Jan 102010
Historians are judges — of what is good or evil, of what is noble or undesirable, of what is human nature or aberrant. In trying to make sense of past events, we judge them — and the people involved in them — in order to understand them. Thus, we ask questions like: were slave owners in the American colonies cruel sadists or did they know not what they were truly doing? Did they unconsciously build a system that robbed others of their very selves by enslaving them or did they set out to intentionally establish a culture of cruelty towards blacks? These are moral questions as much as they are intellectual ones. When we ask them, we are trying to understand the thinking of our ancestors, but we are also making value judgments about their behaviors. We cannot escape doing so. It is part of being human. Social scientist might find this duty objectionable and pretend they can remove it from our practice, but that is foolish nonsense. We are not history automatons and the value of history is tied to its role in creating and supporting our ethical beliefs. We are moral beings studying other moral beings; it would be the height of ridiculousness to pretend to remove morality from that study.
When we write about noble characters who commit great deeds we tend not to struggle with the morality of our judgments as much. We generally accept that people do good and desirable things, so when we write about this, we tend not to question from where this goodness originates. It may be uncommon to be a great patriot, but it isn’t a psychological aberration. When we write about perpetrators of great evils, however, we confront just such qualities. What kind of a man was Adolf Hitler that he could do the things he did? Underlying that question is moral repulsion at his behavior. Thus, in writing about him and the other Nazis, historians struggle with how best to judge these men. Some attack them as evil, psychologically disturbed persons. Others, try to come up with a rationalization that makes their motives seem reasonable and, therefore, comprehensible. In her analysis of Adolf Eichmann’s participation in the Final Solution of the Jewish Question, Hannah Arendt proposed that his case illustrated the “banality of evil.” Eichmann’s actions were not the result of a great prejudice or psychosis. Eichmann was just a regular guy who went along with the herd. The great evil of the Holocaust here was its inanity or lack of conscious maliciousness. In other words, it’s not personal, it’s just business. The ideological extension of that contention is that there is nothing special about evilness and you should not engrandize evil historical figures by characterizing them as exceptional (even in a negative way). Thus, you rob them of their infamy by treating them as regular human beings rather than powerful individuals. Perhaps this is our revenge on them.
Last summer, an old man consumed with disease and hatred endeavored to commit a mass murder at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. A white supremacist with a violent animosity toward Jews, he plotted to kill visitors at the museum — a futile act of rage against the society from which he had become marginalized. He was thwarted in his aim by a guard who wounded him when returning gunfire. Our hero, Stephen Johns, died in the line of duty, preventing a potentially great slaughter. Our villain, James von Brunn, has been declining in jail since that time, dying of his diseases while awaiting trial. Clearly, von Brunn was no Eichmann (or at least Arendt’s Eichmann). His action was intentional and vile. It was abnormal, and it seems impossible to dismiss it as banal. What to do then with this character? How do we judge him? And, if we do so, do we reward him for his evil act by giving him an acknowledged place in history? On the day that he died, the museum put out a statement remembering Johns instead and pointing to the continued need for efforts to eradicate prejudice and hatred in human society. It was a rather ahistorical tack for a place of remembering. It was, undoubtedly, an intentional refusal to acknowledge von Brunn and his significance or connection to the museum. For a place dedicated to keeping the memory of the Shoah alive, as to prevent its reoccurrence, it was an antithetical act, and perhaps not even a proper one. To reject the historical perspective in order to punish one man seems a high price to pay.
In the end, von Brunn’s passing held little significance anyway. The story didn’t even make the front page of the papers. It was a small item on even a slow news day. Perhaps the real justice in this story is the banality of von Brunn’s death. He was not a victim of the death penalty — earning the martyr’s status that would give him longevity among certain circles. It wasn’t a gruesome death etched in the memory of a watching public that would give it notoriety either. No, he died of ill health unrelated to his actions at the museum; it was the way he would have died if he had never plotted murder or raised his gun. Thousands annually die the same way. It was unremarkable, and that is the way history will record it.
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