Three Essays on Fascism by Julie Reshe
This is a revised version of my three essays which were at different times previously published in Russian. They are prophetic but at the same time prophetically pathetic since they failed to have an effect on what they untimely warned about. The essays predicted that the greatest catastrophe of humankind, the one on a par with the tragedy of Fascism, would be brought to the world under the pretext of good. It won't acquire the form of Fascism, but rather come in the form of the struggle against Fascism. In a more general context, the essays are about the inevitability of evil and its affinity to human existence. Evil triumphs under the guise of goodness.
Anti-sociality is shadowing pro-sociality, human care and love sometimes devolve into destruction and murder, we mass kill by loving. While fighting evil, one of the most common name of which is fascism, we could ourselves begin to embody evil and become fascists. The knowledge of the hopelessness of our struggle against the vicious circle of good turning into evil could have being our only hope.
Fascism in Each of Us
Speaking about the Soviet troops entering East Prussia to fight Nazism, war correspondent Natalia Hesse recalled, “The Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty. It was an army of rapists" [1]. Many German women, unable to hide or escape, asked to be killed n aged 8 to 80. or killed themselves and their daughters.
This shows that with the arrival of Soviet troops, the violence did not stop. Only the kind of victims have changed, the place of the Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs was taken by the Germans. The difference in violence was purely instrumental, the essence remained the same. The war wasn’t the battle between good and evil. It was the manifestation of the different faces of evilness, mirroring each other in various forms.
When we talk about the liberation of Europe from Fascism, we lose sight of the fact that it was precisely this reality that was the ultimate expression of the liberation offensive. Any winning party was winning by destroying others and justifying this destruction by destruction committed by the losing party. Soviet troops pursued the Germans in order to punish them for persecuting the Soviet people. In their turn, the Germans pursued Jews referring to the alleged danger of Jews to Germans.
Having admitted this, we cannot avoid facing the question of human’s inescapable evilness, considering that our struggle against violence turns itself into violence, and so on ad infinitum.
***
The Third Reich regime exposed the terrifying dark side of human nature, which we prefer not to recognize in ourselves. The specific postwar popularity of intellectual reflections on Fascism suggests that humanity felt an urgent need to come up with newer ways not to recognize itself as a potential evil-doers. Almost without exception, intellectuals who analyze the fascist regime presented it as a phenomenon alien to humanity as such. Only these crazy Nazi Germans are capable of genocide and extermination camps. For sure, it has nothing to do with the rest of us.
Intellectuals and their readers are often driven by a naive belief in their own virtue. Allegedly, with the exception of the Nazi Germans, humanity is pure goodness and does not show the symptoms of Fascism. The efforts of intellectuals are aimed at locating and isolating the source of Fascism. They help us convince ourselves that we have nothing in common with those people in SS uniforms. Thanks to the efforts of intellectuals, humankind has learned to isolate Fascism at the level of theory, attributing it to someone's specific evil will: "God, how terrible these Nazis were!"
We are ready for anything to keep the illusions of our sinlessness. Even the most daring confessions of intellectuals that no one is safe from becoming a Nazi turned out to be implicitly a repetition of the ritual phrase “fascism is not me.” These confessions only reinforce our naive belief that it is possible for humanity to embody pure goodness.
In addition, these confessions are an attempt to isolate Fascism within a subject. It is assumed that the dimension revealed by Fascism is not a manifestation of a fundamental property of human nature. At maximum Fascism is assumed to be only one of the constituent parts of who we are, the part of which we can get rid of without losing anything substantial. Presumably, if we will try hard enough nothing evil will remain in us, and we will get rid of the threat of becoming the one who will be recognized as a Nazi.
Intellectuals imply that our very unwillingness to recognize ourselves in Fascism and the horror we feel facing the realities of the Nazi regime guarantee our immunity to it. They are guided by the hope that the human dimension embodied in Fascism can be eradicated. The tragedy of humankind is that this very belief exposes to us the fundamental reality that was opened up by Fascism.
***
Humankind tends to ignore everything that exposes the conventionality of the border between it and Fascism. One of the most successful attempts at such exposure was Hannah Arendt's book The Banality of Evil: Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she analyzes the events of the Holocaust, trying to give them an impartial assessment.
