HUMAN CONDUCT AND SOCIETY

People, I will warn you that this post isn’t a particularly happy one (are any of my posts?); in fact it is quite pessimistic and fatalistic (again). Sorry, but that is my feelings about the world at present.

Currently I am re-reading "This was for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen" by Tadeusz Borowski.

Taduesz was a Polish writer who was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau during World War 2. He was lucky in that three weeks prior to his arrival it was decided that, with a few special exceptions, only Jews were to be gassed to death (Auschwitz was originally built by the Germans as a concentration camp for Poles, and the first people to be gassed to death there were Soviet prisoners of war and Poles). As a Polish "Aryan" he was no longer certain to be gassed to death, though he was liable to be killed in a number of other ways, including execution, being beaten to death, through starvation or disease, or just being killed for the fun of it.

However he was lucky enough to survive (as was his girlfriend who was also in Auschwitz) and at the end of the war found himself in the allied occupied part of Germany, then Paris. However instead of staying in the West, he decided to go back to Communist Poland, because he found the West too greedy, selfish and materialistic. Upon returning to Poland he threw himself in with the Communist authorities in trying to rebuild a new Poland. However he soon realised the hypocrisy of Poland’s Communist leaders, and realising that human nature is the same the world over, regardless of the political system, he killed himself in 1951; he gassed himself to death.

"This way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen" is a series of semi-autobiographical stories 'written' by one of the inmates of Auschwitz-Birkenau recounting his experiences. What separates his work from traditional holocaust/WW2 literature is that in his work there are no victims and persecutors, innocent and guilty; everybody is guilty. Those who survived did so at the expense of others; sometimes at the expense of their family and friends. Those that were gassed were gassed because they didn’t resist, they went without putting up a struggle in the hope that salvation would come at the last moment. As such there was nothing noble about those that survived or died, or about the human race generally. In the book he says:

"We said that there is no crime that a man will not commit in order to save himself. And having saved himself, he will commit crimes for increasingly trivial reasons; he will commit them first out of duty, then out of habit and finally – for pleasure.

We told them with much relish all about our difficult, patient, concentration-camp existence which had taught us that the whole world is really like the concentration camp; the weak work for the strong, and if they have no strength or the will to work – then let them steal, or let them die.

The world is ruled by neither justice nor morality; crime is not punished nor virtue rewarded, one is forgotten as quickly as the other. The world is ruled by power and power is obtained with money. To work is senseless, because money cannot be obtained through work but through exploitation of others. And if we cannot exploit as much as we wish, at least let as work as little as we can. Moral duty? We believe neither in the morality of man, nor in the morality of systems. In German cities the store windows are filled with books and religious objects, but the smoke from the crematoria still hover above the forests…

…Responsibility for the world? But can a man living in a world such as our be responsible even for himself? It is not our fault that the world is bad, and we do not want to die changing it. We want to live – that is all."

Which brings us to another thing that separated him from other Holocaust writers. For most Holocaust writers, and people in general, the Holocaust and WW2 were an aberration in human history, perpetrated by a group of people who were unique in history because of how evil they were. For Tadeusz this was nonsense; all human being are capable of such evil, and in fact such evil has been perpetrated throughout history; what WW2 did was take this evil to it’s next logical step; in an industrialised society it used industrial machinery and techniques to kill people. He says:

"We are laying the foundation for some new, monstrous civilisation. Only now do I realise what price was paid for building ancient civilisations. The Egyptian pyramids, the temples and Greek Statutes – what a hideous crime they were! How much blood must have poured on to the Roman roads, the bulwarks, and the city walls. Antiquity – tremendous concentration camp where the slave was branded on the forehead by his master, and crucified for trying to escape! Antiquity – the conspiracy of free men against slaves!

You know how much I used to like Plato. Today I realise he lied. For the things of this world are not a reflection of the ideal, but a product of human sweat, blood and hard labour. It is we who built the pyramids, hewed the marble for the temples and the rocks for the imperial roads, we who pulled the oars in the galleys and dragged wooden ploughs, while they wrote dialogues and dramas, rationalised their intrigues by appeals in the name of the Fatherland, made wars over boundaries and democracies. We were filthy and died real deaths. They were ‘aesthetic’ and carried on subtle debates.

There can be no beauty if it is paid for by human injustice, nor truth that passes over injustice in silence, nor moral virtue that condones it.

What does ancient history say about us? It knows the crafty slave from Terence and Plautus, it knows the people’s tribunes, the brothers Gracchi and the name of one slave – Spartacus.

They are the ones who have made history, yet the murderer – Scipio – the lawmakers – Cicero or Demosthenes – are the men remembered today. We rave over the extermination of the Etruscans, the destruction of Carthage, over treason, deceit, plunder. Roman law! Yes, today too there is law.

If the Germans win the war, what will the world know about us? They will erect huge buildings, highways, factories, soaring monuments. Our hands will be placed under every brick, and our backs will carry the steel rails and slabs of concrete. They will kill off our families, our sick, our aged. They will murder our children.

And we shall be forgotten, drowned out by the voices of the poets, the jurists, the philosophers, the priests. They will produce their own beauty, virtue and truth. They will produce religion."

However one does not have to go back to ancient history to see 'Great Civilisations' built on suffering and death.

The British Empire came about through the invasion of other people’s lands and the slaughter of the native inhabitants, and was fuelled by an industrial revolution built on the backs and deaths of hundreds of thousands of working men, women and children.

The USA, the world’s only remaining superpower, was built on the slaughter of the indigenous inhabitants of North America and fuelled by the enslavement and murder of Africans.

Even Australia was built on the invasion of Aboriginal land and slaughter of the Aboriginal people and was fuelled by forced deportation of Pacific Islanders to Australia and the "convicts" deported to Australia for such crimes as stealing bread to feed the their families.

But the British Empire, the USA and Australia are looked upon favourably, just like Ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt, as opposed to Nazi Germany which is looked down upon.

The question is, will societies look upon Nazi Germany one day favourably, like Ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt or the USA, the British Empire, and Australia are looked upon favourably? Will society one day marvel at the industrial and technological advancements of Nazi Germany just as the industrial and technological advancements of the USA and Britain are marvelled at? Will one day groups of tourists visit the concentration camp at Auschwitz and admire it, in the same way tourists visit the Egyptian pyramids and admire it?