PARTISAN REVIEW
though never with complete success, to establish the superfluity of
man-by the arbitrary selection of various groups for concentration
camps, by
con~tant
purges of the ruling apparatus, by mass liquida–
tions. Common sense protests desperately that the masses are sub–
missive and that all this gigantic apparatus of terror is therefore
superfluous; if they were capable of telling the truth, the totalitarian
rulers would reply: The apparatus seems superfluous to you only
because it serves to make men superfluous.
They will not speak so frankly. But the concentration camps,
and even more so the corpse factories invented by the Nazis speak
only too clearly. Today, with population almost everywhere on the
increase, masses of people are continuously being rendered superfluous
by' political, social, and economic events. At such a time the instru–
ments devised for malcing human beings superfluous are bound to
offer a great temptation: why not use these same instruments to
liquidate human beings who have already become superfluous?
This side of the matter is only too well understood by the com–
mon sense of the mob which in most countries is too desperate to
retain much fear of death. The Nazis, who were well aware that their
defeat would not solve the problems of Europe, knew exactly what
they were doing when, toward the end of the war-which by then
they knew they had lost- they set up those factories of annihilation
which demonstrated the swiftest possible solution to the problem of
superfluous human masses. There is no doubt that this solution will
from now on occur to millions of people whenever it seems impos–
sible to alleviate political, or social, or economic misery in a manner
worthy of man.
1.
That Rousset's purely literary
vitali~m
could survive the years in Buchen–
wald would seem to be striking proof of Kogan's thesis that "most of the pris–
oners [left] the concentration camps with exactly the same convictions that
they had before; if anything, these convictions became more accentuated" (p.
302). David Rousset concludes 702 pages of horror, which prove many times
over that
it
is possible to kill man's humanity without killing his body, with a
short paragraph of "triumph," that sounds as if it had been written by a
literary hack who had never set foot outside of Paris. "We never blasphemed
against life. Our systems of the world were not alike, but more profoundly,
more remotely, our affirmation of the power and creative grandeur of life, our
762
