The Gens, Part 4: Genocide

 

by Roman Sympos

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                    “Exterminate the brutes!”

                                                      --Mr. Kurtz, Heart of Darkness

                                   

                    “Every day we are not grieving is a day we will be taking vengeance.”

                                                      --Sam Keen, Faces of the Enemy

 

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness no longer appears on most college syllabi. The book’s racism is too palpable for today’s undergraduates to put up with, especially students of color. Attempts to redeem its faults by arguing that it remains relevant precisely due to, rather than despite, its (now obvious) prejudices, fall on ears deafened by the roar of our own desperate battles on every front, cultural, political, environmental, and, increasingly, literal.

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Deafened as they may be, however, those ears remain, unlike those of Mr. Kurtz, exquisitely attuned to that “still, small voice” within that we call conscience, just as Kurtz himself remains relevant to our present crisis in Gaza and the West Bank, if only as a mouthpiece for motivations that dare not speak their name.

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More power to the listeners, say I. I will argue them no arguments. May they bring to pass what they so ardently seek, for all our sakes. I write here simply as a man, an old man, who was once as single-minded in pursuit of justice as they and as attentive to the whispering of that still, small voice.

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I hear it now, in fact.  But it’s whispering contradictions.

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In short, I have lost my singleness of mind.

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Which is odd, because genocide--both the thing itself and the fear of it—usually makes minds single. The fear of it can, in the twinkling of an apocalyptic eye, turn the gens from a cooperative group of uniquely minded individuals sharing a common purpose into a berserk social organism whose one thought is to annihilate what would otherwise annihilate it first. What Samuel Johnson said of execution—“when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully”—goes many times over for the nation that has resorted to genocide, whether the existential threat it perceives is real or only a figment of its collective imagination or, at its most extreme, some form of mass hysteria.

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The dominant purpose of the gens, as it has evolved over millennia and as we have seen in the first three parts of this essay, is to perpetuate itself: first, by insuring the generation of new members, second, by encouraging generosity among them, and third, by resorting to genocide when the imaginary Other, the “not us” against which it defines itself as a unified entity, is thought to endanger its very existence.

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Genocide makes minds single not only among the slayers, of course, but among their victims and, often, among the onlookers, at least those of us who can bring oursevles to watch it without blinking.

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It isn’t easy.

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Gone are the days when we could rely on distance to insulate us from history’s atrocities. They are no longer old news conveyed by Phoenician sailors landing on our shores months afterwards, or rumors of war retailed for drinks in taverns by itinerant tinkers, or epical verses on the fall of great cities recited nightly to beguile a prince’s court in some remote province.

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They are, in short, no longer merely entertainment.

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I speak as one among the first onlookers of atrocities.

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Yes, there were newsreels long before television, and photographs well before newsreels. But Matthew Brady’s photographs of Antietam and Gettysburg didn’t move, and the newsreels were unreeled far from our living rooms (“rooms for the living?”). We had to visit dark Bijou boxes and movie Palaces, magnified versions of the camerae obscurae that were our own closed minds. They weren’t even the main attraction, just appetizers.

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Television changed all that. So did Vietnam.

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Fire is what I remember most, fire and smoke. And bodies. Soldiers torching villages made of grass, a Buddhist monk on fire, the black petals of incendiary bombs viewed from a thousand feet. The bodies of “the enemy”—men in what looked like pajamas, women in flat straw hats, children, too—and of “our boys”—the boys we went to school with. “Body counts.” “Collateral damage.” No euphemism could erase from memory the images I saw on the evening news. Day after day. And nothing had a more immediate and visceral impact in turning me against the War.

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What happened in Vietnam was not genocide, however. Let’s not cheapen the term by widening its application to include any conflict where the antagonists are of different races or nations. Genocide, properly speaking, is what Kurtz had in mind: utter extermination. That’s not what Vietnam was about. Yes, there were racist slurs tossed around. But the “gooks” and “slope heads” were the “bad” Vietnamese, the Cong, “Charlie,” not our allies in the South. We weren’t fighting the Vietnamese! No, no! We were fighting Communism, a fatal infection that, as our leaders assured us, nothing short of cauterization would cure.

