Righteous Killers
SF and Violence, Part 3
Jorge Luis Borges’ story “Deutsches Requiem” (1946) opens with this line: “As for myself, I am to be shot as a torturer and a murderer.” You expect the first-person narrator to proclaim he is not guilty of these crimes. But the very next sentence is: “The court has acted rightly; from the first, I have confessed my guilt.” The story is not about an innocent man being accused of murder. It is about a murderer claiming he is innocent.
Borges, like Stanislaw Lem, is one of the classics of SF. His short stories, such as “The Library of Babel”, “The Lottery of Babylon”, and “The Aleph” are what some critics have called “fabulation”: short philosophical tales with a striking and unexpected message. “Deutsches Requiem” is one of these tales but it does not take place in some impossible space, such as the infinite library of Babel. Narrated from a prison cell, it is a self-justifying monologue by a Nazi war criminal.
One of the most irritating features of our time is the fact that the words “Nazis” and “Nazism” have become an all-purpose insult, hurled by the left (and occasionally the right) at anybody who even slightly deviates from the party line. As the result, they have lost all meaning. Jews are called “Nazis” for supporting the right of Israel to exist; scientists are called “Nazis” for using the words “biological sex”; and even people who defend classic liberalism are called “Nazis” because why not? But Nazism was a very specific political ideology. It belonged to the cluster of radical ideologies that emerged in the late 19th-early 20th century and included fascism (not the same thing as Nazism); socialism; and communism.
Without getting too deeply into the weeds of political theory, suffice it to say that all these ideologies were utopian. In other words, they promised an ideal world without inequality and strife. However, to reach this secular millennium, humanity first had to go through the period of Tribulations, during which the enemy standing in the way of progress was to be exterminated and society purified through violence. Once the purification was achieved, the utopia was imminent. The difference among these ideologies lay, first of all, in the nature of the enemy. For Nazis, it was the Jews. For communists, it was the capitalists and eventually, the nebulous “enemies of the people”. 1 To use the language of Christian theology, those standing in the way of progress were the damned, while those who fought for the future were the elect. The criterion for designating the damned was race for Nazism, class for communism. Their visions of utopia were not the same. But ultimately, these differences were no more important than the differences among the visions of paradise in different religions. Because Nazism, fascism, and communism were not just political ideologies. They were secular religions.
John Gray in his book Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia describes the inextricable nexus of utopia and violence:
“Utopias are dreams of collective deliverance that in waking life are found to be nightmares” (17)
In other words, the Holocaust, the Terror, the Great Leap Forward, Kholodomor, the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia are not the “oops” moments in the implementation of an otherwise perfect vision as the remaining true believers in communism or Nazism still argue today. They are the inevitable consequences of the vision itself:
“The use of inhumane methods to achieve impossible ends is the essence of revolutionary utopianism” (Gray 17).
Ideological killers have no sense of remorse because they see violence as service to the ideal. Killing is not done for pleasure or profit. It is a higher duty.
And this is where ideological violence differs radically from crime or even culture-sanctioned violence, such as human sacrifice or ritual cannibalism. Serial killers know that what they are doing is wrong. Some come up with excuses (“she asked for that” or “I was abused as a child”); others do not. But as Fox and Levin point out, many serial killers are ‘stormtroopers in the search of an ideology”, looking for the sense of righteousness that buoys perpetrators of genocide (25).
The difference between utopian violence and culture-sanctioned violence (which includes war) is more subtle. History offers a neverending parade of slaughter done by tribes, countries, and empires in pursuit of power or profit. But as Stanislaw Lem argues, culture-sanctioned violence is limited; it is the means to an end, which at least in principle, is achievable. But utopian violence never ends because utopia is impossible. And so, you have to kill one more Jew, send one more enemy of the people to the Gulag, starve one more kulak, and then history will look kindly at your endeavor and finally the Thousand-Year Reich or communism will be within reach.
Yes, Stanislaw Lem. You did not think that this essay will overlook him, did you? No other writer of SF thought as deeply about the problem of violence as Lem did. But the text I am going to discuss briefly is not one you are familiar with because it has never been translated into English (I do know that I have Polish and Russian speakers among my subscribes, so apologies).
