Humans against inhumanity

Making sense of Syria

PRESIDENT PROCLAIMS WAR; WARNS ALIEN ENEMIES HERE. That was the banner New York Times headline a century ago Friday, as the United States entered The Great War, a five-year winter of trench and chemical warfare that decades later was stripped of its definite article and renamed World War I in the midst of an even greater war.

This Thursday, President Trump bombed the Assad regime in Syria after it again crossed a line by using chemical weapons on its own citizens. That may become the date future historians cite to mark the end of the world order that began to emerge in 1920 and came of age in 1945 in a reshaped Europe after a second, harsher winter of genocide and devastation, along with the largest wave of refugees and forced migrations the world has yet seen — though the one happening today threatens that miserable record.

Monday night, with news photos and footage of children slaughtered in a faraway war still fresh in many minds, we Jews will celebrate Passover. The dinner marks our liberation from slavery and sojourn, and recalls anew the injunction: “You shall not oppress a stranger, since you yourselves know the feelings of a stranger, for you also were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

History is never past, the seder reminds us. Human nature allows for the most inhumane cruelties while human progress remains at best precarious.

Last March, in the heat of the primary season, I wrote a column called “The Donald, the dead kid and us,” asking voters to think seriously before Election Day about our long terror wars and these many millions of strangers now fleeing their home countries, rather than just lurching between sympathy and suspicion with each new report of a dead child or an atrocity in Paris or . . .

Thursday, Trump explained that he’d reversed his view on intervening in Syria and gave the order to attack after seeing TV footage of the “beautiful little babies” there. As I write this Friday, a Russian warship is sailing toward the two U.S. destroyers that launched the Syria strikes. #WWIII is trending on Twitter.

There are no new stories. No repeats, either. Just endless variations on a few themes as America First gives way to Never Forget gives way to America First.

Earlier this week, roughly a million news cycles ago, I happened to be reading “On the End of the World,” a collection of newspaper dispatches from the 1930s by the great writer Joseph Roth, who died at age 44 from alcohol and penury and despair after years shouting into the wind about the rise of Hitler, reporting from exile in a Europe he no longer recognized on the horrors he’d witnessed and the still worse ones approaching.

A different time and place, but some of his words resonate now.

Here’s Roth in 1938, the year before his death, on fake news: “Denial and deformation of the truth are more dangerous than the lie proper, because the lie can break, but to restore a disfigured truth demands the most painstaking labors. To falsify the truth these days, they employ two methods: exaggerate reality or deny it pure and simple.”

In 1934, on the “barbarian power” of national pride, “the idiotic love for the soil (that) kills off a love for the earth” — “one can favor all people equitably, or favor one above the rest . . . the majority of patriots are blind, as lovers are blind. If they weren’t blind, they wouldn’t be lovers.”

The same year, a column entitled "Pitiless Combat" opens with the declaration that “ever since there have been writers, the only duty asked of them has been to create their works.”

But, he continues, “the writer has no more right than anyone else not to take a stand against the inhumanity of the world today,” emanating from Hitler’s Germany, since “talent and genius cannot provide any of that moral engagement that issues from the self,” so that “a writer cannot possess genuine worth if he is not in possession of the following traits: “1-Compassion for oppressed people. “2-Love of good. “3-Hatred of evil. “4-Courage to proclaim in a loud and clear voice, unequivocally, his compassion for the oppressed, his love of good, his hatred of evil.”

Roth applied that standard to writers, because that was his tribe and he wrote in part to take his own measure. But it applies to us, here, now, as the moral infrastructure that for decades insulated many from the worst of human nature breaks down, along with our bridges and tunnels. Contrary to Trump’s promises, little of this can be easily torn down and replaced.

Hard work ahead, for humanity’s crooked timber, to restore as much as it can be this disfigured world. Consult Roth’s list as needed.