Pearls and Irritations

There are many world events now that are hard to take. Many horrors that are hard to watch. Many emotions that overwhelm us. In fear, we can freeze. Our hearts can turn to stone.

No doubt, the most difficult of these events are unfolding in Israel, Gaza, and Palestine. In due course, the International Court of Justice will decide the question of whether those events represent a genocide. In time, history will judge, as it always does, with ambiguity.

But the daily witnessing of horrors has provoked moral dilemmas for us all. How do we respond to these events occurring on our watch? How do we face these monstrous events, and not turn our hearts to stone?

Witnessing these events has many effects on people. They sadden some. They shock others. They sap the will. They paralyse. For a few, they galvanise. They confirm the righteousness of a cause. They deepen beliefs that the enemy is a monster. They incite and justify more violence.

I hear many people say world news is too much to bear. The world is depressing. We yearn for escape. The escape may be fantasy. It may be fiction. It may also be distorted history, which reassures our consciences that we are the exception to Solzhenitsyn’s dictum: that the dividing line between good and evil runs through every human heart.

Others say people who refuse to bear the tragic news, who avert their eyes from evil, are irresponsible. For some, it is shameful. To sit back and let Gaza happen is to commit the mistakes of “Hitler’s willing executioners” in the 1930s and 1940s. How can they permit such events to happen when atrocious images are shared ubiquitously on antisocial media? Why do they — it is never we — refuse to gaze into the eyes of the monster?

Others react to the accusation that they permit crimes against humanity, with outrage and indignation. People like us cannot do things like that. The protesters are the true evil ones. They share a bed with the monster. They are antisemites. In Australia, the government and universities have even established an investigation into antisemitism among critics and protesters on campus. Will it chill the free, open inquiry necessary to understand morally complex history and the many-sided conflicts of Israel and Palestine? One of Australia’s leading historians, Henry Reynolds, thinks so.

Then there is the mystery of why nobody in a position of power can seem to stop the killing. Why does the United Nations complain, but not intervene? Why does the US wring its diplomatic hands, but stage standing ovations in Congress for the main authoriser of the killing? Our institutions have turned into stone, rather than respond humanely.

There are many better-informed people on the Israel-Palestine conflict than me. But over recent weeks, I have been reading Reading the Holocaust (1998) by the great Australian historian, Inga Clendinnen. Her book uses the term the ‘Gorgon effect’ to describe the way our hearts can turn to stone when contemplating the worst that we can do in war, in power and in our imagination. It refers to the paralysing inability to observe reality and horror, honestly and responsibly. It is based on the old Greek myth of the Gorgon or Medusa, the snake-haired monster whose face, if gazed upon, would turn even the toughest culture warriors into stone.

In the beginning of that book, she wrote:

“I want to dispel the ‘Gorgon effect – the sickening of imagination and curiosity and the draining of the will which afflicts so many of us when we try to look squarely at the persons and processes implicated in the Holocaust.”

This Gorgon effect has paralysed the humane feelings of too many on all sides of too many conflicts. Overcoming the Gorgon effect is the moral obligation of our time, and, perhaps, of all times in history. It can be done with the greatest virtue taught by history. That is, empathy.

The most remarkable thing about Clendinnen’s book is how she practised empathy. She sought to understand both victim and perpetrator, both witness and silent bystander. She looked into the face of the real Gorgon, not some sentimental, ideological myth, which we claim limply can never happen again. She wrote:

“Humankind saw the face of the Gorgon in the concentration camps, petrifying the human by its denial of the human both in itself and its prey. … We must do more than register guilt, or grief, or anger, or disgust, because neither reverence for those who suffer nor revulsion from those who inflict suffering will help us overcome its power to paralyse, and to see it clearly.”

She wrote this profoundly empathetic book after the cultural scandal of the prize-winning novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper. Helen Demidenko (Darville) dressed herself in fake Ukrainian heritage to excuse Ukrainian nationalist mass killings at Babi Yar and Treblinka as responses to Jewish, Communist, or Soviet oppression. Progressive, liberal-minded Australia swallowed the nonsense whole. The odd conservative Robert Manne exposed the hoax and lamented Australia’s culture of forgetting. We suffered not only “a dangerously low level of political and historical understanding in Australian intellectual culture, but a disturbing lack of critical acuity and moral poise”.

Thirty years later, Australian intellectual culture has fallen into the abyss.

Clendinnen wrote Reading the Holocaust in part because she too had been seduced by The Hand that Signed the Paper. She had refused “full imaginative engagement” with horrors that were “unthinkable”. She wrote her book so readers could feel them in their full monstrosity.

Clendinnen assumed, on our behalf, the moral obligation to stare into the eyes of the Gorgon, and not be petrified. She wrote,

“In the face of a catastrophe of this scale so deliberately inflicted, perplexity is an indulgence we cannot afford.”

Today’s Australian Government, however, stands with Ukrainian ethno-nationalists and indulges in perplexity on Gaza. Its latest abstention on the UN vote on the occupation of Palestine demonstrates again that, in fear, it fawns on the US.

I regret it is beyond the moral capacity of the Australian Cabinet, our ambassador to the UN and the US, and many community leaders to pick up Clendinnen’s admirable book.

But it is not beyond the moral capacity of readers of Pearls and Irritations.

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