Arendt paid the price for her impartial view. According to Susan Neumann, Arendt's book "was surely the most vilified work of 20th-century moral philosophy" [2]. As Michael Dorfman states: “After the publication of Arendt’s book, most Israeli friends broke off relations with her […]. Arendt was boycotted in Israel for more than 30 years” [3]. Such a reaction to Arendt's book is a defense of an established form of delineation that ensures that Fascism is not us. Within such a framework, only direct supporters of Fascism are the only carriers of evil. Arendt points out the relativity of such a delineation. The irony revealed by Arendt lies in the parallels between the Nazi ideology and Judaism: In their belief of being exceptional, their isolation from others, a perception of the world as threatening.
Arendt was bold enough to point out the massive Jews' complicity in their own destruction and the involvement of Jews in the events of the Holocaust. In her words, “The actual work of killing in the extermination centers was usually in the hands of Jewish commandos [...] Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis [...] the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people ” [4]
However daring Arendt may be, and however far she goes in asserting the unacceptable, her analysis cannot be called exhaustive. Exposing the conventionality of the delineation into victims and executioners, it retains a more general delineation. Like other intellectuals, Arendt retains the desire to remove herself from the analyzed context, to show her non-participation in the realities of Fascism. The position she takes is that of one who exposes the evil in others. Her analysis is an attempt to find out what is wrong with the people who caused the Holocaust. The very posing of such a question presupposes a distinction between the position of the analyst and the object being analyzed.
Arendt's analysis has a therapeutic purpose, an attempt to protect our consciousness from the horrifying dimension of being a human that was exposed by Fascism. The problem is that Arendt’s analysis is based on hope for the possibility of non-evil humanity. It suggests that it is possible to remove dangerous parts of our nature. And this removal would not imply the liquidation of humanity as such. The desire to get rid of the fear that guides Arendt and other intellectuals lead them into a vicious circle. The desire to remove the "evil part" of our nature and the "evil part" of society leads to becoming evil. The fear of recognizing Fascism as a part of one's own nature leads to its discovery in others and serves as the basis for justifying the demand for more and more violence.
***
Perhaps the way out of the vicious circle is not in escaping recognizing potential and actual Fascism in each of us, but, on the contrary, in clear recognition of the fact that none of us is protected from falling into the ills of Fascism. In the recognition of the possibility of inhuman in what is extremely human in each of us.
In the context of these reflections, another author, Varlam Shalamov, is of interest. Based on his personal experience, he wrote a series of short stories about the life of prisoners in the Gulag camps [5]. His way of talking about human evilness is radically different from that of Arendt and other intellectuals who analyze the borderline manifestations of the human.
Shalamov does not offer the reader complex philosophical reflections. For the reason Shalamov's texts lack lengthy moralistic discourse, it is assumed that Shalamov's goal was a simple description of what he saw in the camps. It is a mistake since the absence of reflection in Shalamov's text is a direct indication of his opinion about human goodness — it is an illusion that conceals the truth. In this sense, Shalamov is neither an anti-Soviet author nor an anti-fascist. He is simply a misanthrope. Perhaps one of the most consistent in the history of humankind. In his misanthropy, he surpassed both Arendt and other intellectuals: Shalamov was able to overcome the barrier that prevents us from coming to terms with the terrifying reality of who we are.
Describing the extreme manifestations of being a human - the murders, cannibalism, rape - Shalamov does not say "This is not me!". He says: “It could have been me, I was just lucky that this part of me wasn’t exposed.” Shalamov's analysis of the human is not intended to weaken the fear of the horrifying reality of being a human. On the contrary, it is designed to aggravate it to the utmost, leaving no chance for non-recognition.
***
The rhetoric of Fascism does not substantially differ from the rhetoric of its criticism. Both call to the destruction of some in the name of the well-being of others. The irony is that the more we try to save ourselves from Fascism, the more we sink into it and the more clearly our evil nature becomes visible.
By refusing to recognize themselves as never fully protected from the ills of Fascism, people fragment themselves and the surrounding reality dividing it into proto-Nazist and non-Nazist parts. They limit the scope of Fascism by attributing it to a certain part of reality, which allows them to justify the destruction of this part. Perhaps, In such a way humans save themselves from self-destruction. After all, if people would recognize Fascism as a manifestation of an irreducible part of their substance, in order to get rid of it, they would have to fully destroy themselves.
