If You Were in Hell, How Would You Know It?
One of the most jarring elements of reading Victor Klemperer’s diaries is how often he and his circle ask themselves whether Hitler, long after he’s come to power, is really going to last. They’re constantly wondering whether some diplomatic or domestic crisis isn’t going to be Hitler’s last. From hindsight, it all seems bizarre: we now how the story ends, we know how the story had to end. But at the time of its happening, that was not the case. You can see precisely why Klemperer and company thought as they did. The Nazi seizure of power and subsequent program was, for them, unprecedented. They could only think in terms of previous coups or crises. Not to mention that they had no choice, some of them, but to hope against hope.
Now we come back to today. We’re all focused and rightly concerned about Trump. We read him through the lens of the past. But in reading this post by Samir Chopra, I’m reminded of all the bad things that have happened to the US over the past decades. Yes, we protested them and found them objectionable, but ultimately we lived with them and found a way to go about our business: a presidential election in which the majority of the population voted for the candidate who lost; a catastrophic war that was fought for reasons everyone concedes (and conceded within a fairly short time) were lies and self-deceptions, with absolutely no consequences for the perpetrators; a system of capital punishment in which innocent men and women have been killed; and so on.
Like the rest of us, I have no idea whither we are tending. But reading Klemperer’s diaries, I wonder whether we’re properly identifying the paving stones of our descent, and whether, having reached our final destination, we’d even know we were there.