But just what is it that Günther Grass, the most famous living
German novelist, thinks “must be said”? The closest he comes to
clearly saying what must be said (what he says must be said)
appears to occur here, toward the end of a poem he published a week
ago and which already has stirred up a storm of controversy:
I’ve had enough of Western hypocrisy [Grass
writes]
and I wish that many will want
… a permanent, freely-accorded control of Israel’s nuclear
power
as well as Iran’s nuclear installations…
Even for German verse, you have to admit it is heavy handed;
thus the original:
…weil ich der Heuchelei des Westens
Uberdrussig bin; zuden ist zu hoffen,
Es mogen sich viele vom Schweigen befreien […]
dass eine unbehinderte und permanente Kontrolle
des israelischen atomaren Potentials
und der iranischen Atomanlagen
durch eine internationale Instanz
von den Regiereungen beider Lander augelassen wird.
All right, Goethe it is not, nor Remarque, nor indeed is it any
good against any measure of comparison. For some reason, Mr. Grass,
who one would think would know better, feels compelled to put into
prosaic “verse,” better suited for political platforms or
resolutions written by committees, a demand that both Israel and
Iran submit their nuclear weapons and installations to
international inspection and control (eine internationale
Instanz).
On its face, nothing controversial. It is sort of silly, and
sort of embarrassing for a man of Grass’s moral stature to descend
into such stupid polemics, but on the surface, let us think like
liberals for a moment, like Grass, and consider: Why not call for
international controls, or at least inspections? As a concept? As
an abstract idea relative to the pursuit of a world at peace?
Indeed why not? We, the United States, proposed this sort of
thing in the early years of the nuclear age. We offered to bury the
nuclear hatchets and all, proposed an international atomic control
commission (ja, eine Instanz). Who would not have? We knew
what we had unleashed, and we wished we could do something to
control it.
Observe that, at the time, it was because we understood the
morality of using the bomb to end the war with Japan — we
understood what an awful choice we had made, the destruction of
hundreds of thousands of people, many of them civilians, against
the destruction of even more hundreds of thousands of people, at
least a hundred thousand American fighting men and far more
Japanese, including civilians, than were doomed by the attacks on
Nagasaki and Hiroshima. That would have been the price of an
amphibious invasion of Japan. This is what happens in wartime. You
do not choose between the good and the bad. You choose between the
bad and the worse.
Men hardened, but not corrupted morally, by such choices, could
suggest, in all sincerity, that the best next thing to do was
invent an international nuclear regime that would pre-empt such
awful choices in future conflicts. At the suggestion of that great
original, Bernard Baruch, the Truman administration offered an
international nuclear-energy control regime in the late 1940s, but
the international communist movement led by Stalinist Russia
rejected it. They said we were trying to prevent them from having
the bomb, which we already had. They smelled an imperialist plot.
But their olfactory organs deceived them; more exactly, their
ideological organs deceived their olfactory organs: they could not
conceive of a regime — in their minds the bourgeois-liberal,
formally democratic U.S. — offering such a deal because it was so
outside their concept of what you do with power and the instruments
of power.
This is the origin of the long and dreary history of arms
control negotiations, wherein we kept trying to understand why the
totalitarian communistic enemy refused to see things as we did and
proceeded to negotiate with ourselves into a position of weakness.
Fortunately, it ended well because there were persons in positions
of responsibility, including notably Ronald Reagan and Henry
“Scoop” Jackson, who kept their nerve and saw the essential
immorality to which the arms-control “process,”
culminating in the aptly named doctrine of mutual assured
destruction, had brought us. It was immoral, as the political
philosopher Albert Wohlstetter pointed out very simply, because it
said, “We’ll let you kill our people but then we’ll kill your
people.”
But the story did not end there, just as it had not begun with
the nuclear age. The problem of arms negotiations, whether the arms
in question are battleships or sling shots, concerns primarily
regimes, not arms. This is something a certain mindset peculiar to
liberal-democratic regimes finds difficult to grasp, because it
refuses obstinately to view regimes as motivated by the pursuit of
power. It insists that all regimes fundamentally want to share
power, not grasp it and monopolize it. This leads to the fallacy,
and some would argue corruption, of “moral equivalence.”
The sure sign of the moral-equivalent man is his sanctimonious
tone. Here is an example:
If my country sells one more submarine to Israel
one capable of delivering nuclear warheads
on [targets] where there is no evidence of atomic
weapons
… I say what must be said
Again, if the leaden verses interest you, a few lines may be
perused:
Jetz aber, weil aus meinem Land
das von ureigenen Verbrechen,
die ohne Vergleich sind,
Mal um Mal engeholt und zur Rede gestellt wird
wiederum und rein geschaftsmassig, wenn auch,
mit flinker Lippe als Wiedergutmachung deklariert
ein weiterest U-Boot nach Israel
geliefert warden soll, dessent Speziallitat
darin besteht, allesvernichtende Sprengkopfe
dorthin lenken zu konnen, wo die Existenz
einer einzigen Atombombe unbewiesen ist,
doch als Befurchtung von Beweiskraft sein will,
sage ich, was gesagt warden muss.