In order to fully eliminate Fascism in the way in which Soviet soldiers were eliminating Fascism in Königsberg by raping German women humanity will have to fully eliminate itself. Actually, we survive due to the fact that we destroy ourselves gradually and only partially. We delude ourselves that we are destroying Fascism, just as a surgeon removes an infected organ. But in fact, health is an illusion, we are all infected from head to toe, representing nothing but a disease. We are simply lucky when signs of disease are not visible.
The Pleasure of Participating: What Saves Kills
Hannah Arendt's Banality of Evil is one of the most significant analyzes of subordination. In her book she analyzes the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann held in an Israeli courtroom. Adolf Eichmann directly led the genocide of Jews in Europe, being involved in the extermination of over six million Jews.
Eichmann did not repent of his actions, justifying himself by merely obeying orders. The conclusion Arendt's book brings is Eichmann's incomprehensible and frightening normality. She states that “Half a dozen psychiatrists had certified [Eichmann] as 'normal', and one of them found that "his whole psychological outlook, his attitude towards his wife and children, mother and father, brothers, sisters and friends, was "not only normal but most desirable" [1]. Eichmann was not at all a fanatical antisemite and, personally, he did not hate Jews. He sincerely believed that his conscience was clear and he was not a "dirty bastard” in the depths of his heart. Moreover, he assumed that he would act contrary to his conscience in case he did not do what he was ordered to do.
Although Arendt declares the banality of evil, that is, its indistinguishability from acting in accordance with conscience, in her analysis she is nonetheless guided by an attempt to find what is wrong with Eichmann: he is too naive, overly trusting, incapable of independent thinking, etc. Ultimately, she fails to find anything unusual in Eichmann, but in spite of that, she retains a reproachful gaze and the hope that his monstrosity can still be detected and allocated, and therefore eliminated.
Arendt is afraid to admit that Eichmann is profoundly indistinguishable from those who, like Arendt herself, happened not to be involved in the genocide, that is, that the only feature that substantially distinguishes him is the very fact of his direct involvement. This renders her incapable to fully recognize that the mechanism of genocide was launched by the normalcy of Eichmann and his like, not by their specific deviation.
A few months after the Eichmann trial the famous Milgram's experiment was conducted. The purpose of the experiment was to find out whether people, by executing an authority order, are capable of extreme cruelty towards those against whom they personally do not harbor hatred. According to Milgram himself, his experiment was designed to answer the question "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders?".
Milgram selected 40 participants for his experiment. During the course of the experiment, the actor and the participant drew straws to determine their roles of the "student" and the "teacher". But in fact, the participant always got the role of "teacher" and the actor the role of "student". At the beginning of the experiment, the "teacher" was given explanations that the purpose of the experiment was to test new methods of learning and remembering information. "Student" was tied to an armchair with an attached electric shock. Then the "teacher" was taken to the room next door that contained an electric shock generator and a row of switches marked from 15 volts (‘Slight Shock’) to 375 volts (“Danger: Severe Shock”) to 450 volts (“XXX”). The "teacher" had to give the “student” simple memory tasks. After each error, the "teacher" was ordered to press the button, and the "student" received an electric shocks. In fact, there was no actual electric shock, the actor, who played the role of "student", only pretended to receive them. After each error, the "teacher" each time needed to increase the voltage by 15 volts. With increasing voltage, the actor played an increasing discomfort, then played a great pain and broke into a scream. When the "teacher" began to hesitate, the experimenter (the personification of an authoritative figure) assured that he takes full responsibility for the experiment and for the safety of the "student" and the experiment continued.
What happened during the experiment was a total surprise. Milgram initially suggested that only 1% of the participants would follow instructions and punish the student with an electric shock. In fact, none of the participants refused to follow the instructions, even when the student was pretending to be in acute pain. Moreover, 65% of the "teachers" continued to the highest level of 450 volts, that is, a deadly level of electric shock.
