Flash Post #14

There is a poem I am fond of pointing people to, Bertolt Brecht’s The Interrogation of the Good (see below), whenever I get the sense from them—often stated outright—that our contemporary political disputes are of little consequence in the grand scheme of things. That we should consider such matters beneath us and not let politics get in the way of… more important things. As if we have the privilege of choosing when our lives may be overtaken by political matters.

Before I get into the poem, I want to touch on one of the lesser known atrocities of the Nazi regime. The sort of “minor” atrocity that, to a people accustomed to the rule of law, should be among the most appalling imaginable, but which amounts to a mere footnote in comparison to something like the Holocaust.

During WWII, on the night of September 3, 1943, the UK Royal Air Force conducted a bombing mission over Berlin. Among the places struck was Plötzensee Prison, which served as the site of some of the Nazi regime’s most infamous executions, including those ordered by  Roland Freisler‘s so-called “People’s Court.” Many of those implicated in the July 20, 1944 plot against Hitler would be executed at Plötzensee—stripped of their clothes and hanged by piano wire, slowly strangling to death. However, the most common method of civil judicial execution in Germany (contrasted against the extrajudicial and genocidal massacres carried out, for example, in death camps) was actually beheading by a German version of the guillotine.

On this night in 1943, by pure coincidence, some of the bombs from the RAF raid struck close enough to the prison to damage not only its buildings, but its guillotine. At the time, there were several hundred persons under sentence of death incarcerated at Plötzensee, some with death warrants already signed and awaiting the next arrival of the executioner, but many with appeals for clemency filed and still pending a decision. While some were condemned for purely political offenses—things as petty as saying nasty things about “Der Führer”—I hesitate to describe any of them, even those convicted of murder, as “common criminals.” By this point, the integrity of the German court system had eroded to such a state—had become so corrupted in the service of an evil regime—that even its convictions for serious non-political offenses must be considered suspect. As such, from our perspective today, I daresay the presumption of innocence should still attach to all those tried and convicted under the Nazi regime, no matter how heinous the alleged offense and no matter how seemingly damning the record of their conviction. Therefore, what happened during the nights that followed September 3, 1943–the “bloody nights” as they are now known—must be considered an act of mass murder.

Hitler had already criticized the German “justice system” (such as it was) for the glut of prisoners awaiting execution in Germany—for taking too long to try, condemn, and execute them for their supposed crimes. So when, after the September 3 air raid, they temporarily lost the use of the chief means of execution at one of their largest civil prisons, officials at the Reich Ministry of “Justice” were more than a little embarrassed. Here they were, already subject to scrutiny for failing to expeditiously process and execute so many “criminals,” and now, not only did they not have a working guillotine: they couldn’t even be sure of keeping the condemned from escaping because the prison’s walls had been damaged in the same air raid that took out the guillotine! At the rate things were going, there simply wasn’t time to afford everyone due process.

In response to this embarrassment, and very much feeling Der Führer’s need for urgency, officials at the Ministry of “Justice,” in concert with prison officials, proceeded to draw up a list. Beginning with prisoners whose death warrants had already been issued, and then continuing without interruption, they set out to run through and quite literally dispose of as many prisoners as possible in as brief a time as possible, lest any escape. The list of the condemned was provided to the Ministry of “Justice,” and “Justice” officials, in an effort to give perfunctory attention to the already threadbare due process requirements of the Third Reich, then proceeded to summarily reject each appeal in turn and issue an execution order to prison officials over the phone without the standard written death warrant.

The murders began on the night of September 7, and they continued until September 12. In lieu of a functioning guillotine, and with so many human lives to extinguish in such a short amount of time, they resorted to mass hanging: 8 people at a time from a single gallows, with the condemned waiting their turn in rows of 8 under tight guard in the court yard. On the first of these bloody nights, 186 people were executed (murdered) in this manner. The next day, prison officials realized that six of them—six human beings—had been executed erroneously. That is, their death sentences had been carried out while an appeal was still pending, either because they had been missed in the game of telephone or because some high official had expressed a willingness to actually consider the appeal. Did this stop the bloodletting? Of course not. Although Reich Minister of “Justice” Otto Thierack (who would commit suicide after the war rather than answer for his own crimes) was informed the next day of the mistaken executions, he ordered that the executions (murders) continue—albeit at something short of the break-neck pace of the first night. And so, by September 12, some 250 human beings of various nationalities, including not only Germans, but also many victims of Nazi occupation in France and Czechoslovakia, had been slowly strangled to death in a frenzy of state-sanctioned murder. Again, six of them erroneously, even according to the enfeebled due process protections of the Third Reich.

