Julius Margolin's Memoir of the Gulag

 

I had planned to travel to the Soviet Union long before the start of World War II.
 
At the time, I was living in Łódź, Poland, and interest in the Soviet Union was considerable in that country. Indeed, interest in the communist country was different in Paris and New York from that in Poland, where people remembered 150 years of tsarist occupation and the war of 1920; moreover, the two countries had a common border and Russia had always been both a real threat and a nearby temptation. The Communist Party was illegal in Poland. There were no grounds for it in an agrarian, Catholic country with weakly developed industry and a negligible proletariat.
 
But about ten to fifteen percent of Jewish youth were under the sway of communism. God knows what communism meant to the miserable dreamers of the Polish ghetto. In the 1930s, the Pamphlets of Karl Radek and Historical Materialism of Bukharin were sold from carts on the streets of Łódź. On the day of Lenin’s death in January, the anniversary of the three “Ls,” (the three communist leaders, Lenin, Liebknecht, and Luxemburg) a red flag appeared on the telegraph wires, and Jewish youth broke the glass windows in Jewish-owned shops on Piotrkowska Street. The radical intelligentsia read aloud Broniewski’s poems about “the furnaces of Magnitogorsk.” In Warsaw theaters, Kirsanov’s Granada was recited to loud applause.
 
Tourists traveled the routes of the Soviet travel bureau Intourist to become familiar with the great country of the Revolution. Many returned after a week’s stay in Moscow with a box of Soviet chocolate and pleasant memories. A two-week tour enabled one to visit Ukraine. The resorts of the Caucasus and Central Asia were open to those who could afford a three-to four-week tour. Thus, André Gide visited Gori, Stalin’s birthplace, and Sieburg, a German journalist who traveled frequently to the Soviet Union and published his impressions from there, visited the Red Arctic. Everyone who could write conveyed his own impressions about the Soviet Union.
 
In the years of my Soviet imprisonment, I recalled that literature. It included some well-crafted reportage, full of subtle observations, wit, and brilliance. As a whole, however, all this literature was childish prattle. Neither the skeptics nor the enthusiasts had any understanding of the Soviet Union; they did not have the right to write on a subject about which they knew so little. Now the absurd and tragic disparity between this “tourist” literature and Soviet reality is evident to hundreds of thousands of people like me who wound up deep in the Soviet hinterland during the war years.
 
In addition to institutionalized tourist visits, during the years of Polish independence, there was another sort of travel about which the newspapers were silent. At all times, illegal renegades were crossing the border, people who did not want to remain in capitalist Poland and sought the promised land, “the homeland of all workers,” in search of justice and freedom. We do not know the fate of these people. Why didn’t we hear from any of them? They were not famous writers or delegates from America. When they disappeared like a stone in water, no one took an interest in them. They were insignificant people, anonymous, sawdust, attracted to the lodestone of a dream about a better world. It would have been, however, most worthwhile to question them. Their truthful and nonliterary report would have said much more than volumes of official propaganda. Many of them are living in the Soviet Union, and it is a shame that they are unable to tell us about themselves.
 
In the city of Biała-Podlaska, a Jew had a stall where he sold soda water. His children became rebels: they did not pray to God and did not want to hear about Polish kindness or distant Palestine. When the younger son grew up and became convinced that there was little hope of a revolution in Biała-Podlaska, he arranged with the peasants on the border to take him to the Soviet side. That was in 1931. I met him eleven years later in a Soviet camp, in the great and populous country of the zek [Russian abbreviation z/k for the word “convict,” zakliuchennyi], and I heard his story, which was similar to thousands of others.
 
The country of the zek does not appear on a Soviet map nor is it in any atlas. It is the sole country in the world where there are no disputes about the Soviet Union, no delusions, and no illusions.
 
Melman, the owner of his own engineering firm, lived in the city of Lublin. If his relatives are still alive, here is a report on one who disappeared without a trace. Engineer Melman was an independent and stubborn person. He could not stand the Polish regime, and he crossed the border with a group of “dissatisfied” people. They were sent directly from the border post to prison and from there to a labor camp, where I met him. At that time, after several years of incarceration, he was an unusually taciturn person, broad-shouldered, with a darkened face and gloomy mien. I think by that time he no longer had any convictions. His goal was not to die in a camp, but he did not succeed. He died of an intestinal obstruction in the spring of 1944 in the Kruglitsa corrective labor camp in the Arkhangelsk region. Someone gave him two extra meal tickets and his body, which was unaccustomed to normal food, did not hold up.
 
The year 1937 was fatal for “illegal” tourists. That was the year of the great purge in the Soviet Union. Among the millions dispatched to camps were those who had arrived from abroad to reside in the Soviet Union. It made no difference whether they had arrived legally or illegally.
 
I remember a young nurse in a camp infirmary.
 
“Why were you arrested, nurse?” “My papa came from Latvia.” “How old were you when you arrived?” “Eight.” This is not a conversation of two crazy people. In the Soviet Union, everyone understood this exchange without explanations.
 
I did not arrive in Russia via Intourist and did not cross the Polish border in the dark of night; I was a tourist of a third, special sort. I did not need to travel to Russia—it came to me. The route was a special one that we did not hear about from Intourist. I did not observe Russia from the window of the Metropol Hotel or from the window of a restaurant car on a train. I saw it through the barred window of a prison car, from inside the barbed wire of camps, and I covered hundreds of kilometers on foot when the cursing guards goaded the crowd of prisoners in stages through the forests and the impoverished kolkhozes (Soviet collective farms) of the north; I crossed the Urals twice—in a cattle car and on the third bunk of a rough train car, where the presence of foreign correspondents is not permitted; I lived in the Siberian backwoods, like everyone else went to work, and carried in my pocket the document of which Mayakovsky was so proud: a Soviet passport good for five years. [Margolin was in error: The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote about a Soviet passport for travel abroad, to which ordinary Soviet citizens were not entitled. Margolin, who was not a citizen of the USSR, had only a residence permit.] I do not have this document any longer, which is why I am able to write things about the Soviet Union that our wise men did not dream of and about which people with Soviet passports do not write.

 
People who sympathize with the Soviet system assume that my itinerary was infelicitously chosen and diverted me from famous Soviet routes. I was not in the battle for Stalingrad; I did not take Berlin. Had I been there, perhaps I would have written differently? Perhaps. I did not choose my route; the Soviet regime decreed it.
 
The world knows everything about Stalingrad but nothing about the camps. Where is the truth of Russia, at the Victory Parade on Red Square or in the country of the zek, which does not exist in the atlas? Evidently, we must take these things together in their entirety and interconnection. I have no illusions; I saw underground Russia. I saw it. Let those who pin their hopes on the country of the Soviets take this “material,” too, into consideration and harmonize it with their conscience as best they can.
 
Excerpt from Journey Into the Land of the Zeks and Back by Julius Margolin. Oxford University Press. 2020.
 
Doing Time in the Dark Underbelly of Soviet Russia. By Juliius Margolin. LitHub, October 13, 2020.

We speak of memory, but memory is empty without witness. It is too much to expect that all who suffer speak. Yet without witness, memory devolves into propaganda that serves the moment. Julius Margolin asks whether the real Russia is the one that celebrates victory over Nazi Germany on Red Square, or the one that exists in the uncharted universe of concentration camps that he calls “the land of the zek.” He wrote in 1946 and 1947, right after five years of Soviet penal servitude; the question is still pertinent in the Russia of the 21st century. Margolin was himself a “zek,” a convict, who survived incarceration in the largest concentration camp system during its most murderous period.
 
We call the Soviet camps the Gulag, after the title of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s much later book, published in 1973. Had Margolin’s book been published when he wrote it, “zek” and “land of the zek” would be the terms we use now. This first complete collection of Margolin’s texts about the camps, published as a whole in English translation, arrives at a time when we know a great deal about them. When documents became available after the end of the USSR in 1991, historians sought to balance the experiences of the prisoners with those of the guards, the camp directors, the politburo, Stalin himself. We know certain things that Margolin did not: the locations of most of the camps, the numbers of registered prisoners and deaths, the names of those who persecuted them. Yet without the voices of the witnesses, even such knowledge is not enough. If memory is challenged by witness, history is enriched by it.
 
Only a very few memoirs of concentration camps, and only a scarce handful of memoirs of the Gulag, give a sense of what it was like on the inside. Margolin gives a reason: to become a zek was to lose the points of reference that would make the experience intelligible to others: “No one retains his original form. Observation is difficult because the observer himself is deformed. He, too, is abnormal.” In this sense the title of this book is perfectly chosen. Margolin recounts the five years between his deportation from Soviet-occupied Poland in 1940 and his return to postwar Poland in 1946 and then his subsequent departure for Palestine via France. It is a mark of his honesty that he records his own decline; it is a mark of his recovery that he was able to write this book. This literary and philosophical memoir is not simply an unmatched historical record; it is also a deep moral judgement. Tens of millions of people passed through the Gulag; only a few were able to write searching and reliable books about it. This one is perhaps the best.
 
Margolin was a philosopher, which made him a special witness. Born the son of a doctor in the predominantly Jewish town of Pinsk in what was then the western Russian Empire, he studied for a while in revolutionary Russia and then completed a doctorate in philosophy in Berlin. He called himself a Polish Jew and spent most of the 1930s in Poland, mainly in Łódź. In 1936 he and his family moved from Poland to Palestine. He was in Poland settling some necessary business when Germany invaded on 1 September 1939. Like about a quarter million Jews in western Poland, he fled eastward before the Germans. The Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east on 17 September. Like many of those Jews, Margolin tried to find a way out. When he failed, he returned to his parents in Pinsk, where he lived through the annexation of eastern Poland and the imposition of the Soviet system.
 
