Cultural Amnesia
Page 31
Similarly, in the Soviet Union, the security “organs,” under whatever set of initials they flaunted at the time, were always, at the brute force level, staffed by otherwise unemployable dimwits. The opportunity to inflict torment gives absolute power to the otherwise powerless, and must be a heady compensation for those with a history of being the family dolt. The Japanese army of the twentieth century was based on the Prussian model of strict discipline. Combined with the traditional violent streak of the samurai culture, in which an accredited warrior could decapitate any peasant who failed to bow at the correct angle, the bushido version of Prussian browbeating produced a fatal cocktail. Among the enlisted men, every rank could hit the rank below in the face until finally the wave of intimidation got as far as the lowest rank, whose members had nobody to hit except prisoners and civilians. The unsurprising result was a daily nightmare for POWs and for those Asian people that the Japanese imperial forces had supposedly come to liberate from European colonialism. The details are still hard to credit, and people of a squeamish temperament would prefer to believe that reports were exaggerated. Such a belief continues to be encouraged by the Japanese educational system. Japan’s post-war ministry of education was eager to soft-pedal the bad memories, mainly because it was a bolt hole for high-level perpetrators who had escaped being prosecuted. As a sinecure for the judiciously silent, the education ministry made sure that the next generation learned nothing from the school textbooks about what the army had done to disgrace itself. German school textbooks were already talking about the Nazi disaster by the mid-1950s. In the late 1980s, when I was spending a lot of time in Japan, the one and only author of a school history text who had attempted to mention the 1937 Nanking incident (in which something like a quarter of a million innocent people perished, many of them in hideous circumstances) was in peril of his life, and his book had still not left the warehouse. The situation is better today—mainly because NHK, the Japanese public-service television network, was brave enough to grasp the nettle—but the Japanese right wing still regards any mention of those old embarrassments as a provocation.
In the Italian transit camp of Fossoli during the Republic of Salo (the last stage of Mussolini’s Fascist regime, with the fanatics well in charge), there was a female officer who indulged herself in the Dantesque experiment of packing a cell with victims and keeping them without nourishment of any kind until they ate each other. Many of her victims were women. She seems to have had a social problem: she was cutting prettier, wealthier women down to size. In Latin America, the torturers were all men, but even the qualified medical practitioners among them seem to have been motivated by a similar urge to assure their victims that the boot was now on the other foot. On the disheartening subject of how sadism and sexuality might be connected, Argentina has the dubious privilege of having produced a key document. In a short story called “Simetrias”—a creative work which unfortunately has ample documentation in fact—Luisa Valenzuela tells us how some of the male torturers would take out their victims for an evening in a café or a nightclub. The wounds caused by the electrodes would be covered with makeup. (The story appears in Cuentos de historia argentina, a collection published in Buenos Aires in 1998.) In Brazil after that country’s nightmare was over—it took place roughly at the same time as Argentina’s—a book came out called Cale a boca, jornalista! (Shut Your Mouth, Journalist!) (São Paulo, 1987). The book enshrines the testimony of journalists who had the sad privilege of seeing the big story from close range: too close. Survivors recall being woken up in the middle of the night by the cold barrel of a .45 automatic applied to the nose, as a preliminary to a long encounter with the electrodes. There were journalists who never came back to say anything. Unsurprisingly, silence soon reigned.
In the years since the silence broke, documentation has piled up. Too many of the most terrifying pages reveal that the torments were an end in themselves. Torture, especially when the victim was a woman, went on far beyond any use it might have had as a means of extracting information, and even beyond what was needed to create a universal atmosphere of abject terror. Films like Kiss of the Spider Woman and Death and the Maiden have done their best to face what happened in Latin America, but finally, if we can bear to look at what is happening on screen, we have been spared the worst. The general picture in Latin America squared up badly with the picture of torture evoked in an impeccably realistic film like Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, in which the decent young paratroopers did not really want to be doing that kind of thing. (Alain Resnais’s Muriel, without showing the horrors, made the same point by implication.) In Latin America the torturers did want to be doing that kind of thing. Which brings us back to Brazil, and hence to Brazil. Were they ever the same place?
