This is the first of a series of lectures at the Hillsdale College Summer Hostel program, “Islam and the West.”

 

My co-speakers are giving us a good idea of what Islam is, but if I am to speak on Islam and modern politics I owe you an account of what I mean by ‘politics’ and what I mean by ‘modern.’ By spending the first half of this lecture on those themes I intend to make my subsequent thoughts on Islamic politics much clearer. An added payoff to this approach is that I will be presenting a way in which we can think clearly, as citizens, about politics generally. What I’ll be saying in the next twenty minutes or so will be useful when you think about Saudi Arabia and Iran, but also when you think about China, Russia, Brazil, and the United States of America.

A previous speaker asked a good question: How can we learn about Islam? I want to begin with the question of how political scientists learn about anything.

In trying to understand human communities, political science resembles anthropology, economics, and sociology in one way: it starts with individuals and families and the types of rule seen in the souls of individuals and in families. Political science differs from anthropology, economics, and sociology in one principal respect: political science look to the regime as the key feature that defines our lives together.

It so happens that the term ‘regime’ is much in the news, lately. In the couple of decades, first the Clinton and then the Bush administrations have effected regime change in such countries as Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. What exactly, is a regime? Why should anyone want to change one? Thus the basic term of political science happens to have become central to the American political debate, a debate that we know, at least since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, involves our very lives and our way of life.

A regime in political science roughly parallels a species, or perhaps a genus in biological science. It’s a term of classification or identification; the most impressive early regime typologies appear in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. As in biological species, we identify regimes by both the behavior of the organism—its ways and purposes—and its form or structure.

In terms of behavior, regimes consist of three elements:

1. Rulers. How many people rule—one, a few, or many? And what is their character? It makes a difference if only one person rules a community, or if many do; it also makes a difference if those who rule are for the most part good or for the most part bad, whether the one who rules is Queen Anne of seventeenth-century England or Mao Zedong of twentieth-century China, for example. This matters, not only because one set of rulers will act differently than another but also because we tend to ‘look up’ to rulers, model our lives on them.
2. The way of life, the moral atmosphere of the society—its “habits of mind and heart,” as Tocqueville puts it. Is the characteristic human type who lives in a given society a business person or a warrior, a saint or a sybarite, a cowboy or a computer geek? Or all of these things, in which case you know you’re in America, which might best be defined as a commercial republic, a political community in which a variety of human types defend each other and trade one another.
3. The purpose of the society. When Americans declared their independence, after asserting the unalienable rights of human beings to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they observed that the purpose of government is to secure those rights. The regime of the Soviet Union took as its purpose the formation of ‘Soviet man’ and the globalization of socialism, to be followed by worldwide communism; some Muslim regimes take as their purpose the establishment of a worldwide caliphate to be ruled by Islamic law.

In terms of form or structure, political scientists want to know the authoritative institutions by which the rulers rule. How are the most ambitious people in the society channeled into the positions of authority and prestige they crave? On what channels do these people run?

Obviously, these behavioral and formal elements of the regime—rulers, way of life, purpose, and institutions—are interrelated, mutually influential. If the rulers change, the way of life and institutions may change, in order to accommodate the intentions of the new rulers. For example, the election of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party in Germany in 1933 soon led to a new way of life for Germans, under a new set of ruling institutions, institutions that did not include a genuinely authoritative legislature, among other things.

If the institutions change, the way of life and rulers will change. For example, the way of life of Japan after the adoption of General Douglas MacArthur’s constitution in the 1940s, and the kind of rulers Japan has had since that time, have both changed radically from what they were in the 1930s until August 1945.

Finally, if a community’s way of life and/or its purpose changes, then rulers and institutions will change—usually somewhat gradually but no less profoundly, For example, consider the changes in the Roman Empire after Christianity pervaded its society, ‘from below,’ so to speak (or ‘from above,’ to speak another way). In the United States, the profound changes to the kind of people who enter government and our governmental institutions brought on by Progressivism began in the universities and the ideas taught in those universities.

A regime change is therefore nothing less than a revolution—whether violent, as in the United States and in France in the 1780s and 1790s, or peaceful, as in Czechoslovakia in the 1980s and 1990s.The regime that prevails in our society affects all of our lives in the physical and moral sense, spelling ‘liberty or death,’ sometimes to millions. When we speak of the character or the ethos of a political community, political scientists point to the regime as its cause.

Since the time of the Greek philosophers, four massive facts have intervened to modify, if not alter fundamentally, this system of regime classification.

