Quite brilliant, and well done Unherd for publishing this. The writer’s soul has been seared, and he seeks to set out how and why through the book he’d read but ultimately, this takes him onto a wider discourse about the world in which we all exist, with our humanity – in every sense – on full view to the generations that have succeeded in the post World War era.
Is what we’re witnessing in the sphere of the ‘culture wars’ a reaction to the horror of the 20th century, when mass media brought the reality of mass murder at the hands of intelligent and otherwise cultured citizens? It seems very much that way to me. The reaction to “look away” is followed by the reaction to “move away”, to try to disown the reality of that which we’re all, apparently, capable.
I believe it’s only when we begin to countenance ourselves in this state, to start to own our humanity, that we’ll be able to move on, rather than move away.
Cho Jinn
1 month ago
“the Nazi genocide as being, in some vertiginous sense, the central fact of human history, a catastrophe that stains and alters the meaning of all that came before it and all that follows.”
And our obsession therewith has prevented violent atrocities ever since! I think the Dzungars want to have a word with you.
Ian_S
1 month ago
“… the retributive, genocidal crimes against humanity we’ve watched take place in Gaza these past five months …”
You’ve got to hand it to Hamas, they’ve all but won both the short and long term war against their religious enemy, the Jews.
Even the writer of this article has been taken in. What Hamas has done is place Israelis, and the world’s Jews more generally, into a dilemma. Hamas notified the Jews that Hamas intends to wipe them from the earth. This is documented. Unless the Jews say “oh, ok, we’ll accept an Islamic Holocaust and all be killed”, then it’s a setup for a fight to death. What other options do Jews really have than defend against such a maniacal enemy? On the other hand, Hamas totally knows this, so by attacking Israel and filming their (Hamas’s) atrocities against Israeli civilians, they know this will give Jews no choice than fight back — and for Hamas’s strategy, the more Palestinian carnage the better. So Hamas deliberately keeps civilians in the battle zones, intending them to be killed and “go viral”. And the point of that of course, is to make Israel the bad guy, so that they become an international pariah. Because Hamas is a fanatical religious cult, they see thousands of Palestinian “martyr” deaths as a wholly acceptable means to the end of defeating the Jews. So what should Israel do? Let Hamas maniacs rebuild their war machine and continue the attacks, like Hamas vows to do? Or do Israelis fight for their lives and be condemned for it forever by the world’s sanctimonious bien pensants? For Israel, the stakes couldn’t be any higher.
When this author flings glib accusations of “genocide” against Israel, he fails to see how the situation was intentionally, strategically, set up by Hamas. He fails to see that Israel is damned if they do and damned if they don’t. He fails to think through his own words “no serious people ever thinks about anything else” (than the Holocaust). He should realize the meaning of those words for Jews, for whom this history is not just an interesting French novel to be disturbed by for a week or two, but the entire lens through which to see reality. However, unfortunately, he sees none of these things.
I am glad you have highlighted the irony of the authors failure to understand the Israel/Hamas conflict. Of course, like Liddell’s protagonist many ordinary Israelis have lost the right not to kill and some perhaps have sought revenge through killing as a result of Hamas’s provocative tactical massacre but there is no genocide. War is hell, but the population of Gaza is not being wiped out. While a Judenrein Germany was a possibility the concept of a Middle East without Arab ethnic Palestinians is no more than a phantom that even the most Zionist of Israelis could not contemplate.
The title of the novel hints also of the heart of darkness contained in less lethal urges to do right, to be “kind” that we are more familiar with in our own more settled societies. The career and life destroyed by the kindly ones who want to maintain a woke sin free life by cancellation. This too, while not the hell of war, is it’s own sort of hell perpetrated by those who think themselves as doing the right thing however distasteful it might be.
Yes, it’s a real shame that the woke can’t see themselves in the mirror. If this book was meant to be that mirror, its mission has been diverted by too much content that isn’t metaphor, but unique historical horror.
The pity of October 7 is that Israel was working toward rapprochement with the realities of Palestinian displacement. If the issue was dispossession and reconciliation, it could be done. But for Hamas and it’s backers, there’s an overlay of permanent religious hatred. And that unfortunately is baked into their religious scriptures as timeless divine word. The woke refuse to hear that of course.
The very mixed reaction to Glazer’s Oscar acceptance speech highlighted for me the Gulf between even ‘Western ‘ assimilated Jews who try to apply enlightenment principles, be even-handed and not take sides….
And people on the ground who are fighting what Hamas considers a war to the death for one side or other. What would we do if we were living surrounded by people and nations who have vowed to ‘wipe our country off the map’ ? Probably waffle our way to oblivion. We could even quote Voltaire’s defence of your enemy’s right to express themselves on our way to the death pits to show we hadn’t lost our sense of proportion.
I’ve not read this book but if Bret Easton Ellis is a fellow traveller, I’d expect overhyped, gratuitous and sensationalist torture porn masquerading as profound fiction. The French are far more susceptible in this respect, finding profundity in the strangest places (more Derrida, vicar ?). The fact that the main character is a closet homosexual with a scat fetish who now runs a lace factory says it all really.
Just because a book is about the Holocaust and is shockingly graphic doesn’t mean it’s serious at all, never mind worth reading. I recently tried to read ‘Justine’ by the Marquis de Sade but was ultimately bored to death by the predictable taboo-busting nature of it all. But at least de Sade had a sense of humour.
Maybe it was the magic mushrooms the author just ‘happened to take’ ?
“Probably waffle our way to oblivion” — yes, what do we do about our “be kind” elites, who would be the spokespeople for that? How did their worldview become so vacant? Should we pin that on yet another Putin psyops conspiracy? If we pay a ransom, do we get our elites back in sound mind again? In the meantime, they’re a danger to us and themselves.
Thanks Ian. Nothing to add, but good to read the words of a “fellow traveler”. Depressing to see the hate spewn at Israel again and again. Would have thought that Mr. Doyle would not have been taken in by the pablum being peddled by BBC and others. Oh, well…
Take the Kak out of your eyes, there is only one terrorist here (apart from the USA and NATO warmongers) The new Adolf Hitler (Benjamin Netanyahu) and his army of Nazi Zionist Racist Israel citizens 90% in support of the Genocide taking place in Gaza and the West Bank. This started in 1945 and the West stood by and let the Israelis systematically murder and steal land that did not belong to them. They have been committing Genocide since 1945 against the Palestinians people FACT!! For the intelligent and those that know their history The Apartheid Zionist Israel State TICK ALL THE BOXES for GENOCIDE against the Palestinians. Sadly, the Western Nations and the ARAB NATION COWARDS stand by and let this happen. ISRAEL has brought mankind to the lowest ebb of humanity the meaning of Human Rights eroded, you have to admire the Media Bias influenced by the Zionist Jews, the widespread bias contravening the standards of journalism, However the real TRUTH is classed as the new HATE SPEECH!! and as Orwell said “During times of Universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act, you become a Racist, a Fascist, a Bigot etc. A ceasefire in GAZA is not the answer, A two party country state needs to be established with or without Israel in agreement, we have 193 UN countries and from these we put troops on the ground, we put a no-fly zone in place and destroy ANY aircraft abusing the air space, likewise with Sea access, all borders open for AID. Sanctions on Israel, financially and armaments etc UNTIL the two States one Israel one Palestine are established. The borders go back to 1945. I believe this in place the ARAB world will re-build Palestine and invest in industry for its people. Israel at the moment un-touched but its industries will have to re-locate and the illegal settlers go find somewhere else to live. The UN needs to clinical and act democratically and the policy that decided democratically by the 193 UN countries not the selected few are no more than warmongers. The USA warmonger needs to keep well away, and needs to get its military bases out of the middle east.
there is only one terrorist here (apart from the USA and NATO warmongers) —-> So what is Hamas, a social club? The atrocities of October 7 really did happen. The Israeli response is just that, a response to a group whose sole goal remains the eradication of the Jewish state. Gaza sits on the Mediterranean, has nearby energy deposits, and is nonetheless a third world hell pit of its leaders’ making. They have been committing Genocide since 1945 against the Palestinian people —-> And this “genocide” has been so effective that the Palestinian population is exponentially larger today than it was then. And by the way, Israel was not formed until 1948. A two-party country state needs to be established with or without Israel in agreement, —>Are you unaware that multiple two-nation solutions have been proposed, usually supported by the Israelis and always rejected by the Palestinians?