In the film called Brazil, Michael Palin is the torturer as the civil servant who might conceivably have been doing something else, such as selling life insurance. In the country called Brazil, the same role was usually played by a psychopath. (The key document proving this is Brasil: Nunca mais—Brazil: Never Again—published in São Paulo in 1985. By the time I bought my copy in 1988, it had gone through twenty printings.) We know from the fascinating long interview published as Gilliam on Gilliam that the Palin character in the movie was slow to take shape. The first three drafts of the script were written by Tom Stoppard. Finally Stoppard and Gilliam parted company because of disagreements over some of the characters. One of the characters in question was the torturer. The way Stoppard wrote the part, Michael Palin would have had the opportunity to play against type: he would have embodied evil. Palin is a very accomplished actor and could undoubtedly have done it. But Gilliam insisted on Palin’s full, natural, non-acting measure of bland benevolence: the same set of teeth, but they would be bared only to charitable effect. On the set, Gilliam gave Palin mechanical things to do while acting—eat, for example—so that Palin would be distracted from developing any nuances on top of his natural projection as Mr. Nice Guy. It is a moot point which of them was right, Stoppard or Gilliam. In the long run, the Banality of Evil interpretation of human frightfulness is not quite as useful as it looks. It helps us appreciate the desirability of not placing ourselves in a position where the rule of justice depends on natural human goodness, which might prove to be in short supply. But it tends to shield us from the intractable facts about human propensities.
White settlers of America were horrified to discover that the Apaches would torture their prisoners slowly to death on the assumption that the captor would gain spiritual stature as the captive lost it. The student would prefer not to think that a primitive people was thus showing us what was once universally true, and came from instinct. It would help if mankind were the only animal that tortured its prey: we could persuade ourselves that only a social history could produce such an aberration. Unfortunately, cats torment mice until the mouse turns cold, and killer whales play half an hour of water polo with a baby seal before they finally put it out of its misery by eating it. We can do better than the cats and the killer whales, but it might be a help to admit that the same propensity is widespread, and could even be there within ourselves. In that respect, the film Three Kings was a rare feat for the American cinema. Educated in a hard school of bombed refugee camps, the Arab torturer was trying to show his clueless American victim what it felt like to be helpless. It is possible that all torturers are attempting to teach their own version of the same lesson. But in that case we are bound to consider the further possibility that anyone might be a torturer. The historical evidence suggests that on the rare occasions when a state begins again in what a fond humanitarian might think of as a condition of innocence, a supply of young torturers is the first thing it produces. Certainly this was true of Pol Pot’s Cambodia.
If, as seems likely, Pol Pot would never have come to power had not the U.S. Air Force first devastated Cambodia, then Henry Kissinger has a lot more than the disaster in Chile on his conscience. He has the disaster of the Khmer Rouge torture camps. Of 17,000 peo
ple who were interrogated in the S-21 camp in Phnom Penh, 16,994 died in agony. The half dozen people who survived were questioned again, by journalists, but they had been too badly injured to say much. The writing on the wall probably says all that we need to hear. “While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all,” said Security Regulation No. 6. The other regulations were no less terrifying, but there is something unique about Regulation 6, as if Swift and Kafka had both had their brains picked by a lethal child. There was a variation on the same instruction: “During the bastinado or the electrification you must not cry loudly.” But “not cry loudly” leaves room to cry softly, whereas “not cry at all” has the perfect lack of logic which reminds us, as we will always need reminding, that the Khmer Rouge torturers were not an example of a system of thought decayed into a perversion: they were pre-thought, and thus had a kind of childish purity.