Margolin defines himself as a European and as a “man of the West.” He was forty years old when he entered his first concentration camp, old enough to have seen something of the world and to start a family, but young enough to react with flexibility. He had a strong sense of decency and normality: human rights and truth were basic concepts. He had the vocabulary and concepts of a philosopher with a strong interest in literature: he never lacked for words or concepts in an environment that beggared description. He was a native speaker of Russian, the language of the camps, but also a native speaker of Polish and Yiddish, the languages of the prisoners with whom he was sentenced.
 
As Margolin saw matters from Łódź or Pinsk in late 1939 and early 1940, the Nazis and the Soviets had together destroyed Europe. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1939,and the joint German-Soviet invasion of Poland that followed, was the end of the life he thought he was leading. Poland, from which he had emigrated but for which he had sympathy, was destroyed by its powerful neighbors. In Pinsk Margolin watched as local resources, grain and meat, were directed by Soviet power to the Nazi ally, even as Germany invaded western Europe. Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union declared that the Polish state did not exist; this created a basic problem of access to law and protection for tens of millions of people who were subject not to a conventional occupation but to annexation and colonization. In Margolin’s case, he was sentenced to five years of hard labor in a camp for having the wrong papers.
 
His choices were constrained by the joint action of Nazi and Soviet power. Jews could flee Germans, but would find themselves in territory that would become Soviet. Margolin is a keen observer of what happened in eastern Poland under Soviet rule: the deportation of elites, the subjugation of the economy, the closing of all independent organizations. Many Jews wanted to go back: “as late as spring 1940, Jews preferred the ghetto to the Soviet equality of rights.” Many Jews did in fact return. Those like Margolin who stayed were expected to take Soviet citizenship. Jews who did not were deported to special settlements in Soviet Kazakhstan and Siberia in June 1940. A few weeks after that, Margolin was sent to a camp in the Russian far north to fell trees.
 
During Margolin’s first year as a zek, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allies. His forced labor served an economy that supplied the Wehrmacht. We might be tempted to think of this as ironic; for Margolin it was simply the end of his world: “Both sides were inhuman reflections of everything we held dear and sacred.” There was nothing surprising, for him, in “Russia’s alliance with Nazi Germany.” A Jew in Soviet confinement, he had to endure pro-Nazi propaganda: “The rare Soviet newspapers that landed in the camp were full of pro-German publicity.” The Soviet press was reprinting the speeches of Nazi dignitaries. “In line with Hitler’s successes,” Margolin recalls, “antisemitism increased in the camp.” Although he was a Polish Jew, and well aware of Polish antisemitism, no one called him a kike until he was in a Soviet camp.
 
Margolin knew Germany well but never saw a Nazi camp; he left the country in 1929, four years before Hitler came to power. The comparisons were, however, unavoidable. A young German Jew who feared Nazi terror found his nightmares realized in a Soviet camp. Jews who had been in Dachau said that Soviet servitude was worse. Margolin also noticed that young fascists with whom he was imprisoned admired the camp structure. They agreed with its basic organizing principle: the strong should survive, the weak perish.
 
Margolin and his fellow inmates were evacuated eastwards from the camp on Lake Onega when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Some four million people were in Soviet camps when Hitler betrayed Stalin and Nazi Germany invaded its ally. In the next two years some 2.5 million more Soviet citizens were sentenced to the camps. Between 1941 and 1943, chaotic transports and drastic shortages made a camp sentence even more dangerous than before. About half a million deaths were officially registered in the camps in those years; the true figure is likely far higher.
 
Margolin survived these conditions, observed them, chronicled them, and analyzed them with unparalleled clarity and insight. In extraordinary descriptions, we learn about what he called “the fatal year 1942” when around him “zeks were falling like grass.” He and his fellow prisoners talked about which kinds of grass and which kinds of bark could be eaten. With great precision and without pathos he describes, for example, digging in a canal downstream from an outhouse looking for edible material left over from swill for pigs.
 
Margolin’s great subject was dehumanization: the reduction of zeks in their own minds to hungry beasts, and in the minds of their bosses to laboring machines. Everyone was hungry all the time. Food was rationed so that the more productive got more than the less: “The means of coercion was hunger.” A prisoner can be brought “to a bestial condition where the moment of satiety becomes the culminating point of every day, the sole stimulus of his actions.”

 
To be treated only as an instrument of labor destroyed a sense of self-worth. “Only a free person,” Margolin wrote, “knows the joy of free labor, and for him this labor is meaningful because it serves a goal that he chooses and in which he believes.” It is physically difficult to fell trees all day in a north Russian forest, as Margolin did in his first labor assignment. Yet he notices the spiritual costs as well: “The surest way to make a person ludicrous and contemptible is to force him systematically to do work that he is incapable of doing, in the company of people who are superior to him in strength and skill.” People are reduced to the quantity of labor they perform: “I myself was not worth anything. My right to life was measured by the percentage of the work norms that I fulfilled.”
 
The sheer pointlessness was an element of the suffering. Margolin labored poorly, punished for actions that he could not regard as a crime, sentenced by a state of which he was not a citizen, serving a regime he abhorred. After the war, Margolin read Jean-Paul Sartre and laughed at Sartre’s idea that alienation was something experienced by bourgeois French people. He saw Sartre’s complaint about the absence of absolute meaning in existence as a temptation to seek it in politics, in a system such as communism. As a prediction of Sartre’s politics, this was correct. Margolin actually experienced something very much like a pure alienation and wrote about it with a skill that should have been humbling to those who wrote about what they did not know.
 
Margolin is a chronicler not only of the cruelty and suffering of others but also of the disappearance of the self. In his prose the physical and institutional structure of the camp figures as a threat not just to life but to any sense of what living might mean. Throughout the book, for example, he returns to his constant difficulty in keeping clothed. These passages concern the extreme cold—and basic dignity: “The moment arrives when we no longer have anything of our own. The state dresses and undresses us as it pleases.” Poland is destroyed and Palestine is far away; he has no contact with the people who mattered to him before his sentence; “family ties are liquidated.” It pains him that his wife and son in Palestine do not know what has happened to him. The continuity of life itself is broken, the accumulation of moments, days, and memories that is the oxygen of our consciousness. Prisoners “gradually forgot about our past,” as the present became a matter of mechanical repetition and animal survival.
 
Margolin survived physically, thanks to his languages, his friendships with camp doctors, his canniness, and a good deal of luck. He almost died several times, and his gifts as a writer are perhaps most apparent in his recollections of those moments. Yet perhaps the central experience was not malady but dehumanization. He is saddest about the day when he first robbed from a fellow prisoner, the day when he first struck another man in the face. Even as Margolin gave way physically and spiritually to the system, he never lost his sense of human value. In circumstances where such behavior was understandable and even necessary for survival, he still remembers it as wrong, and as damaging to himself. The Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski said that when we choose the lesser evil we must remember that it is evil. This is a challenge in daily life; that Margolin could retain this level of ethical reflection in the camp is miraculous.

Margolin never lost his capacity to see his fellow zeks as human. He takes care to describe the particular conditions of his fellow Jews, who were the majority of his campmates at the beginning. He explains that Poles, with whom he shared a language and a country, were the group closest to Jews in the camp. Margolin befriends Ukrainians, with whom, as he recalls, Jews had an uneasy history. Ukrainians were sent to the Gulag in disproportionate numbers before, during, and after the war; in Margolin’s book they have a voice.
 
Margolin knew that he was an unusual witness. Concluding his book in 1947, at a time when the world did not know about the Gulag and did not want to learn, he writes, rather formally, that on “the basis of my five-year experience, I affirm that the Soviet government, utilizing specific territories and political conditions in its country, has created a subterranean hell, a kingdom of slaves behind barbed wire, inaccessible to world public opinion.” Margolin correctly anticipated that the very moral emptiness that he experienced would become an argument of the defenders of the Soviet regime. What he opposed was the total abandonment of ethics, the open nihilism and its attendant sadism: “Might is right; everyone lies; everyone is a scoundrel; fools must be taught a lesson.”
 
The defense of the Soviet system, before the war, during the war, after the war, and even today, was that the abandonment of humanity served some goal. What Margolin experienced as an emptiness could be seen from a distance as a stage in history. Hunger, dehumanization, and mass death in wastelands were necessary to reach a greater good. This is what Sartre, for example, believed, and similar defenses of the Gulag are mounted even now, in Russia and beyond. Margolin’s experience directly contradicts this wishful thinking: “What I saw in five years of my stay in the Soviet subterranean kingdom was an apparatus of murder and oppression acting blindly.” He turns the argument from determinism around: “The Soviet regime’s crime is not justified but, on the contrary, aggravated and accentuated if it turns out that there is no other way of reinforcing the power of those in the Kremlin than the monstrous camp system of contemporary slavery and millions of anonymous deaths.”
 
Margolin had no patience with relativism, or what we today call what-aboutism. It is no defense of Soviet mass killing to point out that the Nazis committed worse crimes. The Soviet camp system, he noted, was older, larger, and more durable than the Nazi one. It was wrong to “justify the Soviet camps by asserting that Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka were much worse.” As Margolin saw matters, the Nazis and the Soviets had together destroyed Europe in 1939. Neither side was right in the war that began in 1941,and so defending one by referring to the crimes of the other was a logical mistake. Margolin was himself physically trapped between the two systems. But human freedom, for him, was the ability to judge both on higher criteria, rather than on the terms their alliance or their clash seemed to force.
 