1. The first of these are religions that are both prophetic and international—specifically, Christianity and Islam. These are prophetic rather than civil religions in the sense that they require their adherents to ‘speak truth to power’ and not simply to reinforce existing regimes They are international, indeed universal in that the God of the Bible and the God of the Koran rule over all human beings, not only particular communities or peoples. Notice that each of these religions has a regime. God is the King of kings; He is also the founding lawgiver, prescribing institutions and also requiring a particular way of life. This sets up a circumstance in which the City of God ‘cross-cuts’ the City of Man, sometimes commending a given human regime and sometimes calling it to account or even undermining it. Prophetic and universal religions have changed both internal politics and international politics, permanently.
2. The modern state appeared, invented in theory by the Florentine philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli and put widely into practice in Europe by the middle of the seventeenth century. Aristotle saw two basic kinds of political communities, in terms of size and centralization. The polis was small and centralized, tightly-knit, a place where even a regime of ‘the many’—either a regime that mixed oligarchic and democratic elements or a democracy—could assemble all of its rulers in one place for deliberation in common. In such highly centralized and highly ‘politicized’ communities, the regime mattered intensely to everyone because the rulers really could rule everyone, ‘reach into’ the life of every family. The empire, in contrast to the polis, was big but decentralized, typically a loose confederation of political communities whose subordinate members paid tribute money and honor to the central government—which might have any of the six regime types—but otherwise left most major ruling decisions to the local rulers. The modern state combines the centralized rule of the polish with, potentially and sometimes actually, the size of an ancient empire. Machiavelli and subsequent political philosopher and statesmen invented ways of making this possible, of making the central ruling authority capable of reaching down  into what now would be called ‘civil society,’ in contrast to ‘the state.’ These included the technologies generated by modern science, animated by the ambition enunciated by Machiaelli’s philosophic disciple, Francis Bacon: “the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate.” Other modern political methods included an impersonal and professional bureaucracy—avowedly ‘scientific’ in its methods of rule—and modern, standardized military practices, seen most notably in the German military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz.
3. A third feature of modern society, again proposed by Machiavelli and his innumerable followers, consisted of an acquisitive, commercial/capitalist society—not mere trade routes or port cities, which had existed for millenia, but whole societies devoted to acquisition, with systems of finance to match. Such a political economy of acquisition could generate the vast revenues needed to support the modern bureaucratic and military apparatuses of the modern state. The modern political economy typically led to the ’embourgeoisement’ of society, the augmentation of the middle classes and the partial displacement of the titled aristocracies.
4. Social embourgeoisement, but also the professionalization of military and civilian bureaucracies also enhanced the democratization of society, whereby, increasingly, who you were mattered less than what you were, especially with respect to what you could do to enhance the power of acquisition—politically, militarily, and economically.

These four massive facts—prophetic religion, statism, commercial capitalism, and social egalitarianism or social democratization (the last three at the servide of the modern scientific project)—have come together to form what we have come to call the distinctively modern life. That life raises the perennial question of regimes in the most serious ways. From the disposition of your soul for all eternity to the disposition of soul and body here and now, it matters more than ever who rules, by what institutions they rule, the way of life rulers and ruling institutions reinforce, and the purposes of that way, those rulers, those institutions. Given the massive and transformative powers of modern states, as ruling entities and as frameworks for civil-social activities, regimes matter to us, to ordinary citizens or subjects, in some ways more than ever.

The history of the past two centuries accordingly has seen vast, sometimes worldwide struggles over exactly this regime question. The American regime of commercial republicanism is one answer to the question. But we’ve also seen the military republicanism of revolutionary France, the military tyranny of Napoleonic France, the constitutional monarchic imperialism of Metternich’s Austria, the military-capitalist monarchy of Wilhelmine Germany, the military and ideological tyrannies of Communist Russia and China, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Today, Islamism addresses this same questions of who will rule us and how we shall be ruled in the modern world.

Now let’s apply these basic ‘political-science’ terms to Islam, and particularly to contemporary ‘Islamism.’

