Good Guys, Bad Guys

I'm old enough to remember the end of the Second World War.  I was staying with my grandmother, who lived across the street from the factory where my father worked. When the whistles started blowing, my grandmother grabbed my hand and said, "Come on, we've got to find your father!" We never did. People started streaming out of the factory and into the streets and there was singing and dancing and hugging and kissing. I was five years old.

A few years later - I was in fourth grade, so it must have been 1949 - a terribly naive teacher decided it would be fun to ask everybody, "Where does everybody here come from?" I lived in a town filled with first generation immigrants, and we didn't bother with hyphens. As she went around the room, everybody gave their ethnic background: "Polish! ... Italian ... French-Canadian." When they came to me I brushed past the fact that my father's mother was English-Canadian from Nova Scotia and his father was born in Scotland. I said, "German," because the most important person in my life was my mother's mother, my Großmutter.  My German-born mother had learned to hide her identity during the war, as thugs threw stones through the windows of the German Lutheran Church they attended, but to my grandmother it was unthinkable that she should apologize for being German. "There are good people and bad people everywhere," she said in my response to the question of how the Germans could have started the war and done those horrible things to the Jews. That explanation was adequate for a pre-teenager. It still is for maybe most people in the world today.

The result of my admission that I was of German stock was that I got slapped around at the next recess. Largely by the "Italian" kids. At nine or ten I was old enough to recognize the absurd irony of Mussolini's people beating me up for being identified with fascism. By the end of the war, though, Italy's part in the war was largely forgotten and all the anger was now directed at Germans.

The question of identity has dogged me ever since. For years my mother wanted to deny her German identity. For years I wanted to deny my gay identity. Many years later, travelling in Europe, we used to laugh at all the Americans who wanted to be taken for Canadians, after the world began to turn against America for its involvement in Vietnam. Later, the tendency of Americans to wave their flag in people's faces, declare themselves to be "God's country" and repeat notions like "city on a hill" when talking about themselves made it necessary to distance ourselves from the kind of jingoism that would one day become the pathology of Trump's "America firsters." That those folks were always there is now obvious, but until Trumpism opened the door to uninhibited self-promotion, the arrogance was kept in check.

One learns at an early age about the intellectual error of over-generalization. But that doesn't prevent us from committing it over and over again. Reductionism is a given in almost any discussion of cultural differences. I lived in Japan for over twenty years, all told, and had to contend with the notion that "We Japanese think collectively; you Americans think individually," from even some otherwise erudite folk. On the one hand that's a truism, but on the other, it's also an opportunity for the intellectually (and morally) lazy to hide their inability to handle nuanced thinking.

I started into the article this morning in the latest New Yorker by Masha Gessen, "The Prosecution of Russian War Crimes in Ukraine," but had to put it aside. I'm a bit burned out by tales of torture and brutality. She tells the tale of the Russian attack on Bucha and Irpin, vividly detailing the shooting of innocent civilians in the back of the head and not even dumping them into mass graves, but leaving them to rot in the road, and preventing their families from carrying them away in a wheelbarrow.

One of my favorite film moments of all time is from the film Munich, with its screenplay written by Tony Kushner. If you're not familiar with it, it's the story of the revenge killing by Golda Meir of the Israeli Olympic Team murderers. She put together a team to kill them all, one by one. Each team member is assigned one of the assassins. When they get to the last one, he can't pull it off. He keeps hearing the voice of his grandmother, telling him in his head, "It isn't Jewish."

It's that simplicity of the black-and-white thinking involved here that appeals to me. Clearly it is Jewish to kill the killers of your own tribe. Golda Meir and her cabinet are all Jews and they are all behind the effort. But one can easily see how a Jew, like the avenger's grandmother, might be grounding her idea of right and wrong in perhaps the greatest contribution anyone has ever made to a global ethic, the Jewish notion that one does not kill. Jews don't own the idea; others have come up with it as well. But the Jews put it in one of their ten commandments, which they, with the aid of the Christians, have carried down through history to serve as part of a universal system of right and wrong.

Despite that, as with most things, the devil is in the details. What is murder and what is justified killing is in the eye of the beholder. And in the end, there is no ultimate judge beyond an arbitrarily embraced religious or other source of authority. What it comes down to, obviously, is who gets to speak for the tribe. And that leads to the question of who gets to choose the person who decides who gets to speak for the tribe.

My grandmother's explanation that there were "good Germans" and "bad Germans" stayed with me only until I was old enough to come at the question of right and wrong from another direction. Was it really just Adolf Hitler who brought on the Holocaust? Obviously, he could never have pulled it off on his own. Ultimately he managed to get a critical mass of Germans behind him, intimidate the fearful, empower the thuggish, appeal to nationalist idealism, march the youth of Germany to their deaths, and take so many millions of lives with them that we can't agree even today on the final number. Wikipedia puts it at between 70 and 85 million.