Margolin has a final word for those who would shrug their shoulders at the history of Soviet concentration camps in the belief that in so doing they are somehow serving progress. “The people who justify Soviet camps, who say ‘Let them sit in camps’ or ‘Perhaps this is not true’ or simply ‘What do we care?’ may consider themselves anti-fascists and wear a mask of rectitude. It is clear to me that these people are preparing a second edition of Hitler in the world.” If you lose your concern for the facts of history, you have lost your concern for humanity. If you choose evasion and propaganda, then the anti-fascists lose out to the fascists, the better evaders and the better propagandists. The act of truthfully recording human suffering, by contrast, is also the act of affirming human value. The dignity of recalling detail is also the dignity of passing judgement. As a matter of individual ethics and also as a matter of democratic pragmatism, no “trampling on human rights should remain anonymous.”
 
Witness undoes anonymity, and judgment girds an ideal. Margolin thought that democracy transcended a shallow quarrel between Right and Left. The Right was not bound to defend fascism, and the Left was not bound to defend the Soviet Union. And no one was bound to identify with Right or Left. The trap of us-and-them was dehumanizing. What humanized was an active moral concern for truth, access to the historical record, and the freedom to express what was learned. Although every democracy is flawed, as he recognized, the flaws can be seen as such. When the witness and judgment of individuals informs the discussion and choices of citizens, a democracy can be corrected and renewed.
 
Foreword  in  Journey Into the Land of the Zeks and Back: A Memoir of the Gulag by Julius Margolin.Oxford University Press, 2020.
 
A Zek Remembers Stalin’s Camps. By Timothy Snyder. Tablet, October 1, 2020.

Oxford University Press

Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back: A Memoir of the Gulag by Julius Margolin.
 
The first full English translation of a masterful Gulag memoir that preceded Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago by decades.
 
Panelists:
• Deborah Kaple, Princeton University (the author of Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir)
• Stefani Hoffman, Hebrew University (book translator) 
• Leona Toker, Hebrew University (the author of Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors)
Chair: Eli Lederhendler, Hebrew University.

 YouTube

Julius Margolin was a Polish Jew caught between the twin 1939 invasions of Poland by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. He spent the years 1940-1945 in Soviet labor camps, finally returning to his family in Palestine, in 1946. In her book Journey Into the Land of the Zeks and Back (Oxford UP, 2020), Israeli scholar Stefani Hoffman has provided the English-speaking world with its first full translation of Margolin’s story, which reiterates the importance of individual human dignity, no matter the circumstances.

 Aaron Weinacht  talks with Hoffman.

 New Books Network, November 12, 2020

Julius Margolin (1900-71), a philosopher-writer, after having barely survived five years in the Soviet gulag with other zeks (a Russian slang term from the abbreviation of the word zakliuchennyi, meaning “convict, a prison or forced labor camp inmate”), found himself stuck in Marseilles for three weeks in 1945, waiting for a ship to Palestine. He had two books by Jean-Paul Sartre with him, Nausea and Being and Nothingness.
 
Margolin’s time in the gulag profoundly influenced his experience of reading these two books. He remembers in Journey Into the Land of the Zeks and Back that Sartre’s “world was quite simply not the one in which I lived, and I resolutely refused to submit to Sartre’s ‘nonbeing.’” Later he asks, “How could [Sartre’s philosophy] help my friends whom I had left in Russia in the camp hell, and whom it would have been so easy for me to néantiser [turn into nothingness] according to Sartre’s prescription?”
 
In other words, Sartre had written of life in the West as an existential hell, but Margolin had lived in an actual hell, that of the Bolshevik concentration camp. He had left a wife and child behind in Palestine to seek work in his native Poland; unfortunately, he did so in September of 1939 and was swept up in the German invasion from the west and the subsequent Soviet invasion from the east. After attempts to get home ended in vain, he found himself on the Soviet side of Poland. Because he didn’t have a Soviet passport and the Soviets didn’t recognize his Polish one (because Poland no longer existed), he was rounded up with thousands of other Poles, a mix of Gentiles and Jews, and crammed into boxcars sent to the gulag in northwest Russia.
 
Margolin’s memoir of his five years there reminded me of Varlam Shalamov’s two books Kolyma Stories and Sketches of the Criminal World: Further Kolyma Stories, and of Solzhenitsyn’s three-volume work, The Gulag Archipelago. Margolin’s work is not as well-written as theirs: Shalamov was the equal of Hemingway, and Solzhenitsyn brings Tolstoy to mind. Yet Margolin’s lesser talent as a writer (though he is no less passionate) makes Margolin’s book more affecting, at times, as a record of the hell of the gulag.
 
But he wrote for a world that did not want to hear him. The West had been allied with the Soviet Union in the war, and many Jews in Palestine and elsewhere were still hopeful about the Soviet Union. Further, the world did not want to read more bad news. After the Allies had ripped out what Margolin calls the “thorn” in the body politic of Hitler’s concentration and extermination camps, few wanted to read of camps that were worse, in terms of population and duration, even if not dedicated to genocide.

But now we have the first English translation of the book, and in our current political climate it behooves people on both sides of the political aisle to read it. It reiterates what Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn describe: the severe malnutrition combined with absurd work quotas; the ravages of the urki, or criminals whom the camp commanders often allowed to run the camp interiors; the arbitrariness of the sentences prisoners received.

 Almost all of them (except the urki) were innocent of any offense; the Party had set quotas for how many people from each district should go to the gulag, and Russian prisoners of war were always given 10 years on principle. Margolin mentions a middle-aged man sent to the camps for three years because he had murdered his wife, and a younger man who, for sweeping a floor for German occupiers, was given 20 years.

 Where Margolin’s book differentiates itself from Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn is in the depths of one man’s experience. Shalamov shares his experience in a shattering series of stories, but one comes away with a kaleidoscopic view of the Far East gulag. Solzhenitsyn tells the epic story of the gulag as a whole: his personal story, but also the historical and political development of what he calls “our sewage disposal system.” Shalamov spent 17 years in the gulag, Solzhenitsyn 10; Margolin, there for five years, wrote a more concentrated and distilled work.

 Trained as a philosopher, he also makes occasional philosophical and psychological asides. In fact, he wrote several philosophical works in the camps, but they were destroyed by guards. In Chapter 32, “The Doctrine of Hate,” Margolin tells of how he wrote it and gives a précis of what he wrote. “That man,” Margolin writes, meaning Stalin, “hates, which means that some kind of inner weakness develops into hate, the result of some organic problem. Some kind of lack, defect, or unhappiness may remain within the bounds of his sense of self, but it may also spread to his social milieu and be transmitted to other people.”

 Hitler, Margolin says, must have felt himself to be “deeply hurt.” “Had he wanted the truth, he would have found a real cause, but the truth was too much for him to bear. He therefore began to search for external guilty parties.” He goes on to explain:

 “All haters are great unmaskers. Instead of a mask, however, they tear off live skin, the true nature, and they replace reality with a creation of their inflamed fantasy. Hatred starts with an imaginary unmasking and ends with real flaying, not in theory but in practice…. It is sufficient to compare the tirades of Mein Kampf with Lenin’s passionate polemics and his thunderous charges against capitalism to sense their psychological affinity. It is the language of hate, not of objective research.”

 We hope, Margolin concludes, to assuage our own suffering with our hate, and restore “mental equilibrium.” But this possibility is imaginary, and the result is “eternal mental anguish.”

 Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism that “dwelling on the horrors” of the concentration camps, although not helpful in forming political programs, can help us determine if a political movement is prone to totalitarianism. Concentration camps sprang up as soon as both Lenin and Hitler came to power. Their present-day prototypes in the West are warnings.

 The left, when it strives for utopia, comes up with communism; the right with fascism. Both ultimately produce concentration camps where, as Arendt said, people are “superfluous.” Hell can be other people, as Sartre said, but as Margolin describes in his latter chapters, lovers know their temporary heaven. It is the ultimate irony that the two movements of the 20th century that tried to create heaven on earth—one of a future workers’ paradise, the other of a nostalgic hearkening back to a glorious nationalist past—ended up creating instead the hells of the concentration camps.

 Review: Never forget the suffering and injustice of the gulag. By Franklin Freeman.  America : The Jesuit Revue, April 22, 2021.

 

 

‘It was a gray mass of people in rags, lying motionless with bloodless, pale faces, cropped hair, with a shifty, gloomy look.’ Julius Margolin’s first encounter with Soviet prisoners takes place in August 1940 on the way to a labour camp in the north of Russia. Four years later, waiting at another transit point, he sees ‘semi-cripples, former, present and future invalids’, ‘bony shadows with hands and feet like sticks, in smelly tatters and dirty rags’. He has another year of horror ahead.
 
A Polish Jew stranded in the USSR at the beginning of the second world war, Margolin refused to take Soviet citizenship and as a result was sentenced to five years of forced labour. There followed a succession of prison camps with their inhumane conditions, everyday brutality, hunger and diseases. Margolin’s account of those years, first published in 1947, is as clear and detailed as it is chilling, his analysis of human behaviour under terror not blurred by what he had to live through.
 