Pretty standard stuff, though I note that after you’ve accused Jews of Nazism and genocide (it’s a nasty kind of jew-baiting though, saying that, isn’t it? It’s meant to trivialise the Shoah and mock its victims by reducing it to empty slogans), you don’t actually shout “from the river to the sea”. So a slight crack of daylight between you and Hamas propaganda, but not much. Enjoy your UnHerd subscription.
I’ve noticed many times Jews or Israel are involved, some commenter (whom I assume is otherwise heterodox and proud of it) unironically parrots the woke hyperbole of the far left.
Mr Learad’s thinking and mode of expression remind us of the ugly fact that, while attempts to reach rational rapport between differing points of view is a civilised aspiration, we must remain on guard to defend ourselves against those who are unable, by their own natures, to engage in reasonable perspective sharing and to give and take for the sake of peace. Against such people we must, while remaining peaceful to our core, be ready and willing to defend ourselves with everything at our disposal. When those such as Mr Learad make no attempt to understand but only to oppose, civilised people must be willing to forgo perspective sharing and simply militate against their opponents, or forgo their own existence.
Kind of. It is very silly to read an 1000 page novel expressing a detailed first-person account of the Holocaust, write a long review of it, and then sign off with your final insightful takeaway being that Israel’s war with Hamas is somehow comparable to the Holocaust – a banal regurgitation of Current Thing progressive group prejudice.
Israel is not under genuine threat of genocide from Hamas however, since there is a notable power imbalance.
Hamas’s strategy is to isolate Israel internationally. If they manage to turn Israel into a pariah state, the US will end their support, as it would be too costly in terms of US domestic politics. Then the power imbalance will be redressed, and Hamas with its regional partners including Iran have a much better chance of driving Jews out of Israel and eradicating the Jewish state, which is laid out in the Hamas charter. The charter also makes clear that the fundamental problem is not colonialism but that Jews offended Allah. This is also explained in their charter. It may be arguable, but the actions of Hamas, in the context of their intent regarding Jews, fits the criteria of genocide. Also to note is that Hamas is aware that if they can successfully frame their goal of eradication as “decolonisation”, they will have the support of Western elites. Their plan is certainly achievable and so far they are winning.
Really good breakdown of the underlying, Palestinian (not just Hammas) long term strategy. It reminds me of the quote from a Taliban leader, (paraphrasing approximately). They have all bombs, but we have all the time in the world, and we will win.
Is anybody anywhere under a ‘genuine threat of genocide’? (Even the Nazis came nowhere close to eliminating Jews from the world.)
In my opinion the “power imbalance” between Hamas and Israel is (a) illusory, since Hamas has the full support of Tehran, and (b) irrelevant – because while the Israeli state may be stronger than Hamas, individual terrorists are much stronger than individual Israeli citizens – think of those raped and murdered and tortured and tell me about this idea of “power imbalance.” Who was stronger on October 7?
“he fails to see how the situation was intentionally, strategically, set up by Hamas.”
If this is true, and I’m not saying it isn’t, why is Israel walking headlong into the trap? You don’t win by doing exactly what your enemy wants.
Israel, aware that has an enemy that wishes to annihilate it, should’ve defended its borders effectively on Oct 7, and continued to do so for as long as it takes for Hamas to pass.
But this is the dilemma. If Israel don’t fight back, Hamas will prosecute with further attacks. Hamas did after all build a vast underground fortress for that very purpose. They would do that until eventually Israel does fight back, or just let themselves be conquered. If Israel do fight back, then they simultaneously have to fight a propaganda war, which is actually the war Hamas is most invested in. Assuming Israel doesn’t choose abdication and so does fight back, their military strength will overwhelm Hamas. So why would Hamas choose to provoke the conflict? Because Hamas is ultimately only using the physical war to create a massive body count, which is the central pillar of their propaganda war. The goal of the propaganda war is to isolate Israel internationally. It’s a genius strategy to outwit Israel’s military strength. Israel’s problem is that Hamas have maneuvered Israel into a pincer attack, where Israel is vulnerable to the propaganda war, but must inevitably fight the physical war anyway.
Hamas isn’t going to conquer Israel – it hasn’t, and never could have, the capability. It should focus on preventing attacks on its territory.
Your argument is like suggesting the UK should’ve destroyed the IRA by flattening Catholic areas of NI. It would never have worked and it would have created the next generation of terrorists. Which is exactly what Israel is doing now.
I was going to try and write something similar but your reply here is brilliant and outweighs what I could have concocted.
My heart sank on reading the baseless lies about genocide, laying open the writer’s bias during what was mostly a decent article. There’s also no famine, that’s a full on propaganda lie in the same way it isn’t the Israelis stopping aid getting in.
The question no one seems to be able to answer is, if the Israelis are genocidal why hasn’t it happened, ever, despite them having the ability to do it in less than half an hour?
Tony Taylor
1 month ago
(strangely, I couldn’t quite convince anyone to read it)
I’m not sure that you convinced me to read it, either. While undoubtedly more worthwhile than Salo, or Ilsa She Wolf, and probably better than Schindler’s List whose disdain I share with Littell, I’m tempted to stick to my Sven Hassels. Meanwhile, I’ll bookmark this page into my read-list.
I read ‘Cross of Iron’ a few years ago (never read war books normally) and thought that while it was obviously popular fiction, it was nevertheless well written, convincingly grim, psychologically astute and packed a big punch at the end. I can understand why it was and still is one of the most popular books of its kind.
I really enjoyed the book (back when it was called The Willing Flesh). The film wasn’t a classic, but enjoyable nevertheless. TWF/COI has Sven Hassel’s style of German potboiler covered. I’d probably still enjoy it today at 62, not so much SH’s work, which I gobbled up in my mid to late teens. Just last year on a whim I picked up The Bloody Road to Death, but I bailed out at page 50.
I preferred and still will always prefer to re-read “Man‘s Search for Meaning”. It sits on my book pile next to my bed. It is written by the inmate Viktor Frankl and shows the horror of the dehumanising hell of Auschwitz. But in spite of the terrible suffering Frankl finds meaning in all this terror. He doesn’t describe a pornography of nihilistic violence, but the story of the uncrushable human spirit versa seemingly unredeemable horror. How would my mind and soul profit from endless pornographic violent images? Thanks no, I will give it a miss.
Charles Stanhope
1 month ago
For those of us who are not part of the cognoscenti would it not have been apposite to mention that Jonathan Liddell is a New York born Jew? Telling us that he was born in the US and brought up in France and his father was a successful ‘spy novelist’ is pretty disingenuous to say the least.