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Atrocity is inevitable in armed conflict, just like prostitution and profiteering. You can try to minimize it, but you won’t eliminate it. Genocide is nothing but atrocity. It is the distillation of all armed conflict into Kurtz’s imperative. This means that the death of every victim of genocide is an atrocity. There are no “rules of genocide” and there are no “just kills,” only justifications. When innocent people are not given the time or opportunity to get out of the way of lethal weaponry zeroing in on “the enemy,” we’re not talking about collateral damage. We’re talking about a reckless, policy-driven disregard for human life—reckless because it does not reckon that life to be deserving of the rights due a human being.

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This is the rationale behind all genocides. Dehumanizing the Other is what the gens must first accomplish if it is to justify the extermination of the “not us”—justify it not only to onlookers, but to itself.  Even the gens recognizes, on some level, the enormity of what it has undertaken when, in the face of what it perceives to be an existential threat, it goes genocidal.

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In Gaza, as of a week ago (October 22nd), over 42,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli guns and bombs, the vast majority of them non-combatants and more than half of them women and children. And the slaughter continues. And yes, the US is complicit in that slaughter as long as it keeps supplying the matériel Israel needs to keep at it.

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These facts on the ground have made many minds single in their opposition to what Israel is doing in Gaza and the West Bank, and to our country’s aiding and abetting it.  These minds are to be found not just among the current generation of college age students whose sit-ins, camp-ins, and clamorous demonstrations are the most conspicuous signs of opposition to the policies of the Netanyahu and Biden administrations. You’ll find like minds, more and more of them with each passing day, among the general population, including American Jews.

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Something must be done.

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That’s what I hear my still, small voice whispering, in the tones of my youth.

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Something, yes. But what?

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The answer is hard to discern because it’s competing with another, spoken in a voice more tentative and cautious.  

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I recognize it now: it’s my own voice, half a century on.

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This is a voice I never took seriously as a young man, when it issued from other lips. Like so many of my cohort, I was taught not to trust anyone over thirty. (Or, when I reached thirty, forty, or in another ten years . . . you get the picture.)

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My younger voice urges—no, insists—that I make my outrage and sorrow unmistakably clear by speaking truth to power not only on the street, over the kitchen table, and at coffee hour after church, but at the ballot box. It demands that I withhold my endorsement of the Biden administration’s material and financial support of Israel's war in Gaza by refusing to vote for his political surrogate, Kamala Harris, on November 5th. To do otherwise would be to make myself complicitous in our nation's support for the genocide of the Palestinian people.

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I guess you could say my younger voice is hardly still or small. That’s what makes the disruptive power of my older voice, which sounds feeble and hesitant by comparison, so surprising to me. Perhaps I’ve simply learned to trust it more. It’s achieved a perspective on current events commensurate with its longevity. It sees the long game.

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It reminds me that what’s happening now, in 2024, happened before, in 1968, on my watch. We had a President running for re-election that year, too, who was not only complicit in, but dyed red to the elbows with the blood of innocents. I remember riding the bus from Milwaukee to Ann Arbor one night in late March, along with dozens of other young door-to-door bell-ringers who’d spent the weekend stumping for Eugene McCarthy, an anti-war senator from Minnesota, as the Democratic nominee for President. This was just days before the Wisconsin primary. Someone listening to a transistor radio shouted the news to the rest of us: Lyndon Baines Johnson had announced, on national television, that he would not be seeking re-election. The bus erupted in cheers and fist pounding. At last, we were really doing something! We were making a difference!

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You can read about the difference we made in the Golden Book of Unintended Consequences. Johnson was out, but McCarthy didn’t stand a chance at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. While Mayor Richard Daley’s police pounded and tear-gassed protestors on the streets surrounding the convention arena, Vice President Hubert Humphrey got the nod and the cheers inside. Like Kamala Harris, another vice president, he hadn’t participated in a single primary. He lost to “Tricky Dick” Nixon, largely on the strength of Nixon’s promises to end the war, but arguably for lack of support from my generation of outraged voters. Nixon’s margin of victory in the popular tally was a mere 0.7%.

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My shame at having played any part in sending Nixon to the White House would be complete except for one thing: I voted for Humphrey.

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Nixon’s election not only prolonged the war—and the suffering and the “body counts”—it also expanded the conflict to Laos and Cambodia, where thousands of square miles of countryside were doused with Agent Orange and carpet bombed in an effort to interdict the Viet Cong’s supply routes without having to commit more American troops to the conflict.