‘I immediately ceased to be a human being,’ he says of his arrest. His abiding memory is of man being reduced ‘to a bestial condition, where the moment of satiety becomes the culminating point of every day, the sole stimulus of his actions’. That Margolin managed to survive, both physically and mentally, was partly down to luck — at one point a doctor gave him three months to live — and partly to his ability to adapt. For many inmates, however, hardship was but the first step to total dehumanisation, a loss of dignity more irreversible than physical demise. Deprivation paralysed their spirit, making them want ‘to fade into the common mass, to be as obedient as possible, an industrious instrument of another’s will’.
 
‘Every day the food ration is ready,’ former peasants say of their life in the camp. ‘At liberty I did not live better.’ Such testimonies demonstrate how far from reality the radiant future promised by the Soviets is for the majority of the population; but also, even more importantly, how little it takes for human beings to forget what makes them human, to stop noticing ‘the abnormality of the abnormal’. This motif runs through the book: ‘In camp, they say the words: man, culture, home, work, radio, dinner, cutlet, but not one of these words means what it normally signifies in freedom.’ In that, the camp is a replica of totalitarian society as a whole, one in which language has degenerated into empty propaganda.
 
When the war broke out, the choice for many of the Jews trapped in occupied territories was between a Nazi ghetto and a Soviet camp. Inevitable comparisons between the two lead Margolin to conclude that it is wrong to defend the Gulag as an antidote to Auschwitz. ‘The people who justify Soviet camps,’ he writes, ‘are preparing a second edition of Hitler in the world.’ The historian Timothy Snyder reiterates this view in his foreword, quoting the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, who said that ‘when we choose the lesser evil we must remember that it is evil’.
 
Margolin repeatedly turns to the West’s perception of the Soviet system, talking of ‘imagined communism’ and other illusions entertained by sympathisers of the USSR, labelling reports from enthusiastic visitors to the country as ‘childish prattle’. When Journey first appeared, the crimes of the Stalinist regime were relatively little known in the wider world; by now they have receded far enough into the past to be seen by some as a historical aberration. And yet totalitarianism remains a threat to this day. That is why documents like this book must be read and remembered.
 
The brutality of the Gulag was totally dehumanising. By  Anna Aslanyan. The Spectator, December 12, 2020.
 

People in the gas chambers knew, when they were dying, that the world had risen up against their executioners. People in the (Soviet) camps, however, did not have even this consolation.
 
These stark, shocking words were written by Julius Margolin over 70 years ago in Tel Aviv after a forced sojourn of five years in a camp in the Gulag Archipelago.
 
His account as “an accursed zek (prisoner)” and the daily struggle to survive in the permafrost is now being published for the first time in English this month.
 
Margolin’s memoir, Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back, was not only one of the earliest accounts of the incarceration of millions by Stalin’s regime, but one which significantly also mentioned the suffering of Jews in the Gulag.
 
Born in Pinsk, Margolin was a follower of Jabotinsky and a writer on Zionism. He was the archetypal Polish Jewish intellectual who spoke many languages and completed his PhD in Germany.
 
In 1936, he emigrated to Palestine with his wife and son, but had to borrow £1,000 to qualify for a visa. In order to pay off this debt, he returned to Poland to manage a textile factory in Łódz. He was due to return to Tel Aviv on 3 September 1939 — the very day that war broke out between Nazi Germany and this country.
 
Two days before, Hitler had invaded Poland from the West. Two weeks afterwards, Stalin invaded Poland from the East. Poland ceased to exist — the outcome of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the friendship treaty between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia.
 
A desperate Margolin tried to cross the border into Romania, but discovered that Jews were barred from entry. He returned to his aged mother’s home in Pinsk, which became a centre for gatherings of the Jewish intelligentsia.
 
In many towns, the entry of the Red Army was welcomed by the Jews as salvation from official discrimination. In Pinsk, Jewish youth demonstrated in the streets — carrying portraits of Pushkin and Stalin. Reality soon began to overwhelm such enthusiasm.
 
The NKVD (forerunner of the KGB) began the Sovietisation of Pinsk with the closure of newspapers, libraries and bookshops. The Jewish school of 700 pupils was closed down. The works of the Hebrew poets, Bialik and Tchernikovsky, were declared illegal. Yiddish replaced Hebrew as the language of educational instruction.
 
The phoney war ended with the invasion of Norway, the fall of France and the Battle of Britain in 1940. In Soviet-occupied Poland, Zionists and Bundists were arrested and deported in increasing numbers. It is estimated that between the outbreak of war in September 1939 and Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941, more than a quarter of a million people were arrested by the NKVD in eastern Poland. As Margolin comments: “They were doomed to fall into the meat grinder and to be reworked into a formless glob in the Soviet kitchen.’
 
Margolin regarded the Soviet Union as being in neither Europe nor Asia, but more a hybrid where arbitrary commands by indifferent apparatchiks could mean the difference between life and death.
 
Some Polish Jewish refugees could not cope with this environment and actually crossed back into Nazi-occupied Poland — much to the astonishment of the Germans. As one returnee put it: “With the Germans, there is the threat of physical death, but here it is moral death. With the Germans, you don’t have to lie or conceal your thoughts.”
 
Polish Jews were prevailed upon to take Soviet citizenship. Margolin refused because he knew that if he did so he would never be able to return to Tel Aviv. Margolin placed his hopes in receiving a visa for Palestine. He suspected that the British in Tel Aviv were blocking entry as a matter of policy.
 
Although he did eventually receive a visa extension because he possessed a permanent residence certificate, the NKVD still arrested him for violating passport regulations. His Polish passport was one of a country that now no longer existed. His documents were not recognised and instead he was imprisoned for many weeks, awaiting deportation.

 
All the prison inmates were covered in armies of lice. Margolin remarks: “Lice of all sizes and colours swarmed on the undershirts: chestnut, brown, black and transparent white lice, brunettes and blondes and powerful pregnant lice.”
 
Within weeks, he was one of 700 people, aboard “the Wandering Coffin”, a train pulling bolted boxcars to the Gulag.
 
In the camps, only the strong survived. In Margolin’s camp, the work of tree felling began at 5 am, at -30°C during the harsh winters. Margolin describes the bewilderment of Galician Chasidim from Złoczów and the proud aristocratic wives of Polish officers on arrival. The descent into “Dante’s Hell” included both Silesian coalminers and Jewish writers from Vienna. The “urki”, Russian camp criminals, preyed on the newcomers and stole their possessions with total impunity. Women who fell pregnant had their babies taken away after birth.
 
Everyone had to work. Fundamentalist Christians, “the little christs”, refused to work on a Sunday — and were shot.
 
There were four levels of food supplied. Those who did not fulfil the work norms were given 500g of bread and “a thin soup” in the morning and evening.
 
The bread ration rose to 700g for those who fulfilled the norm. The third level was those who passed the norm by 125 per cent and the top level those who surpassed it by 150 per cent. They received macaroni and peas — and “a goulash” of rotten horsemeat.
 
The prisoners of the first two levels simply did not survive through lack of food. The zeks were reduced to “hungry beasts” — labouring machines for their masters.
 
Margolin survived years in the camp because he was able to avoid the rigour of inhuman labour. His proficiency in language, friendship with doctors and plain luck saw him through. He was able to occasionally read books in the camp and regarded his sole weapon as “the power of the word”. Yet other prisoners now called him ‘Grandpa’ instead of ‘Dad’ as his hair had turned white — he was still in his forties.
 
Margolin writes that antisemitism was widespread and that all intellectuals were regarded as ‘Jews’. Religious Jews, he observed, possessed “great moral strength and fortitude” and yeshiva students seemed to fare much better than former members of the Komsomol (Young Communists).
 
News filtered into the camp sporadically. When Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland, the zeks believed that this was an attempt to forge a pact with Britain in which both countries would turn against the USSR.
 
After several false starts, Margolin was finally released from the camp into a year’s internal exile. His aim was to return to Poland and then travel home to his wife in Tel Aviv who had no idea of what had happened to him.
 
In Poland he came across starving German prisoners. “While remembering that my tortured mother lay in a mass grave in Pinsk, with a feeling of fastidious horror, I gave them bread.”
 
When Margolin had completed this book, he found it extremely difficult to find a publisher. No one wished to criticise the Soviet Union whose armed forces had helped to defeat Hitler. The imagery of the victory parade in Red Square was preferable to the knowledge of the parallel world of the Gulag. No European Communist wished to believe this “fake news” about the beloved Soviet motherland. Margolin regarded his book in the same light as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin — it was a clarion call to condemn slavery and slave owners.
 
Margolin died a few weeks after the first show trial of Soviet Jews in Leningrad exactly 50 years ago this month. He lived long enough to bear witness therefore to the genesis of the great emigration movement which eventually brought one million Jews to the state of Israel.
 
The publication of his book finally in English brings his remarkable story to a new generation.
 
 
A journey to the Gulag and back: one survivor's account of Stalin's slave camps. By Colin Shindler. The Jewish Chronicle , December 4, 2020. 

If a writer’s message is unwelcome, it may not be heeded for many years. January 21 marks the 40th anniversary of the death of the Polish Jewish author Yuli Borisovich Margolin at age 70. Margolin — whose first name is also transliterated as Julius or Yuly, and was also known as Yehudah in Israel — should be as familiar a name as Solzhenitsyn for bearing witness to the Soviet gulag system. Yet the first-ever complete edition of Margolin’s almost 800-page-long gulag memoir in any language only appeared last November from the small Paris literary press Les éditions Le Bruit du temps.
 
