Let me start somewhere in the middle …

After snapping out of the naïvete that is the privilege of pre-pubescence, abandoning the arrogance of adolescence and defeating the doldrums of twentysomething angst, I managed to exorcise most of the heroes of my youth and accepted the ideas and icons that had shaped the core of my beliefs and values. These values coalesce around justice, equality, non-violence and the treatment of humans, always, as ends in themselves, and never as means to an end. Through all of this, there have remained, nonetheless, the nagging thoughts about guilt and innocence.

Innocence, I have come to believe, is terribly over-rated. Who among us can claim, for instance, that crude lust never took control of our loins, or that unrequited love has never led us to that cold and lonely place — the tight space between the toilet bowl and the bathroom wall; reeking of rum, filled with bile and self-defeat, and with the bitter taste of gastric secretions in our mouths and dripping from our nostrils — where we wished upon the one who scorned us a sulphuric bath in Hades? Who among us has not wished them dead? Innocence is not what it’s cracked up to be. Guilt may well be. If only for the headache.

How do we carry the burdens of our beliefs? How many of our fellow travellers are guilty of the basest of crimes against humanity. As I write this, I remember a passage by Arthur Koestler about his own tolerance of the intolerable. During his fiercely Zionist phase, while writing Thieves in the Night, Koestler was deeply troubled by what he described as “an acute conflict between conviction and inclination”. Having had what he explained as his “fill of terror and violence”, he felt “compelled to explain and defend the cause of Jewish terrorists”. He was referring, of course, to the Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stern Gang terrorist organisations that were part of what would become more than 50 years of systematically removing Palestinians from their homes and land.

I recently read an article by one of those super-intelligent beings (I offer no apologies for my sarcasm), those mere mortals who seem to know everything about everything — and who are always right. He is, of course, an economist; a white male from the United States. No, it is not that one; it is the other … In an article this same economist cast the gravest of aspersions on one of the finest historians of the 20th century, Eric Hobsbawm, by drawing attention to the latter’s Marxist affiliations. In a single passage he, the economist, associated Hobsbawm with all the victims of Stalin and Mao; he even provided the numbers of people killed during the reigns of both. I will not direct you to his website because I will not encourage people to reproduce in any form what I consider to be self-righteous blather by the (self-arrogated) innocent.

My immediate thoughts were as follows: Stalin and Mao each killed (let’s say) 50-million people. Stalin and Mao were both communists, ergo communism kills. But then I asked (myself) some questions. (Potentially offensive parts removed following complaints by readers).

1. If I consider myself to be a communist, am I guilty of those murders?
2. Hitler was not a communist (in fact, he hated communists); are all people who hate communists guilty of killing more than 10-million people during Hitler’s reign?
3. If Stalin killed more people than Mao, was the Soviet leader more evil?
4. So, if the economist ranks figures such as Stalin and Mao (trust me, he even referred to “clubs” of mass killers) according to the number of people they killed, were they more evil than Hitler?

Then these questions piled up and started doing my head in … Really, there is no need to even bother with answering such questions. Hitler, Stalin and Mao were the worst mass murderers of the 20th century; theirs were deeds of unspeakable cruelty. No buts.

However :-) are the numbers of victims all that matter? Can we actually say, or should we even bother whether Mao may have been more evil than Stalin because the Chinese leader killed more people? I kept coming back to that question of numbers. Economists love numbers.

Anyway, while wrestling with the numbers and meaning and all that, I remembered another passage that I read elsewhere, written by the Berkeley sociologist Robert N Bellah, about World War II and the dropping of atomic bombs on the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima — which, by most uncritical accounts, brought an end to the war and victory to the Allies.

“But,” wrote Bellah, “is it so entirely clear that we won the war? Wasn’t there a sense in which we were defeated in that war, and I don’t mean only by the early disasters? I would say that we were defeated to the extent that we became like the enemy we opposed. Early in the war we condemned the Germans for their indiscriminate bombing of civilians. By 1943 or 1944 we were engaging in the most terrible bombing of civilians in history.

“Hundreds of thousands died in the fire-bombing of Dresden, Tokyo, and other German and Japanese cities. And then on August 6 and 9 the United States unleashed the only two atom bombs ever to be used, unleashed them on the large, crowded cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As an eighteen-year-old at the time, looking forward to immediate induction into the army, I, like most other Americans, had no doubt that using the atom bomb was the right thing to do. Only considerably later did I come to see it as second only to the Holocaust among the crimes of the twentieth century.”

I remembered, also, a passage by Christopher Coker — the teacher whom I will always remind myself has been the greatest inspiration in my scholarly escapades — who wrote about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sometimes, he explained, we avoid discussing the past because it hurts. Sometimes we do so because it is embarrassing. So we create dissonant discourses — even in real time.

After the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US decided not to look at their devastation: “Rather than garrison the two cities they preferred their allies to do so. They spared their own soldiers scenes of what they accomplished.” Citing Eli Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor Christopher Coker explained that the Holocaust could only be understood together with Hiroshima: “The only way for the world to save itself … is by remembering … the Holocaust. There could have been no Hiroshima, symbolically without Auschwitz … only Auschwitz can save the planet from a new Hiroshima … We recall the ultimate violence in order to prevent its recurrence.” (I’m sure I did not misquote Christopher.)

So where does this leave me? Where does it leave my beliefs? Sure, I’m a Marxist. I also believe that Marx had as little to do with what happened in the Soviet Union between 1923 and 1985 as Jesus has with Christianity in the late capitalist period. Eric Hobsbawm, the British historian whom the economist tarred with the same brush as Stalin, was guilty by association of the death of millions of people. I have the greatest respect for Hobsbawm; I probably respect him more than any living scholar and human being. Ergo, I am guilty of the murder of tens of millions of people in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era, and tens of millions more during Mao’s reign. That’s a lot of dead people. That’s more people than what died in Nagasaki, Hiroshima, in Hitler’s slaughter of Jews, gays, Gypsies and anyone who was considered to be “impure”.

However, if (just to piss of the economists) we removed the numbers and considered all mass murderers as bad people, then all of us (communists and anti-communists) are bad; not just some of us — then we’re all guilty. Also, if we want to find, say, one human being guilty for something that we all are guilty of, are we not compelled to look at ourselves? Or will we continue to labour under the pretence that good people cannot be bad, and that bad people cannot be good?

Oy vey!