Muhammad was a political ruler and, more than that, a lawgiver and founder of a new regime. The regime he founded was a monarchy, and he began the conquest of territories that became a vast empire soon after his death. The empire he founded was an ‘ancient’ empire, not a modern state. Authority in that empire derived from persons—ultimately, from Allah—and not from impersonal functions in a centralized bureaucracy. For Islamists, too, politics is central. But unlike Muhammad they live in societies where the modern state reaches down into the lives of every individual and family, societies in which centralized rule intrudes more into everyday activities than it ever did in the empires of antiquity or the middle ages. Pushing back against the modern state, and against the modern projected generally, Islamists put politics in the foreground of their enterprise. This is why the French scholar Olivier Roy and many others call Islamism ‘political Islam.’ Islam itself is ‘political’ in the sense of being a system of rule. However, even Islam in its original form is not political in Aristotle’s sense of reciprocal rule, ‘ruling and being ruled’; it is rather what Aristotle would call a form of ‘masterly’ rule. This sharply differentiates both Islam and its modern derivative, ‘Islamism’ from the conception of civil life that has informed the West.

Islamism also reflects the social-democratizing tendency of modernity. The breakup of the Ottoman Empire resulted in the elimination of the caliphate by the statist-nationalist modernizer, Kemal Ataturk. That same breakup also saw the advance of modern, nation-state-ruled empires—Great Britain, France—in the Middle East. The elimination of the caliphate has brought a vast democratization to Islam. Under the caliphate, only a trained Islamic scholar could issue a fatwa; today, and adolescent can do so, and some have. Now, that’s democratization for you. But again, it democratization without the civil or ruling-and-being ruled practices of the West, with our habits of ‘taking turns’ in ruling, or in shared rule.

To put the matter in theoretical terms: modernity involves egalitarianism and the sharp break with tradition implied by the conquest of nature. Both egalitarianism and anti-traditionalism undermine the authority of the family, of fathers and mothers, of parental rule. To undermine the family is to generate individualism, the sense of ‘I’m on my own.’ But undermining the family in no way stops human beings from being what they are by nature: social and political animals who desire a sense of ‘belonging,’ a sense of community. Therefore, to undermine the family is to initiate a quest for a substitute for the family. In modernity, we see several such substitutes. One is nationality; significantly, one’s country is called ‘the fatherland’ or ‘the motherland.’ Another substitute for the family has been the life of the communist cell, a sort of fraternity without parenthood. Still another substitute for the family has been ‘the family of God’—seen in the religious revivals that have swept modern societies periodically in the past three centuries. This comes as a surprise to secularists, who had supposed, since the Enlightenment, that they alone would control the moral terrain of modernity. Socially, Islamism—for all its ‘traditional’ trappings—resembles the revivalism or fundamentalism that have characterized much of modern religious life. Islamists break with their families, adopting a version of a particular religion along with a new, ‘adopted’ family—experiencing, as they do so, the intense emotions associated with family life. In the phrase of the French scholar Olivier Roy, Islamists are agitated by the “side effects of their own Westernization” or, more precisely, their own modernization. Politically, they differ from, for example, fundamentalist and evangelical Christians because in recent decades they’ve tapped into the political leftism of university campuses in the West, especially in Europe, which is where they experienced the emotional consequences of their removal from their real families, and where they began to think through their encounter with modernity. The earlier generation of Islamists similarly took some of their ideas—particularly their organizational plans—from fascism and communism in the decades following World War I.

The elimination of the Ottoman Empire and its replacement by modern empires also meant a crisis for Arab and Iranian nationhood. In subsequent decades, Arab rulers allied themselves with Soviet Russia and then Nazi Germany in their quest for national independence—a dangerous strategy from which they were saved by the commercial republics which defeated those alternate empires. In the 1950s,Arabs won their independence not through Islam but through nationalism—Nasser in Egypt, the Baathists in Syria and Iraq. Even the Palestinian Arabs, living in and out of Israel, appropriated a nationalist identity an program, and will now tell you, in the fanciful way nationalists tend to adopt, that they are the descendants of the ancient Philistines, and therefore predate the Jews in their residency on the land.

As long as the nationalists had credit with Arab and other peoples of the Middle East, the thinkers now called Islamists remained on the fringes, persecuted by nationalists. These men included Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran, Sayyid Qutb in Egypt, and Mawlanda Mawdudi in Pakistan. In fact, Qutb was hanged by Nasser in 1966.