“Voyage au pays des Ze-Ka” (“Trip to the Land of Ze-kas”), now edited and translated by Luba Jurgenson — a Moscow-born Sorbonne professor who specializes in modern Russian history — was written in 1946 but neglected for decades. In France, an abridged edition of Margolin’s book appeared in 1949, under the title “La Condition Inhumaine” (“Inhuman Condition”), a title which parodied that of André Malraux’s naïve prewar Marxist novel, “La Condition Humaine” (“Man’s Fate”). This was followed by another abridged Russian-language version, which appeared from a New York publishing house, since it was impossible to print it in Stalinist Russia. An unsparing, often furious narrative, Margolin’s work was out of sync with widespread Western European admiration for the USSR.
 
Born in Pinsk, Margolin earned a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Berlin in 1929, but became a resident of Palestine in 1937, after meeting Ze’ev Jabotinsky and other leading Zionists. Unfortunately, Margolin decided to visit his homeland in 1939, just before war broke out. He was arrested in Pinsk in 1940 and imprisoned by the Soviet secret police as a “Ze-Ka” (or Z/K). The term is a Russian-language abbreviation for zakliuchyonnyi, or “inmate,” a term which originally referred to prison laborers who built the White Sea Canal in the early 1930s. Unlike 8,000 of the slave laborers who died in that earlier project, Margolin survived his imprisonment in several gulags. He returned to Palestine in 1946, where he wrote his memoir in Russian, finally finishing the book in 1947.
 
 
However, Israeli publishers and politicians did not want to hear about the gulag system in the USSR, which was seen as a wartime ally against Hitler. In February 1946, Margolin wrote letters to such leading Israeli politicians as Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Moshe Sharett and Yosef Sprinzak, informing them of the situation of Soviet Jews imprisoned in the gulags; none of these leaders replied. Nor did English-language publishers take any interest, despite the advocacy of Arthur Koestler. (Jurgenson notes that Koestler “tried in vain to interest influential English-language personalities to get the book published.”)
 
Margolin’s book caused some stir in Europe, mostly in conservative circles. Excerpts were serialized in the right-wing newspaper Le Figaro, and these were accentuated when the French political activist and Buchenwald survivor David Rousset called for a commission composed of former Nazi concentration camp inmates to inspect the USSR’s slave labor camps. Pierre Daix, a hard-line Marxist art historian, friend of Picasso and survivor of the Mauthausen concentration camp, refused to believe Rousset, calling him a “counterfeiter.” Rousset sued for libel, and in 1951, Margolin traveled to Paris to testify on his behalf, since Rousset had based many of his arguments on “La Condition Inhumaine.” Margolin informed the tribunal:
 
 
“I am a Jew. In the streets of Tel Aviv, Mr. Daix’s article is sold as a pamphlet entitled ‘Why did David Rousset invent Soviet camps?’… Neither Mr. Rousset nor myself invented these camps. In these camps, my hair turned white. Who will claim that Mr. Rousset invented my white hair? Let me personalize the words of a great Polish poet [Adam Mickiewicz]: ‘My name is Million, for I love and suffer for millions of people.”
 

With Margolin’s support, Rousset won his case against Daix, who is still thriving in Paris today at age 88. When a lawyer asked Margolin how he dared attack Stalin, that staunch enemy of Hitler, Margolin replied: “Hitler shed enough Jewish blood, so there is no need to attribute Stalin’s victims to him as well.” Yet Margolin’s memoir is more than merely accurate in a legal sense. It’s an uncompromising work with a gimlet eye for literary detail. Even when describing the most harrowing oppression, Margolin often pauses for a pen portrait of a friend, as if realizing that his verbal description may be all that will remain of someone otherwise lost in the war and subsequent Soviet oppression.
 
One such victim was his friend, the Polish Jewish poet Mieczysław Braun (born Bronsztejn; 1902-1942), who, despite having suffered combat wounds in 1920 defending Warsaw against Bolshevik invaders, was by 1939 shunned as a Jew by fellow Poles. Margolin notes that Braun had to “cross the challenging path from socialist assimilation to Zionism.” In 1939, Braun wrote a poem about secret immigration to Palestine, situating among the youngsters fleeing anti-Semitic Poland on a hazardous ship the anachronistically caped figure of poet Heinrich Heine, also “returning home.”
 
Not just Heine, but also Dostoyevsky is invoked after Margolin’s arrest and deportation to a series of gulags. Among the scant reading materials available in Siberia was Dostoyevsky’s novel “The House of the Dead,” which provided unexpected comic relief for Margolin and his fellow prisoners. In his 19th century Siberian prison camp, Dostoyevsky employed his own personal servant to cook for him, keep his samovar warm and go to the market for his favorite delicacies. Margolin recounts: “‘That’s a penal colony for you!’ we guffawed. ‘They went shopping!’” More seriously, Margolin notes that since Dostoyevsky’s time, the Soviet camps’ “school of depersonalization” was marked by “contempt for humanity which far exceeded anything in the Tsarist penal colonies… Instead of thousands, as in Dostoyevsky’s time, the prisoners now numbered in the millions.”
 
Writings by another Soviet-approved author, John Steinbeck, were also represented in the gulag library. Even the benighted Joad family in Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” victims of the Great Depression, had it comparatively easy, Margolin argues: “[The Joads] were free to travel across the country, to protest, to struggle. Steinbeck’s pen advocated for them, whereas our mouths were gagged. Had Steinbeck lived for a time in our camp, he would have reacted less violently to the American mess.”
 
Ever the philosophy student, Margolin also reflects on what he terms the “paradox of hatred,” seen in the “anti-Semitism of those maniacs who are incapable of doing without Jews.” Margolin cites the example of the rabidly anti-Semitic Polish author Adolf Nowaczynski, who wrote a 1921 novel, “The Anonymous Power,” about Jewish bankers ruling the earth and whose mania is well described in Aleksander Hertz’s 1988 “The Jews in Polish Culture,” from Northwestern University Press. Margolin writes: “[Nowaczynski’s] life would have been quite empty without the Jews; if they had not existed, he would have had to invent them.”
 
Such reflections, born of bitter experience, are found throughout Margolin’s massively impressive account, which on its merits should have been translated into English decades ago. Preceding even Gustaw Herling’s compelling 1951 gulag memoir, “A World Apart: Imprisonment in a Soviet Labor Camp During World War II,” Margolin’s text substantially foreshadows Solzhenitsyn’s works, written in the 1960s, and also offers a unique Jewish perspective on this tragic chapter of modern history. Margolin spent the remaining years of his life as a militant for the rights of Soviet Jews and lived long enough to see more recent gulag inmates finally reach Israel, emerging from the inhuman prisons he had so unforgettably described.
 
Forgotten Witness to the Gulag.    By Benjamin Ivry. Forward , December 28, 2010

The Consumption and Creation of Images are Political

 

Meaning—or narrative—isn’t always what we see, or even look for, in images. In 1868, following the International Exposition in Paris, the Italian novelist and essayist Vittorio Imbriani published “La quinta promotrice,” a collection of his observations and theories on contemporary European art. This included his theory of the macchia, which Teju Cole describes as “the total compositional and coloristic effect of an image in the split second before the eye begins to parse it for meaning.” Approaching a painting, one is most likely to see before anything else its arrangement of colors, shapes, shadows, and space, and only afterward begin to understand those colors as flesh or flora, those shapes as human, or as stone. This visual macchia (“stain”) acts, Imbriani says, upon the nerves before the consciousness can interpret it; like anything primal, it readies the human animal before the human being. “Imbriani’s was an argument for the inner life of pictorial effect,” Cole writes, “not so much about the way in which visual organization transcended subject matter but the way in which it preceded subject matter.” This seems to embrace Impressionism down to its most subconscious, emotional level—one’s passions excited prior to understanding, which Edmund Burke described as the sublime.

 
Cole—a photographer as well as a writer—describes experiencing something similar when he uses Google’s “Search by Image” function to find “visually similar images” to his own work. What he found, he wrote, “told me what I knew but hadn’t articulated about the pictorial idea of my own picture, its rhetoric of red and shadow and scatter. It was like hearing a familiar tune played on unfamiliar instruments, with dramatic changes in the timbre but the pitches staying the same.”
 
Attempting this same experiment with GIFs instead of still images, Google doesn’t return visually similar images but instead images that are contextually similar: GIFs or stills from the same films, for example, or the same moments in culture. But that is not to say a macchia of motion does not exist. There are GIFs that echo other GIFs in their variations of movement, their choreography, as in Tumblr GIF sets that assemble tapestries of images. They are synchronous, separate but simultaneously so.
 
Unlike sets of GIFs that recount jokes in multiple frames, the viewer doesn’t read these choreographed GIFs sequentially, but opens their eyes to a quilt of motion. The delight here is in the moment before the brain can see each GIF individually, before it can understand. Even porn GIF sets offer a macchia of flesh that echo the ecstasy, and the anachronisms, of the erotic moment. They reveal the beauty of motion in sex; their emotional stain is one of rhythmic synchronicity, of bodies transcending understanding. Even a captured cumshot—that curtain call of the video clip—is here presented as infinite, a fantasia in which pleasure can flow in perpetuity. Any narrative beyond the body’s becomes inconsequential.
 
