James Carroll, the author of Constantine's Sword and a regular columnist for the Boston Globe, is one of those liberal commentators who often run hot and cold. His politics are always good, but there are times it seems he simply cuts and pastes multi-culturalism, the preferential option for the poor, respect for gender difference, etc., into a cookie cutter rumination on whatever the issue of the day might be. On his bad days, his prose reminds me a little of the Washington Post's Richard Cohen, whose hackitude rivals Thomas Friedman's.
When Carroll is good, though, he is simply spectacular. In today's column, on the cultural significance of the Holocaust Museum shooting, he rivals Frank Rich's ability to put his finger square in the center of the problem he is addressing, and to use that aim to bring to light unique and key insights into the society we live in.
Join me over the fold for some discussion of Carroll's column.
Carroll starts appropriately by introducing us to Officer Stephen Johns, the museum guard whose kindness in opening the door for a patron was repaid with an assassin's bullet. He then assigns personal responsibility for the murder to the racist anti-Semite James Wenneker von Brunn, who, he says, should be swiftly brought to justice for his crime. However, Carroll notes:
it is impossible, and would be irresponsible, to ignore the implications of this event: a set of extravagant hatreds combined with a mysticism of the weapon, laying bare multiple connections. A Jew hater, von Brunn could have assaulted a synagogue. A racist, he could have targeted an African-American postal worker. A nihilist, he might have attacked another tourist site in Washington; the guard randomly confronting him might have been white - but what von Brunn in fact did defines its own meaning.
These multiple connections, not the racist murderer, become the focus of the column. He enters his topic through the Holocaust Museum itself, pointing out that its architecture "resembles a death factory," and that physically it is surrounded by, and imposes itself upon, public buildings built in part by slaves and various monuments glorifying war.
Carroll's master work, Constantine's Sword, is a deep and profound meditation by a former priest that uncovers the roots of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in the portrayal of the Jewish people by the authors of the Christian Gospels themselves. The book's argument is sophisticated and nuanced, intellectually rigorous, and historically rich. He traces the history of anti-Semitism from the first century through various twists and turns through the Roman Era, the Middle Ages, and modernity, outlining the tension within Christianity between universal love, which he believes is the religion's core value, and the increasingly irrational fear and hatred of Jews, which he views as an aberration in the religion's structure. Several moments he identifies as turning points, when the Western Church encountered the possibility of either rejecting anti-Semitism or embracing it. Most times, he finds, the Church (and its Protestant competitors) embraced and deepened the anti-Semitic impulse.
Here's how that discussion relates to von Brunn:
von Brunn’s act dramatizes... that race hatred in Western culture is elliptical, and has two foci: anti-Semitism and white supremacy. In ways that are rarely understood, the former generated the latter, which then curled back as anti-Jewish genocide. Aggression of one group toward others is built into the human condition, but we are speaking of something more deadly than that - an effervescent lethality that is peculiar to the culture that comes from Europe.
There's more:
What we call "racism’’ can be traced to the 15th-century Iberian idea of "blood impurity,’’ a biological fault that set Jews apart from Christians. Jewish unworthiness was no longer in their religion, but in their physical makeup - an inherited inferiority. That idea combined at about the same time (1492 a marker) with assumptions of innate European superiority over the "savages’’ encountered in first-wave colonialism. The new European imperialism (unlike, say, the imperialism of ancient Rome) depended on the ideology of absolute ranking by race.
Now, I'm starting to bump against fair use guidelines, so I'll limit my blockquoting but there's one more little bit and it's perhaps the most profound insight of the column. Carroll begins the paragraph by talking about the routine and often genocidal brutality European colonizers deployed against colonized peoples throughout Africa and the Americas. He doesn't directly reference Heart of Darkness, but anyone who's read Conrad's novel knows exactly what he's talking about. He then writes this:
As the scholar Sven Lindquist observed, Hitler’s innovation was to apply within Europe, against Jews, the method that conquistadors and colonists had long used against aboriginals on four continents.
I haven't read Lindqvist's book Exterminate All the Brutes, but the Amazon review of it says this:
In a chilling and controversial book, Swedish author Sven Lindqvist recounts the grisly history of 19th century European imperialism and its connection to a legacy of genocide. Moving crudely through present-day Africa while tracing the routes of British conquerors, Lindqvist tells how armed troops massacred 11,000 Sudanese with only 48 British deaths in 1898 and how the King of Ashanti was made to kiss the feet of British officers in 1896. Lindqvist doesn't stop in Africa, writing of the extermination of the Tasmanian aborigines and other atrocities inflicted on native people. He then connects those acts with those of the Nazi regime, showing how rampant imperialism sowed the seeds of the Holocaust. A moving account of the forces of history.
It makes me wonder if the revulsion we feel towards the Holocaust stems not so much from the systematic, bureaucratically efficient brutality of the event -- which in fact was not unprecedented in modern European history -- but rather that such brutality was deployed against a European people and was conducted in the very heart of Europe itself. It's easy to justify the horrendous things Uncle Tom does when he's half a world away, in a strange land populated by people with an unfamiliar culture, but it's much harder to do do so when the concentration camp is a short train ride away from your hometown.
Carroll, forever a man of the Enlightenment, ends on an optimistic note:
If we humans were condemned to such homicidal impulses by the mere fact of our human condition, then the denial of history would be tolerable, moral amnesia inevitable. But anti-Semitism and racism come from particular times and places, choices and consequences - from culture created by humans. Therefore such culture can be changed by humans - but only if we reckon with its past. It was to history, memory, and the possibility of a better future that Officer Stephen Johns opened the door. May he rest in peace.
I second the emotion.