But Arab nationalism became discredited in the eyes of many within a single generation. The nationalists failed to conquer Israel, losing spectacularly in the Six-Day War of 1967 and falling short in the Yom Kippur War (or, as they prefer, the October War) of 1973. Nationalist rulers also came down firmly on the despotic side of social democratization, blocking the vast majority of their peoples from political participation. The post-independence generation of Muslims thus never fully sympathized with nationalism; many listened more eagerly to the transnational notions of Islamism, spread by modern technology to a worldwide audience. Islamism also benefited from the policy of the nationalist despots, who co-opted many of the more traditionalist clergy, rather in the way the Soviets had co-opted many Russian Orthodox clergy. Traditionalists often turned to an apolitical or quietist form of Islam—very arguably a deviation from the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. Thus compromised, the traditionalists lost prestige in the eyes of the young, and their loss was Islamism’s gain. Islamists did not shrink from a sort of politics. Urbanized and educated, Islamists exemplified Tocquevillian democratization, but did so without the middle-class background of the liberal democrats or commercial republicans of nineteenth-century Europe. Furthermore, in the last twenty-five years Islamists have notched some important successes, overthrowing the Shah of Iran, defending the new regime against Iraq and Iraq’s Saudi backers in the 1980s, launching successful terrorist attacks against American and other targets around the world, and defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Who are these people? What is Islamism?

Khomeini, Qutb, and Mawdudi all rejected nationalism as a form of idol—atry, a neo-paganism to be resisted as violently as Muhammad had resisted the paganism of his time. To Islamists, the sovereignty of anyone but Allah is idolatry; nation and state are idols. The core of modernity, ultimately the self-deification of man, is false and evil. I shall save Khomeini for the lecture on Iran; today, I’ll outline the ideas of Qutb, Mawdudi, and Qutb’s mentor, Hassan al-Banna.

In Egypt, Qutb joined the existing radical group, the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been founded in the 1920s by a schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna. Faced with the overwhelming power of the modern state, the Brotherhood sought to Islamify it, advocating what they called “Islamic modernity.” As the French scholar Gilles Kepel so pointedly notes, “The exact meaning of Islamic modernity has never really been settled. Understandably so, inasmuch as it is fundamentally a contradiction. Islamic modernity, for the Brotherhood, involved a sort of totalitarianism—an amalgamation of society, state, culture, and religion, all under the guidance of Islam, and therefore of Islamists. We recall that the founders of the United States had warned that such an attempt to eliminate all factionalism, to constitute any thoroughgoing unity, would lead to tyranny. Peoples in the Middle East have seen this in those places—Khomeini’s Iran, the Taliban’s Afghanistan, and most recently in the territories ruled by ISIL—where Islamists have established a regime. In each of these places, one might add, the people have been restive under the ‘totalizing’ yoke. Islamists have found that a shared religion does not constitute a sufficiently strong bond to hold a society together, and so have resorted to coercion as a conspicuous supplement. Government by consent of the governed does not, and in principle need not apply when the law of Allah (as interpreted by Islamists) prevails.

Islamism agrees with Wahhabism (and indeed with Islam simply) on the need to ‘Islamify’ all society, everywhere. It disagrees with Wahhabism on the issue of social equality. Islamism would end landed aristocracy. It is more urban and democratic—more modern—than Wahhabism. Wahhabism can tolerate the Saudi royal family, so long as they seem pious and subsidize the clerics. Islamists do not tolerate the royals at all.

As leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Banna copied his organizational practices from the Nazis, who were active in Egypt, against the regnant British Empire, in the 1930s. He established a young wing; he endorsed the Führerprinzip (the ‘leadership principle’); he had his people engage in paramilitary training, and cultivated a cult of the heroic death—all Hitlerian motifs. He was assassinated in 1949, but the Muslim Brotherhood persists to this day, although often in a less rabid form.

Qutb joined the Brotherhood in the early 1950s, but favored a radicalism of the Left, not the now-defeated radicalism of the Right. The Islamist theorist he admired was Mawdudi of Pakistan, a contemporary of al-Banna who had advocated an Islamic state in all of India. Mawdudi wanted to take the modern state and use its apparatus to ‘Islamify’ Indian society ‘from above,’ eradicating what he regarded as the local paganism, namely, Hinduism. Mawdudi founded his party, the Jamaat-e-Islami, on Lenin’s successful Bolshevik model. As you will recall, Lenin was a Marxist, believing that ‘History,’ understood as the course of human  events, was proceeding inevitably toward an end, the class-free or communist society. As Marx had taught, Lenin proceeds dialectically, claiming that history proceeds by the conflict of socioeconomic classes. The urban working class, or proletariat, eventually will triumph over the bourgeois class, seize and transform the bourgeois state, and use its power to eliminate all classes. Once all classes are gone, the state will “wither away,” as it will no longer have any purpose. To hurry ‘History’ along to this wondrous consummation, Lenin formed the Bolshevik Party as the working class’s vanguard party, the political party on the cutting edge of the historical dialectic, leading the working class to victory. The vanguard of the vanguard was, of course, Lenin himself, leader of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and embodiment of Tocqueville’ prediction of a Russian empire facing off against the great commercial republic of America.

