- Timothy Snyder, from Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, p. 402
What allows people to kill one another?
This frank, unadorned question has occupied humankind through the ages, provoking both disgust and fascination, terror and excitement. It is one which all schools and sciences have attempted to understand on their own terms; a question which is at the center of comprehending and destroying the human condition.
Perhaps we can address this question by first asking another. Have you ever read Camus' The Stranger? The novel's protagonist Meursault is a pied-noir, or Algerian citizen of European heritage, who murders an Arab person. Caught and sentenced to death, he eventually comes to terms with his mortality, stolidly refusing to yield to despair by allowing himself to be consumed by the meaningless grandeur of existence.
Camus' work has long been appraised a classic and, in fact, the paragon of secular existentialism, which boldly proclaims that existence precedes essence. There is no transcendent truth or divine purpose. People must forge their own reality and set of values by which to live, superimposing a personal understanding of existence on life's cumulative chaos and conquering the leviathan of despair.
The problem with this outlook is its implicit acceptance of life as a series of competing fictions. Questions concerning life's meaning are not so must elucidated, or even struggled with, as they are circumvented altogether. Lingering and, as Camus himself recognized, searing doubts about one's constructed worldview are deemed an unnatural and regressive tendency. Even while noting the crushing reality of these doubts -- what Camus called "despair" -- the idea that these doubts may indeed allude to some greater existential purpose or need (like every other sensation) is never entertained.
Indeed, denial of these unnatural but universally-held doubts may be the only aspect of the existentialist worldview that Camus asserts must be shared. One can make up the other details as they so please, but they can never acknowledge the ever-palpable sensation of doubt, even as it suppurates and festers.
What makes this ideology dangerous is its separation of the subject from their environment and, by consequence, its investiture of a god-like status within each participant through which they may order their own world. The writings of Camus and many other great authors appeal to contradictory desires and senses. Algeria is portrayed in lush yet terse prose, evoking a landscape of multiple contours which immediately please the senses. We can relate to the sights and sounds, the daily grind and numbing worries of Meursault's world.
At the same time, Meursault is granted supernatural powers that are not noticed by even many close readers. Though his world is one of aesthetic complexity conveyed in pleasing language, he is granted the decidedly unnatural ability to dictate the rules of his universe, standing apart and directing it from a vantage-point of near-supernatural power. No character's personality is quite as rich and developed as his own. The person he kills is not even granted the honor of a name -- all we know is that he was an "Arab."
The idea that a person can stand apart from their environment and construct it according to their own whims is a dangerous one. When the reader remembers that a human being was murdered because of Meursault's assumptions of personal privilege, epistemic power and belief in his possession of a god-like ability to construct his own universe, this truth becomes clearer, though it is one which Camus ironically seems to have not recognized (even though his main character killed a man, or "Arab").
People are not clairvoyant -- they do not sit outside their world and objectively peruse it -- but, rather, are in the middle of this messy process we call existence. The danger that resides in presuming the right to organize one's universe according to supposedly objectively-constructed principles, i.e. principles seen as personally constructed outside the natural process, is all too real.
People easily become pawns, subject to the beholder's assignment of judgment or placement in the world. After all, if one's assumes the ability to craft their own world then this naturally involves dictating the roles of other people, at least in reference to one's own person. Since the intellects of all people are finite and fallible it is impossible for the beholder to ascertain the inordinate complexity and individuality of even a single other person, not to mention themselves.
Plainly spoken, the problem of believing that one can objectively structure one's own world, or infuse essence into it after the fact of existence, is that other people are inevitably turned into mere objects. Their personhood cannot be conceived because it is beyond the intellectual capacity of any mere human. Yet by believing in their ability to create their own reality Meursault and company assume this god-like ability. If they may construct their world then it naturally revolves around them; how could it be otherwise? Other people are deemed tertiary rather than integral to their world, and, in some cases, expendable.
The fact that Meursault manages to conquer his doubts, or despair, should not be a cause for rejoicing but profound sadness. And the fact that he shows no remorse for murdering a fellow human being, a person whom Camus perfunctorily assigns the title "Arab," is equally disturbing. In both cases reality is denied: real needs signified by a physical sensation are repressed instead of addressed, and the life of another person is senselessly cut short. If anything, it would seem that these two developments bode ill for Camus' existentialism, though somehow these details remain conspicuously and alarming overlooked.
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The assertion of one's fictions, or constructed understanding and terms of existence, provides a powerful framework within which murder can easily become justifiable, even reasonable. For if there is anything that greases the way for killing it is the assignment of otherness to people beyond one's self. In order to kill someone else it is often necessary that the killer first distinguish themselves from the potential victim by painting them as fundamentally different from themselves.