The text is called “Provocation”. It is a Borgesian metafictional tale: the review of a nonexistent book. It first appeared in the Polish magazine Odra in 1980 and was then printed, together with “One Minute”, by a German publisher Suhrkamp Verlag in 1981. However, while the rest of Lem’s Borgesian reviews have been translated into English and collected in several volumes, the Lem website maintained by his estate starkly notes: “Prowokacja has not been translated to English”.
Is it simply an oversight? A publishing accident? No. “Provocation” articulates the stark truth about the human condition that the Anglophone West was not ready to confront forty years ago and seems even less ready to confront now.
Like all of Lem’s reviews of nonexistent books, “Provocation” has the format of an actual review, with the title of the book being discussed and the particulars of the writer at the beginning. This book is supposedly a two-volume work by one Horst Aspernicus, titled simply Genocide and consisting of two volumes: The Final Solution as Salvation and Foreign Body Death.
Aspernicus starts his non-existent masterpiece by summarizing the history of massacres. He points out that war and murder are human inventions; animals kill only for survival. Predators cannot choose to shift to a vegetarian diet. Humans, on the other hand, kill for a variety of reasons, only some of them having to do with competition for resources. But the key word here is “reason”. Wars, massacres, ethnic cleansings abound in the historical annals of every nation and go back to the very origin of our species, if not before. In wars of antiquity, the women and children of the defeated enemy were often enslaved, while the men were put to the sword. Whole cities were plundered and burnt. However, these massacres had a pragmatic, utilitarian aspect. Plunder, enslavement, political power, revenge –no matter how depressing, the list of reasons for ancient wars demonstrates that killing was always a means to an end, whatever this end may be.
It is only in modernity that genocide becomes separate from warfare. And only in modernity, genocide truly comes into its own as a motiveless, purposeless extermination of an entire group of people, in which, whatever its ostensible justification, the killing is an end in itself. It is not done for material gain. It fulfils no military need. The only purpose of mass murder is mass murder.
The first modern genocide was the slaughter of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War 1. It already bore what Aspernicus sees as the distinguishing feature of mass murder today: its utter futility. The Armenians were not a military threat. The Ottomans attempted extermination of an entire ethnic group brought no gain to the crumbling empire. It did not slow down its defeat and disintegration. It seemed to have no utility whatsoever.
The Holocaust magnified that purposefulness of genocide and made it the defining feature of the subsequent mass murders through the twentieth, and eventually twenty-first, centuries. The extermination of German Jewry was a net economic loss for Germany, causing a grave damage to the country’s financial, educational, and medical systems. Of course, much of Jewish property was eventually plundered but it did not cover these losses. And in any case, most of Jewish property had already been confiscated before the deportation to the death camps in the East started in the middle of the war, putting an additional strain on the country’s resources without any gain. In fact, the opposite was the case. The diversion of materiel and human resources to extermination sites and death camps was a serious drain on the military. So why was it done?
In his novel His Master’s Voice (1968), Lem offers a partial answer. In this novel which deals with communication with incomprehensible and mysterious aliens, there is an embedded story by a Holocaust survivor named Rappaport, which, we now know, is based on Lem’s own experience. Rappaport (and Lem) were about to be executed but then suddenly let go. Rappaport describes the behavior of the Nazi officer who was polite to the Jews and then shot them simply, efficiently, and with no hesitation:
“Although he spoke to us, you see, were not people. He knew that we comprehended human speech but that nevertheless we were not human; he knew it quite well. Therefore, even if he had wanted to explain things to us, he could not have…The simpler ones among his men did not possess this higher knowledge; the appearance of humanity given by our bodies…deterred them a little from their duty; they had to butcher those bodies to make them unlike people’s. But for him such primitive proceedings were no longer needed (65-66)”.
In her magisterial work The Nazi Conscience (2003) Claudia Koonz shows that many Nazis were, in their own eyes , good people who undertook the genocide unwillingly, as a heavy duty to the Fatherland rather than as an orgy of violence. The rhetoric of literal dehumanization led to many Germans sincerely accepting the notion that Jews were “alien beings” excluded from “Germans’ universe of moral obligation” (Koonz 6-8). And here we meet Borges’ character Otto Dietrich zur Linde who presents himself as a selfless martyr for the cause of Nazism, a hero, if not a saint.
