Away with all your monuments. Yet today, again, we are compelled to monumentalise. It is the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Little liberation it was: of the 1.3 million Jews sent there, over a million were murdered. The resistance failed. What does the compulsion to monumentalise feel like? Screens everywhere littered with stories of quiet bravery in the face of fascism. Faith in the promise that history could have been otherwise. Tales of fortitude picked up like golden tickets by all those officials, who happily assure us that should fascism ever threaten again they would be on the right side. And what were those who died like? Some were good people, others bad. Some were communists, some not. Some were Zionists, others not. Some resisted. Some collaborated. Most were broken before death. And resistance often meant a quicker death too. Ultimately it made little difference, because they alike were murdered. And although many brave people across Europe risked everything to save Jews, to rescue them and smuggle them across borders, many others did nothing.
I’m scared by these stories, that deal in separating good from bad, the resistor from the collaborator. The horror of Auschwitz is of indifference. Among the victims of the Holocaust the compulsion to resist was the very same as the compulsion to collaborate. And if the lesson that is learned is that every Kapo deserved his own execution, it is no lesson at all. Today I am remembering those who, as well as resisting, did not resist, could not resist, resigned, gave in, handed over their brothers and sisters, parents, children, and comrades to fascists and were nonetheless murdered. It is a grizzly thought but one we cannot do without. Today I am remembering those who survived and who nonetheless were far from angels, whose lives were blighted and who continued to blight the lives of others. Because to become victims of fascism did not make them good either. This is not to say that those who brought the message of what happened, that those who were spared and fought to stop us forgetting, were no good.
The compulsion to monumentalise means that Auschwitz has become some fatal star of morality. The industrialised murder of Jews, of Roma, of people with disabilities, of gay people, of communists, has become an opportunity for the great and the good to distance themselves from evil. It is feel good and blindness. It has become a festival of comfort and of peace. Peace we need and comfort we do not. In making sacred the victims it remakes them into sacrifices, whether or not they were spared.
I think of the words of the great philosopher Gillian Rose, who talks about “the sentimentality of the ultimate predator” in thinking about the film Schindler’s List. She wrote, “Schindlers List betrays the crisis of ambiguity in characterisation, mythologisation and identification, because of its anxiety that our sentimentality be left intact. It leaves us at the beginning of the day, in a Fascist security of our own unreflected predation piously joining the survivors putting stones on Schindler’s grave in Israel. It should leave us unsafe, but with the remains of the day. To have that experience, we would have to confront our own fascism.” It is one of the bravest thoughts.
Today fascism again threatens. It threatens in the middle of our culture of sacralised victims. The fascism of our time has more than it would like to admit in common with the compulsion to monumentalise. It stands opposite and as mirror image of the saintly victim, as the accused. It says, “if the victim does not need to question whether they are good or bad, if their victimhood is sovereign, then I have no need to take their accusation seriously, and have no need to confront my own fascism.” But we do not need our victims to be good for the demand for justice to be righteous. Indeed justice can illuminate the world only in the redemption of those who were not already good, not already saints, not already sacralised by what was done to them. And justice does not recognise the goodness of those who were compelled to resist, as others failed. So today I resist as I affix my memory to those who did not resist. Away with all your monuments. Only then can we confront fascism, without prematurely celebrating (already 75 years too late) our anti-fascism.
(I put this up, now a year later, because I haven’t had time to write something new this year.)