To Mawdudi, Marxian dialectical struggle seemed very reminiscent of jihad. Under the Islamic rubric of jihad, the “central theme” of which is “the propagation of the Faith through combat,” he could imitate Leninist political organization. Mawdudi departed from Lenin in preferring a more strictly political course of action. His party engaged  in parliamentary politics with a patience Leninists seldom exhibited; in this he resembled the Marxists of the Social-Democratic parties, not the Marxists of the Bolshevik Party. Here is where Qutb sided more with Lenin than with Mawdudi. Endorsing the ideas of the revolutionary vanguard and of the one-party state leading to class-free society, Qutb preferred extra-parliamentary methods; indeed, in Nasser’s Egypt, such methods would have been quite irrelevant. The Muslim vanguard will work for the “abolition of man-made laws,” and their substitution with the perfect law, the Shar’ia, obedience to which he deemed true liberation. Thus, in what would eventually be seen as typical Islamist fashion, Qutb attempted to use modern political technique as instrument of Islam.

As for the deeper substance of the modern project, Qutb authored a multi-volume critique of modernity. Modernity, he argued, had caused humanity to lose contact with its own nature. The original error went back much farther than modern philosophy, however. The original error went back to Judaism and Christianity.

Judaism had been God’s revelation. But Judaism fell prey to legalism because Jews had become slavish under their years of captivity in Egypt. Slavery had actually changed their natures, and so, when they received the laws of God from Moses, they inclined to worship the laws themselves instead of God. This led to the mission of Jesus of Nazareth, who rightly broke with Jewish legalism. However, the early Christians fell victim to harsh persecution, causing the Christian message to become garbled; this adulterated message went tooo far against legalism. Having abandoned the Jewish law entirely, Christians reached out not to Judaism but to paganism (specifically, to Greek political philosophy) as the needed, worldly supplement to their faith. Thus Christianity left itself vulnerable, in Roman times, to what Qutb regarded as Constantine’s pseudo-conversion, which drove the genuine Christians into the monasteries, as ascetic ‘desert saints.’ Asceticism, however, is another form of Christian extremism, a rejection of the bodily, bifurcating what should be coordinated, namely, spirit and nature. This leads to the characteristic Christian dualisms—sacred versus secular, God versus Caesar—dual standards.

To remedy this “hideous schizophrenia,” the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century brought a new legal code. This new code reintegrated spirit with physical nature. The unified , genuinely monotheistic religion of Islam thus reestablishes both the original revelation to the Jews and the original message of Jesus. Almost as boldly, Qutb claims that the return of the proper human relation to physical nature opened Islamic minds to the experimental scientific method, which Muslim scientists discovered in the Middle Ages. Unfortunately, the full use of this method for the benefit of all mankind was blocked by the Christian Crusaders and the Mongols, both of whom disrupted Islamic life shortly after the discovery was made. The scientific method was taken by Christians to Europe in the sixteenth century, and exploited by them. However, under Christian auspices, this method was used to reinforce the sacred-secular bifurcation favored in that civilization. Conflict arose between religion and science, the one informed by faith, the other by atheism. Atheist modernity has triumphed over Christendom in this struggle, leading to the crisis of nihilism in the West.

Thus, in Qutb’s account, Jews, Christians, and Muslim infidels have caused the current plight of Arab Muslims. Having spent time in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Qutb charged that America, with its separation of church and state, embodies both the Christian and the modern legacy. America’s presence in the Middle East betokens a war against Islam. The whole world has reverted to the condition of paganism seen by Muhammad. Qutb and his followers are the only true Muslims remaining; they must do what Muhammad did: reconquer the world for Allah.

It is worth noting, in passing, that Qutb’s brother, Muhammad Qutb, became a professor in Saudi Arabia. One of his students was a young Saudi named Ussamah bin Laden.

 

Review of Jack Eisner: The Survivor. New York: William Morrow & Company, 1981.

Published May 1981 in Chronicles of Culture.
Republished with permission.

 

“Learn to be silent”–so Elie Wiesel advises those who would speak of the Holocaust. Especially those who were not there: “In intellectual, or pseudo-intellectual circles, in New York and elsewhere too, no cocktail party can really be called a success unless Auschwitz sooner or later figures in the discussion. Excellent remedy for boredom….” (Legends of Our Time: New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968).
The Jews, he observes, died because they had no friends, and even friends should not judge one another until shared circumstance teaches them understanding. Savants’ chatter camouflages their secret indifference along with their ignorance.