Following the results of his experiment Milgram has concluded, “After witnessing hundreds of ordinary people submit to the authority in our own experiments, I must conclude that Arendt’s conception of the banality of evil comes closer to the truth than one might dare imagine. The ordinary person who shocked the victim did so out of a sense of obligation – a conception of his duties as a subject – and not from any peculiarly aggressive tendencies. This is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process” [2].
The Milgram experiment was reproduced many times in different variations. Milgram planned the original version of the experiment as the first stage, after which it should have been reproduced in Germany. He assumed Americans to be less obedient and expected that the level of obedience of the Germans would be higher. His expectations did not match the reality, in all countries where the experiment was held, the results were approximately the same. The latest replication of The Milgram experiment was conducted in Poland in In 2015, its results aligned with the results of Milgram’s original version, demonstrating that humankind has not changed in almost half a century [3].
In 2014, Alex Haslam and his colleagues published an important study in which they analyzed the post-experimental reports from the participants of the original Milgram experiment. As a result, they concluded that in his analysis Milgram incorrectly introduced the general emotional state of the participants: he focused on the state of stress participants experienced. Haslam and his colleagues came to a more frightening conclusion that, although the state of stress was indeed present, the overall emotional atmosphere was the pleasure of participating in the experiment. 84% of respondents to a post-experimental survey were ‘glad’ or ‘very glad’ to have taken part in the experiment. Only 1% of respondents were ‘sorry’ or ‘very sorry’ that they participated in the experiment. Almost no one spoke of remorse. For example, one of the participants wrote in their report:
“I am very delighted to be a part of this project. I have often thought perhaps I was the subject, but I could not be any happier. I’ve been waiting very anxiously for this report to really put my mind at ease and curiosity satisfied. Again I will say I am happy to be a part of this project. . . . Last but not least I sure hope my efforts, and cooperation, have been of somewhat useful for your project” [4].
***
The results of Haslam's study do not suggest that every person is a born sadist who gladly commits violence toward others, rather, vice versa, which is bad news. What participants of the experiment was glad about was not causing harm to others, but participation in a socially significant project. The procedure itself, which presupposed harming another, indeed caused the anxiety, but the participant's stressful condition did not intervene with their pleasure, rather it emphasized the significance of what they were doing — if, for the sake of the project one has to resort to anxious actions, their anxiousness could even confirms that they are doing something significant. For instance, in a similar way we experience the anxiety of causing pain and simultaneously the joy of our deed when we push the careless passer-by to save them from being crushed by a car.
Haslam reconsiders Milgram's conclusions, suggesting that what his experiment exposed was not the willingness to submit to authority, but rather the human predisposition to trust and cooperate with those who are identified with collectively significant goals and values. Haslam commented on Milgram's experiment, "it is this selfsame identification with a ‘noble’ cause that led his participants to prove willing to administer what they thought were lethal shocks to a helpless stranger and then, ultimately, to feel happy about what they had done”. The pleasure experienced by the participants was the pleasure of social cooperation and the sacrifice of their personal interests to socially significant goals — the same basic human values that allow society as such to persist.
Haslam's research does not justify people and does not present them as innocent and sinless, rather it reveals a terrible truth that human evil is not just banal, as Hannah Arendt believed, it could be also an ultimate manifestation of good.
Humans are capable to resort to great inhumanity only if it justified by the superior humanity, that is, if inhumanity is placed in the more general context of humanity and serves its the purposes of the later.
It was this logic that was largely responsible for the Nazi genocide. Visiting Poznan in October 1943, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler addressed SS officers responsible for carrying out operations to exterminate Jews. He encouraged them, reminding them of the nobility of their cause:
“I am referring here to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. This is one of the things that is easily said: "The Jewish people are going to be exterminated," that's what every Party member says, "sure, it's in our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination - it'll be done." [...] Of all those who talk like that, not one has seen it happen, not one has had to go through with it. Most of you men know what it is like to see 100 corpses side by side, or 500 or 1,000. To have stood fast through this - and except for cases of human weakness - to have stayed decent, that has made us hard. This is an unwritten and never-to-be-written page of glory in our history [...] All in all, however, we can say that we have carried out this most difficult of tasks in a spirit of love for our people” [5].
We should not expect that the upcoming large-scale catastrophe of humanity will be caused by something we recognize as inhuman, no doubt, it will result from an exalted unity and cooperation of people in defense of humanity — it will be the result of the very same due to which we are still alive.
