29 April, 2003
Friends of Anne Frank

Looking back, we can see that Anne Frank should not have been sent to her death. All right, let's grant that most of her contemporaries would have been horrified at the thought of such a crime, if made to think of it. Others would have stopped short of wishing a human being dead, if pressed about their wishes. Even among Nazis there may have been some who would have liked to make a sentimental exception for a young girl, if her case had unavoidably come to their attention. But today, everybody with any pretensions to moral righteousness is a friend of Anne Frank.

Even schoolchildren in places far removed from the old haunts of the Nazis get a good chance to steer clear of bigotry by learning Anne's story: how, when she was three years old, her family left Nazi Germany and went to live in Amsterdam; how, when she was thirteen, the family had to go into hiding in secret rooms; and how they were eventually found and sent to the death camps, where Anne died in her sixteenth year shortly before the camps were liberated. We get the story all at once, in its historical context, with a classically sympathetic protagonist standing for the victims of the Holocaust. We see, as exhibits in a museum, the guilt of those who committed the crime and the shame of those who gave it moral countenance, and so of course we do steer clear of bigotry and soon find ourselves, as we think, on the high road of righteousness. If there's one thing we'll never do, it's let them send Anne Frank to Bergen-Belsen.

Looking back, then, at the years when the crime was being plotted and yet the people who were capable of such a crime inspired admiration in a large part of the world, we tend to feel a natural affinity with the other part. As adults we should recognize easily enough that that feeling is naïvely subjective. We, most of us alive today, have no personal access to the moral choices of the 1930s. It's too late to be clear-eyed or courageous in the face of twentieth-century fascism. The only opportunity left to us by the people of that time is to see how their choices may prefigure some guilt or shame of our own. With any luck, we'll never be as guilty as Nazis. However, we can easily become as wretched as those who found that they had been Anne Frank's enemies in spirit without meaning any actual harm. Not many people could have failed for very long to see through the Third Reich merely because they were smitten by its architectural and sartorial splendors. To keep on failing, they needed a blind spot for anti-Semitism. The Nazis laid the groundwork for their crime by depicting Jews as economic oppressors, and too many non-Nazis felt disinclined to object.

It's important to remember that while the Nazis' anti-Semitic rhetoric ran from theories of economic domination all the way down to crude insults, that rhetoric based its appeal on the hearer's predisposition to feel that Jews had too many of the world's good things; that they stood outrageously high, not despicably low. Passive bigots, being essentially normal people, don't relish the persecution of the weak and innocent. But if they can be made to see an aggrieved accuser in place of a persecutor, and if the proposed victims are a tribe which they themselves consider altogether too powerful, why, that's another matter.

Of course you see where this leads. Many writers have already drawn parallels between the anti-Semitism of the 1930s and the anti-Americanism of the present. Others have pointed out the distinctions that need to be made (even collectively, Jews could hardly have been accused of intimidating the world with military might). The differences may outnumber the similarities, but the two main similarities are big and bad. One is that logic which clears a moral path for cruelty by declaring the victim to be advantaged and therefore undeserving of pity. It's an egoistic logic that operates in all of us in some casual, disorganized way. We know it does, if our reaction to human suffering ever contains a touch of chagrin at seeing a particular sufferer gain the status of victim. When we think we've found a whole set of people who have too many good things, the logic organizes itself into sustained antipathy. We may sense the egoism in it and loathe ourselves for it, but we can stop short of absolute self-reproach because those people do not, after all, appear to us as so many Anne Franks. They don't pass our test for sympathetic powerlessness and innocence. And now that we've started thinking of "those people," we come to the bigger and worse similarity between the two bigotries in question, which is simply the essence of all bigotries: the We-They Mentality.

There's not as much talk about the We-They Mentality now as there used to be, partly because it's supposed to have been discredited. Not eliminated, mind you, but sufficiently discredited to make self-respecting people hate to catch themselves descending to it. And then there has been the innocently contradictory trend of multiculturalism, which has provided We-They with the cover of ethical confusion since the 1980s. When people insist on building a proud We around themselves, it does become harder to conquer the all-degrading They. Before multiculturalism set in, many American parents and teachers were wont to caution American children against the We-They Mentality. The children learned, if they were paying attention, that it was wrong to "generalize about people," meaning wrong to lump people together in categories smaller than the whole human race, because it did the individual an injustice. This led to a great deal of self-monitoring and a fair amount of actual improvement in human relations. Haters remained haters and went on spreading their spawn, but people who were supposed to know better did, for the most part, know better. Conscientious Americans felt their society progressing on the road of civilization, working its way into the company of mature societies. Certain countries of Europe came to mind.

