THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS
political community or a party in the narrower sense. Attempts have
failed to create a European elite with a program of inter-European
understanding on the basis of the common experience of the concen–
tration camp, much in the same way that similar attempts after the
First World War failed to draw political consequences from the ex–
perience of the front-line soldier. In both cases it developed that the
experiences themselves could impart only nihilistic platitudes, such as:
"Victim and executioner are alike ignoble; the lesson of the camps
is the brotherhood of abjection; if you haven't acted with the same
degree of ignominy, it's only because you didn't have time ... but
the underlying rot that rises, rises, rises, is absolutely, terrifyingly
the same" (Rousset ). Political consequences like postwar pacifism
followed from the universal fear of war, not from experience of the
war. An insight, led and mobilized by fear, into the structure of
modern war would have led not to a pacifism without reality, but
to the view that the only acceptable ground for modern war is to
fight against conditions under which we no longer wish to live-and
our knowledge of the camps and torture chambers of totalitarian
regimes has convinced us only too well that such conditions are pos–
sible.
An
insight into the nature of totalitarian rule, directed by our
fear of the concentration camp, might serve to devaluate all out–
moded political shadings from right to left and, beside and above
them, to introduce the most essential political criterion for judging
the events of our time: Will it lead to totalitarian rule or will it not?
In any case fearful anticipation has the great advantage that it
dispels the sophistical-dialectical interpretations of politics, which
all
rest on the superstition that some good can come out of evil. Such
dialectical acrobatics retained at least an appearance of justification
as long as the worst evil that man could inflict on man was murder.
But murder, as we know today, is still a limited evil. The murderer
who
kills
a man wlio must die in any event, moves within the familiar
realm of life and death, between which there is a necessary relation
that is the basis of dialectics, although dialecticians are not always
aware of it. The murderer leaves a corpse and does not claim that his
victim never existed; he may obscure the traces of his own identity,
but he does not efface the memory and grief of those who loved his
victim; he destroys a life, but he does not destroy the very fact of its
eyer having existed.
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