The Blind Spot of Antifascism or The Cruel Humanity of Hitler
World War II forced humanity to recognize what monstrosities human beings are capable of. The horrific events of the genocide laid bare the seemingly impossible reality of cruelty that human societies could degrade to. This terrible newly opened reality had to be examined, brought to awareness, made known, and deeply remembered in order to never be repeated again. After World War II, the question of Nazism became the main subject of examination in almost all areas of knowledge. Being frightened by the horrors of the Nazi regime, post-war humanity developed an urge to explain its causes and prevent its recurrence. We became paranoid, trying to keep what is possible from remaining humanity and to purify it from the exposed evil. It is no wonder that Nazism or Fascism became the synonym for the ultimate evil in the postwar discourse. In contemporary speech, they tend to designate something even worse than the pure evil. Pure evil is too abstract, while Nazism is a historically experienced real embodied evil.
There is a blind spot in the important lesson learned by humankind in the aftermath of World War II. In our pursuit of humanity, the danger which we see in Nazism and everything that we find to be relatable to it, we overlook that the very accusation of Nazism has become to operate as a mechanism of dehumanization at both the individual level and international level. The most painful example of this is Ukraine, where Russia is committing the genocide of the people who were dehumanized by being declared Nazis. Paradoxically, this genocide is not the result of the lesson of World War II being unlearned and not the impact of the failure of the restriction not to ever repeat it again, but the perverse result of the lesson being learned. The strong desire to avoid a repetition of the horror resulted itself in the repetition.
The excessive fear of repetition and the failure to find intelligible and comprehensive answers caused intellectual and everyday discourses to plunge into a state of paranoia and phobia. Fear, if not excessive, serves as a means of protecting normal life activity, it increases the awareness needed to deal with a threat. But in the case of phobia and paranoia, the level of fear is so excessive that it interferes with normal functioning. Phobic fear tends to exaggerate the danger and irrationally notice a source of danger in irrelevant instances. Gradually postwar humanity has turned into Nazism seeking and Nazism exposing devices.
Such a feature of modern thinking was captured by so-called Godwin's law, which asserts that "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches 1" []. That is, if an online discussion (regardless of topic or scope) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will compare someone or something to Adolf Hitler or his deeds. Surely, a similar principle also works in the intellectual and everyday offline discourse. It could be added that when the conversation reaches the point of reference to Nazism, a meaningful dialogue can be considered abolished because it indicates the manifestation of a phobia incompatible with sober, respectful thinking.
To be good today and to assure your goodness is to be actively anti-fascist. Accusation in Nazism or Fascism serves a function of dehumanization of an accused person or a group of people. It serves as a license to kill, establishing a moral pretext for stigmatization and cancellation. Even when a theoretical confrontation with Nazism and similar instances of evil has already reached the level of violence against concrete people, fighters against Nazism and would still imagine themselves to be beautiful souls acting in the name of humanity. They establish themselves as being good, not evil, not Nazis. They see Nazism as existing somewhere outside of them, captured by their gaze, but never being in the eyes of a beholder. The anti-fascist gaze easily lapses into paranoia. It makes real what it fears the most.
The South Park episode "World War Zimmerman", which parodies the film World War Z about the zombie apocalypse, demonstrates the mechanics of the paranoiac gaze. The role of the zombies in that episode is played by African Americans. Cartman, the main protagonist, sees them as a threat to humankind. Groundlessly expecting that at any time a ‘zombie’ attack on whites can begin, Cartman is acting unusually nice and is exceptionally careful with regard to Token, his African Americans schoolmate. Though, from time to time, Cartman cannot hold back, exposing Token's involvement in the secret plans of African Americans. Every time Token gets irritated with such ridiculous accusations, Cartman interprets his reaction as the beginning of the outbreak, trying to calm down Token or hiding from him as a source of danger.
This situation manifests that Token fell into the trap of Cartman’s interpretation. When placed under a suspecting paranoiac gaze, the suspect cannot escape it. Each of his reactions will inevitably be interpreted as a manifestation of what he is suspected of. At the end of the episode, Cartman attempts to murder Token.
