I was going through the stacks at the local library and came across a book by Primo Levi that I hadn't read yet. Primo Levi is a fine, precise writer and I've enjoyed and learned from every book of his I've read. This book consists of newspaper essays, stories, and reviews that he wrote over the last few decades of his life. He was an industrial chemist and used words as carefully as he analyzed the components of stains, paints, and coatings.
The Mirror Maker: Stories and Essays by Primo Levi
NY: Schocken Books, 1989
ISBN 0-8052-4076-4
(85) But they were all identical [the German guards], those faces, those voices, those attitudes: all of them distorted by the same hate and the same anger, and by the lust of omnipotence.
See what I mean? "The lust of omnipotence" is a clear description of the unthinkable and an extremely useful description of the authoritarian mindset.
(90-91) Just as every person, even the most innocent, even the victim himself, feels some responsibility for Hiroshima, Dallas, and Vietnam, and is ashamed, so even the one least connected with the colossal labor of cosmic flights feels that a small particle of merit falls to the human species, and so also to himself, and because of this feels that he has greater value. For good or evil, we are a single people: the more we become conscious of this, the less difficult and long will be humanity's progress toward justice and peace.
from "The Moon and Man" [on the flight of Apollo 8, Borman, Lovell, and Anders]
What struck me about this passage with astonishment and sadness was that Hiroshima, Dallas, and Vietnam are all American actions. They were not Italian acts, not even European acts. The sadness comes in when I consider that America will probably not have that kind of status ever again in my lifetime. I don't think an Italian writer, a European writer will ever take on the responsibility for our actions in Iraq. We will have to be ashamed for ourselves.
(104) Staying with the image, I propose that the conversion should be gradual; spears into shields, and then shields into ploughshares, when prudence permits.
In short, would it not be possible to invest the dizzying amounts of money allotted to the military budgets mainly (and gradually) in defensive weapons? In radar networks instead of nuclear warheads, in antitank missiles instead of tanks, and so on? This would be an unequivocal signal to the opposite camp that the guard has not been lowered but that there are no aggressive intentions.
This is an interesting attempt at ratcheting down the impetus to war but defensive weapons are weapons nonetheless. The Cobra Dane radar deployed at Eareckson Air Station in Shemya, Alaska is part of the Strategic Defense Initiative and has been criticized as a defensive weapon that is an active threat. The Navy's low frequency active sonar program seems to be killing whales and dolphins as a side effect. The transition to peace from war is not as simple as we would like it to be.
(108) It is a page that takes your breath away [Kafka's death of K. in The Trial]. I, a survivor of Auschwitz, would never have written it, or never in that way: out of inability, or insufficient imagination, certainly, but also out of a feeling of shame before death that Kafka did not know, or, if he did, rejected; or perhaps out of lack of control.
The idea of "shame before death" is something I do not want to but can easily imagine now. Primo Levi was a survivor and that is perhaps why I enjoy his work so much. We are all survivors, until we are not.