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Doctor Destouches in Germany

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Doctor Destouches (aka Louis-Ferdinand Céline)

He will never win any humanitarian awards, or, for that matter, any awards, but Louis-Ferdinand Céline is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, an anti-Semite, a Nazi sympathizer, and probably a very decent human being otherwise. Born Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches in Courbevoix, France in 1894, Céline became a wounded war hero at Ypres in 1914

After the war, he became a physician and toured Africa and the Americas working for the League of Nations. In 1932, he published his greatest and most approachable novel, Journey to the End of the Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit). Unfortunately, in the early 1940s, he published several anti-Semitic books urging closer ties to Hitler’s Germany.

After the Allied invasion of France, Céline fled to Germany after having been identified by the Resistance and the British as a collaborationist. It was the beginning of a long and confused period escaping Allied bombing attacks and the Russian Army that was brilliantly described in his trilogy about being a guest of the Nazis as they were being pounded to pieces:

  • Castle to Castle (D’un château l’autre) 1957
  • North (Nord) 1960
  • Rigadoon (Rigadon) 1961

Years after reading the first two volumes, I have just finished reading Rigadoon and loving it. Céline and his wife are constantly being shuttled on trains from one bombed-out city to another. At one point, he escorts a group of eighteen severely retarded children from Hannover to Hamburg and manages to transfer them to a special Swedish Red Cross train taking them to safety. Unfortunately, the same train took Céline to Copenhagen, where he served a year in prison for his collaboration with the Nazis.

He died in 1961. Although his novels were a powerful influence on other novelists, Céline was never treated with the honor that his literary and medical work deserved. He spent his last years being a doctor treating poor patients in the slums of Paris.

So fair and foul a career I have not seen. I love Céline’s novels even as I detest his racial and political views. Life can be strange.

Maxim Gorky on Anti-Semitism

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Anti-Semitic Cartoon from 1892

I have been reading Maxim Gorky’s Fragments from My Diary (Заметки из дневника) published in 1924. Here are two excerpts.

SUBSTITUTES FOR MONKEYS

Professor Z., the bacteriologist, once told me the following story.

‘One day, talking to General B., I happened to mention that I was anxious to obtain some monkeys for my experiments. The General immediately said, quite seriously:

‘“What about Jews—wouldn’t they do? I’ve got some Jews here, spies that are going to be hanged anyway—you’re quite welcome to them if they are of any use to you.”

‘And without waiting for an answer he sent his orderly to find out how many spieas were awaiting execution.

‘I tried to explain to His Excellency that men would not be suitable for my experiments, but he was quite unable to understand me, and opening his eyes very wide he said:

‘“Yes, but men are cleverer than monkeys, aren’t they? If you inoculate a man with poison he will be able to tell you what he feels, whereas a money won’t.”

‘Just then the orderly came in and reported that there was not a single Jew among the men arrested for spying—only Rumanians and gypsies.

‘“What a pity!” said the General. “I suppose gypsies won’t do either? … What a pity …!”’

The second is a paragraph excerpted from a fragment labelled:

ANTI-SEMITISM

I have read, thoroughly and attentively, a number of books which try to justify anti-Semitism. It is a hard and even repugnant duty to read books written with a definitely ugly and immoral design: to brand a nation, a whole nation. A remarkable task indeed! And I never found anything in those books but a moral ignorance, an angry squeal, a wild beast’s bellowing, and a grudging, envious grinding of teeth. Thus armed, there is nothing to prevent one from proving that Slavs, and all the other nations as well are also incurably depraved. And is not this the reason for the violent hatred of the Jews, that they, of all races of mixed blood, are the ones who have preserved comparatively the greatest purity of outward life as well as of the spirit? Is there not more perhaps of the ‘Man’ in the Jew than there is in the anti-Semite?

This Is Indeed Poway

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Why the Synagogue Shooting Happened There

The mayor of Poway, California, Steve Vaus by name, went on the air to say that the synagogue shooting on the last day of Passover was not representative of Poway. “This is not Poway,” he said. I beg to differ from him.

My own personal experience of Poway was a negative one. When I worked for Urban Decision Systems in the 1990s, we had to let our secretary go: She was getting too old. Her family had her move to Poway, and I went to visit her there. My impression of the town north of San Diego was that it was a sterile racially homogeneous suburban upper class slum. I hated the place and could hardly wait to leave. And that was over twenty years ago!

Now this type of place is a natural for a racist, bigoted shooter. It is easy to develop a hatred for Jews or Muslims or immigrants or African-Americans—if everyone around you is lily white and drinks the same Kool Aid as you do. They’re all in the same bubble.

I’ve read an interesting article in The New Yorker about what the Chinese are doing to keep dissidents from embarrassing the government at inopportune times:

While Presidemt Xi Jinping played host to African dignitaries in the Great Hall of the People, the police played host to [dissident Zha Jianguo] at various scenic spots in the province of Hubei, about a thousand kilometers away. A number of other Beijing activists and civil-rights lawyers … were treated to similar trips….

This practice is known as bei lüyou, “to be touristed.”

I begin to think the Chinese have the right idea. White racists should “be touristed” for several weeks at a time, perhaps to South Africa or Honduras or Afghanistan or even Israel. The idea is that no white person should be so ensconced in his bubble that he does not understand how people who are different need not be conceived of as being threatening.

On my vacations, I have visited a number of what our Presidente would call “shithole countries.” I have come to admire the Latin-American peoples to the south of us. They have been excellent hosts during my travels and more knowledgeable about us than we typically are of them.