Another Khmer Rouge regulation is almost charming: “Don’t try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that. You are strictly prohibited to contest me.” The charm is in the waste of effort: the prisoner can give only one answer, so why didn’t the interrogator just write it down and sign it with a mark, especially since the prisoner’s eventual signature wouldn’t make much sense anyway? Unfortunately for our hopes of innate human goodness, all the evidence suggests that the torturers were keen to get on with the job even if it was meaningless. All the evidence was still there afterwards, including photographs taken at every stage of the torment. Whether the Khmer Rouge torturers were psychopaths is a question for psychiatrists. The question for general students of human affairs is about the reputation of the Khmer Rouge in the West. Their own mad frenzy did not last long, but while it lasted there were sophisticated Western apologists who made some marvellous pretexts this and that. It was notable, however, that in this one case the apologetics had no staying power. One of the first Western publications to blow the whistle was The New York Review of Books, which could normally be depended on to suspend judgement as long as possible in such cases. Access made the difference. If we had known as little about what went on in the Killing Fields as we knew about, say, North Korea, the example of Pol Pot’s Cambodia (“Hands off democratic Kampuchea!”) might have rallied the West’s faithful dupes a lot longer. But the story got out straight away, mainly because a pack of adolescents were in charge. Adults are cannier.
Back in the late 1950s, on the sleeve of the Beyond the Fringe record album, Jonathan Miller made a dark joke about his worst fear: being tortured for information he did not possess. The assumption behind the joke was that if he had something to reveal, the agony would stop. He was looking back to a world of polite British fiction, not to a world of brute European fact. In the Nazi and Soviet cellars and camps, people were regularly tortured for information they did not possess: i.e., they were tortured just for the hell of it. Kafka guessed it would happen, as he guessed everything that would happen. In his Strafkolonie, the tormented prisoner has to work out for himself what crime he has committed, and is finally told that it is being written on his body by the instrument of torture into which he has been inescapably locked. Kafka was there first, but he wasn’t alone for long, and now we must all live in a modern world where the words “No no no no no no no no” can be recorded with perfect fidelity for their sound, yet go unheeded for what they mean.
JOSEF GOEBBELS
Josef Goebbels (1897–1945) began as a professional student (he was enrolled at eight different universities) and would-be literary figure. He ended as a corpse in the Reich Chancellery, having achieved, in the interim, the distinction of being minister of public enlightenment and propaganda in the Nazi government, and a ranking second only to Goering’s among those closest to Hitler. During the war, after Goering’s prestige waned, Goebbels moved up to the vacant second spot, and was effectively in charge of the country in the final period when its most terrible crimes were being carried out: the idea that Himmler acted without Goebbels’s knowledge does not bear examination. A crippled schizophrenic, Goebbels was easy to make fun of at the time by those safely out of his reach. Now that we all are, we should perhaps try to remember that as a young man he was interested in the arts, loved the movies, saw the power of advertising, studied the techniques of publicity, and favoured the idea of politics as a spectacular drama. A lot of what we think normal now, he thought of first: so we need to be very sure that we have a different slant on it. Even his anti-Semitism began as an intellectual pose: he took it up while he was on a scholarship.
Since Stalingrad, even the smallest military success has been denied us. On the other hand, our political chances have hugely increased, as you know.
—JOSEF GOEBBELS, QUOTED IN HIS OFFICE ON JANUARY 25, 1944, BY WILFRED VON OVEN IN Mit Goebbels bis zum Ende, VOL. 1, P. 178
AMONG THE NAZIS who got away to Argentina after the war was the future author of what would be the world’s funniest book, if it did not take your breath away so thoroughly that laughter is impossible. After a notable beginning as a war correspondent reporting Nazi victories in Poland, the West, the Balkans and in Russia, Wilfred von Oven spent the late part of the war as press secretary, personal assistant and tireless sounding board for Goebbels. At the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin, Goebbels would think aloud by the hour while von Oven wrote it all down. Von Oven was on the spot when Goebbels microfilmed his personal diaries and made them safe for posterity.