Am I also being too cynical to note the timing of this essay, just as Gaza appears to be reaching a crescendo?
Either way, I like Tony Taylor of this venerable site, will probably stick with Sven Hassel for my bedtime reading, along with a mug of Ovaltine ‘mit cognac’.
No. No one deserves that, not the children nor the parents. It doesn’t matter if they are Israeli or Irish. And going down that road is what leads us to what happened in Israel.
What you said is just a beautiful phrase in this situation.
I would say “virtue signaling”
First. There are no crimes of genocide in Gaza, we have a war with terror.
Second. I’m sure he’s on the side of the left when it comes to illegal immigration into his country. As a minimum I can blame him in the crimes of these migrants. He is guilty.
Graeme Macdonald
1 month ago
Thankyou Sir for another, very timely, reminder as to why Jews and the state of Israel are permanently exempt from criticism. Thanks also for pointing out that we are all collectively responsible for the ongoing atrocity in Gaza by dint of being a part of the same species. We’d all murder our enemies (and their women, children and animals) given the chance, wouldn’t we. Think I’ll do the right thing and commit suicide before I hurt someone.
“very timely, reminder as to why Jews and the state of Israel are permanently exempt from criticism.”
Yes it’s disgusting really. You try and wipe them out once and for all, then when you fail, they just keep playing back atcha with the “Holocaust card”. I mean, the chutzpah.
Come on, Jews and Israel are endlessly criticized. What you seem to mean is, some people frustratingly insist they have a right to self defence against a group sworn to eradicate them due to religious hatred. How about you condemn Hamas? Or, is it because of “Islamophobia” (now there’s a get out of jail card if ever there was one), they too are “permanently exempt from criticism”?
You’re getting sucked in by superficial, highly judgemental woke cr*p, and now you’re talking about s****ide. For your mental health, give up on the Guardian and the BBC. They’re for fools.
Dominic English
1 month ago
Thanks. But I think I’ll wait for the Netflix adaptation.
Danny Kaye
1 month ago
Couldn’t help noticing the all-too-expected ending with “the retributive, genocidal crimes against humanity we’ve watched take place in Gaza these past five months” and then “Palestinian men in their underwear, blindfolded and crammed in the backs of trucks, or of skeletal children being starved to death in real time, of time and space folding in on themselves, of symbols merging, of the victim’s face becoming that of the perpetrator.” How neat. The genocidee becoming the genocider. What a satisfying closing of the circle. And what rubbish. As if the Palestinian men in their underwear were being herded to the gas chambers. As if, pictures of skeletal kids notwithstanding, hundreds of truckloads of food weren’t being delivered to Gaza each day (the Warsaw Ghetto would have been happy with such aid in 1943, to say nothing of today’s South Sudanese or North Yemenites). But why let facts get into the way of the satisfying coda of “the victim’s face becoming that of the perpetrator”, of the atavistic blood libel against the Jews. On this at least, one can indeed say: Plus ça change et plus c’est la même chose.
William Miller
1 month ago
Man, what a blowhard.
Glynis Roache
1 month ago
What is the ‘take-away’ from this book meant to be, exactly? A book that would cause me to reflect seriously on, or otherwise ‘confront’, the capacity of humanity for extreme behaviour would need (for me) a main protagonist whose pre-established behaviour patterns were a little nearer to the centre of the bell curve. A ‘seriously troubled pervert’ ( also described as a ‘sensitive young man’?!)who has already committed incest with his sister and has a predilection for faecal matter to the extent that the author feels compelled to impress it upon his readers for a hundred pages, can tell me nothing about humanity in general. He’s an unreliable lens through which to view anything – especially something that has no need of further disturbing garnish. Having experienced the anguish of my Jewish uni flatmate during the six day war and been made to read Babi Yar, which had been published the year before, I feel that this book of Littell’s sounds, by contrast, somewhat exploitative in nature.
Had the protagonist’s behavioural patterns somehow been induced by involvement in genocide, the work could have had, perhaps, a certain instructional or moralising validity. I am not prepared to go back and attempt to discern the timing of the story arc in terms of behavioural development but, as it struck me, this ‘infernal narrator’ seems to have been chosen by Littell for no other reason than to be a vehicle for ‘extreme literature’, as Mr Doyle politely calls it. And that is Littell’s choice, of course. Presumably, he lays it all out in a very accomplished, authorial fashion. My choice is whether or not I want to give myself a vicarious, ascending urinary tract infection by wallowing in the s**t with him. I think not. Mr Doyle’s macabre fascination with the work did not ‘rub off’ – I barely finished his article.
Allison Barrows
1 month ago
Littell sounds like the “psychopath” and the “sadist”. 100 pages of Aue “masturbating in his own sh*t”? The author of this article is apparently a masochist.
G*d no. I’ll stick with my current read, “Life and Fate” by Vasily Grossman.
I have read both. Good as it is Life and Fate is still a poor man’s War and Peace.
Ignore the authors florid misrepresentations, The Kindly Ones is a truly monumental work and possibly one of the greatest works of the 20th Century.
Paul Sagar
1 month ago
I read this book quite a few years ago now. I think the author here is completely correct. It is an astonishing literary and philosophical accomplishment. I am glad to see it publicly recognised as such, and with such accuracy.
Dylan Blackhurst
1 month ago
I’m just glad he read it, so I don’t have to!
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
1 month ago
I thought The Kindly Ones was a towering achievement
Mike Rees
1 month ago
A francophone hit but an Anglophone miss? That’s because the French have often delighted in elevating some old pervert’s w**k dreams to high art! My how the literati did love a paedophile in France last century. All art is a caricature of life. Some is good caricature; this sounds like voyeuristic shite!
Bill Kupersmith
1 month ago
I found the book utterly engaging, to share the point of view of a believing Nazi.
aaron david
1 month ago
Ireland, as your bio mentions you are from, has a history of appeasement with Nazi Germany. And, further, not only did nothing as a country to help end that war, punished those citizens who did volunteer to help.
Does this make you a Holocaust accomplice?
I bring this up to help center, as is the term used these days, your flip comment re Gaza and genocide. Remember, the Palestinians are the ones who paraglided into Israel and slaughtered 1200 people. In other words, they started the war, and here you are excusing them. Sound familiar?
There is an old joke/saying: Europe will never forgive the Jews for the holocaust. It’s funny. It’s not so funny.
Eamonn Toland
1 month ago
How can we live with ourselves? Perhaps when we recognize that instinctive revulsion at the Shoah is the appropriate, natural human response.
One of the things that makes the Holocaust so transgressive is that people like us, in a modern industrial society, influenced by the Enlightenment and the Scientific Method, were able to rationalize mass murder that is completely at odds with our intrinsic nature.
We now know that humans are born with a “rudimentary moral sense” (Just Babies, Paul Bloom, Yale). We also know that we instinctively recoil from harming innocent strangers (Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes). The Milgram Experiments showed that obeying orders that cause harm to strangers is extremely stressful, and we will wriggle out of compliance if we can. We need to be the good guys. Anything else causes stressful dissonance. Warfare itself is a very recent phenomenon – the earliest known war graves, in Jebel Sahaba on the Egyptian-Sudanese border, are only 14,000 years old. Of the 3,000 skeletons found at 400 locations that date to between 50,000 and 15,000 years ago, less than a handful show any signs of human violence (Matthew Piscitelli, Misled by Ethnography). For 95% of the 300,000 years homo sapiens has walked the earth, population densities were so low and resources so relatively abundant that our incentives to collaborate – in finding food, raising children, and warding off predators, outweighed conflict.