Yes, I say what must be said — despite the weight of the crimes
my country committed, etc., I say what must be said about our
selling Israel nuclear subs (U-Boot nach Israel) because
we are mixing up business deals and “reparations” guilt
(Wiedergutmachung) — and nothing satisfies the
moral-equivalent man more than wallowing in his own guilt.
Dubious as poetry, is this at least sensible as an idea? He is
stating that one more sub sold to Israel will be one too many for
him, and he will have to “say what must be said.” But why would one
be one too many?
Israel is not party to the non-proliferations regimes that the
U.S. and other nations have promoted over the years, and there are
good reasons for this. Israel developed a nuclear deterrent quite a
few years ago to counter the possibility that eventually its
enemies would develop military power capable of annihilating
it.
Meaning, of course, not just the hardware but the strategic
know-how. Israel always has been outgunned and out-numbered, and
has relied on superior strategy, ultimately resting on a will to
live that is stronger than its enemies’ will to kill, to win the
several wars it has fought for survival since the liberation war of
1948-49. But Israelis, including — especially, perhaps — its
tough and arrogant generals, know that in war you can never assume
anything. Indeed, this lesson was learned the hard way during the
1973 or Yom Kippur war, when an excess of self-satisfaction, or
complacency, gave the encircled country a scare it would not soon
forget.
Israel’s policy makers grasped what ours did in the 1950s,
namely, that it is precisely the side least likely to use the
ultimate deterrent weapon that most needs it, precisely because it
is the other side that is prone to use whatever advantage it may
obtain. But, pace the dangerous fallacies inherent in our
years-long arms-control obsessions, it is also because we
ultimately recognized how morally abhorrent it is to base a
strategy on an exchange of hostages involving the entire
populations of several nations that we always sought to stay ahead
strategically and tactically: the idea is to be able to keep
fighting and winning without having to resort to ultimate
deterrents.
Günther Grass is being harshly criticized in both Israel and
Germany as a lousy poet and a shoddy thinker. He is a fine writer
and a man of moral stature, one of the generation that grew up
under Nazism (in the Polish city of Gdansk, called Danzig by the
Germans) who knew he had to say what had to be said about his
country and his neighbors. His youthful enlistment in the Waffen-SS
has been held against him, but he was scarcely out of childhood
then, and what is more peculiar, and arguably reprehensible, is
that he hid this biographical fact until late in his life. However,
he is a writer not a celebrity, and he felt, one supposes, that
what he wrote was what mattered.
What does matter more, though, is what Grass’s stance says about
his view of Israel, more broadly of the problem of defending
oneself in a world gone badly and irredeemably wrong. This problem
— the problem of evil — is scarcely new, and since Grass knows
this, one is forced to consider that he thinks Israel is different
from other nations, and ought to deal with the eternal problem of
evil differently from other nations, to wit, by not taking measures
to ward it off.
Israel is different, very obviously so, from the nations in its
region. It is a democracy, a welfare state (one that works pretty
well), a place of freedom where children are loved and nurtured and
taught to be doctors and musicians, not suicide bombers and haters.
Grass in his poem suggests this nation is more dangerous, is more
likely to kill innocents and bring on a world nuclear war, than the
other country in his poem, Iran, which is run by men who have
repeatedly promised to rain fire on Israel and destroy it
utterly.
What really must be said, or asked rather, is whether Günther
Grass represents a trend toward Israel-hatred in European literary
and intellectual circles, or whether his is an isolated case; or
again whether this is a form of acquiescence toward the power of
Islamic radicalism somewhat, or somehow I should say, comparable to
the attitude toward the Soviet Union many in Europe took a few
years ago, when they felt they had no alternative but to
compliantly accept the communist tyranny’s mastery of the continent
if not the world.
It is surely observable that there has been some of both lately,
acquiescence and hatred. You see and hear it in European
universities that banish Israeli colleagues, for example, and in
European countries’ “soft” diplomacy toward the hard problems of
the Middle East. You see it in the self-censorship that prevents
many in Europe from speaking truly about the various threats, some
in the own midst, some outside their borders, to their survival as
a distinct civilization composed of specific, if complex, national
cultures.
On the other hand, you also see the horror provoked by the most
flagrant and savage flashes of these threats, such as the recent
murders in Toulouse that targeted Jews (and especially Jewish
children), as well as (I presume) apostates, young men of Islamic
background serving the French state in its military. What must be
asked today is whether the shock that followed this atrocity will
bring with it a view of the kind of world we live in that will
predominate, in the old world, over the view represented by the
Nobel Prize winner and German man of letters, Günther Grass.