Hitler became a name most directly associated with horrific misdeeds that occurred in the history of humanity. But what is even more incomprehensible about him, apart from his atrocities, is his humanity. It's hard to comprehend how humanity can coexist with the ultimate inhumanity.
Because Nazism has become synonymous with ultimate evil and antonymous with humanity, it is very uncomfortable to talk about the humanity of Hitler and Nazism. We prefer to live in a comfortable illusion of unambiguity, according to which nothing human was peculiar to them. We lose sight of the crucial thing, that fascism was humane, maybe even too human in a Nietzschean sense. It might be even possible that it became to embody such a large-scale tragedy precisely because of this. Possibly, what allows the horror and inhumanity of fascism to be embodied is its humanity. Maybe it was (and it could only be) dragged into existence as a reverse dark side of humanity. If this is so, it means that our own humanity, something the most human in us, could never absolutely guarantee the absence of its other dark side and ensure that we are not Hitler.
In considering Hitler and fascism, we usually exclusively focus on their evil sides, like Hitler’s mental deviation or monstrosity. There is a stigma, and for obvious reasons, not to speak about him positively, not to recognize his humanity. Such a prohibition is fraught with the inability to see the inhuman side of our own humanity and goodness. Maybe this is exactly the place where it originates.
Hitler was a loving son. When his mother was dying from breast cancer he was the one who was taking care of her. His sister Paula Hitler would confess, “My brother Adolf spoiled my mother during this time of her life with overflowing tenderness. He was indefatigable in his care for her, wanted to comply with any desire she could possibly have, and did all to demonstrate his great love for her” [1]. Their family doctor Eduard Bloch, who was Jewish, would write the following in his memoir, “Outwardly, his love for his mother was his most striking feature [...] I have never witnessed a closer attachment” [2].
Hitler's humanity is terrifying because it means that the presence of humanity in ourselves does not at all guarantee that we are opposite to him. Nothing, including the fact that we love our families, can’t be a guarantee.
According to the expression of Mahatma Gandhi, "The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated" [3]. If so, then the nazist Germany should be recognized as the most moral one. It is known that Hitler was a passionate defender of animal rights and a vegetarian. At the legislative level, Third Reich also had reached significant progress in animal protection. In 1933, after the National Socialist Party came to power, the Reichstag voted to ban vivisection. Thus, Germany became the first country where such a ban was introduced. Early next year, Hitler asked to formulate a law that would restrict hunting. A year later, Reich Nature Conservation Act was passed to protect nature. An entry in the Goebbels' diary dated 26 April 1942 states that after the successful end of the war Hitler will eliminate slaughterhouses throughout Europe.
“The Eternal Jew” is the 1940 Nazi propaganda film purporting to be a documentary. One of the film's key moments is the scene where the Jewish custom of ritual slaughter is shown in full detail — the cow is convulsing violently and bleeding to death. This custom is presented as shedding light on the traditions of the Jews. The final conclusion, into which the whole logic of the film had been led, "the blood of the Jews should never again poison the Germans' blood". Obviously, the aim of the scene about slaughtering cattle was to expose the Jews as immoral and inhuman. In other words, the elimination of the Jews was presented as a moral act of combating the lack of humanity.
In the framework of the Nazi ideology Jews were presented as harmful pathology humanity had to be rescued from. In his death testament, Hitler begs “to resist mercilessly the poisoner of all nations, international Jewry" [4]. It is possible to assume that Hitler sincerely was struggling to save humanity by curing it of a deadly pathology.
Such interpretation of Hitler’s intentions by no means justifies the consequences of the Nazi regime, but these consequences do not cancel his humanity and don’t reveal the ultimate evil truth of his intentions. His intentions are not necessary evil by their nature, but, simultaneously, their consequences embody the most extreme manifestation of evil.
As applied to the current context, this means that there are no final guarantees to ensure that something we perceive today as a manifestation of the most humane and progressive, in the end, will not turn out to be the greatest evil. The naive hope that humanity can cleanse itself from all evil and keep only goodness is vain.
