Our wars are never just; our heroes are never pure.
Paul Fussell, whose service in the American infantry during the Second World War defined his entire life and work, understood this. He wrote that all wars are ironic because the distance between the reasons for fighting them and the things that are done in the name of those reasons is vast and unbridgeable. The war in which he fought remains the least morally ambiguous of the hundreds visited on our weary world over the last ten centuries, but even it was not pure. There was the war being fought by nations and generals and heads of state, and there was the war being fought by people against their oppressors, and too often we tend to confuse the two.
But we should not forget the latter group, for it is they, and their courage and determination, that made the war what it was in our moral memory, if not in our historical record. There are few villains of history as clear-cut as the Nazis of Germany, the Fascists of Italy, and the Imperial Forces of Japan, and the misery and suffering they inflicted on countless innocents in the name of their cruel and bogus ideologies were the reason that so many ordinary men and women, many of whom had never dreamed of fighting anything before, felt them a great enough threat to take up arms for the first — and, for most of them, the last — time in their lives.
The people who suffered the most under the Nazi tyranny left a legacy of the importance of not remaining neutral in the face of moral monstrosity. The fact that their position has been reversed, and that the nation founded as a gesture towards repaying them for their agonies is the one currently engaging in a genocide against their own marginalized populations, is one of those proofs that history does not repeat, but it rhymes. Nonetheless, their wisdom persists and should not be forgotten, because the rhyme is getting too loud to not hear; the train is speeding towards its grim destination, and there can be no neutrals here.
I wrote some time ago, when the current crisis (which, of course, is merely the consolidation of other crises into one, the culmination of our decision to ignore or encourage dozens of other malignant political threads) was in its infancy, that it was going to cost friends, drive apart families, strain personal relationships, and jeopardize careers. This has already happened — not just to people, generally, but to me, personally — and it is going to keep happening to degrees that seem unbelievable, even now. But here is where I will say something that will be upsetting and possibly alienating: We have reached the point at which there are more important things than preserving your friendships and protecting your job. As William Saroyan wrote of another incipient genocide, time is running out.
Entire books — entire libraries — have been written about how things like the rise of fascism and the Holocaust could have happened, about why the political and social system collapsed, about how ordinary people could have possibly stood by and done nothing, said nothing as the architects of genocide clearly laid out their plans and announced their intents. We have studied over and over the denial and delusion, the weakness and timidity that kept people from moving against the horrors even as they encroached into their everyday lives, even as the charnel pits and mass graves got closer and closer to their homes and the stench of death began to replace the smell of fresh and open air. There’s no need to rehash it all here.
But at its very heart, at its most basic level, it happened then for the same reason it is happening now: because so many of us have failed to rise to the occasion. Because we have not realized that this is the time, and this is the moment, when we have to decide that it is more important to take a stand against unspeakable and constant cruelty and evil — evil that is being materially supported by our own elected officials — than it is to maintain good relationships with our families, comfortable moments with our friends, and smooth paths to advancement in our careers. Now is the time to understand that there are things more important than ourselves and our comfort. The time is not coming — it is already here — when we have to decide whether the smooth operation of our social relations are worth more than the lives that are being shattered and obliterated with our unspoken consent.
It should also not be necessary to enumerate what is going on; anyone who cares to do so can learn easily about how many liberal democracies are making a fascist turn, about how many innocent women and children are being ground into dust by the Israeli war machine, about the corruption of our press and the bankruptcy of our leadership and about the violence and deprivation we are forcing on the most marginalized and helpless by brutes and monsters to distract us from their theft of our labor and the common wealth. Nor am I going to address any of the ‘what can I do?’ questions that suggest themselves at times like these; for one thing, that information, too, is plentiful and all of us have the means to help, even in small ways, the people at the receiving end of this brutality. For another, sometimes it is enough simply to make your position clear, and this is one of those times.
This is the time. This is the moment. This is when things have gotten bad and are going to get worse. If you know about such times, you know that there are those who did speak up, who did not let their jobs or their families or their friends dictate whether or not they would let evil operate in silent consent. You can choose that path; certainly most people do. I do not have children, nor much of a job, and perhaps it is easy for me to say all this, from a position of having nothing much to lose. But in any case, I have chosen the path of speaking out, and organizing, and fighting. I will damn this damnable horror for as long as I can speak or write, and I will organize against it for as long as organizing can be done. I am fat and old and my knees are weak and my heart is not strong, but if the time comes to fight, I will fight, and I will do whatever I can to cost the authors of fascism in their own blood.
We remember too little of the past. But in times of genocide, we remember four kinds of people: the perpetrators; the victims; those with the moral courage to speak out; and those who quietly stood by and prayed for an easy life, for it all to pass over them, for nothing more noble than to hope that the suffering would be inflicted on someone else, not on them. This is not their time. This is the time for moral courage. Find it, and let it be your shield against what is coming.