The GIF’s unique macchia of motion is what makes it valuable as a unit of language, especially as used in memes. Moving there in the frame is an array of colors, a pacing of movement, and a unique, repeated choreography; and all of this our nerves register before, first: understanding what’s literally taking place in the image; second: reading the caption that’s been assigned to it; and third: completing the juxtapositional association so we can perceive what the meme is trying to say. In short, our eyes soak up the GIF’s stain of motion before we even perceive that someone is trying to communicate with us: the impression precedes language.
 
GIF-based memes, like all memes, risk entering our everyday usage; read often enough, they become part of our standardized vocabulary of motion. As Britney Summit-Gil observed in her essay “Gif Horse,” there are ancillary technologies cropping up all the time meant to augment the technology of the GIF as language: “Sharing a gif now has been streamlined and democratized by the rise of searchable databases like Giphy and by the integration of gifs into phone apps. Finding just the right clumsy puppy or celebrity eye-roll is as easy as finding the right word in the moment, making communicating through gifs commonplace.” Proliferating as they are across multiple platforms of text-based communication, the risk of unique GIFs cementing themselves as specific connotations, and one day denotations, increases exponentially. Lauren Michele Jackson, for example, has written about how GIF search engines can create clichés of motion, even racial slurs of motion. Discussing the commonplace deployment of “black reaction GIFs” by white users, Jackson describes how “these are the kinds of GIFs liable to come up with a generic search like ‘funny black kid GIF’ or ‘black lady GIF.’ For the latter search, Giphy offers several additional suggestions, such as ‘Sassy Black Lady,’ ‘Angry Black Lady,’ and ‘Black Fat Lady’ to assist users in narrowing down their search.” This kind of “digital blackface” is a consequence of a delightful linguistic technology left unexamined and uncriticized—sort of like able-bodied persons continuing to refer to themselves or others as “paralyzed with fear,” as “tone deaf.”
 
Of course, a shared vocabulary of motion preceded the widespread use, or even the invention, of the internet. Since the 1950s, communities of gay men have quoted not only the dialogue of camp films, but the motions as well—Anne Baxter’s hand gestures in The Ten Commandments or Bette Davis’s shoulder shrugs in All About Eve (or really, anything from All About Eve). For decades now, covens of young people have quoted, in speech and in gesture, every frame of Monty Python and the Holy Grail or The Rocky Horror Picture Show from memory. What has changed with the internet is our ability to quote motion in writing.
 
Via GIF-based memes, our person-to-person language of motion is gaining a writing system, and with it an increasing tendency toward standardized meanings. Like the photograph, which clips a moment out of time and uses it to say this is how things looked in this moment, the GIF has captured how it was that we moved in that moment. It liberates motion itself from time and elevates it to a mythology of movement; and it’s in this technological middle space where we find ourselves, right now, able to write this captured motion but simultaneously experience it as art. It hasn’t yet fossilized, not completely, into language.
 
The cliché—or the dead metaphor, or the image we see instead of watch, or the GIF we read instead of enjoy—is where art ends. It is, after all, a kind of death—not for the person but for what persons create—and what we see in these corpses is where language begins; and from there it’s the new metaphors, the next images, the future works of art, that we build from these bones.
 
Excerpted from Image Control: Art, Fascism, and the Right to Resist. Counterpoint Press, 2021.

 

When You See It. By Patrick Nathan. Bookforum,  August 18, 2021.

Americans, generally, aren’t so good at history. It’s tempting to think our propensity for dramatizing wars, disasters, and other so-called tragedies onstage and in cinema has been detrimental to our understanding of events, populating “collective memory” with individual stories, as if episodes from an epic. In episodic narratives, nothing ever changes—everything is normal in the beginning, terrible in the middle, and resolved by the end. Characters and settings are comfortably static. With respect to real-life atrocity, this is how the United States has “lost its innocence” at least half a dozen times, from the Civil War to 9/11 to Trump’s election. Everything that happens is a “shock” to the nation. This is how our “never again” becomes “ever again”: an innocence déjà perdu.
 
History, after all, is heavy. For many Americans, it’s something to leave behind. We say we’re post-race; we say same-sex marriage put an end to homophobia. To do this we tell stories of slavery and civil rights, of the AIDS epidemic. These are photos we snap and label as past. Indeed, history itself is something our nation, as an idea, tried to escape—the entrenchments of Europe, the legacies of Kings, and whatever else the wealthy white men who created our country on paper promised themselves.
 
In truth, we are history; our unique pasts exist only in the present. In forsaking them for prescriptive memory, particularly without interrogating who has prescribed us these memories, we place a tenuous hope in what writer and psychotherapist Adam Phillips calls “a redemptive myth.” We believe, he says in “The Forgetting Museum,” that “remembering done properly will give us the lives that we want.” In saying, Look what happened, there is an optimism that the image itself will carry the pain and do the work, all in a gamble that atrocity will look the same when and if it reappears. That, ultimately, is prescriptive memory’s weakness; even two real, literal photographs taken of the same person are never identical. To rely upon images instead of contextualized history is to guarantee getting lost.
 
Not that we’re always meant to find our way. Some memorials, for example, are particularly careful images of the past. Their aesthetics harbors a desired emotional, not intellectual, understanding: Viewers and visitors are meant to feel, not think. At the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, the aesthetics of absence—two seemingly bottomless black pools surrounded by the names of the thousands who died—alongside recovered detritus, burned clothing, rubble, and the final voicemails of those trapped inside, all frame a narrative of destruction that points to a strangely opaque other: Al-Qaeda. Absent altogether is Osama bin Laden’s long relationship with the United States government. To contextualize him among the names, faces, and voices of the dead—especially as a CIA-funded militant in the Soviet–Afghan War—would politicize something more easily remembered as tragedy.
 
Yet there was nothing apolitical about the destruction of the World Trade Center, and to expunge politics from the memorial is its own political act, the effect of which is to stir grief, incite rage, and mobilize Americans against an ambiguous enemy. As I write this, what is still branded “the War on Terror” has surpassed its nineteenth year, its sixth trillionth dollar, and the end of anywhere between half a million and two million lives. “Never Forget” is laughable if, from the start, there’s no genuine history to remember; and “Never Again” means nothing when victims are aestheticized as propaganda, when our own government uses them to amplify retributive terror.
 
*
 
Americans are also bad at propaganda—that is, at recognizing it. As producers and consumers of propaganda, the United States outperforms every other nation in the world. For most of us, the word connotes negatively. It’s the “odor” to advertising’s “scent,” a reputation created by propaganda of our own: the way propaganda is portrayed, for example, in history and in fictions of the U.S.S.R. and the Third Reich, not to mention countless dystopian futures imagined by authors and filmmakers. But propaganda, as Andrew O’Hagan wrote for T magazine a few months after the 2016 elections, does not necessarily come from one man in power who “supplant[s] what is true with what they wish to be true.” Instead, propaganda stems from “an impulse to choose a side and press its case with wily elegance,” and what it “sells” is a way of life, or “a series of values, traits and skills that others might do well to emulate.”
 
O’Hagan’s words are precise—might do well to emulate—and reflect how propaganda excels. It doesn’t demand or dictate so much as suggest, aggressively. “Manipulating human belief might sound like an alarming project for governments and designers to undertake,” he adds, but it’s one of the oldest professions in the book, and corporations, religions, entertainers and doctors, to say little of politicians, are dedicated to the art of making you think what you ought to think. Populism is based on the notion that people can think for themselves, but most people can’t and don’t want to; they need team colors and a direction of play that is worked out by other people . . . For good or for ill, the art of propaganda must set out to persuade them of what they think.
 
Indeed, it’s this “for good” that has been most overlooked in the United States, even though we see “good propaganda” at work every day, and have for decades—in certain commercials, for example, when nearly every race and gender and sexual orientation is equally represented in its consumption, say, of heartburn medication; or in film after film where money, no matter how hard the rich man tries, can’t bring him what he wants, not even happiness.
 
It was a little more obvious, O’Hagan notes, during World War II, when it was “considered by most of the Allies to be something of a gentle and spirited approach to the survival of the species.” In 1943, the United States Department of War produced a short film called Don’t Be a Sucker. The film features one-dimensional Americans going about their lives, yet reminds us that this is a country full of “free people” of many different religions who go to their own churches and form their own opinions. But, the film’s narrator says, “There are guys who stay up nights figuring out how to take that away.” The film cuts to a middle-aged man, sour with anger as he preaches from the steps of a government building. “I’m just an average American,” this man says, “but I’m an American American . . . I see Negroes holding jobs that belong to me and you.” He rants about what must be done, who must stick together and who must be excluded, while two men in the audience debate his speech. “He seems to know what he’s talking about,” the younger of the two says, but his perception is quickly dismantled by the older man, whose Hungarian accent connotes an authority on “what this talk can do.”
 
In America, he says, “we have no other people. We are American people.” He informs the younger man how the Nazis came to power, how their rhetoric divided the populace. “We human beings are not born with prejudices,” he says. “Always they are made for us. Made by someone who wants something. Remember that when you hear this kind of talk. Somebody is going to get something out of it. And it isn’t going to be you.” The film is a brilliant piece of anti-fascist, pro-American propaganda, appealing not to the sympathies of others but to the young man’s self-interests: the focus is not on the fate of minorities in fascism’s crosshairs, but on how fascism won’t bring prosperity to the young man, only those using him as a pawn.
 