Yet the Shoah did happen, and we can understand Thomas Hobbes, writing in the seventeenth century, having a bearish view of mankind. We are able to subvert our moral sense by persuading ourselves that we are being righteous. You can’t read the highly articulate speeches and op-eds of the nineteenth century defending slavery in a society that held all men are created equal without a sense of horror at our ability to ethically justify evil when it is in our utilitarian, rational self-interest. It may come as no surprise that surveys of prisoners locked up for violent crimes show that they believe themselves to be more moral, trustworthy and honest than the general population, and only slightly less law-abiding. By asserting the right to self-defense, however spuriously, we have repeatedly scapegoated Them, whether in the revived witch hunts of the Renaissance or the slaughter of the innocents that started on October 7th last year. I was shocked by how quickly people started to condemn Israel when they announced their intention to destroy Hamas, yet in dealing with an enemy that willfully uses their own people as human shields, they have to show that they are not fighting terror with terror.
The Nazis followed the precepts of social Darwinism. The one commandment that Hitler believed in was “Thou shalt preserve the species.” He predicted that Christianity would be replaced by a more muscular creed as scientific progress advanced. Still, recognizing that sensory contact with the innocents would cause revulsion, they did more than ply their troops with alcohol before machine-gunning their victims, whether in piling up people in death pits using the Sardine Method, deliberately starving prisoners to death under the Hunger Plan, or deploying the mobile gas vans and ultimately the gas chambers and crematoria.
We should feel sick when we contemplate the Holocaust, but we should also be mindful that without humility and self-awareness, ordinary people can be persuaded to do despicable things and still convince themselves that they are the good guys. If we are to learn the lessons of history, we have to challenge our own thinking rather than living in a fug of moral complacency. We must recognize that it’s not about Them. It’s about Us.
“Warfare itself is a very recent phenomenon – the earliest known war graves, in Jebel Sahaba on the Egyptian-Sudanese border, are only 14,000 years old. Of the 3,000 skeletons found at 400 locations that date to between 50,000 and 15,000 years ago, less than a handful show any signs of human violence (Matthew Piscitelli, Misled by Ethnography).”
These kinds of statements drive me crazy. If I plunge a knife into your heart, or slit your throat, what kind of “sign of human violence” would we expect to find in your skeleton 50,000 years later? If we had a data set of 3,000 data points drawn from 400 locations worldwide, why would we think we had a sufficiently representative sample to say anything about the hundred of thousands or millions of people who lived over that 35,000 year period?
It often seems to me that we humans got so excited by the scientific and industrial revolutions, that we forgot that not everything is knowable, and that ‘reasonable inferences’ made from tiny data sets are basically only ever so slightly more likely to be correct than mere guesswork.
William Cameron
1 month ago
The People being bombed by Israel voted to put Hamas into power. They voted for the policy to kill jews.
What did they expect Israel to do ?
Mark Gourley
1 month ago
For me The Kindly Ones is part of Anthony Powell ‘s great novel sequence and I am happy to keep it so.
Sounds like rubbish. I recommend Hitler’s beneficiaries (Gotz Aly) to understand the Nazis. This is a dense history book but will be easier to read then the above for sure.
Once the tribalists (Bibi & pals + Hamas) have won and shaped the world to their liking (i.e. life or death conflict) then everyone has a binary choice: kill or be killed. (with no escaping it, however brainy you think you might be)
30k deaths out of a population of 2.4 million is too small to be defined as a genocide. Israel probably has the capability to kill more, so the evidence is that they are showing restraint. Yes, its brutal.
Klive Roland
1 month ago
Great review. Thought provoking and original. This is why I subscribe to Unherd. Thank you.
Nancy Kmaxim
1 month ago
This article seems to me to be a crystal clear illustration of the source and purpose of pornography. It even leads the reader,alongside the author, into that dark place where moral action is a fantasy.
You have expressed very clearly the thoughts I was having as I read the article. The struggle for moral clarity is all about learning to distinguish and make judgements about our lower brain’s enduring weaknesses for, and fascination with evil.
Lindsey Thornton
1 month ago
Thanks Ian_S for your insights into this article and the author’s rather over ‘mush’-roomed mind. I was reading his piece with great interest comparing my own experience until he inevitably got to the bit about Gaza. I instantly recoiled in disbelief. The influential novella ‘House of Dolls’ by Ka-tzetnik 135633 (first published in the UK in the 1950s) left an indelible mark on me when I read it as a child (borrowed from my Dad’s book shelf, innocently misinterpreting the title); as a result I have come to a very different conclusion to Rob Doyle. My mind is now focussed on the young Jewish women captured, sexually abused, humiliated and dehumanised, now as we speak in the tunnels under Gaza by Hamas. Something that Rob Doyle would perhaps be better reminded of, instead he pursues the mindset of Nazi antisemitism. ‘House of Dolls’ is part of the Israeli high school curriculum as a necessary read for innocent young Jews who cannot conceive of the hatred they will inevitably be subjected to. How tragic that this is being played out again now.
Thanks Lindsey. I’ll check out House of Dolls — I’d heard the title, but had no idea what it was about.
Dan Croitoru
1 month ago
Typical UnHerd selfie piece a la “I’m reading a book! and I must share that I know now how to live vicariously” Thousands of words … a literary transcript of a “reaction video”. It all amounts to nothing of course. Well, read another book …
William Murphy
1 month ago
Having visited Auschwitz, Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Teresin, I am definitely not buying this book. One of the Babi Yar mass murderers, who has fascinated me and about whom I would like to read more, is Doctor Doctor Otto Rasch, commander of Einsatzgruppe C. He had two university doctorates and managed to escape earthly justice on medical grounds. He may be in Liddell’s tome as a supporting character. His biography could well be a meditation on the limitations of civilisation and education.
Jurjen van den BROEKE
1 month ago
“ the distracting anomalies of righteousness” the author escapes any question of ethics by a priori exclude the question of guilt.
Primary Teacher
1 month ago
It won’t send you to hell. I read it many years ago and I am still alive and well in England. Oh, hang on a minute…
Iain MacKay
1 month ago
I am one of the apparently small community of British readers who have actually read this book. From other’s comments it seems that most of us who have read the book itself rather than reacting to reviews are very impressed with it and would recommend it.
It’s not light reading but it is not pornographic. The events it chronicles occurred and the book is a laudable and necessary attempt to help us understand the mentality of Nazi society. The spiritual heirs of the Third Reich are flourishing today – just read the other comments to this very article. “Know thine enemy”.
The review though favourable fails to acknowledge the compelling narrative quality of “The Kindly Ones” with its capacity to engage and shock even to the final page.
The book is not making the facile observation that a deranged psychopath could find a comfortable niche in the Nazi misadventure. In fact the narrator is delinquent even within that context, and his own mental state only becomes non-functional in proportion to the threat he perceives from the Nazi’s own criminal justice process. Once liberated from that threat he becomes free to enjoy a long life of comfort, immune from the demons of PTSD haunting other survivors of that era. The author has skillfully woven several threads of such irony.
I see the narrator as an embodiment of nationalism. Once you ascribe personal identity to a body of people united only by their geography or ethnicity, that personality can become capable and unrepentant of any atrocity, while most of its enablers, willing or unwilling, pay a psychological price for their complicity.
We should know history, lest we repeat it.
We should understand the people who made history, lest we become their reincarnations.