Wiesel knows that “the only ones who were, who still are, full conscious of their share of responsibility for the dead are those who were saved.” Here, responsibility means guilt–not the unreasoning guilt of one tormented by his own survival, but the all-too-reasonable guilt of one who remembers the terms of survival. The Nazis death quota, that engine of arbitrary selection, seems a triumph of collectivism, a perfect expression of indifference to the individuality of the victims. But the quota forced another excruciating individuality upon the survivors: “the one who had been spared, above all during the selections, could not repress his first spontaneous reflex of joy. A moment, a week, or an eternity later, this joy weighted with fear and anxiety will turn into guilt. I am happy to have escaped death becomes equivalent to admitting: I am glad that someone else went in my place.” Some of those who admitted this tried to forget the dead. Others joined them in death. Still others initiated a silent monologue, continued to this day, “which only the dead deserve to hear.”

What is this monologue? Those of us who ask risk becoming cocktail party cognoscenti, pretenders to understanding. Yet we should ask, I think; we may not deserve to hear the monologue, but if we do not hear of it, if we do not face the memories of the Holocaust, our silence will begin with tact and end with the cowardice tact may conceal.

Jack Eisner calls his memoir The Survivor. He knows the silent monologue of which Wiesel speaks. After the war he spent much time with other survivors. “We understood one another’s silences.” Did they? Surely they understood each other’s need for silence, but I doubt that all these monologues with the dead were alike. Both Wiesel and Eisner call themselves gravestones, markers commemorating the dead. But they are different men with different things to say to us–whatever they say to the dead.

Guilt enters Eisner’s monologue to us, like Wiesel’s. Not as Wiesel’s: “I am one in a thousand who survived. Why me? Was I better than the half million Jews in Warsaw who did not?” Eisner tells us how he survived. Although in this passage he means to deny his superiority to the dead, his memoir shows us in what ways he was `better’ than those who died, why he was a better survivor. Acts concern him more than thoughts. Wiesel, who cares much for thoughts and less for action, tortures himself with the question, “Why did you not resist?” Eisner did resist, did act, at times with a prudence that Wiesel might find profoundly disconcerting. These two men could not say the same things to the dead any more than they can say the same things to us. Guilt touches them differently.

To Eisner, thought undirected toward acts weakens the thinker. “My father was a dreamer a philosopher, a gentle man.” “He believed in the goodness of humanity” and “had faith in a civilized Germany.” “I loved and respected him, but sometimes I wished he were a more forceful man.” The means by which the 13-year-old Jack Eisner might have begun a life of the mind disintegrated by the grace of the Nazis: in 1939 they destroyed the Warsaw Music Conservatory, which had awarded him a scholarship. After that, his thoughts served action and his acts served survival. Action, in this circumstance, required courage first of all. “I knew that my Christian friends didn’t believe in Jewish valor…. But I also knew, in my heart, that they were wrong.” Indeed they were. When the Nazis tried to destroy the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, Eisner was there. They “entered the ghetto in their usual way, firing guns in the air and screaming for all Jews to come out of their buildings.” Eisner adds proudly, “But we weren’t the usual Jews.” After repeated invasions failed, the Nazis finally could `conquer’ the ghetto only by leveling it with artillery fire.

Eisner himself is no “usual” man. His courage did not depend on comrades. At Budzyn, the second of four concentration camps he endured, he escaped alone, then faced punishment alone after his recapture. The commandant beat him with a whip: “he wanted me on the ground at his feet.” Eisner refused to fall. Eventually, the commandant exhausted himself, but Eisner “straightened back to attention.” “I felt the world was crushing me. The sky was falling like a shattered mirror on my face. But I stood.” Survival, both as a Jews among Jews and as an individual, obsessed Eisner, but survival finally served not only the will to live, the desire for revenge, and the need to bear witness to the struggle of those who died; it was a matter of dignity, of affirming the humanity the Nazis–and all the Jews-haters of the day, whether malevolent persecutors or icy bystanders–tried to deny.

