Forces of Nature
by Kay Hagan
A month after the 2004 US presidential election I was in Washington DC visiting my sister, and I took the opportunity to visit the Holocaust Museum for the first time. In addition to paying homage to the dead, I was searching for clues in that social movement toward barbarism and savagery, to the puzzling political climate of today.
Red/blue. Secular/religious. Right/center, and left out altogether. I had participated passionately in the election, reluctantly but deliberately setting aside my cynicism and allowing myself to believe in a more innocent time when the simple strategy of “throw the rascals out” was still possible.
So my outlook as I entered the Museum was as grim as the gray December day. I was resigned to another four years of a social movement championing its own brand of barbarism—this time, it would seem, in my name.
At the start of the museum tour, I took an “identification card” to carry with me from a stack of thousands in a bin by the elevator door. “For the dead and the living we must bear witness” was written above the seal of the US on the face of the passport-like card. Inside was the story and photograph of Rachel Rechnitz, a real person who lived in Poland during the Holocaust. Although her luggage was waiting to be shipped to Palestine on the day the Germans attacked Poland, she died before she could escape.
I walked out of the elevator into a chamber of darkness, the displays of photographs, newspapers, artifacts, and films lit with only the dimmest of light. With Rachel as my guide, my eyes slowly adjusting, I began my search for clues, and brought to mind my two questions: “How was it possible?” and “Is it happening again?”
The intricate presentation was chronological, describing moments in the gradually shifting climate that spawned the rise of the National Socialist party, and its ambitious leader. Nazi propaganda was simplistic, emotional, repetitive, and uncompromising I learned, its aim to evoke “people’s total obedience to the unlimited power of the regime.” As the public rallies and rituals increased, people were expected to participate, and this helped to “weed out” the disobedient.
Historian Fritz Stern commented recently:
German moderates and German elites underestimated Hitler, assuming that most people would not succumb to his Manichean unreason; they didn’t think that his hatred and mendacity could be taken seriously. They were proven wrong.
Stern goes on to say:
A key lesson is that civic passivity and willed blindness were the preconditions for the triumph of National Socialism, which many clearheaded Germans recognized at the time as a monstrous danger and ultimate nemesis....German history teaches us that malice and simplicity have their own appeal, that force impresses, and that nothing in the public realm is inevitable.
One way the museum conveyed the Nazis’ industry of extermination was through an eye-level display on the scale of a model train, this one depicting a death camp crematory, hundreds of small figures, carefully inventoried and marked, entering the low flat building on one side, lining up for the gas chambers as if queuing up for food rations, the resulting corpses then carried unceremoniously to a line of attendants waiting by the ovens. Standing back, I could see the orderly system in one glance: a design of ingenious problem-solving that began as a creative idea, a thought, an image in someone’s mind.
The problem to be solved was one of sheer numbers: the thousands, then millions. How to kill efficiently, how to dispose of the bodies? The cremation solution was the result of trial-and-error, after corpses buried in the cold winter earth inconveniently resurfaced in the thaw of spring.
This is repugnant, I think. These people were monsters. Then, in my mind’s eye I see the orderly campus of Los Alamos National Laboratory, its identification cards of many colors, and the high science of modern weapons design adding to our public vocabulary: daisy-cutters, bunker busters, and highly-prized small-yield nuclear arms. I see orange jumpsuits in rows of wire cages in Guantanamo, fresh-faced soldiers grinning over a cold corpse in Abu Grahib, and a ladder of bureaucrats and generals in the halls of Congress admitting responsibility, but not being held accountable. No, the designers of death are not monsters. They walk among us. They are us.
Still, those numbers. At the museum I cross a walkway suspended over a small sea of shoes on either side, then pass a mound of old luggage, each worn leather case carefully marked with a name in white. Across the room, a photographic mural seems at first to be a landscape, at close range is a mountain of human hair. And the numbers, the numbers.
How do we comprehend the numbers, the death toll, the toll of death? A few weeks later, urged by seething magma, tectonic plates deep under the Indian Ocean shift and shudder. The south Asian tsunami rises up from the sea, pushing then pulling the edges of eight countries, sweeping away everything in its wake. These forces are evidence of physical cause and effect, not the consequence of choice or design or industry. The death toll begins at ten thousand, doubles and doubles again, to one hundred thousand and rising, horrifying and motivating a worldwide rush of compassion as we are told the losses are incomprehensible, unfathomable, unable to be imagined. Yet we do imagine them. In our dreams, we see each face disappearing into the dark.
We are shown diagrams of geology and understand this tragedy is blameless, a force of nature. The island animals had fled to higher ground, while people gawked at the tide, receding into the horizon before returning at warp speed. Our hearts open, we ache with sadness, we send money, make frantic phone calls and hold our dear ones closer, away from the undertow of unpredictable swirling water.