Oftentimes, the symbols and titles used to separate the potential killer from their victim are attendant to their own perverted worldview. In all cases, these titles and barriers to the acknowledgement of shared humanity are cosmetic, distracting from the eternal truth that all people possess humanity as well as intrinsic value (as opposed to essence after existence).
Thus Camus does not assign a name to the murdered victim, merely labeling him an "Arab." The term "Arab" operates on multiple levels. At one level the person's personhood is degraded by the omission of their name but on another level he is denigrated with the label used, it being racial and consequently denoting a clear set of power relations between him and Meursault, in which he is the lesser being.
It is highly doubtful that Camus understood the racist overtones of this omission and racial labeling. The constructed worldview which he held, amongst numerous other progeny and inheritors of European colonialism, was that race does exist and in it lie certain notable differences. When one reads Camus' other works such as The Plague, his "Arab" characters remain just as anonymous and forgettable. After Meursault kills the "Arab" he does not experience regret because he acted according to a prescribed though plastically perverse logic form of logic which clearly grants him power over the anonymous "Arab."
Camus' subscription to the equally synthetic and destructive idea of nationalism, or support of an allegedly shared goal by a random group of people who reside within manmade borders, is equally telling. It is this uncritical nationalism which allowed him to support the French war effort against native Algerians who sought independence from the onerous yoke of French imperialism during the Franco-Algerian War (1954-62). Again, the good guys and the bad guys are determined by their use of symbols and constructed identities -- the flag, skin color and residence -- erecting barriers to the acknowledgement of their shared humanity.
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In Timothy Snyder's masterful history of the genocides and ethnic cleansings that preceded, and occurred during and after WWII, he emphasizes the manipulation of notions of difference that greased the way for mass murder. While millions of Jews, Belarusians, Poles, Ukrainians, Soviet soldiers and others died because of the ethnic, political or religious identities, it is a grievous error to see these people as Jews, Belarusians, Poles, Ukrainians or Soviet Soldiers.
These ethnic, national, political and religious identities are the ways in which their murderers saw them, often differing from the ways in which the victims identified themselves. In fact, it is by these facile labels that Hitler, Stalin and other murderers perceived the victims, stripping them of all human attributes.
To say that the person killed was a Jew or Pole is to accept the Nazi and Soviet narratives -- the narrative of the killers.
Most people who died during this period did not see themselves primarily as a Jew, Pole, etc. but as a mother, father, doctor, author, student, lover, and so on. To reduce them simply to an ethnic, religious or political moniker is to take for granted a simplistic narrative of predestined destruction -- the Nazi and Soviet narratives. One version saw these people as expendable so that a German empire could be consolidated and the other saw them as fodder for the building of socialism.
In both cases, these people and their destruction were perceived as existing outside of history. The builders or forgers of this new world would complete this dirty but necessary work, and then history could resume itself. To state this differently, the murderers saw themselves as entitled to create a new world order with themselves at the center. They alone were privileged with the ability to objectively envision and construct this new order, and with irrepressible self-assurance this is what they attempted to do.
It is one of the tragedies of victimhood that the victim often ends up taking the name assigned to them by the killer. Unless they take up this label their claims to victimhood are often denied or rendered unrecognizable, seeing as the dominant narrative is almost always that of the powerful aggressor. This is one of the legacies of power -- the murderer can dictate the terms of the account even after their passing.
The tragedy of the Holocaust and WWII is not that people who were "Jews," "Poles", "Belarusians," or "Soviets" died. The tragedy of the Holocaust and WWII is that people died.
The tragedy of the Holocaust and WWII is not that people who were "Jews," "Poles", "Belarusians," or "Soviets" died. The tragedy of the Holocaust and WWII is that people died.
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In Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment, the main character Rodion Raskolnikov murders an elderly pawnbroker only to be crippled by guilt and remorse. No matter how hard he tries, he cannot extinguish feelings of self-loathing and psychological torment. Unlike Camus' Meursault, however, Raskolnikov eventually acknowledges his crime and the reality of his profound torment, repenting of his grisly deed and coming to terms with his iniquity.
In one novel, the main character murders a man and succumbs to the psychosis of his grisly deed; in the other, the protagonist acknowledges the reality of moral compunction and comes to reconcile himself to the existence of transcendent truth. One character entertains the pretension of being able to construct reality; the other recognizes his fallibility -- his humanity.
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