That was then. By the time of the war in Afghanistan, even before the Bush Administration's unilateralism had wreaked havoc with international relations, it seemed that a lot of water had passed under all our bridges. It may only be that a change in the wind had made us aware of some stagnant pools, but suddenly the odor of We-They filled the air. Salman Rushdie smelled it and wrote, in February, 2002,

Anybody who has visited Britain and Europe, or followed the public conversation there during the past five months, will have been struck, even shocked, by the depth of anti-American feeling among large segments of the population. Western anti-Americanism is an altogether more petulant phenomenon than its Islamic counterpart and far more personalized. Muslim countries don't like America's power, its "arrogance," its success; but in the non-American West, the main objection seems to be to American people. Night after night, I have found myself listening to Londoners' diatribes against the sheer weirdness of the American citizenry. The attacks on America are routinely discounted. ("Americans only care about their own dead.") American patriotism, obesity, emotionality, self-centeredness: these are the crucial issues.

A Canadian legislator made news just a year later by saying, "Damn Americans! I hate those bastards." Not America, but Americans. Hawks and doves, rich and poor, people who ignore Canada and people who admire Canada, the minority for Bush and the plurality for Gore, the cruel and the kindly, individuals all: she damned them, hated them, and called them bastards. Possibly she meant a certain set of Americans with whom her government had to deal, but there are ways of expressing that. What came out, and not only from a single mouth, was " ... Americans!" But caution, now. It doesn't follow from any of the above that "those Canadians" hate Americans, or that "those British" have covered their dartboards with maps of the USA. And it doesn't follow from the opportunistic behavior of France's President and Foreign Minister that "those French" deserve to become unpersons with an unculture and an uncuisine. What, no foie gras in George W. Bush's America? No Marie Antoinette economic doctrine? When the We-They Mentality gets loose, anyone may suffer.

As for understanding this state of affairs, the stagnant-pool model is, alas, probably the operative one. It's sad but true that racism, now as ever, is the shame of American society. It's equally true, and sadder, that racism is not the shame of many other societies because not many other societies have developed a capacity for shame about such things. Where racism, religious bigotry, sexual prejudice, or other manifestations of We-They are not conspicuous blemishes, it's often the case that they've blended into the social complexion. Then something goes wrong, temperatures rise, and angry red scars appear. It seems that every long-established nation has its long-established stereotypes of others and of its own internal tribes. No doubt each nation now includes many people who are past disdaining these received prejudices, but also many for whom prejudices are "those old beliefs and conceptions which have stood the test of time and experience, and enshrine the mature wisdom of the ages." That's how the late Sir Isaiah Berlin describes the seminal thought of an early anti-rationalist anti-individualist in his essay "Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism." When people share the proto-fascist's taste for old prejudices, it becomes a matter of course to concoct new ones. One can always find materials for them: an undeniably large number of fat people, a conspicuous minority of heartless money-lenders, or something. Nobody ever made a stereotype out of thin air, but it's still wrong to make one, for two reasons. In the first place, it's unjust to those people who don't fit the pattern. In the second place, it's unjust to those who do. Even if the Frank family had included a heartless money-lender, he wouldn't have deserved to be machine-gunned or gassed or confined in the midst of squalor and rampant typhus, as was Anne Frank. The proper punishment for heartless money-lending is not death. For merely belonging to the same tribe as the money-lender, no punishment at all is proper. Very few people would want their everyday prejudices to lead to such extremes. The problem is that they do lead to such extremes once in a while, and the rest of the time they produce at least a cruel remoteness. Therefore Joseph de Maistre must be put out of court.

If we're friends of Anne Frank, we have no business speaking in those plural nouns and pronouns that concentrate people in camps. We're not called upon to rescue her, or even to tell her story if it's only going to be a moral tour of paved roads, but to put our fingers in the dirt at our feet and pull out that commonplace weed, the We-They Mentality. In Anne Frank's time there was a humorist, Robert Benchley, whose flitting absurdities include one that briefly lights on that very weed: "There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don't." A silly thought on a serious subject, but then Anne probably loved silly thoughts.

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