But that’s not what this post is about. This post is supposed to be about a poem. Still, I think the digression is warranted as it provides important context for why this poem comes to me now: when substantive due process is lost, when basic human dignity is denied and fundamental rights are treated as mere conveniences that may be set aside without substantial justification, procedural due process is not long to follow. Once a nation begins to slide, to turn its back on due process for some, there is no telling where it may end. Nor, when it comes to authoritarian regimes, is this accidental: lawlessness is the point.

Anyway, it’s a short poem, so I’ll go ahead and reproduce it here:

The Interrogation of the Good, by Bertolt Brecht

Step forward: we hear
That you are a good man.
You cannot be bought, but the lightning
Which strikes the house, also
Cannot be bought.
You hold to what you said.
But what did you say?
You are honest, you say your opinion.
Which opinion?
You are brave.
Against whom?
You are wise.
For whom?
You do not consider your personal advantages.
Whose advantages do you consider then?
You are a good friend.
Are you also a good friend of the good people?

Hear us then: we know.
You are our enemy. This is why we shall
Now put you in front of a wall. But in consideration of your merits and good qualities
We shall put you in front of a good wall and shoot you
With a good bullet from a good gun and bury you
With a good shovel in the good earth.

What is “Good”?

One interpretation of this poem is that it is a fairly straightforward lament on how oppressive regimes kill the good, literally and figuratively. Brecht was a German national, born in 1898, and he would admit to studying the works of Karl Marx—although he would claim he never was a member of the Communist Party. With such pedigree, he would have had the opportunity to witness, either first hand or through reports, the descent of both the Soviet Union and Germany into the archetypal oppressive regimes of our time: one ostensibly on the left, and the other very much on the right. And the timing certainly makes sense. The poem was written circa 1935, and by then Stalin and Hitler both were firmly in control of their respective governments, well on their way to converting the architecture of the state into a means to further consolidate their hold on power. But I think such a reading is both overly superficial and highly cynical.

Alternatively—and I will admit that this is how I interpret the poem—it represents one side of a dialogue between the oppressed and the oppressor. But which side represents the oppressor: the interrogator or the subject of the interrogation? It would be easy to assume that the interrogator must naturally be the oppressor. After all, what are firing squads if not a tool of the oppressor? Did not Stalin, in his purges, send so many of his detractors—real or imagined—to the firing squads? Would not Hitler do the same? And, more recently, Pol Pot? Saddam Hussein?

Well, yes. But here again, I think such a reading is superficial.

What if, rather than being a “pulled from the headlines” retelling of events from Brecht’s own lifetime, the whole interrogation and ensuing firing squad are more… metaphorical? What if the poem represents the sort of judgment against the oppressor that the oppressed might yearn for and the anti-authoritarian revolutionary may aspire to?

Because I have to admit, when I think of people meekly offering up a defense along the lines of “Please don’t judge me too harshly, I’m a good person,” it’s not the oppressed that come to mind, it’s the oppressor. Because the truly oppressed—that is, those whose grievances are not imagined and who really have been subject to extraordinary persecution by an authoritarian regime—are not so naive as to think that merely being a good person will save them. They will know, long before it comes time to face the (often literal) firing squad, that it is not for want of any “good qualities” that they have been selected for persecution. More likely, it is some intrinsic characteristic that has sealed their fate, and this without need for any kind of interrogation—metaphorical or literal—by their oppressor. Indeed, it is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes that they will deny the most grievously oppressed any opportunity, even in the form of a show-trial, to put forward a defense of the sort that “the good” is afforded in Brecht’s poem. How many victims of the Holocaust, for example, do you suppose were interrogated before they were lined up and shot en masse or sent to the gas chambers? Not many, on a relative scale, I would wager. They were prejudged. No interrogation was necessary according to their oppressors.

