Currently reading Jonathan Littels novel ‘the kindly ones’ (written in french as ‘les bienveillantes’). The spooky thing about this novel is that you get a view from the second war atrocaties from the inside. And what you see is not as much the perspective you would have expected. What you get is the basics, the day-to-day aspect of it. So to say the organisational side of it. When we think about organizing killing in the scale it happened in the second world war (and as it happenes as we read or write this in other parts of the world), we think of the grand and malicious plan. Reading this books brings you in contact with the lower level organisation: the day to day decisions that lead directly to the intended result, all the smaller evils that sum up to the big evil. And the small ones are a bit more easy to perform, to understand. Here we see the pattern of a monstrous and utterly evil act, emerging from smaller evils. Here we see again a system at work, the system that is ‘bigger’ than all of the individual parts in the system.
And the other way round. I will never forget the ‘maths’ of destruction, were Littell boils down the abstract number of death to the number of death per month, per week, per day, per hour and per minute.
Tags: emerging