But the papers in von Oven’s own keeping were even more precious. In Argentina von Oven typed up his reminiscences as if they constituted a world historical document, which indeed they did, and still do. They were published in two volumes by Dürer-Verlag in Buenos Aires in 1949. My set dates from 1950, when the work achieved a second printing. (They had an awful lot of coffee in Brazil, and they had an awful lot of Nazis in Argentina.) I bought the set second-hand in that same city fifty years later. The twin volumes were in good shape: bound in yellow cardboard with orange cloth spines, they had never sprung their hinges, and the paper, though of low quality, had not yet begun to crumble. I took my find to my favourite café in San Telmo, sat down to read, and almost instantly realized that I was in the presence of an unrivalled comic masterpiece. In Mel Brooks’s The Produc ers, the berserk playwright in the helmet admires Hitler as one psycho admires another. But von Oven is funnier than that. He thinks Goebbels is the soul of reason, a great intellectual, a philosophical and creative genius whose visions are frustrated only by unfortunate circumstances. Making it even funnier is that van Oven himself shows few signs of being exceptionally stupid. Like his boss, he was able and industrious. He didn’t miss a trick. All he missed was the point.
If we ever doubted that Goebbels did the same, the evidence is here. Goering knew that the game was up when the first P-51 Mustang long-range escort fighter appeared over Berlin. Even Himmler started looking for a way out. But Goebbels kept the faith. Though finally it got to the point where not even he could keep his faith in victory, he still kept his faith in Hitler. Even as it became clear that the insurmountable obstacle to any political solution was the existence of Hitler himself, it never occurred to Goebbels that his loyalty to Hitler could be abandoned. After the attempted coup of July 20, 1944, it was suggested to Goebbels that the cause might still be saved if Hitler could be sidelined in favour of a Goebbels–Himmler duumvirate. Though Goebbels held Himmler in high respect (“immaculate,” “a paragon of character”—vol. 2, p. 301) he could see no choice: he was for Hitler, even if it meant that Germany and Hitler would go down together. As the end neared, the only reproach Goebbels made against Hitler was that the Führer had not been sufficiently true to himself, having allowed himself to be surrounded by a gang of opportunists, time-servers and mediocrities. There was certainly some truth in that. Goebbels had good reason to think of himself as the genuine Nazi article. The comedy lies in his unintentional revelation of what being a genuine Nazi entailed. One thing it entailed was a huge, incapacitating overestimation of the world’s tolerance for Nazi poli
cies of territorial aggression and mass murder. Goebbels was right to believe that Stalin threatened civilization in the West with a similar disaster. But he was wrong to believe that the Western allies, when they realized this, would see Nazi Germany as a bastion against the threat. He couldn’t let it occur to him that the unlikely global alliance against Nazi Germany was held together by the existence of Nazi Germany itself, and would be maintained until Nazi Germany was gone. For him it was a thought too simple to be grasped. He was too clever for that.
Goebbels’s cleverness was diabolical. Faithfully transcribing the master propagandist’s torrential paroxysms of inspiration, von Oven was right to be awed. The man who invented Horst Wessel (a Nazi thug beaten to death by Communists, Horst Wessel was turned by the creative staff in Goebbels’s office into the hero of a song) never ran out of ideas. But the diabolical cleverness all served a self-deception. In September 1944 we find the Minister (von Oven always calls Goebbels the Minister or the Doctor) favouring his assistant with a long tirade about how the situation could be saved if only he, instead of Ribbentrop, were in charge of foreign policy. “I would work in both directions,” Goebbels explains. “The English way of thinking is congenial to me. I could bring into play my good and friendly connections with many important Englishmen. But I would also start talking to the Bolsheviks. It is not for nothing that I count as the representative of our party’s left wing. What possibilities! What visions!” Der Minister seufzt und lehnt sich in seinen Sessel zurück (vol. 2, p. 145). The Minister sighed and leaned back in his chair.