Rebecca Solnit observed that “the tsunami has been treated as an occasion when we should know as much as possible, see as much as possible, feel as much as possible, give as much as possible” but “when our military has created the catastrophe, we are not allowed to see so much or encouraged to empathize or attempt to assuage it with charitable contributions....”
A tidal wave of “news coverage,” of propaganda, prepared us for the moment of “shock and awe” and we watched from a distance as our ocean of violence rose up and rolled over one country then another, the momentum fueled by the triple tithing of our taxes, a different kind of contribution.
We are spoon-fed these numbers, a somber marking at one thousand soldiers killed, while a footnote that same week calculates civilian deaths at one hundred thousand. But the front page held no pictures of wailing mothers holding their gray babies, or corpses lined up on the ground, forming a patchwork of not blameless death, but death calculated, systematic, and in our names. Our hearts do not open to these numbers, our compassion unawakened. We sleep soundly, without dreams.
Then, a tremor, deep in the collective memory, the shifting tectonic plates of an aching skull. Upstaged by the ocean’s power, does he feel the need to assert himself? The arrogant eye, growing bored with the untidy matters of mop-up and accountability, shifts its gaze to Iran.
If we respond with a wave of compassion to the toll of death from a force that is blameless, can we grasp the power of our choice to see the uncounted faces of those killed in our names? Iraq. Darfour. Guantanamo. Germany. Brace yourself for the undertow. The ovens are being lit.
Seymour Hersh, investigative reporter, said recently:
...The amazing thing is we are being taken over basically by a cult, eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have to wait for much later historians and better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease. It does say something about how fragile our Democracy is. You do have to wonder what a Democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way.
I am in the final corridor of the Holocaust Museum, a section devoted to those who resisted. “Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized people as allowing itself to be governed without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct.” This, from the first pamphlet of the White Rose Society, made up of students from Munich University , the only group in Germany to openly protest the Jewish genocide.
Six decades later, Fritz Stern reminds us that in Nazi Germany “even in the darkest period there were individuals who showed active decency, who, defying intimidation and repression, opposed evil and tried to ease suffering.”
The graceful, circular Museum sanctuary at the end of the exhibit is filled with candles lit to honor the dead. I feel my heart open to possibility, to hope, to the power of my own choices. I will speak, I will stand witness, I will resist and imagine. I will feel the tremor of shifting earth, and move to higher ground.
When I came out into the afternoon, muted by the overcast sky, I walked to meet my sister, who had passed the morning at an exhibition of Japanese prints at the Smithsonian. We sat on a park bench in front of a courtyard carpeted discordantly with bright blue pansies, glistening with recent rain. She showed me her treasures from the exhibition shop: calendars and cards, graceful images in gentle luminous colors, of the full moon over mountains, snowy egrets on the wing, and geishas in repose. And then she asked how my morning was. Fine. Good. Intense, I stammered, searching for how to go on, my heart full. Her face quickly closed, her eyes dropped away, and I fell silent as we walked past the Capitol dome, down the stairway to the metro tunnel, into the darkness.
February 2005
note on sources
Fritz Stern. Acceptance speech upon receiving the Leo Baeck Medal at the 10th annual dinner of the Leo Baeck Institute, November 14, 2004. Transcript: lbi.org/fritzstern.html
Rebecca Solnit. “Sontag and Tsunami.” January 3, 2005. www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2095
Seymour Hersh. Acceptance speech upon receiving the Menorah Award for “bringing new light into dark places,” from The Shalom Center, December 12, 2004. Broadcast on Democracy Now!, January 26, 2005. Link to transcript: www.democracynow.org; search “We’ve Been Taken over by a Cult,” Seymour Hersh.
working notes
Hurricane Katrina offers another opportunity to observe the difference in our compassionate reaction to natural disasters—earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes—and catastrophes caused by humans: wars of aggression, failures of preparedness and response, economies of greed and disdain.
I continue to be perplexed by our ability as humans to detach emotionally from episodes of mass suffering for which we can be held, or can hold others, responsible. The underlying question that drove the writing of this essay concerns how our compassion is influenced by our belief about whether human beings are separate from nature or a part of the natural order. Which is to ask: Is the human ego a force of nature? Acknowledging the obvious place of humans within the natural order pushes us past comfortable attitudes of separateness and superiority, toward a curiosity about and assumption of our responsibility to nature. I do believe we are a part of nature, the part that has a conscience. Stern, Solnit, Hersh, and the White Rose Society provide glimpses of that compassionate conscience in action.
And as the similarities grow between contemporary US government policies and those during the rise of the Third Reich, one wonders what will be on display in The American Empire Museum.
September 2005
about the author
Kay Hagan is the author of Vow: The Way of the Milagro (2001), Fugitive Information: Essays from a Feminist Hothead (1993) and several other books. Since moving to New Mexico twelve years ago, she's become interested in anthropology, nuclear morality, and Dominionist Christianity. Recently, she emerged from the sudden parenting of a teen aged girl. She thinks the return of Trivia heralds either the death of patriarchy, or the Rapture.