On the other hand, “I’m a good person” (and its close cousins, “I am a not a bad person” or “I wasn’t any worse than most others in my position”) sounds like exactly the sort of ham-fisted defense a stereotypical oppressor—or one of their present day apologists—might offer up when it comes time for even the weakest kind of moral judgment. Think the commandant of a concentration camp who loved his wife and children, standing trial at Nuremberg. Think the slave owner, writing in his memoirs after the Civil War about how, “first of all,” the Civil War was totally about state’s rights (it wasn’t), not slavery, and in any event slavery really “wasn’t so bad” because they hardly ever beat their slaves to death and they also hired a preacher to read to them from the Bible every Sunday (most likely with a heavy dose of Ephesians 6:5-8). All nice guys if you’d only get to know them, right? As if running a death camp or purporting to own other human beings as property and subjecting them to forced labor and corporal punishment is somehow compatible with being a “good” man. As if the normalization of evil—its broad cultural acceptance, or at least its being condoned by the most powerful in society—must necessarily confer absolution upon those who do evil.

More broadly, I see the poem and its implied dialogue between the interrogator and the interrogated as a confrontation between relative morality and critical morality. Where relative morality might, for example, have us judge historical figures or people in other cultures by the standards of their day or of their culture, critical morality admits a more universal approach. Which is not to say that critical morality is absolute or that circumstances don’t matter (that’s more a distinction between deontology and consequentialism), only that, when viewed through a critical lens, the mere claim that an evil act is broadly accepted or regularly practiced within a time or place does not suffice to make the act less evil—let alone “good.” Under critical morality, even if we were to grant, for the sake of argument (and, to be clear, I do not) that slavery was once broadly recognized as at worst morally neutral and at best a moral good (as your bible-thumping plantation-owner might well imagine), we are nevertheless free to condemn it according to our own, hopefully more advanced, understanding of morality and the human condition.

For what it’s worth, I am firmly on the side of critical morality. I could go on at length about what I consider to be the merits of critical morality and the numerous shortcomings of relative morality, but in the interest of time, I’ll put forward just one. That is, that morality has never been monolithic. Even in the deep south, in the midst of the Civil War, when opposition to slavery could be construed as treason and punished by death, there were abolitionists and Unionists who understood, as well as we do now, that slavery was wrong and that fighting a war to preserve it was morally abhorrent. And yet, so often, the relativists would have us discount such anti-slavery sentiments from our moral calculus and simply conclude that “people just didn’t know slavery was wrong back then.” It’s circular, it’s perverse, and it’s predicated on the erasure of not only the oppressed (who, as a condition of their oppression, often lacked the means or opportunity to leave behind a written record), but also those voices that we do have, often from a favored class (eg: white abolitionists), who spoke out against the oppression.

Moral relativism, whether applied to history or to contemporary injustices in other cultures, thus deals a double blow to the oppressed. Not only does it admonish us against calling out the evil that was or is being done to them by their oppressors, it necessarily discounts the countervailing moral views of the oppressed and those who would stand with them. It adopts the moral calculus of the oppressors, and in so doing portrays those who stand against oppression as deviants who are thus implicitly—and sometimes explicitly, as in the case of radical abolitionists like John Brown—deemed immoral. See also racist stereotypes about southern “mammies” (subservient and loyal—staying “in their place”) versus “uppity [insert racial slur]s.”

But this is not supposed to be an essay on the merits of critical morality over relative morality. It’s just some thoughts I have on a poem. As for how it all ties in, I suppose it comes down to how I see the poem as one side of a dialogue between the oppressed and the oppressor. As a dialogue about judgment. Although I like to imagine that it is the oppressed who has gained the upper hand and now stands in judgment over the oppressor, the poem does not admit a definitive interpretation. Which is to say, in the end, I do not know who the judge is. Such is the beauty of poetry, I suppose.

More pressingly, I do not know who will judge me—or if I will be judged at all. I can only hope that, if I am to be judged, I will not have to stand before the tribunal on such a weak defense as “I was a good man” or “I wasn’t any worse than anyone else in my position.” To me, that sounds like an admission of complicity. It smacks of the sort of defense that would be offered by one who has stood alongside the oppressor and watched, in silence, as their fellow human beings were denied due process and systematically stripped of their rights. For myself, if judgment should come, I hope instead that I might say, “I stood with the oppressed against the oppressor,” and be judged accordingly–whether by the oppressor or the oppressed.

We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant.

– Eli Wiesel

I cannot be silent. I cannot look away. I must take a side. I urge you to do the same, and to stand ready for judgment if and when it comes.