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen published a very powerful book in 1996 entitled Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, in which he pretty much makes the case it wasn't just Hitler but the German people and their longstanding anti-Semitism that brought about the Holocaust. It is tempting to think Goldhagen has pulled off an important insight here. Not Good Germans vs. Bad Germans, but something in the German nature that made this genocide possible. I became a convert to the notion, despite the cognitive dissonance I had even as a child when I had to explain the Nazis over and against the kind folk who taught me not only right from wrong but also the importance of dancing and singing and enjoying a great glass of beer.

It's the reductionist problem all over again. It's not that the Germans killed the Jews and it's not that the Russians are brutalizing the Ukrainians. It's not that the British reduced India to poverty and the Americans repeated the imperialist French folly in Vietnam. It's that in each case the potential for committing those atrocities lay dormant in their various national cultural homes, waiting for the invitation to surface.

A minority seized power in Germany in 1933, and pulled off some very effective terrorist acts, chiefly the burning of the Reichstag, which they were able to blame on the Communists. A century later, the alienation experienced by so many Americans would lead them to think the China shop they lived in just needed a good bull, and objective truth was an easily ignored impediment to that goal. We are on the verge of throwing our democratic experiment, greatly improved since the early days of the Republic but far from perfect, into the trash. And because that inclination to violence and destruction lies in the character of Americans, just as surely as does the desire for fair play and the expansion of Enlightenment morality and justice, we could go either way.

The Germans, one hundred years ago, opened the gates to the violence within, as did the Japanese in their desire to be like the European imperialists when they marched into Manchuria and Korea. As the Russians are now doing in Ukraine. And Americans, an alarmingly high percentage of them, are willing to let the white Christian nationalists among them who believe religion should be given priority over civil rights.  Hungarians are lining up behind an expressly anti-Semitic leader, and so are the Americans who marched in Charlottesville, shouting, "Jews will not replace us!"

It is a total waste of time trying to slap the label of "bad guys" on an entire nation of people, or even a large section of it. There are still Nazis in Germany, but it's not difficult to see that most Germans are strong supporters of the enlightened democracy they have built up since 1945, and particularly since 1989. Many Americans followed the Pied Piper Donald Trump for a time, but as the vote in Kansas to keep the access-to-abortion amendment in their constitution demonstrates, they are no longer calling the shots.

There's no escape from the nagging question of what to do about the misery caused by the "bad guys," big and small. Masha Gessen's article (which I went back and finished later in the day) centers on the efforts of the Ukrainians to document atrocities for eventual prosecution by the world court. It's a thankless process, and one is easily overwhelmed by the extent of the misery. Why focus on punishing one evil-doer when you know thousands of others will get away scot free? How do you keep things in proportion?

When do you seek punishment, as with the Nuremberg Trials, and when do you seek reconciliation instead, as the South Africans did once they had overthrown apartheid? How do you decide whether the descendants of slaves in America are due compensation for what was done to their ancestors?  The questions go on and on and it's tempting to just throw up your hands and say the best thing is to let bygones be bygones and focus on the future.

That's not my take on the issue. I've picked up the conviction that order beats chaos, if you can impose it, and that includes bringing criminals to justice, no matter how daunting the task. It can take a decade or more to bring genocidal killers to justice. But that doesn't mean you don't work the whole time to bring about that goal.

I can't get my head around the Christian notion that we are all born in sin. But I do at least wonder if they're onto something. There is a good guy and a bad guy in all of us. The important question is whether we can find the energy, the integrity, and the good will it seems to take to make sure the good guy is not overpowered by the bad guy. That you can sleep at night. Look yourself in the mirror.

I'm perhaps a little early, but put a big circle around November 8th on your calendar. It's the power mechanism we have to keep the bad guys from taking over.

In the meantime, I think we have no choice but to keep pushing that boulder up the hill yet another time. To keep clear headed.  To not allow Trump to be the sole focus of Trumpism and think we've solved the problem by putting a DeSantis in power instead and declaring victory. All that accomplishes is giving a more competent bully the stick to beat us with, taking us out of the frying pan into the fire. I lost a good friend some time ago who got tired of my appeal not to surrender the U.S. to the bad guys. He decided I was a fool, blinded by the ideology I was indoctrinated with as a youth to believe America ever was or ever could be a democracy.

I'd like to find a way to reconcile with that friend. I suspect that's not going to happen. I'm not willing to surrender control to the bad guys. I owe it to the health of my soul to keep on going. 

I won't hate you if you flee to Canada.  But I'm staying here.