Quite brilliant, and well done Unherd for publishing this. The writer’s soul has been seared, and he seeks to set out how and why through the book he’d read but ultimately, this takes him onto a wider discourse about the world in which we all exist, with our humanity – in every sense – on full view to the generations that have succeeded in the post World War era.
Is what we’re witnessing in the sphere of the ‘culture wars’ a reaction to the horror of the 20th century, when mass media brought the reality of mass murder at the hands of intelligent and otherwise cultured citizens? It seems very much that way to me. The reaction to “look away” is followed by the reaction to “move away”, to try to disown the reality of that which we’re all, apparently, capable.
I believe it’s only when we begin to countenance ourselves in this state, to start to own our humanity, that we’ll be able to move on, rather than move away.
“the Nazi genocide as being, in some vertiginous sense, the central fact of human history, a catastrophe that stains and alters the meaning of all that came before it and all that follows.”
And our obsession therewith has prevented violent atrocities ever since! I think the Dzungars want to have a word with you.
“… the retributive, genocidal crimes against humanity we’ve watched take place in Gaza these past five months …”
You’ve got to hand it to Hamas, they’ve all but won both the short and long term war against their religious enemy, the Jews.
Even the writer of this article has been taken in. What Hamas has done is place Israelis, and the world’s Jews more generally, into a dilemma. Hamas notified the Jews that Hamas intends to wipe them from the earth. This is documented. Unless the Jews say “oh, ok, we’ll accept an Islamic Holocaust and all be killed”, then it’s a setup for a fight to death. What other options do Jews really have than defend against such a maniacal enemy? On the other hand, Hamas totally knows this, so by attacking Israel and filming their (Hamas’s) atrocities against Israeli civilians, they know this will give Jews no choice than fight back — and for Hamas’s strategy, the more Palestinian carnage the better. So Hamas deliberately keeps civilians in the battle zones, intending them to be killed and “go viral”. And the point of that of course, is to make Israel the bad guy, so that they become an international pariah. Because Hamas is a fanatical religious cult, they see thousands of Palestinian “martyr” deaths as a wholly acceptable means to the end of defeating the Jews. So what should Israel do? Let Hamas maniacs rebuild their war machine and continue the attacks, like Hamas vows to do? Or do Israelis fight for their lives and be condemned for it forever by the world’s sanctimonious bien pensants? For Israel, the stakes couldn’t be any higher.
When this author flings glib accusations of “genocide” against Israel, he fails to see how the situation was intentionally, strategically, set up by Hamas. He fails to see that Israel is damned if they do and damned if they don’t. He fails to think through his own words “no serious people ever thinks about anything else” (than the Holocaust). He should realize the meaning of those words for Jews, for whom this history is not just an interesting French novel to be disturbed by for a week or two, but the entire lens through which to see reality. However, unfortunately, he sees none of these things.
I am glad you have highlighted the irony of the authors failure to understand the Israel/Hamas conflict. Of course, like Liddell’s protagonist many ordinary Israelis have lost the right not to kill and some perhaps have sought revenge through killing as a result of Hamas’s provocative tactical massacre but there is no genocide. War is hell, but the population of Gaza is not being wiped out. While a Judenrein Germany was a possibility the concept of a Middle East without Arab ethnic Palestinians is no more than a phantom that even the most Zionist of Israelis could not contemplate.
The title of the novel hints also of the heart of darkness contained in less lethal urges to do right, to be “kind” that we are more familiar with in our own more settled societies. The career and life destroyed by the kindly ones who want to maintain a woke sin free life by cancellation. This too, while not the hell of war, is it’s own sort of hell perpetrated by those who think themselves as doing the right thing however distasteful it might be.
Yes, it’s a real shame that the woke can’t see themselves in the mirror. If this book was meant to be that mirror, its mission has been diverted by too much content that isn’t metaphor, but unique historical horror.
The pity of October 7 is that Israel was working toward rapprochement with the realities of Palestinian displacement. If the issue was dispossession and reconciliation, it could be done. But for Hamas and it’s backers, there’s an overlay of permanent religious hatred. And that unfortunately is baked into their religious scriptures as timeless divine word. The woke refuse to hear that of course.
The very mixed reaction to Glazer’s Oscar acceptance speech highlighted for me the Gulf between even ‘Western ‘ assimilated Jews who try to apply enlightenment principles, be even-handed and not take sides….
And people on the ground who are fighting what Hamas considers a war to the death for one side or other. What would we do if we were living surrounded by people and nations who have vowed to ‘wipe our country off the map’ ? Probably waffle our way to oblivion. We could even quote Voltaire’s defence of your enemy’s right to express themselves on our way to the death pits to show we hadn’t lost our sense of proportion.
I’ve not read this book but if Bret Easton Ellis is a fellow traveller, I’d expect overhyped, gratuitous and sensationalist torture porn masquerading as profound fiction. The French are far more susceptible in this respect, finding profundity in the strangest places (more Derrida, vicar ?). The fact that the main character is a closet homosexual with a scat fetish who now runs a lace factory says it all really.
Just because a book is about the Holocaust and is shockingly graphic doesn’t mean it’s serious at all, never mind worth reading. I recently tried to read ‘Justine’ by the Marquis de Sade but was ultimately bored to death by the predictable taboo-busting nature of it all. But at least de Sade had a sense of humour.
Maybe it was the magic mushrooms the author just ‘happened to take’ ?
“Probably waffle our way to oblivion” — yes, what do we do about our “be kind” elites, who would be the spokespeople for that? How did their worldview become so vacant? Should we pin that on yet another Putin psyops conspiracy? If we pay a ransom, do we get our elites back in sound mind again? In the meantime, they’re a danger to us and themselves.
Thanks Ian. Nothing to add, but good to read the words of a “fellow traveler”. Depressing to see the hate spewn at Israel again and again. Would have thought that Mr. Doyle would not have been taken in by the pablum being peddled by BBC and others. Oh, well…
Take the Kak out of your eyes, there is only one terrorist here (apart from the USA and NATO warmongers) The new Adolf Hitler (Benjamin Netanyahu) and his army of Nazi Zionist Racist Israel citizens 90% in support of the Genocide taking place in Gaza and the West Bank. This started in 1945 and the West stood by and let the Israelis systematically murder and steal land that did not belong to them. They have been committing Genocide since 1945 against the Palestinians people FACT!! For the intelligent and those that know their history The Apartheid Zionist Israel State TICK ALL THE BOXES for GENOCIDE against the Palestinians. Sadly, the Western Nations and the ARAB NATION COWARDS stand by and let this happen. ISRAEL has brought mankind to the lowest ebb of humanity the meaning of Human Rights eroded, you have to admire the Media Bias influenced by the Zionist Jews, the widespread bias contravening the standards of journalism, However the real TRUTH is classed as the new HATE SPEECH!! and as Orwell said “During times of Universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act, you become a Racist, a Fascist, a Bigot etc. A ceasefire in GAZA is not the answer, A two party country state needs to be established with or without Israel in agreement, we have 193 UN countries and from these we put troops on the ground, we put a no-fly zone in place and destroy ANY aircraft abusing the air space, likewise with Sea access, all borders open for AID. Sanctions on Israel, financially and armaments etc UNTIL the two States one Israel one Palestine are established. The borders go back to 1945. I believe this in place the ARAB world will re-build Palestine and invest in industry for its people. Israel at the moment un-touched but its industries will have to re-locate and the illegal settlers go find somewhere else to live. The UN needs to clinical and act democratically and the policy that decided democratically by the 193 UN countries not the selected few are no more than warmongers. The USA warmonger needs to keep well away, and needs to get its military bases out of the middle east.
there is only one terrorist here (apart from the USA and NATO warmongers) —-> So what is Hamas, a social club? The atrocities of October 7 really did happen. The Israeli response is just that, a response to a group whose sole goal remains the eradication of the Jewish state. Gaza sits on the Mediterranean, has nearby energy deposits, and is nonetheless a third world hell pit of its leaders’ making.