Evil is not the opposite of goodness. Much more often, the former is an extreme level of the latter. The most sincere love and desire to care for others does not guarantee humanity, but simultaneously love and care make our world fit for existence. Humankind is perpetually in a tragic situation — what can destroy us, is also a condition for our survival. Perhaps the very awareness of this hopelessness is our only ‘hope’. Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault may have made the only correct move — revealing each and every person as a bearer of fascism. In the preface to Deleuze’s Anti-Oedipus Foucault calls to confront “the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior” []. In theory, such an approach could solve the problem — a suspicious gaze would be directed primarily at oneself, rather than acting as a mechanism to ostracize others.
The dehumanization of Hitler and fascists serves as a blind spot that allows fascism to be embodied. Today every child is trained to dehumanize Hitler. Everyone has learned that if Hitler was killed in time, the world would be a better place. He is one whose humanity is forbidden to be taken into account. Comparison with Hitler has become a standard technique for dehumanization — we associate those we do not like with Hitler and fascism, justifying our desire for them not to exist. Hitler is a universal instance of dehumanization. Everyone is allowed to wish him dead, and precisely because he, by dehumanizing others, perished them.
Putin and Russians in general, are coming to substitute Hitler and Nazism in being a blind spot of the humane mechanism of dehumanization. At least my daughter and my mom (both Ukrainians) believe that kiling Putin would solve all the problems. Atrocities committed by Russian forces in the Ukrainian towns near Kyiv were my personal threshold, I couldn’t stop wishing anything else but death for Putin. I began to suspect that something is not right with all the Russians. Technically, the war in Ukraine made me, my daughter, and my mother a Nazis who dehumanize a people of certain nationalities. At the same time this like a right thing to do in order to protect Ukrainians and remaining humanity in the world. Maybe it feels the same way for Putin who in his imagination is taking care of Russians and humanity by illiminationg Ukrainians. He is clearly thinks of himself as a messianic figure. In Putin's rally at Luzhniki stadium, he praised his soldiers who were send to kill Ukrainians. Putin was referring to the Bible, saying, "There is no greater love than giving up one’s soul for one’s friends” [5].
References
Essay 1:
[1] Antony Beevor, “They raped every German woman from 8 to 80.”, The Guardian, 1 May 2002,
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/may/01/news.features11
[2] Susan Neiman, «History and Guilt», Aeon Magazine, 12 August 2013,
https://aeon.co/essays/dare-we-compare-american-slavery-to-the-holocaust
[3] Михаэль Дорфман, «Евреи и жизнь. Холокост — это смешно?», АСТ, М, 2009.
[4] Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin Books, p. 123.
[5] Shalamov, V. (1994) Kolyma Tales, London: Penguin Books.
Essay 2:
[1] Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin Books, p. 25.
[2] Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York, NY: Harper & Row, p. 6.
[3] Doliński, D., Grzyb, T., Folwarczny, M., Grzybała, P., Krzyszycha, K., Martynowska, K., & Trojanowski, J. (2017). Would You Deliver an Electric Shock in 2015? Obedience in the Experimental Paradigm Developed by Stanley Milgram in the 50 Years Following the Original Studies. Social Psychological and Personality Science.
[4] Haslam, S. A., Reicher, S. D., Millard, K., McDonald, R. (2014). ‘Happy to have been of service’: The Yale archive as a window into the engaged followership of participants in Milgram’s ‘obedience’ experiments. British Journal of Social Psychology 54(1): 55–83.
[5] Documents on the Holocaust, Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland and the Soviet Union, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, 1981, Document no.161. pp. 344-345.
Essay 3:
[1] Interview with Hitler's sister on 5th June 1946,
https://www.oradour.info/appendix/paulahit/paula01.htm
[2] Kurth, G. M. (1947). The Jew and Adolf Hitler. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 16:11-32, p.22.
[3] Singer, P. (2011). 'Moral Progress and Animal Welfare', ABC, 14 July,
https://www.abc.net.au/religion/moral-progress-and-animal-welfare/10101318
[4] Patterson D. (2016) Nazis, Jihadists, and Jew Hatred, ISGAP Flashpoint, 30 September, https://isgap.org/flashpoint/nazis-jihadists-and-jew-hatred/
[5] Foucault M. (1983), Preface to the English edition, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, p. xiil.
[6] Carter B, Gill B. (2022). ‘Putin Cites Bible Verse at Massive Rally to Justify His War on Ukraine’, CBN News, 18 March,
Cover photo credit by Hasan Almasi