After the War, however, American propaganda began to differentiate itself from state-driven efforts in countries designated as political enemies—an executive strategy seen as incompatible with “the freedom of the individual.” O’Hagan cites the CIA’s famous covert literary magazine, Encounter, as one example to “win the hearts and minds of the English-speaking world,” as well as Hollywood’s decades-long project to “churn out pro-war propaganda and sexist assumptions as if they were catnip to the people.” Whether funded by the government or not, these corporate propaganda systems reinforce the image of the United States the government has established, which in turn benefits wealthy donors and lobbyists whose funding influences legislation that complements this propaganda.
 
During the Trump presidency, state-driven propaganda returned to the limelight, complete with slogans, an emphasis on loyalty, a racially based isolation of who is elevated as “American” and who is not, and a flagrant disregard for what is true in place of what one man in power wishes to be true. In fact, the phenomenon of Donald Trump embodies not only how propaganda functions in this country today, but how an image’s politics depends entirely upon context. Not only does one see the tenuous, even fragile relationship between images and language, there is an increasing acquaintance with the relationship of images with other images, whose juxtapositions become a language in and of themselves. I’m thinking of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign ad, in which the iridescently lit faces of children filled the screen while actual footage of Donald Trump played out on the televisions they were presumably watching. “What will our children think?” Clinton’s voiceover asks while Trump degrades immigrants and women and Muslims and persons with disabilities to enthusiastic cheers. It was a beautiful and earned work of propaganda, giving context to an image (Trump) by placing it against another (children, shorthand for America’s future).
 
But so too was the president’s lexicon of epithets (“Crooked Hillary” Clinton, “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz) a successful deployment of propaganda, and so too his talent for slogans. Above all—by focusing on crime in border states, Islamic terrorism, the legitimacy of President Obama’s birth, and “urban” violence—it was his aggressive suggestion that whiteness in America was under attack that proved most successful among a vicious and victorious minority of voters. Through propaganda, Trump overtly politicized whiteness in a way Americans had not seen in a presidential election since George Wallace’s pro-segregation campaign in 1968. Unlike Wallace, he won. This didn’t come out of nowhere. We’ve been learning to see “fascistly” for decades; it’s only now that our government reflects it so brazenly.
 
Excerpted from Image Control :  Art, Fascism, and the Right to Resist. Counterpoint Press, 2021.
 
“Americans Are Bad at History.” At the Fault Lines of Memory and Propaganda. By Patrick Nathan. LitHub, August 19, 2021
 

Today’s interview with Patrick Nathan, as thoughtful and original a writer as you’ll find, pairs him with Claire Foster, longtime reviewer for Foreword and author of two award-winning short story collections. In their starred review of Patrick’s Image Control: Art, Fascism, and the Right to Resist, Claire points to some alarming realizations about how we are shaped by the photographs and images around us, and we were dying to hear more. As you’ll see, there’s no doubt these two have earned each other’s respect.
 
At a time when social media analytics—not necessarily depth, artistry, or even talent—guide consumer and industry decisions, why is it important to acknowledge how images or simplified communication erases real meaning?
 
PN : Because meaning influences our behavior—and our behavior is our politics. Or simply our lives. I think “erases,” too, might be the wrong metaphor. Uninterrogated images—images used in place of language, or language used as images (tweets, slogans, aphorisms, etc.)—eclipse meaning. The meaning is still there. It’s just that something very small, but from our perspective very large, is blocking out what is real, what is true.
 
In a solar eclipse, it could certainly seem as though the sun had been destroyed or drained of fire. That night had fallen in the middle of the day, and perhaps permanently. We know this is not the case. Ideally, our day to day experience with images (on social media, most obviously, but also traditional media, our interactions with others, and most importantly in the way people assimilate media into their speech, their thoughts, their lives) would carry the same measure of calm, the same understanding that what we’re seeing is not what is happening.
 
Of course the eclipse metaphor fails when you consider the impetus behind the eclipse, as far as the majority of reductive images, slogans, and so on are concerned. A solar eclipse is an astronomical event. An image eclipse is a political event: someone has put it there to deliberately occlude meaning, usually for profit. And the greater the profit, the more wealth becomes concentrated; and the greater wealth is concentrated, the easier it becomes to occlude meaning. I don’t think it’s coincidental that wealth and the reliability of truth are simultaneously more unequal, more destabilized, than they’ve been in this country for a hundred years, nor that “free speech” is both blade and wound in these mutual degradations—the enforcer and the casualty of truth; the enforcer and the casualty of determining whose speech is heard. And this has always been a function of fascism wherever it appears: to concentrate wealth and deplete the world of truth.
 
Like your muse Susan Sontag, you also wrote a novel (Some Hell, Graywolf Press, 2018). How does Image Control square with your understanding of fiction, and why do you think so few authors do both forms well?
 
PN : Somewhere toward the end of Image Control, I say something like “A crucial word for all of us is and.” For me, fiction is that “and.” For someone else, it might be movies; for someone rather different, it might be God. While writing this book, I realized it couldn’t only work in one direction. It couldn’t only demystify; I had to respect the impulse toward mystification, the desire to eclipse or occlude. While the book begins in political urgency, it arcs toward spiritual activity, toward insisting that there is something human (necessary) in wrapping ourselves in darkness.
 
As a novelist, talking about fiction is how I can relate this in a nonfiction project like Image Control. I want us to understand and not understand. Fiction—like all art—is a place, and what we do there is play, experiment, rest, rejuvenate, and otherwise practice our emotional and spiritual relationships with ourselves, our environment, and each other. This is what I think certain authors—at least the ones who aren’t obviously disingenuous—mean when they say their novels are “apolitical.” It’s not that politics aren’t in the novel, and it’s not as if they stake no political claim in the world. It’s just that what they seek is more than politics. Politics is not a totality; otherwise we wouldn’t cry, to our own shock, over certain sunrises or chord changes or the way one character in a film looks at another. These are meaningless experiences that often change our lives. Art is always about that more, about that and.
 
Which perhaps answers the second part of your question: why so few authors succeed in both the essay and the novel (or the story). Obviously a memoir isn’t an essay, though their opaque and chunky emulsion into the “personal essay” must be confusing for a lot of readers, and has much more in common with fiction, but the essay seems, to me, like a journey that must be completed. A work of fiction doesn’t have to arrive, but an essay certainly does—meaning that the author, by the end of it, has to know what they think. Most American fiction writers don’t seem to know what they think. Which is a very American thing, to not know what you think. It’s hard to talk about this without mentioning the institutionalized obsession, over the last sixty years or so, with the aesthetics of “craft,” with the “rules” of fiction and so forth. Obviously they’re going away. I think the politics of craft, thanks to Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World and the perspectives of other long-marginalized writers, is finally becoming visible for what it is: conservative, reactionary, and ultimately in the service of white supremacy and imperialism.

 

In short, we’d probably have a lot more writers in the United States who could give us great novels and great essays simultaneously were it not for the CIA’s “literary man,” Paul Engle, and his outsized role in establishing and standardizing the MFA workshop throughout the country. This is also, I think, why poets are the strongest moral authorities in contemporary American literature. American poets have never seemed terribly interested in rules.
 
Speaking of Sontag, she seems to be a presence in Image Control. What was her creative influence on this project for you? Did you have a particular message or north star when you set out to write this book?

PN : For a few years now, Sontag has been my little bump of coke. When my attention flags or I get tired or feel stupid, I turn to one of her books—the second volume of her journals is particularly “pure” in this regard—and I feel reinvigorated, reenergized. I’ve listened to her hourlong lecture on classical pornography from 1964 about ten or twelve times, usually while cooking or cleaning, and it still gives me something. Same with her three-hour appearance on C-SPAN during the Iraq War. Unfortunately this sometimes manifests as a dependence. “There’s this Sontag quote,” I find myself saying, or “It’s like that time Sontag told an interviewer…” and so on. But then, so much of her own thinking—on art and politics, on literature, even on spirituality and being “against interpretation”—is pastiched from other writers, usually writers she was reading in French at the time. And so alongside Sontag I have Berger, Teju Cole, Sarah Schulman, Adorno, Angela Davis, Barthes, Maggie Nelson, Harold Rosenberg, Ibram X. Kendi, Foucault, Geoff Dyer, Arendt, Baldwin, Edward Said, Boris Groys, Hal Foster, David Graeber, de Beauvoir, Valeria Luiselli, and dozens of other “idea” writers whose books I’ve underlined and scrawled in and filled with articles and essays I’ve clipped out of newspapers and magazines; and I feel less dependent.
 
Perhaps what sets Sontag apart for me—and Teju Cole, for that matter, and Valeria Luiselli—echoes back to your previous question. The Volcano Lover is a phenomenal novel, a work of art. Open City and Lost Children Archive are works of art. These are writers who know what they think and whose “and,” whose “more,” is what I aspire to.
 
Since images (like RuPaul GIFs and thirst traps) often supersede meaningful writing, it was a pleasure reading a longer meditation and analysis of the influence social media has on our ability to communicate. Image Control is a wonderful example of how well-crafted sentences can break through the fascism of simplified language. What other recommendations do you have for readers who want to re-embrace semantic complexity?
 
PN : Before I answer that: [heart-eyes emoji]. Thank you so much! It always means the world to me when someone notices the language for what it is, so thank you, for real.
 
