This is the essence of the unhuman... These Jehovah's Witnesses knew the situation; they knew that they and other people were going to be gassed. And yet they were typing lists, and emptying wastebaskets, whatever, as long as it didn't break some damn ordinance in the Bible like "Thou shalt not salute the flag." They'd go to their deaths rather than salute the flag, and yet they'd type up and carry lists of people who were to be exterminated!"Pink Beams of Light From the God in the Gutter, p. 17. The Dick quote is from Philip K. Dick: The Dream Connection, by D. Scott Apel.
Hmm. He has a point, but I think it was a bit more complicated that he thought. For one thing, I don't think JWs (or Bibelforscher) were gassed as a matter of course. I thought that those who were put in the camps were just starved and/or worked to death, unless they agreed to sign a paper rejecting their subversive beliefs and acknowledging the Fuhrer's supremacy.
When my teenaged refugee father stopped to rest in an evacuated concentration camp, he found prisoner JWs serving tea and doing other chores. An officer (I don't know if he was just Wehrmacht, or SS) explained that the JWs were used in this role because they were totally non-violent and thus trusted. All the other inmates had been evacuated* but they got to stay. My father was impressed. I think by that time he had had his fill of war, of both the Nazi and Communist variety.
*Because, you know, the Nazis just had to kill as many people as they could before they went down in defeat.
5 comments:
I would certainly *not* call that the "essence of the unhuman." These were people who could have walked out of that place at any time but refused to compromise. Despite that, they were *still* human beings who wanted to *survive* and if typing up lists was what to took, then so be it. I don't think doing so makes them terrible people. The terrible people were the Nazis. Next on the list were the people who did absolutely nothing to stop the Nazis.
I can't believe he's actually picking on the JWs for something so stupid. To survive, a person will often do just about anything. Is it really so shameful or surprising? Many did far worse and who is to say what *we* would have done in similar circumstances.
Good point.
(Though Dick is dead, so... too late.)
The JWs, I've read, were treated fairly well in the camps and were not worked to death - for the reasons your father told you. This makes the moral point a little more slippery. They, unlike the other prisoners, could have had every expectation of surviving.
It's an interesting question. On the other hand, Gypsies were the very model of 'bad' prisoners, for exactly the same reasons they are despised to this day by so many Europeans - they had absolutely no respect for authority. If they felt like stopping and smoking a cigarette, they did so - even though they knew they would be immediately shot. Unlike the JWs who seem to have considerable respect for authority, as long as it didn't go against their tunnel vision restriction.
I don't think PKD was attempting to describe or attack JWs in general; he was just talking about one specific account. (Dick says he read it in a book by "Martin Buber's wife," but there's no citation in the interview.) In any case, the point of it is that, by preparing the lists and participating in the camp bureacracy, the prisoners in question were participating in brutality. "To survive, a person will often do just about anything"-- but don't Christian ethics require non-participation in violence and murder, even at the risk of one's own life? Clemens rightly uses the phrase "tunnel vision." But Dick's entire point is that participating in systems of oppression, for whatever reason (including self-preservation), is immoral.
For more context, here's another quote from a few paragraphs up in the same interview:
"Suppose you have a job as a civil servant and somebody hands you a list and says, 'Go get these people and bring them downtown.' Now the mechanical, the android, element takes place when the person simply takes the list, goes to the door of these people, and says, 'Come with me.' And then this same android quality shows up tragically--and incredibly--among the very victims, who come along docilely, who don't say, 'Well, what are they going to do downtown?'"
Dick uses the JW example simply because of the irony involved-- they were there because of disobeying the Nazi regime on some matters of secular authority, but submitted to the authority of concentration camp bureaucracy. He's seeing them as victims of the system as well as perpetrators-- they've allowed themselves to be co-opted; they've been convinced to play along in the very system that was persecuting them. He is absolutely saying that the Nazis were evil, but he's describing the mentality of the "next on the list" that Anactoria mentions-- those who did nothing to stop them.
Well, that was long. Hope you're enjoying the book, Elliot!
Keep in mind that the JWs were not anti-Hitler nor anti-Nazi. If they would have been left alone to sell WatchTower's door-to-door, etc, they would have been fine with Nazi atrocities. JWs only care about themselves and their activities. Their philosophy is that if "Jehovah" wants a problem with the world to be corrected, then he will do so in his own good time. JWs see their job as simply recruiting more members into the cult.
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