They have been committing Genocide since 1945 against the Palestinian people —-> And this “genocide” has been so effective that the Palestinian population is exponentially larger today than it was then. And by the way, Israel was not formed until 1948.
A two-party country state needs to be established with or without Israel in agreement, —>Are you unaware that multiple two-nation solutions have been proposed, usually supported by the Israelis and always rejected by the Palestinians?
Good rational reply. UnHerd has held mine back.
Pretty standard stuff, though I note that after you’ve accused Jews of Nazism and genocide (it’s a nasty kind of jew-baiting though, saying that, isn’t it? It’s meant to trivialise the Shoah and mock its victims by reducing it to empty slogans), you don’t actually shout “from the river to the sea”. So a slight crack of daylight between you and Hamas propaganda, but not much. Enjoy your UnHerd subscription.
I’ve noticed many times Jews or Israel are involved, some commenter (whom I assume is otherwise heterodox and proud of it) unironically parrots the woke hyperbole of the far left.
Mr Learad’s thinking and mode of expression remind us of the ugly fact that, while attempts to reach rational rapport between differing points of view is a civilised aspiration, we must remain on guard to defend ourselves against those who are unable, by their own natures, to engage in reasonable perspective sharing and to give and take for the sake of peace. Against such people we must, while remaining peaceful to our core, be ready and willing to defend ourselves with everything at our disposal. When those such as Mr Learad make no attempt to understand but only to oppose, civilised people must be willing to forgo perspective sharing and simply militate against their opponents, or forgo their own existence.
Bravo. Perfectly articulated.
Kind of. It is very silly to read an 1000 page novel expressing a detailed first-person account of the Holocaust, write a long review of it, and then sign off with your final insightful takeaway being that Israel’s war with Hamas is somehow comparable to the Holocaust – a banal regurgitation of Current Thing progressive group prejudice.
Israel is not under genuine threat of genocide from Hamas however, since there is a notable power imbalance.
Hamas’s strategy is to isolate Israel internationally. If they manage to turn Israel into a pariah state, the US will end their support, as it would be too costly in terms of US domestic politics. Then the power imbalance will be redressed, and Hamas with its regional partners including Iran have a much better chance of driving Jews out of Israel and eradicating the Jewish state, which is laid out in the Hamas charter. The charter also makes clear that the fundamental problem is not colonialism but that Jews offended Allah. This is also explained in their charter. It may be arguable, but the actions of Hamas, in the context of their intent regarding Jews, fits the criteria of genocide. Also to note is that Hamas is aware that if they can successfully frame their goal of eradication as “decolonisation”, they will have the support of Western elites. Their plan is certainly achievable and so far they are winning.
Really good breakdown of the underlying, Palestinian (not just Hammas) long term strategy. It reminds me of the quote from a Taliban leader, (paraphrasing approximately). They have all bombs, but we have all the time in the world, and we will win.
Is anybody anywhere under a ‘genuine threat of genocide’? (Even the Nazis came nowhere close to eliminating Jews from the world.)
In my opinion the “power imbalance” between Hamas and Israel is (a) illusory, since Hamas has the full support of Tehran, and (b) irrelevant – because while the Israeli state may be stronger than Hamas, individual terrorists are much stronger than individual Israeli citizens – think of those raped and murdered and tortured and tell me about this idea of “power imbalance.” Who was stronger on October 7?
“he fails to see how the situation was intentionally, strategically, set up by Hamas.”
If this is true, and I’m not saying it isn’t, why is Israel walking headlong into the trap? You don’t win by doing exactly what your enemy wants.
Israel, aware that has an enemy that wishes to annihilate it, should’ve defended its borders effectively on Oct 7, and continued to do so for as long as it takes for Hamas to pass.
“why is Israel walking headlong into the trap?”
But this is the dilemma. If Israel don’t fight back, Hamas will prosecute with further attacks. Hamas did after all build a vast underground fortress for that very purpose. They would do that until eventually Israel does fight back, or just let themselves be conquered. If Israel do fight back, then they simultaneously have to fight a propaganda war, which is actually the war Hamas is most invested in. Assuming Israel doesn’t choose abdication and so does fight back, their military strength will overwhelm Hamas. So why would Hamas choose to provoke the conflict? Because Hamas is ultimately only using the physical war to create a massive body count, which is the central pillar of their propaganda war. The goal of the propaganda war is to isolate Israel internationally. It’s a genius strategy to outwit Israel’s military strength. Israel’s problem is that Hamas have maneuvered Israel into a pincer attack, where Israel is vulnerable to the propaganda war, but must inevitably fight the physical war anyway.
Hamas isn’t going to conquer Israel – it hasn’t, and never could have, the capability. It should focus on preventing attacks on its territory.
Your argument is like suggesting the UK should’ve destroyed the IRA by flattening Catholic areas of NI. It would never have worked and it would have created the next generation of terrorists. Which is exactly what Israel is doing now.
The writer is Irish, of course.
This is the best account I’ve of the plight of the Jewish state and its people. Thank you for it.
I was going to try and write something similar but your reply here is brilliant and outweighs what I could have concocted.
My heart sank on reading the baseless lies about genocide, laying open the writer’s bias during what was mostly a decent article. There’s also no famine, that’s a full on propaganda lie in the same way it isn’t the Israelis stopping aid getting in.
The question no one seems to be able to answer is, if the Israelis are genocidal why hasn’t it happened, ever, despite them having the ability to do it in less than half an hour?
I’m not sure that you convinced me to read it, either. While undoubtedly more worthwhile than Salo, or Ilsa She Wolf, and probably better than Schindler’s List whose disdain I share with Littell, I’m tempted to stick to my Sven Hassels. Meanwhile, I’ll bookmark this page into my read-list.
You really should read it. The book is an outstanding achievement
Agree. An exceptional novel. Horrifying but compelling, believable and quite funny in parts.
I read ‘Cross of Iron’ a few years ago (never read war books normally) and thought that while it was obviously popular fiction, it was nevertheless well written, convincingly grim, psychologically astute and packed a big punch at the end. I can understand why it was and still is one of the most popular books of its kind.
I really enjoyed the book (back when it was called The Willing Flesh). The film wasn’t a classic, but enjoyable nevertheless. TWF/COI has Sven Hassel’s style of German potboiler covered. I’d probably still enjoy it today at 62, not so much SH’s work, which I gobbled up in my mid to late teens. Just last year on a whim I picked up The Bloody Road to Death, but I bailed out at page 50.
Thanks, blokes. Like I noted, I put it on the backburner for now, and I’ll probably have a lash at it when the moon and stars align.
Oh, and Hänschen klein, which is the song the kids sing at the start of the film, has ever since been an ear worm form me.
Thanks, but I think I’ll still give it a miss.
I preferred and still will always prefer to re-read “Man‘s Search for Meaning”. It sits on my book pile next to my bed. It is written by the inmate Viktor Frankl and shows the horror of the dehumanising hell of Auschwitz. But in spite of the terrible suffering Frankl finds meaning in all this terror. He doesn’t describe a pornography of nihilistic violence, but the story of the uncrushable human spirit versa seemingly unredeemable horror. How would my mind and soul profit from endless pornographic violent images? Thanks no, I will give it a miss.
