Only Three Choices

I note this week an article by Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books where he writes, "in 1945, in one of her first essays following the end of the war in Europe, Hannah Arendt wrote, the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of post-war intellectual life in Europe - as death became the fundamental problem after the last war."

During the aforementioned Diocesan Council, last weekend, one fella spoke upon a resolution (it might have been Payday lending or immigration), demanding as much
anger about these issues as there is about sexuality.

On September 2, 2007, the Bishop of Uyo, Nigeria, the Rt. Reverend Isaac Orama said, "Homosexuality and lesbianism are inhuman. Those who practice them are insane, satanic and are not fit to live because they are rebels to God's purpose for men."

In the 1940's, the kind of language employed by Bishop Uyo, drew upon ideas lodged in the hearts and minds of future genocidal perpetuators and ushered them to fruition through otherwise unimaginable practices of fulfilling them. Judt makes the point, though, that by equating the Holocaust to all levels of inerrant behaviors today, we grow numb to the real possibilities. Predatory payday lending practices, and inhumane treatment of immigrants represent unaccepatble assaults upon the dignity of victims; there are casualties, along the way, but universal declarations that usurers, debtors or illegal aliens are not fit to live, are rare.

I continue to read in Julian Roy's, "Trial of Marshall Petain," how the French confronted the evils of Nazism. Prosecution and defense witness debate, from self-serving viewpoints, since very few had clean hands, what they apprehend as the crux of the matter - whether the honor of the nation was best preserved by taking one of three choices: a ceasefire; an armistice; or capitulation.

The honorable crux devolved upon the shoulders of vainglorious military men, who'd reluctantly, sacrificially, in their minds, assumed power in June 1940, as the German blitzkreig rolled south; men whose pre-existing monarchial, clerical and authoritarian predilections did not contrast greatly with their Nazi conquerors.

Nowhere else in Europe was a defeated country offered an armistice that preserved half the country as a nominally free land. As one prosecution witness said, 'if we'd capitulated, they'd have installed a gauleiter, and we would've known where we stood.' Vichy, instead, created a moral wasteland, subject to gradually magnifying diabolical compromises.

Wikipedia reports, "Petain immediately used his new powers to order harsh measures, including the dismissal of republican civil servants, the installation of exceptional jurisdictions, the proclamation of anti-semetic laws, and the imprisonment of his opponents and foreign refugees." After General Weygand, a defense witness, had been appointed by Petain as Delegate-General to the North African colonies, "he applied Vichy's racist laws against Jews very harshly, driving out from the colleges and from the primary schools most of the Jewish pupils, including small children aged 5 to 11 - Weygand did this without any decree of Marshall Petain's, [but] by analogy," he said, "to the law about Higher Education."

Perhaps later in the book, charges of genocidal complicity will be raised; so far, it's not the fate of victims that forms the crux of the matter; only the honor of old men is at stake.

In Helmuth Von Moltke's, "Letters to Freya," which we reviewed earlier, there was a passing reference to sanitoriums where SS men were taken who'd broken down after performing genocidal duties. I've attempted to research that intriguing tidbit further, yet, to no avail. While moving in that direction, however, I stumbled upon Nuremburg testimony that refutes the 'only-following-orders' defence. Prosecution researchers were unable to find few, if any, cases, where SS officers who'd refused to kill were they themselves killed - almost all received minor punishment.

Even if the French generals only had three choices in the immediate wake of German conquest, what choices did they face; what actions did they take, post-Armistice?

No one is clean. Jules Roy, the author, himself, of The Trial of Marshall Petain, according to the NY Times, is alleged to have exhibited early Vichy sympathies (which, detected between the lines, he doesn't deny) before joining the Royal Air Force, and later, becoming famed, for "resigning his commission in 1953 to protest French involvement in the war in Indochina, and expressing fierce opposition to French efforts to smother Algeria's late 1950's fight for independence."

When it comes to Vichy, lest we think our country much cleaner than France, we need look no further than the story of Varian Fry, as reported by Marc Leepson, in World War II magazine, who as a volunteer for the American Rescue Center from "August 1940 until early September 1941, was able to spirit some two thousand refugees, nearly all of them artists and intellectuals, and many of them Jews, out of the city and away from the clutches of the Gestapo and their French Vichy collaborators."

Who were Fry's greatest antagnonists? The Gestapo? Vichy officials?

"The U.S. Consul general in Marseilles, Hugh S. Fullerton, vehemently opposed Fry's efforts." William Peck, Vice-Consul, a man who "was anti-Jew and anti-Fry, seemed to delight in making autocratic decisions and refusing as many visas as he could."

Finally, "In the summer of 1941, the State Department brought Fry's work in Marseilles to an end by refusing to renew his passport unless he agreed to leave France. Fry refused to budge -- only to be expelled by the Vichy French in September 1941. His colleagues kept his refugee escape operation going until June 1942, when French authorities shut it down."

Ironically, according to the International Herald Tribune, as "This Wednesday marks the 75th anniversary of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party taking power in Germany, [it's] prompted yet a new round of soul-searching." Avi Primor, former Israeli ambassador to Germany, said, "Where in the world has one ever seen a nation that erects memorials to immortalize its own shame? Only the Germans had the bravery and humility." The Herald further reports "the experience of Nazism is actively alive in contemporary public debates over everything from the country's troops in Afghanistan to the low birth rate to the country's dealing with foreigners."

The experience isn't actively alive here. The deeper problems of evil aren't fundamental to our public debates, whether at Diocesan Council, or in our daily lives. After 9/11, it was, for a little while. Unless the problems continue to touch us, directly, they don't linger in our thoughts. When we narrow our choices to the few immediate options in front of us, as did the French generals, we block out the real lurking dangers. When we go to trial, will any of us have clean hands?