![The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 3]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/712FckuT-TL._AC_UL165_SR165,165_.jpg)
I’d dare say that more is here to be learned for the average reader than any other book than I can figure out just now. I mean about human nature, the soul and the mind, the abstract aspects of human life, in contrast to its material aspects that are dealt appropriately enough with science and its body of knowledge. About the soul -which admittedly constitutes half of what we can ascertain as existing out there-, this is the richest source of available evidence open to scrutiny and debate.
Yes, because while moral issues have been discussed and vivisected time and again for centuries, we lack as yet a sound, convincing conceptual framework to model it, to explore, to provide its foundations. So, considering that ethics is today essentially still an open problem, the most useful sources are those that confront us with the most radical, paradoxical, unsurmountable problems. And the problem of evil, as exemplified in the Holocaust is one of them, if not ‘the one’.
In summary, the book provides a meticulously documented account of the works and crimes of a group of German reserve police officers, reccruited around the start of WWII in the area of Hamburg. They were essentially normal middle-to-low class workers who nobody would expect they could turn into cold-blooded mass murderers. The action is centered in 1941-1943 in the Lublin district of occupied Poland and their Bataillon was assigned to ‘routine’ tasks in the context of the Final Solution: The extermination of all jewish human beings in the newly occupied territories.
Why did the Holocaust occur ? Can it happen again ? Under what conditions can it or can not ? What kind of responsibility are the perpetrators subject to ? Are we not -at least in part- responsible for them ? What responsibility, if any, confronts us as members of the society in which it happened?
Until these questions are not adequately solved, we as human beings cannot even call ourselves masters of the world, and should continue to behave as we always did: as incidental bystanders, perplexed flesh and bones at the mercy of no-one knows what, or who, or where.
The author discusses several theories and puts forward a tentative explanation in a long (35 pages) articulate and informative Afterword. The discussion is interesting, but IMHO still falls short of explicative power. Of course, he is an historian, and the strong point of the book is in his accurate, meticulous, balanced and heart-breaking account of the facts in this miniature laboratory of (in)human barbaric, devilish behavior. (If the devil exists, this is it). The fact that the perpetrators were modern ‘normal’ human beings, like you and me, is the crucial asset, which forces you to rule out easily most customary explanations.
By the way, the author does not take advantage of this fact, and he argues that the most significant determinant of the criminal conduct was a combination ‘authority’ and ‘peer’ conformity, or the inability resist to both ! Of course this, being true factors, cannot provide the desired explicatory key mechanisms, since this is what we all do all the time to a large extent: accept authority and conform with the group. It would be tantamount to accepting that the Holocaust can happen again any time, anywhere. This might be true, but it remains unproven and, in the meanwhile, should be held back as a terrible, discouraging conclusion.
Let me set it straight (and this is just my opinion): Most authors set out from the assumption that they could (never!) behave in such a way, and they then try to find out what was wrong with the people that committed the horrendous crimes. The root is in their brains, in their psychological constitution, as it were. Others, starting from the same assumption try to locate the seed of the evil in the social-economic environment to which these people were exposed at some previous time in their life, and they propose their theories. (BTW most of them them quite amusing and adequately dealt with in the book). The result are several frivolous discordant proposals, that invariably reflect the cultural/ideological standpoint but fall short of consistency with the data. How can it be that 80% of (willing executioner-) normal guys in a normal middle class society, with no background trauma nor obvious shortcomings could perform the actions ? Lets accept it: we do not know. But we need to. And the reason why we need to is simple: Unless we have a better grasp of what happened to these guys, the odds are that you, and me, and anybody else (Germans and Non-Germans!), somewhere, sometime, could be the perpetrators of these or even worse crimes.
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