Yet survival, as Wiesel insists, can also cost dignity, expend what it tries to save. Eisner knows this. Courage needs thought to complement it, and thought that serves survival often recommends indignity. Eisner watched an SS officer whip Eisner’s mother: “I wanted to leap at the sadist’s throat. But I didn’t budge. Survival was what counted.” He watched a Nazi commandant herd Jews into a synagogue, put a gasoline can on the porch, then explode the can with machine gun bullets. “Sick to my stomach, I watched the inferno from a distance. All my fears, anguish, and self-pity vanished. I wanted to jump on [the commandant’s] neck. To squeeze it. To wrench the last breath from his body. But my mind told me I was helpless. All I could do was turn my eyes to the forest.” In Flossenburg, his last concentration camp, Eisner became `friendly’ with a German criminal who worked at the disinfection chambers. “I soon became part of the elite, an inmate with connections”–so much so that he achieved re-designation as “an Aryan Christian.” Wiesel would devote many pages to such incidents, weighing the moral problems they pose (in fact he did watch his father beaten and writes extensively about it). Eisner, the survivor who acts, moves on.

Eisner has no immunity to guilt. Early in the war, after escaping the ghetto to live in “Aryan Warsaw,” he returned; “my conscience was bothering me.” When a young friend was killed during a smuggling expedition, Eisner felt responsibility. Forced to carry starving inmates to the crematorium in Flossenburg, madness nearly claimed him: “That night, I couldn’t sleep at all. Those big brown eyes. those big blue eyes. Those big wide-open green eyes. Millions of eyes stared at me all night long. I hated those eyes…. I hated the world.” Guilt, yes: disabling guilt, never. In his monologue with the dead–with these dead, the ones he carried–Eisner may accuse himself, but he can accuse the world with more vehemence, and more justification. In his book he restrains himself, except when he writes of the Nazis.

This world, not quite rid of Nazis, reads memoirs of the Holocaust, watches new holocausts in Mao’s China and in Cambodia. Perhaps the world’s continued ignorance, indifference and criminality goads Eisner not only to present Hell but also to explain it. (For example, he tells of a sign on Flossenburg’s gate that said, “Work liberates,” adding “The message was totally ironic.” He does this sort of thing more than once.) At times he tells us more than we should know, as when he describes a couple of his early sexual adventures in prose worthy of Penthouse. There are pages that read all too much `like a novel’–or worse, a cheap and trivial screenplay. He embarrasses his reader when he dips into what can only be described as Holocaust kitsch. What he has lived needs no such (melo)dramatization. Eisner, who writes with terse forcefulness at his best, should not be blamed for literary misjudgment; he runs an import-export business (the world of acts, as always), not a literary journal. Blame his editors.

Wiesel’s more refined and powerful intellect takes us places Eisner cannot. Eisner’s activeness also takes us places, giving us five memories for each Wiesel presents. Here is one that only Wiesel could elaborate upon properly: at one camp, a Nazi general on a white horse stopped in front of the inmates. At his side, on a white pony, road a 10-year-old Jewish boy dressed in a white uniform, black boots, and carrying a small whip. The boy ordered his fellow Jews into the showers, Days later, he saved Eisner from execution, ordered him to be whipped, smiled, complimented Eisner’s courage and handed him a chocolate bar. Shining like ebony, this brilliant evil mesmerizes as it repels. If he had survived, what would be this child’s monologue with the dead? If memoirs of the Holocaust teach us to learn the right silence, they also teach us to try to find the right speech and the right acts by showing us what happens if we fail.

2016 NOTE: Jack Eisner died in 2003, having dedicated much of his life’s considerable earnings to educating people about the Holocaust, especially through memorials he caused to be built in several countries. His memoir does indeed read at times like a screenplay for a melodrama and was produced as both a stage play and a film. The jarring disjunction between his experiences and some of his descriptions of them show a tough, blunt sensibility somewhat warped by the vulgar forms of entertainment he escaped to live in the midst of,  for the rest of his life. His book’s many fine and striking passages in this way represent his triumph not only over the death camps but over the trivializing coarseness of what Malraux calls “the arts of satiation.”

Article published November 1978

Editorials in the Soviet Union’s chief propaganda organ, Pravda (the word means “truth” in Russian) ordinarily attract little serious attention outside the Soviet Union, and are likely to be tracked more by those who try to spot subtle shifts in Kremlin policy rather than those who seek, well, the truth. But a recent Pravda pronouncement has caused a stir. Aimed, obviously, at a wider audience than the usual captive one, its author avoided the customary good-Bolshevik polemics and won the accolade “sober and worried” from the perennially sober and worried New York Times.

