Every social order creates victims. Consequently, every social order has to deal with victims. And victims have to deal with the social order – if they survive.
For the victims, in the afterlife of victimage event, in the narrative trajectory of their life as victims, there is a narrow spectrum of subject positions, from accusation to forgiveness, from resentment to forgetting. And the same this is true for those who are the great beneficiaries and managers of the social order, who move between demonizing the victim to programs urging reconciliation and assimilation, with guilt and fear mingling together. The managers have, of course, more elbow room, and can even afford to spare some understanding for the perpetrators - since the managers are not victims. They even have the luxury, which they abundantly use, of condescending to the victims. Yet, if they are wise, they also must feel a certain fear. The ghosts may conspire, the victims may revolt. The dialectic between the masters and the slaves is, as Nietzsche pointed out, the defining structure of dialectic itself. Without victimage, there would be no dialectic. Victim-measuring is the social project that binds together the accused and the accuser,
‘Judge not that ye be not judged.”
“He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me." Those who harbor such thoughts do not still their hatred.
"He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me." Those who do not harbor such thoughts still their hatred.”
This is the codex of the anti-social, the kingdom of Heaven.
You have seen Hanns Chaim Mayer, or his brothers and sisters, in the famous photos, “toothless skeletons that were reanimated with Angloamerican corned beef in a can” from April or May, 1945, at Bergen-Belsen. Mayer changed his name in anger to Jean Amery and fled, when he was able, to Brussels. Under the angry name, he waited for revenge. He waited for the people who had sustained and supported the people who tortured him and killed millions of Jews to be reduced, in their circumstances, to living in a vast “potato field.” Not for him the disgusting, “vibrating” hug of the oppressor, in forgiveness, of someone like Martin Buber. By the nineteen-sixties, though, it was clear that destruction, revenge, any cosmic equalling of the balance, was not going to happen.
In an essay entitled “Ressentiment”, he begins by contemplating the “miracle” of postwar Western Europe. The democracy! The prosperity! The liberal society! “I am not at ease in these peaceful, beautiful lands full of clever and modern people. Why, one has probably already guessed. I am one of that (happily) slowly dying species of people who are called, by an agreed upon convention, the victims of Nazism.’
Jesus, Buddha, Nietzsche and John Stuart Mill all agree that ressentiment is a poison, a darkness that must be avoided, even when one is beyond Good and Evil. Amery takes the devil’s side. Or, rather, his essay is about the victim’s dealing with being a victim.
As we all know from our everyday political and social experience, the political life of “modern” societies is oriented, to a massive extent, to either disparaging victims or claiming victimhood. There are no non-victims in this discussion – even those establishment figures who are most scornful of “victims” are liable to portray themselves as the victims of victims – or, since this is too reminiscent of the crimes that created the victims, victims of those who “speak for” victims, and who are false friends, not real victims at all. The real victims are, of course, dead and gone, as is right and proper. Survival is a mark that really, one is not a victim at all, but a victimizer of the happy and the prosperous, of Capital and its bosses, of supposed skin “privilege”, etc., etc.
Amery compares his situation in 1945 to that of the giant bug in Kafka’s Metamorphosis:
“I was, as who I was – a surviving resistance fighter, a Jew, one of the persecuted people by a hated regime – in a mutual agreement with the world. Those who wounded me and turned me into a bedbug as dark powers had one operated on the protagonist of Kafka’s Metamorphosis – they were themselves the horror of the winning camp. Not only National Socialism – Germany was the object of a general feeling, that before our eyes turned from hatred to contempt.”
However, just as the bug in the Metamorphosis is kicked out of the house of “normality”, so too was Amery – as an accuser. He quickly became out of synch with the “world-clock”, which had other plans than to make Germany into a potato field. And so the foundation of peace and modernity was laid on the tacit agreement to limit the amount of justice, or revenge, enacted on the perpetrators and their complicit populations.
This moment was not historically unprecedented. After the Civil War, the same thing happened to the victims of slavery. Emancipation turned into compromise, and then into second class citizenship, social death on credit, so to speak. Dubois’s “double soul”, the hyphenated accuser or assimilationist, was born out of a vast broken promise.
This is to spread the question over its largest dimension. Amery’s essay, though, takes the opposite route of asking the question about the bug he had become. How does one survive one’s survival?
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