Love may own the most variable, the most volatile, the most contradictory of definitions of any of the virtues and perhaps of any noun.
One may declare love for an object, an action, a food or drink, animals, trees, flowers, every kind of flora and fauna, for a weapon, for a rosary, for Presidents, dead or living, for tyrants, for states of being – He loves being in love. One may pursue vengeance as a duty born (and borne) out of love. Love may be unrequited, obsessive, immediate – the lightning strike, or devastating – a bad break up at 18. However, can love turn so far on a circle that 180 degrees later its definition permits murder, mass murder, genocide?
My friend believes the Holocaust was primarily motivated by love, not hatred. His key word is primarily. His contention is that hatred began with Hitler and the ingrained anti-Semitism of Germany (and much of Europe), but hatred is hot, it burns itself out. Pogroms kill but devolve into exhaustion. Genocide requires method, stamina, a motivation greater than animus.
He writes, “When it isn’t occupied moving mountains, love of nation, love of Volk, love of [an] abstract principle” of Aryanism, of being Germanic can be a force of terrible destruction. “[Hitler] believed he had been chosen to lead Germany in a war against a people that he believed presented an existential threat to the nation and Volk.” By conflating “the mythical Jewish threat with the very real, very immediate Bolshevik threat, … he created a psychic world view for the German people in which Germany itself [came under] imminent threat of destruction and eradication at the hands of an evil … all the more dangerous because of its insidiousness. To love one’s country meant to be racially pure. To secure the continued existence of the country of the Volk that one loves [means] that one must eradicate its nemesis, its Jewishness,” the eternal Jew.
I was initially taken aback by this assertion. My always present idealism balked at the idea of love as a generator of methodical mass murder.
But perhaps my idealism is the problem.
As described in the King James translation, First Corinthians, 13, love is an encompassing charity, a word that in its broadest sense suggests benevolence, self-sacrifice, enduring kindness, enduring goodwill:
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.4 Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,5 Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;6 Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;
This is what I believe, but I just took note of that qualifier “though,” and now must think how it might work beyond signifying wise counsel and a rebuke to a blinding pride. “Though” also operates here as a caution in a deeper sense. It implies that none of these qualities of love are a given but instead a state of being to be sought after, in fact, one that must be continuously pursued.
It is silly that I did not see that before now when the evidence of malice and ill-will is everywhere, but still, how can love, that quality which “thinketh no evil and rejoiceth not in iniquity,” become a conduit for hatred or harden into a chrysalis within which it may alchemize into genocidal malice?
It is the alchemy that is the key. I think my friend is right. Hatred can burn itself out. Its passion is its undoing, but if planning and incessant propaganda are added to it as components for the metamorphosis, then what emerges from the chrysalis is neither hatred nor love but indifference, the flat, machine-like emotion that one might argue is the true opposite of love.
Elie Wiesel spoke about “indifference” in a speech at the White House in April of 1999:
“What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means “no difference.” A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil. …. Of course, indifference can be tempting — more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person’s pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the Other to an abstraction.”
My friend spoke of “love of some bullshit abstract principle” as one of the necessities for mass murder. In this, we agree – a love of the country, of a theory of race, of an ideal, can become a weapon if human beings who do not look or speak like us are relentlessly described as an enemy and thus are reduced to an ‘other,’ a threat, parasites, unGermanic, un-American. This is how they become an abstraction.
It is that transformation of human beings into abstractions, that other metamorphosis, that makes them easier to kill. Now, mechanize the oppression – create camps, abuse the abstractions on the way to the camps, in the camps and then kill them. That requires indifference, not hatred and not love. An assembly line is by necessity unemotional. It is either efficient or inefficient. It demands a disinterested eye to make those evaluations, and for that, as Hans Frank said, the Nazis had to “eliminate all feelings of pity.” What was left was cold, methodical, a job to get through, blocks of matter to move, blocks of matter to kill.
Love of nation or Volk or race or tribe may have been (often is) a beginning for mass murder, but it is always allied with contempt for the victims, with a belief in the oppressors’ superiority. With a focused leadership, with willing accomplices, with organizational ability, with ceaseless propaganda, that pairing becomes murderous. At its culmination, not an atom of love remains, only brutality.
In conclusion, I do not think love is the engine of such evil but indifference. By its nature, industrial evil, perhaps any evil action repeated day after day, deadens feeling to the point of disappearance. Bureaucrats merely give orders. The “others” are gathered by thugs, chased down, zip-tied, shackled, beaten, loaded. The buses run, the planes fly, the trains move from station to camp, from camp into the next world, into death or into invisibility. Auden got it right: “Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot/
where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse/ scratches its innocent behind on a tree …,” the killers too go on with their work, dutifully filing the reports, methodically pushing the buttons, impatiently shoving the blocks of matter into whatever comes next.