But is he as convinced of his own rectitude as he makes it out to be? There are hints in the story that Linde is less at peace with murder and torture than he pretends to be. And as Aspernicus points out in “Provocation”, if the Nazis truly believed that the Final Solution was virtuous and necessary, they would advertise Auschwitz and Treblinka instead of hiding them.
If the Nazis opted for what was obviously a less effective method of getting rid of the Jews because of a single advantage it offered. This advantage was the experience of murder, either in person or by proxy. Death camps and execution sites, such as Babyn Yar in Ukraine, were places were Jews could be tortured, humiliated, and eventually murdered with impunity. Paradoxically, in opting for murder instead of sterilization of some other form of bloodless extermination, the Nazis indirectly acknowledged the humanity of their victims. Had they truly believed Jews were mere insects, they would have found no pleasure in torturing them. You do not torture cockroaches in your kitchen when you call in an exterminator. But the whole point of the Final Solution was to impose the maximum amount of suffering, humiliation, and pain on the victims. The goal of this historical crime was the pleasure that the crime offered its perpetrators.
Holocaust denialism is the direct heir to the Nazis’ own doublespeak. It is not that deniers actually believe that the mountains of evidence, testimonies, photographs, and documents are all fake. It is that they need to deflect the moral opprobrium of the genocide by blaming the victim, while still enjoying their vicarious participation in mass murder. The Nazi had their cake and ate it by describing the genocide as a virtuous undertaking to save humanity from the Jewish parasites while knowing full well that what they were doing was murder. Holocaust deniers have their own cake and eat it by painting the victims as the perpetrators of a giant hoax, while knowing in their heart of hearts that the evidence is incontrovertible.
A genocide, according to Aspernicus, does not need a reason. It needs a pretext. It is an end in itself, not the means to an end.
Today we see the exactly same dynamics at work in what Hamas did on October 7. Hamas went beyond the Nazis. The latter were at least somewhat ashamed of what the did. Hamas put its rape and torture online for all to see. In October 7, the thirst for utopian violence has come full circle. No need for a substitute religion such as Nazism or communism. Hamas ideology is, or pretends to be, rooted in the actual religion of Islam. But the dynamics of self-justification, utopian purification, and the pleasure in violence are exactly the same as described in “Provocation”. If serial killers are the stormtroopers looking for a cause, terrorists are the serial killers who have found what they have been looking for.
Nazism, communism and terrorism are industrialization of death in the service of pleasure. At least in the moment of killing, a terrorist escapes their own mortality and becomes one with the kitsch image of the Ultimate Judge derived from the half-forgotten religious eschatology. By torturing or executing his victim, he kills his own death.
Is Aspernicus right? Is it true that Nazis killed Jews for no other reason that they wanted to? Is it true that terrorists, in Lem’s time and today, torture and kill their victims because they can; because as opposed to common-or-garden variety serial killers, they can enjoy both the pleasure of violence and the self-righteousness of collective struggle? Is it true that the Holocaust was not an exception but the rule? Is it true that motiveless genocide has become an inseparable part of modernity, and we are going to see more and more slaughter under the banner of justice or decolonization or progress?
I believe it is.
Works Cited
Gray, John. Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (London: Penguin Books, 2007).
Koonz, Caludia. The Nazi Conscience. (Harvard University Press, 2003).
Lem, Stanislaw. "Provokaziya." n.d. https://www.jewish-library.ru/lem/biblioteka_1_provokatsiya/. electronic. November 2023.
Lem, Stanislaw. His Master's Voice. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983 (1968)).
Levin, James Fox and Jack. Overkill: Mass Murder and Serial Killing Exposed. (New York: Plenum Press, 1994).
Of course, the categories significantly overlapped, especially as Nazism was also anti-capitalist in its own way, and communism pretty quickly slid into open antisemitism.
Excellent essay
This is brilliant! Thank you Prof. Gomel!