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And the unintended consequences didn’t end there. Nixon’s election was the first step in the Republican Party’s Southern Strategy for repainting the traditionally Blue south Red by exploiting Dixie’s backlash against the Democrats’ civil rights revolution. It marked the beginning of the Republicans’ slow and patient take-over of our machinery of governance, from school boards to SCOTUS, for the last fifty years, eventuating in the dire scenario facing us should Harris suffer defeat next Tuesday at the hands of an unapologetic Fascist keptocrat and convicted felon, whose hand-picked Supreme Court majority has handed him the carte blanche of absolute presidential immunity.

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I said at the outset of this essay that I would argue no arguments, but didn’t say I wouldn’t get down on my knees and beg. Young or old, if you are consumed with rage and helplessness at what Israel is doing in Gaza and tempted to skip voting on Tuesday or to vote “None of the above” in order to register your disapproval of our country’s current policies toward Israel, I implore you: please don’t complete what my generation began on that fateful weekend in March of 1968.

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And if the unintended consequence of living under a dictatorship cannot dissuade you from withholding your vote, consider this one: the stateless nation whose plight moves you to tears and indignation will suffer incalculably worse treatment if a Trump administration assumes power. Benjamin Netanyahu is counting on you to help him stay in office. He is counting on you to help him finish the job he set out to do.

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Prove him wrong. Vote for Kamala.

                                                                        ***

I began writing this essay in the heart of darkness (5:00 am to be precise), but I refuse to end there. Sam Keen, philosopher, theologian, psychologist, and (according to his thumbnail bio) master of the flying trapeze, gives us a penlight of hope. It won’t dispel the gloom, but it’s enough, perhaps, to light a way through it.

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My good friend, Bill Schulz, former executive director of Amnesty International USA and author of several books on human (and other) rights, put me on to Sam Keen several months ago by citing the epigraph printed above. It appears in the context of Keen’s analysis of why nations go to war, but it applies with special force to what I have called war’s distillation, genocide.

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Its relevance to the situation in Gaza and the West Bank is hard to miss. On both sides, among Israelis as well as Palestinians, there is much to grieve, and on both sides, not a day passes without thoughts of vengeance. In our own darkness as well, the darkness of this electoral year, we hear cries of grievance and retribution coming at us from every direction. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” is older than its familiar source in Exodus (21: 23-37), reaching back to the Code of Hammurabi, which pre-dates Exodus by half a millennium. Violence has begotten violence for thousands of years, and will continue to do so, it seems, forever and forever, without end.

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Can we break this cycle?

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There's a chance, but only if we never stop grieving.

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The sorrow Keen has in mind goes beyond the grief that must inevitably give way to vengeance, grief for those "like us," for the members of our family, our tribe, our nation—our gens—who have become the victims of the “not us.”  It includes grief for ourselves and, through ourselves, grief for all others, enemies included. “When we are unable to confess that our own parents, our own governments, our own styles of life, have disappointed and injured us,” Keen says in Faces of the Enemy, a book written before the fall of the Berlin Wall,

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we will inevitably create an enemy on whom we heap our anger. The Soviets must find a scapegoat on whom to lay the burden of pain caused by World War II, the purges of Stalin, and the continuing brutality of their own bureaucracy. The United States must find a scapegoat on whom to lay the pain of the disappointment in the American dream and the increasing frustration of life in a high-tech, low-touch society.

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Keen’s psychoanalytic approach brings us back to where this series of essays on the gens began. The Other against which we define ourselves as a unified people is the repository of everything we least like about ourselves, but cannot bring ourselves to recognize as belonging to us: our greed, our suspicion, our spite, our arrogance, our love of pleasure.

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Our fear of death. Of extinction.

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In the faces of our enemies we misrecognize this one, great, over-riding fear because we are desperate to give it a form we can fight. We make it the visible target of our hatred because we cannot, ever, eliminate its invisible, terrifying presence inside us.

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If we follow Keen’s psycho-logic through to the end, we arrive at a faculty of the mind last encountered in part 3 of this series, on “Generosity,” namely, the sympathetic imagination. “To lessen the quantity of cruelty” in the world, Keen writes, “we must learn to listen to the cry beneath violence. The victor must hear himself in the victim's cry, the winner feel himself in the humiliation of the loser.”

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“Every day we are not grieving is a day we will be taking vengeance.”  It sounds like a grim prescription for what ails the world, but it’s the only medicine that will work, and offers the only reliable light for finding a path out of this enveloping darkness.