For those of us who are not part of the cognoscenti would it not have been apposite to mention that Jonathan Liddell is a New York born Jew? Telling us that he was born in the US and brought up in France and his father was a successful ‘spy novelist’ is pretty disingenuous to say the least.
Am I also being too cynical to note the timing of this essay, just as Gaza appears to be reaching a crescendo?
Either way, I like Tony Taylor of this venerable site, will probably stick with Sven Hassel for my bedtime reading, along with a mug of Ovaltine ‘mit cognac’.
You are really missing out
genocidal crimes against humanity we’ve watched take place in Gaza
.
I’m sorry, Rob, you deserve your “refugees” who stabs Irish children
No. No one deserves that, not the children nor the parents. It doesn’t matter if they are Israeli or Irish. And going down that road is what leads us to what happened in Israel.
What you said is just a beautiful phrase in this situation.
I would say “virtue signaling”
First. There are no crimes of genocide in Gaza, we have a war with terror.
Second. I’m sure he’s on the side of the left when it comes to illegal immigration into his country. As a minimum I can blame him in the crimes of these migrants. He is guilty.
Thankyou Sir for another, very timely, reminder as to why Jews and the state of Israel are permanently exempt from criticism. Thanks also for pointing out that we are all collectively responsible for the ongoing atrocity in Gaza by dint of being a part of the same species. We’d all murder our enemies (and their women, children and animals) given the chance, wouldn’t we. Think I’ll do the right thing and commit suicide before I hurt someone.
I am tempted to say that you won’t be missed. But there are always people with lousy taste.
“very timely, reminder as to why Jews and the state of Israel are permanently exempt from criticism.”
Yes it’s disgusting really. You try and wipe them out once and for all, then when you fail, they just keep playing back atcha with the “Holocaust card”. I mean, the chutzpah.
Come on, Jews and Israel are endlessly criticized. What you seem to mean is, some people frustratingly insist they have a right to self defence against a group sworn to eradicate them due to religious hatred. How about you condemn Hamas? Or, is it because of “Islamophobia” (now there’s a get out of jail card if ever there was one), they too are “permanently exempt from criticism”?
You’re getting sucked in by superficial, highly judgemental woke cr*p, and now you’re talking about s****ide. For your mental health, give up on the Guardian and the BBC. They’re for fools.
Thanks. But I think I’ll wait for the Netflix adaptation.
Couldn’t help noticing the all-too-expected ending with “the retributive, genocidal crimes against humanity we’ve watched take place in Gaza these past five months” and then “Palestinian men in their underwear, blindfolded and crammed in the backs of trucks, or of skeletal children being starved to death in real time, of time and space folding in on themselves, of symbols merging, of the victim’s face becoming that of the perpetrator.” How neat. The genocidee becoming the genocider. What a satisfying closing of the circle. And what rubbish. As if the Palestinian men in their underwear were being herded to the gas chambers. As if, pictures of skeletal kids notwithstanding, hundreds of truckloads of food weren’t being delivered to Gaza each day (the Warsaw Ghetto would have been happy with such aid in 1943, to say nothing of today’s South Sudanese or North Yemenites). But why let facts get into the way of the satisfying coda of “the victim’s face becoming that of the perpetrator”, of the atavistic blood libel against the Jews. On this at least, one can indeed say: Plus ça change et plus c’est la même chose.
Man, what a blowhard.
What is the ‘take-away’ from this book meant to be, exactly? A book that would cause me to reflect seriously on, or otherwise ‘confront’, the capacity of humanity for extreme behaviour would need (for me) a main protagonist whose pre-established behaviour patterns were a little nearer to the centre of the bell curve. A ‘seriously troubled pervert’ ( also described as a ‘sensitive young man’?!)who has already committed incest with his sister and has a predilection for faecal matter to the extent that the author feels compelled to impress it upon his readers for a hundred pages, can tell me nothing about humanity in general. He’s an unreliable lens through which to view anything – especially something that has no need of further disturbing garnish. Having experienced the anguish of my Jewish uni flatmate during the six day war and been made to read Babi Yar, which had been published the year before, I feel that this book of Littell’s sounds, by contrast, somewhat exploitative in nature.
Had the protagonist’s behavioural patterns somehow been induced by involvement in genocide, the work could have had, perhaps, a certain instructional or moralising validity. I am not prepared to go back and attempt to discern the timing of the story arc in terms of behavioural development but, as it struck me, this ‘infernal narrator’ seems to have been chosen by Littell for no other reason than to be a vehicle for ‘extreme literature’, as Mr Doyle politely calls it. And that is Littell’s choice, of course. Presumably, he lays it all out in a very accomplished, authorial fashion. My choice is whether or not I want to give myself a vicarious, ascending urinary tract infection by wallowing in the s**t with him. I think not. Mr Doyle’s macabre fascination with the work did not ‘rub off’ – I barely finished his article.
Littell sounds like the “psychopath” and the “sadist”. 100 pages of Aue “masturbating in his own sh*t”? The author of this article is apparently a masochist.
G*d no. I’ll stick with my current read, “Life and Fate” by Vasily Grossman.
Life and Fate
Superb
Good but not superb. It has no substance. It is a propaganda piece
I have read both. Good as it is Life and Fate is still a poor man’s War and Peace.
Ignore the authors florid misrepresentations, The Kindly Ones is a truly monumental work and possibly one of the greatest works of the 20th Century.
I read this book quite a few years ago now. I think the author here is completely correct. It is an astonishing literary and philosophical accomplishment. I am glad to see it publicly recognised as such, and with such accuracy.
I’m just glad he read it, so I don’t have to!
I thought The Kindly Ones was a towering achievement
A francophone hit but an Anglophone miss? That’s because the French have often delighted in elevating some old pervert’s w**k dreams to high art! My how the literati did love a paedophile in France last century. All art is a caricature of life. Some is good caricature; this sounds like voyeuristic shite!
I found the book utterly engaging, to share the point of view of a believing Nazi.
Ireland, as your bio mentions you are from, has a history of appeasement with Nazi Germany. And, further, not only did nothing as a country to help end that war, punished those citizens who did volunteer to help.
Does this make you a Holocaust accomplice?
I bring this up to help center, as is the term used these days, your flip comment re Gaza and genocide. Remember, the Palestinians are the ones who paraglided into Israel and slaughtered 1200 people. In other words, they started the war, and here you are excusing them. Sound familiar?
There is an old joke/saying: Europe will never forgive the Jews for the holocaust. It’s funny. It’s not so funny.
How can we live with ourselves? Perhaps when we recognize that instinctive revulsion at the Shoah is the appropriate, natural human response.
One of the things that makes the Holocaust so transgressive is that people like us, in a modern industrial society, influenced by the Enlightenment and the Scientific Method, were able to rationalize mass murder that is completely at odds with our intrinsic nature.
We now know that humans are born with a “rudimentary moral sense” (Just Babies, Paul Bloom, Yale). We also know that we instinctively recoil from harming innocent strangers (Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes). The Milgram Experiments showed that obeying orders that cause harm to strangers is extremely stressful, and we will wriggle out of compliance if we can. We need to be the good guys. Anything else causes stressful dissonance. Warfare itself is a very recent phenomenon – the earliest known war graves, in Jebel Sahaba on the Egyptian-Sudanese border, are only 14,000 years old. Of the 3,000 skeletons found at 400 locations that date to between 50,000 and 15,000 years ago, less than a handful show any signs of human violence (Matthew Piscitelli, Misled by Ethnography). For 95% of the 300,000 years homo sapiens has walked the earth, population densities were so low and resources so relatively abundant that our incentives to collaborate – in finding food, raising children, and warding off predators, outweighed conflict.
