PARTISAN REVIEW
making martyrdom, for the first time in history, impossible. Rousset
writes:
How many people here still believe that a protest has even historic
importance? This skepticism is the real masterpiece of the SS. Their
great accomplishment. They have corrupted all human solidarity. Here
the night has fallen on the future. When no witnesses are left, there can
be no testimony. To demonstrate when death can no longer be postponed
is an attempt to give death a meaning, to act beyond one's own death.
In order to
be
successful, a gesture must have social meaning. There
are hundreds of thousands of us here, all living in absolute solitude.
That is why we are subdued no matter what happens.
The camps and the murder of political adversaries are only part
of organized oblivion that not only embraces carriers of public
opinion such as the spoken and the written word, but extends even
to the families and friends of the victim. Grief and remembrance are
forbidden. In the Soviet Union a woman will sue for divorce
im–
mediately after her husband's arrest in order to save the lives of her
children; if her husband chances to come back, she will indignantly
tum him out of the house. The Western world has hitherto, even
in
its darkest periods, granted the slain enemy the right to be remem–
bered as a self-evident acknowledgment of the fact that we are all
men (and
only
men). It is only because even Achilles set out for
Hector's funeral, only because the most despotic governments hon–
ored the slain enemy, only because the Romans allowed the Chris–
tians
to write their martyrologies, only because the Church kept its
heretics alive in the memory of men, that all was not lost and never
could be lost. The concentration camps, by making death itself an–
onymous-in the Soviet Union it is almost impossible even to find
out whether a prisoner is dead or alive- robbed death of the mean–
ing which it had always been possible for it to have. In a sense they
took away the individual's own death, proving that henceforth noth–
ing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely
set a seal on the fact that he had never really existed.
This attack on the moral person might still have been opposed
by man's conscience which tells him that it is better to die a victim
than to live as a bureaucrat of murder. The totalitarian governments
have cut the moral person off from this individualist escape by
making the decisions of conscience absolutely questionable and equiv–
ocal.
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