What Would Camus Do?

On Resistance, Sazan Island and the Return of the Untermenschen

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Sometimes the act of writing can show us what we didn’t know we knew, or hadn’t yet admitted to ourselves. Often, actually.

I reached out to a friend and fellow writer last week and over the course of a few late-night emails (late for me, at any rate), we talked about what we’d been up to and I mentioned this newsletter. “As for my substack,” I wrote, “it’s nothing like Sven Birkerts’ ‘short, quick probings at the very axis of reality,’ to recall Melville, which I admire very much, but more like short, quick conniptions or hair-pulling exercises over the state of things. Not my forte, but do nothing I can’t, so I spit into the hurricane.”

I hadn’t realized I felt that way – or not exactly – but there were the words and I couldn’t deny them. They clarified a few things for me. In my life, as in these posts, I’d been hesitating, awkwardly, between engagement and escape, between talking about what’s happening (though political commentary is not, in fact, my forte), and trying to tend my own garden - both metaphorically and not.

My late-night note made my decision easy, showed me that, in my heart, the decision had already been made. All the beauties of the earth will have to wait. Escapism is not what is wanted now.

For a decade or more, the bumper sticker on the back of my Toyota read: “What Would Thoreau Do?” It was a good question, and it still is. It points the way to a larger healing.

But the crisis of the moment, this rising storm of injustice we find ourselves in, demands a different writer: What would Orwell do?

What would Camus do?

Feel free to swap out their names for others in the storied annals of resistance, but the answer will be the same: Whatever they could. Whether they preferred it or not.

Spit into the hurricane. And keep spitting.

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Two items, largely masked by this week’s increasingly surreal parade of imbecility and corruption, give a sense of the hurricane’s size. Taken together, they suggest that this storm isn’t going to end easily or quickly, that the bastards aren’t going to pack up their tents and slink out of town when Donald Trump meets his maker.

Item #1: In Albania, tens of thousands have been protesting (and in some cases, rioting), because Jared and Ivanka, while tooling around on their yacht, apparently ‘discovered’ an island named Sazan and have been moving ahead to build a luxury resort there with the help of an obviously corrupt Albanian administration.

All par for the Trumpian golf course, you might say. What else would you expect from Jared and our very own Marie Antoinette?

Well, beyond the environmental impact, which would be horrendous, lie some interesting facts. Sazan, it turns out, is on the Strait of Otranto, a choke point between the Adriatic and the Ionian Sea, which makes it the gateway between the Adriatic and the Mediterranean. Not surprisingly, this fact has made it a place of interest to successive regimes from the Ottoman Empire to USSR, which left behind 3,600 nuclear bunkers, ten miles of underground tunnels, Soviet submarine pens and deep water anchorages.

Quite a ‘discovery,’ what with all the unexploded ordnance they’ll have to clear. So what’s going on?

Whatever it is, you’re unlikely to find out from the so-called legacy media, which have barely reported on the huge demonstrations against a Trump family project. It’s taken independent journalists to find out that the outfit behind all this, Atlantic Incubation Partners, LLC, is linked to Kushner’s company, Affinity Partners, which includes Trump appointees like the former Chief of Staff to the US Justice Department.

Apparently, this didn’t qualify as “All the News that’s Fit to Print.”

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Item #2, on the other hand, did come from the Times, or, more specifically, M. Gessen, whose work (along with Jamelle Bouie’s and a handful of others’) is the only reason I’ve kept my subscription.

Gessen, who knows a thing or two about authoritarianism and writes about it fearlessly, calls our attention to a White House web page. In cheesy, horror-movie green type, against a starry night sky, the page purports to reveal the long-held government secret that ‘aliens’ have embedded themselves in our communities and walk among us. “They’ve shopped in the same stores,” the web site explains, “attended the same classes as our children, and lived seemingly normal human existences.”

Aliens – get it? It’s ham-handed, sophomoric, pitched to idiots of all ages. And that’s how I read it until I came to that last clause, “ . . . and lived seemingly normal human existences.”

It’s a nativist joke, yes, but it’s testing out a perspective, a stance. It’s a baby step toward catastrophe.

Ten or twelve years ago, I wrote a long essay for Harper’s that was accepted for publication, then set aside when the Editor in Chief got canned. It happens. The essay was called, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Hate,” and I’ve sat on it, except for a few touch-ups ever since. Until today.

Herewith, a small, difficult, but relevant section:

It’s a snapshot drawn from the far outlands of hate, from a period in history that still beggars our ability to comprehend it.

In a sworn affidavit that froze the courtroom in Nuremberg when it was read aloud, an engineer named Hermann Graebe described witnessing the mass killings carried out by the Einsatz commandos at the execution pits at Dubno in the Ukraine. The gas vans had proven inadequate to the need – things had to be speeded up.

I’ll spare the details, which are very nearly unreadable. There are two images from Graebe’s affidavit, however, that I need to isolate from the general horror.

As wave after wave of naked men and women, many carrying children, were driven to the edge of a giant pit filled with the bodies of those who had gone before them, a slim young woman, passing Graebe on the way to being shot, pointed to herself and said, simply, “twenty-three years old” - last words so heartbreaking in their smallness, their stubborn sense of disbelief, that writing them here I find myself struggling for breath.

The second is Graebe’s description of the executioner: “I looked for the man who did the shooting. He was an S.S. man who sat at the edge of the pit, his feet dangling into the pit. He had a tommy gun on his knees and was smoking a cigarette.”

Few of us, I believe, are monstrous by nature; we’re shaped into monstrosity – or our view of the world is, which comes to the same thing – the way clay is shaped under the potter’s thumb. My point is this: In order for you to find yourself sitting on the edge of that pit smoking a cigarette, a great deal of work had to be done. Years of preparation went into making you possible, preparation that had a single aim: to create a vision of the ‘other’ based not just on difference, but degradation. It’s not an original insight: For us to kill with enthusiasm and efficiency, the enemy has to be made alien, unrecognizable. Lowered beyond the reach of our empathy.

It’s hate’s ability to mask our similarities that’s enabled us to do what we’ve done from the days of Genghis Khan to the massacres of the American West to the killing fields of Democratic Kampuchea to the successive massacres of and by Israelis these past two years. In these instances and a thousand like them, the mask of the untermenschen, the sub-human, made everything possible. Your enemy was no longer a Blackfoot woman or fellow Cambodian, a Tutsi or Bosnian Muslim neighbor; an Israeli or Palestinian child, your enemy was no longer he or she, but they, and then, the final step, it – transformed into one of a million indistinguishable vermin, units, numbers, things.

All of which should make Stephen Miller’s description of Democrats as “soulless,” or Trump’s description of immigrants as ‘rapists’, ‘scum,’ and ‘animals’ - something worth thinking about, and if the analogy to the killing fields of history sounds like a stretch, I’d argue that rhetoric prepares the way, and that we’ve seen what the notion of the untermenschen prepared for us in the past. Why would we assume our haters are different – because they’re ours? Like the process of birth, hate is a continuum – there is no discernible moment when the hate-spark lights – and while it’s true that our Neo-Nazi brethren and their ilk haven’t yet come as far in the world of deeds, the conveyer belt they’re on is the same and its destination familiar.

This is my request: Don’t hide. Don’t seek safety.

Call it out. Call it for what it is.

Spit into the hurricane.

It’s what Camus would do.

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