Pravda‘s editorialist warns that “changes dangerous to the cause of peace are taking place in the policy of the U. S. A.” Two things disturb him. “There is no end to attempts at interfering in our country’s internal affairs”–a reference to America’s reaction to the trial of Anatoly Sharansky and other Russian dissidents. More ominous, however, are critics of détente who seek “a common language with the aggressive anti-Sovietism of the Chinese rulers.”

According to the editorialist, the motives of these “groupings that would like to undermine détente and return the world to the cold war” is not the alleged superiority of Soviet military power, but the fear of military equality. These malignant “groupings,” he argues, do not want the United States and the Soviet Union to be truly equal; they want the U. S. to return to its former state of military and geopolitical superiority. It is these motives that stand in the way of ratifying SALT II, and hope to stymie other arms limitation agreements.

Without speculating on the motives of the supposed anti-Soviet elements in the Carter Administration, it is easy to find in the writings of the most prominent among them, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, much to reassure rather than to worry writers in the employ of Pravda and the Times. In his book Between Two Ages, published in 1971, Brzezinksi argued that “even if one is not a Marxist, it is not necessarily a cause for rejoicing to note that Communism–which helped to enlarge the collective consciousness of mankind and to mobilize it for social progress–has failed in its original objective of linking humanism with internationalism.”

Given this `humanist’ reading of Marx, no wonder Brzezinski recommends, in the same book, that “it would be wise for the United States to make an explicit move to abandon the Monroe Doctrine”; that “an extensive American military presence abroad is becoming counterproductive to American interests and to the growth of an international community”; that “it would be advisable to view the question of the political development of both communist and the developing countries with a great deal of patience”; indeed, that American foreign policy should become “increasingly depoliticized” or ideologically neutral.

Each of these recommendations have been, or are in the process of being carried out by President Carter, who has been tutored in foreign policy by Professor Brzezinski since 1973. And, remarkably enough, Brzezinski may well be the `toughest’ anti-Soviet voice in the Carter Administration. That alone should reassure Moscow about Washington’s motives.

The belief that gives the fizz to these and other Brzezinskian bromides is what’s called `convergence theory’–the hypothesis (it shouldn’t be dignified by the term `theory) that the regimes of the United States and the Soviet Union will become more and more similar. While the Soviets democratize politically the United States will socialize economically; the two countries will then have no more reason to quarrel, having become brother social democracies.

This strikes me as wishful thinking on the part of democratic socialists, whose mild and hazy Marxism substitutes meliorism for dialectics. Real Marxism has without exception yielded trannies. These tyrannies have varied in their severity from mere police-state brutality, as seen in today’s Soviet Union, to genuinely Hitlerian levels of degradation, as seem in China twenty years ago and Cambodia now. He who argues, as Marx does, that human nature has no innate dignity, that it is `historically’ determined by forces traceable to economic class struggle, can justify the most vicious attempts to remake human nature, all the while citing pseudo-philosophic `proofs’ to justify his barbarism.

What Pravda calls “our country’s internal affairs” means the Kremlin’s consistent policy of denying human rights to the Russian people. The Carter Administration has condemned the show-trials of Russian dissidents and the mistreatment of Russian Jews, but these policies flow from the Soviet regime, the Soviet form of government, which oppresses not only political and religious dissidents but all Soviet subjects.

It will be objected that the Soviets, being Marxists, have a very different conception of human rights than that held by the United States or the West in general. Correct, obviously: but that only reveals the fundamental problem with the policy of détente. Contrary to Pravda, America’s withholding of trade and its cancellation of joint scientific conferences aren’t quite the selfsame designs to undermine the socialist system that our people were compelled to encounter in one form or another beginning in 1917. Hitler was a bit more forceful and malignant than sober, worried liberal U. S. scientists and intellectuals. But such economic sanctions do damage Soviet interests. What needs to be emphasized, however, is that Soviet interests, insofar as they are Soviet and not simply Russian–for it’s in Russia’s interest to dismantle “Sovietism”–are fundamentally opposed to American principles.

Those principles are opposed to those of “Sovietism.” Arms agreements, worth only the arms that guarantee them, may come and (assuredly) go. But as long as the fundamental moral, political, and spiritual principles of the two regimes remain opposed, there will be no end to the conflict, whether understood as a `Cold War’ or masked under the misleading term, `détente.’ That is why so many liberals, especially in the West, dream of ideological `convergence.’ For better or worse, the only important dreamer of `convergence’ in the Soviet Union is the physicist-turned-dissident Andrei Sakharov. Needless to say, he is not President Brezhnev’s adviser on national security.