Yet the Shoah did happen, and we can understand Thomas Hobbes, writing in the seventeenth century, having a bearish view of mankind. We are able to subvert our moral sense by persuading ourselves that we are being righteous. You can’t read the highly articulate speeches and op-eds of the nineteenth century defending slavery in a society that held all men are created equal without a sense of horror at our ability to ethically justify evil when it is in our utilitarian, rational self-interest. It may come as no surprise that surveys of prisoners locked up for violent crimes show that they believe themselves to be more moral, trustworthy and honest than the general population, and only slightly less law-abiding. By asserting the right to self-defense, however spuriously, we have repeatedly scapegoated Them, whether in the revived witch hunts of the Renaissance or the slaughter of the innocents that started on October 7th last year. I was shocked by how quickly people started to condemn Israel when they announced their intention to destroy Hamas, yet in dealing with an enemy that willfully uses their own people as human shields, they have to show that they are not fighting terror with terror.
The Nazis followed the precepts of social Darwinism. The one commandment that Hitler believed in was “Thou shalt preserve the species.” He predicted that Christianity would be replaced by a more muscular creed as scientific progress advanced. Still, recognizing that sensory contact with the innocents would cause revulsion, they did more than ply their troops with alcohol before machine-gunning their victims, whether in piling up people in death pits using the Sardine Method, deliberately starving prisoners to death under the Hunger Plan, or deploying the mobile gas vans and ultimately the gas chambers and crematoria.
We should feel sick when we contemplate the Holocaust, but we should also be mindful that without humility and self-awareness, ordinary people can be persuaded to do despicable things and still convince themselves that they are the good guys. If we are to learn the lessons of history, we have to challenge our own thinking rather than living in a fug of moral complacency. We must recognize that it’s not about Them. It’s about Us.
“Warfare itself is a very recent phenomenon – the earliest known war graves, in Jebel Sahaba on the Egyptian-Sudanese border, are only 14,000 years old. Of the 3,000 skeletons found at 400 locations that date to between 50,000 and 15,000 years ago, less than a handful show any signs of human violence (Matthew Piscitelli, Misled by Ethnography).”
These kinds of statements drive me crazy. If I plunge a knife into your heart, or slit your throat, what kind of “sign of human violence” would we expect to find in your skeleton 50,000 years later? If we had a data set of 3,000 data points drawn from 400 locations worldwide, why would we think we had a sufficiently representative sample to say anything about the hundred of thousands or millions of people who lived over that 35,000 year period?
It often seems to me that we humans got so excited by the scientific and industrial revolutions, that we forgot that not everything is knowable, and that ‘reasonable inferences’ made from tiny data sets are basically only ever so slightly more likely to be correct than mere guesswork.
The People being bombed by Israel voted to put Hamas into power. They voted for the policy to kill jews.
What did they expect Israel to do ?
For me The Kindly Ones is part of Anthony Powell ‘s great novel sequence and I am happy to keep it so.
https://amp.scroll.in/article/1054041/in-sanskrit-plays-paradise-is-always-lost-but-the-attempt-to-regain-it-never-ends
Sounds like rubbish. I recommend Hitler’s beneficiaries (Gotz Aly) to understand the Nazis. This is a dense history book but will be easier to read then the above for sure.
Once the tribalists (Bibi & pals + Hamas) have won and shaped the world to their liking (i.e. life or death conflict) then everyone has a binary choice: kill or be killed. (with no escaping it, however brainy you think you might be)
30k deaths out of a population of 2.4 million is too small to be defined as a genocide. Israel probably has the capability to kill more, so the evidence is that they are showing restraint. Yes, its brutal.
Great review. Thought provoking and original. This is why I subscribe to Unherd. Thank you.
This article seems to me to be a crystal clear illustration of the source and purpose of pornography. It even leads the reader,alongside the author, into that dark place where moral action is a fantasy.
You have expressed very clearly the thoughts I was having as I read the article. The struggle for moral clarity is all about learning to distinguish and make judgements about our lower brain’s enduring weaknesses for, and fascination with evil.
Thanks Ian_S for your insights into this article and the author’s rather over ‘mush’-roomed mind. I was reading his piece with great interest comparing my own experience until he inevitably got to the bit about Gaza. I instantly recoiled in disbelief. The influential novella ‘House of Dolls’ by Ka-tzetnik 135633 (first published in the UK in the 1950s) left an indelible mark on me when I read it as a child (borrowed from my Dad’s book shelf, innocently misinterpreting the title); as a result I have come to a very different conclusion to Rob Doyle. My mind is now focussed on the young Jewish women captured, sexually abused, humiliated and dehumanised, now as we speak in the tunnels under Gaza by Hamas. Something that Rob Doyle would perhaps be better reminded of, instead he pursues the mindset of Nazi antisemitism. ‘House of Dolls’ is part of the Israeli high school curriculum as a necessary read for innocent young Jews who cannot conceive of the hatred they will inevitably be subjected to. How tragic that this is being played out again now.
Thanks Lindsey. I’ll check out House of Dolls — I’d heard the title, but had no idea what it was about.
Typical UnHerd selfie piece a la “I’m reading a book! and I must share that I know now how to live vicariously” Thousands of words … a literary transcript of a “reaction video”. It all amounts to nothing of course. Well, read another book …
Having visited Auschwitz, Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Teresin, I am definitely not buying this book. One of the Babi Yar mass murderers, who has fascinated me and about whom I would like to read more, is Doctor Doctor Otto Rasch, commander of Einsatzgruppe C. He had two university doctorates and managed to escape earthly justice on medical grounds. He may be in Liddell’s tome as a supporting character. His biography could well be a meditation on the limitations of civilisation and education.
“ the distracting anomalies of righteousness” the author escapes any question of ethics by a priori exclude the question of guilt.
It won’t send you to hell. I read it many years ago and I am still alive and well in England. Oh, hang on a minute…
I am one of the apparently small community of British readers who have actually read this book. From other’s comments it seems that most of us who have read the book itself rather than reacting to reviews are very impressed with it and would recommend it.
It’s not light reading but it is not pornographic. The events it chronicles occurred and the book is a laudable and necessary attempt to help us understand the mentality of Nazi society. The spiritual heirs of the Third Reich are flourishing today – just read the other comments to this very article. “Know thine enemy”.
The review though favourable fails to acknowledge the compelling narrative quality of “The Kindly Ones” with its capacity to engage and shock even to the final page.
The book is not making the facile observation that a deranged psychopath could find a comfortable niche in the Nazi misadventure. In fact the narrator is delinquent even within that context, and his own mental state only becomes non-functional in proportion to the threat he perceives from the Nazi’s own criminal justice process. Once liberated from that threat he becomes free to enjoy a long life of comfort, immune from the demons of PTSD haunting other survivors of that era. The author has skillfully woven several threads of such irony.
I see the narrator as an embodiment of nationalism. Once you ascribe personal identity to a body of people united only by their geography or ethnicity, that personality can become capable and unrepentant of any atrocity, while most of its enablers, willing or unwilling, pay a psychological price for their complicity.
We should know history, lest we repeat it.
We should understand the people who made history, lest we become their reincarnations.