As for instructive or illuminating writers (for un-reductive writers), I want to zero in on a single poet and essayist: Joseph Brodsky. Obviously you could read all the writers above and get a deeper sense of language, especially as it affects our thoughts and feelings, our ethical impulses, but with Brodsky the experience is not only unique, but uniquely edifying. And if you have to sample Brodsky in one individual essay, I think “On Grief and Reason”—his ultra-close reading of four Robert Frost poems—is your essay. For most of my life, Frost was another Edward Hopper, someone whose work, I assumed, didn’t really merit close attention, didn’t seem to me dynamic enough or complex enough, mostly because of its cultural associations—quotable, accessible, “American” in all the wrong ways. Worst of all, “common.” Yet just as Olivia Laing, in The Lonely City, brought a depth and sympathy to Hopper’s paintings I never could have anticipated, Brodsky’s intense appreciation for Frost’s work—particularly “Home Burial”—at last gave Frost’s poems to me. Brodsky teaches the magnetism of language magnetically, its push and pull, its energetic charge in each gap. After thousands of books, I’ve never read anyone with an eye like his. You really have to cherish that, when it happens. And to keep your own eye open for those cherishable writers.

 
Reviewer Claire Foster interviews Patrick Nathan, Author of Image Control :  Art, Fascism, and the Right to Resist.  By Claire Foster.  Foreword Reviews,  August 27, 2021

Early in Image Control: Art, Fascism, and the Right to Resist, novelist and cultural critic Patrick Nathan admits, "I never thought I'd write a book about photographs and fascism because I knew nothing, I thought, about photographs and fascism."
 
Image Control is, unmistakably, the work of an autodidact. Nathan's curiosity is evident on every page; so, too, is the breadth of his interests. He writes about photography in both its professional and social-media forms, yes, but he also discusses epic poetry, gentrification, literary citizenship, Donald Trump's tweets, the decay of magazine journalism, and much more. These objects of study may seem scattered, but Nathan effectively weaves them into a sharp, passionate, and frequently scathing plea for artistic ethics in what he calls "fascist times."
 
In order to track Nathan's ideas, it is necessary to get on board with his habit of invoking fascism broadly, emphasizing its aesthetic and imaginative tendencies over its concrete manifestations. Of course, the latter rely on the former; Nathan notes that fascism works via "division, isolation, and elimination," none of which are possible among a citizenry that considers itself united. Per Nathan, living in fascist times does not necessarily mean living under a fully fascist regime. Rather, it means existing in a nation that, first, teaches people to "discard and be discarded" and, second, denies the social interdependence that Nathan takes as a core human truth. According to Nathan, no life is coherent or comprehensible in isolation. "We are all," he writes, "each other's context."
 
Images need context as much as people do — or, really, more, since we can talk. One of Nathan's biggest concerns is the contemporary habit of "ceding to photographs and other images the kind of authority that belongs to language." He refers first and foremost to political or moral authority; The New York Times, he argues, acts as if photographs of suffering Syrian children could impel readers to oppose Assad's regime, when in fact they have no such power. But the authority of language is, fundamentally, just the ability to convey meaning. Words can do it; pictures can't. Images, no matter how striking or upsetting, cannot make claims or express ideas — but increasingly, we act as if they could do both.
 
Nathan explains this error readily enough. "The consumption and creation of images," he writes, "like the usage of language, are political: every choice has behind it an ethics." Yet language can not only contain but convey ethics; images, no matter how much the viewer may sense their intention, cannot. According to Nathan, it is impossible to truly learn from an image, to debate one, or to forge a real connection with one. He draws this idea through a nuanced condemnation of social media, a "surrealistic environment" that numbs users to suffering and turns their friends into "a catalogue of images to consume, reject, and discard." Later, he argues that literary culture has a similar effect — which seems a stretch at first, or hardly relevant to Image Control's preoccupation with visual art, but his suggestion that market pressure on authors to commodify themselves creates cynical literature is compelling. After all, if a writer has to sell their image in order to sell books, a library or bookstore suddenly becomes yet another catalogue of frozen, silent people to accept or reject.
 
Nathan often makes this type of associative leap: social media to literature, Romanticism to Trumpism, Kill Bill gifs to Homeric metaphor. Not all his jumps are easy to follow, but every one works. His intellectual roving, chaotic though it may sometimes feel, renders Image Control not only fascinating but genuinely exciting. It can be a real pleasure to watch Nathan build scaffolding between his ideas. In one excellent chapter, he draws on the great writer and activist Sarah Schulman's broad body of work, which he combines with Run the Jewels' hip-hop, Kimberlé Crenshaw's theory of intersectionality, and more, to argue that Americans have entered a "gentrified era of political thinking" in which "a consumable image of an idea, a historical event, or a political belief replaces the real-life complexity of that idea or event or belief." This insight would be both true and useful without its varied antecedents; with them, it becomes powerful.
 
Image Control can be frustrating at times: polemical, hyperbolic, messy. But the book's aggravating moments stem from, and are redeemed by, its intelligence, originality, and heart. Cultural critics rarely frame their work as explicitly ethical, and Nathan's insistence on doing so is refreshing. He transforms the idea that images need linguistic context — which could be reduced to a defense of wall text in art museums — into an ethical system that defends human complexity against the ever-flattening pressures of both consumer capitalism and creeping fascism. As proof of concept, Image Control more than succeeds.
 
'Image Control' Is A Plea For Artistic Ethics In What Author Calls 'Fascist Times'. By Lily Meyer. NPR, August 30, 2021.

Image Control: Art, Fascism, and the Right to Resist (Counterpoint), the new book by novelist and essayist Patrick Nathan, is one that looks at looking. The lens, as it were, through which he views the sociopolitical role of the image was ground by Marxism, queer theory, and the thinking of Sontag, Arendt, and Adorno, among other philosophers. The result is fiercely argued, fascinating, brilliant. It is also sometimes maddeningly abstruse. Nathan is good at getting us angry about fascism’s darkly insidious ways and means. He is less convincing about how we might counter it. Being made to understand the mechanisms of a deadly problem when we have so little ability to affect them is, to this reader at least, depressing in the extreme. For starters, the genie of visual propaganda’s digital amplification is not going back in the bottle.

 
It’s shaky theory to connect photography with the urge to totalitarianism. It vilifies a medium, which in itself is neutral, on behalf of its singular deployments. Nathan’s initial assertion—that we are “ceding” the authority that belongs only to language (because it alone conveys meaning) to photographs, which “can’t say anything at all”—is tenuous. Art “says” plenty of things. It just doesn’t happen to use words. This is analogous to the common claim that other animals don’t have language; of course they do. Much of it is visual: rich, subtly variegated, and largely unknown to us. What other animals don’t have is what we understand as speech.
 
Nathan goes on — and here we’re only on page two — to state that our “assumption” that images can act as a suitable replacement for more thoughtful means of communication (itself an assumption) “opens the door to fascism, an ideology that requires a schism with reality.” He’s right that fascism operates through filling the void it first creates by isolating a society from sources of truth. But visual art, notably photography, does not intend to assist this severance from reality. If a photograph cannot mean, it cannot intend either.
 
The proliferation of images shared on social media, a mass personal addiction with a secondary benefit to digital media companies of rendering them the stickiest places in our attention, is another thing entirely. Nathan is on solid footing in explaining that when we allow human relationships to be reduced to consumption of two-dimensional representations, we practice becoming collectible, then disposable—as capitalism requires.
 
The author relies heavily on Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977) to consider the nature of photography, as well he must. He correctly identifies it as eerily contemporary: more than 40 years ago, she seems to have identified the smartphone camera’s work in service of creating each individual’s “atomized reality.” But do photographs “always” aestheticize suffering, reordering it as a preordained “what is meant to be”? Does viewing a photo of an atrocity always preemptively relieve the need to do anything, giving us a hit of restorative sorrow before we move on? True, every picture is framed, contained, and past. But perhaps it is less what is pictured than where: digital media is structured to be endless, an ongoing question without answer. The storytelling instinct toward narrative (beginning, middle, end) is never fulfilled, only met with further yearning for completion. Hence doomscrolling. Hence hour after hour of mindless consumption of visual empty calories. It makes us the pigeon that, in B. F. Skinner’s experiment, was trained to peck 10,000 times on the same spot for a single pellet of feed.
 
Our brains evolved to scan the visual field quickly for danger and make decisions—there was no time to ponder whether that shadow was a cloud or mountain lion. As a result, we “read” images far more rapidly than text. Their emotive power is immediate. Good for art, bad for the rise of the meme. (Nathan faults both right and left for use of “noise and merchandise” to sell ideology: “I wish I could say otherwise, but the aesthetic of resistance is no different—equally noisy and commodified, right down to the T-shirts, the slogans, and stupid tweets.”)
 
Image Control is packed with insight, digression, observations both original and rehashed, exegesis of a spectrum of works from Greek myth to Twin Peaks; it is passionate, disorganized, philosophical in both the best and worst ways. Its rants are written as if Trump were still president, which is more true than most of us would like to admit. It’s a “difficult” book, tough to read and at times tough to make sense of. But that is another way of saying necessary: what are we here for but to confront every difficulty? Proponents of fascism are masters of making life a trial for anyone who doesn’t fall in line. To resist is to start by comprehending the mechanisms by which they do so. That is the purpose that Patrick Nathan’s book fulfills.
 
Not that he gets there straightforwardly. The author often arrives at stunning interiors through broken doors. In a discussion of music apps’ playlist function—its tendency to package and bland down music into a form of aural décor, yet another way the untidy, organic, or thoughtful is capitalistically “gentrified” (a process of commodification applied, as Nathan explains, to many aspects of culture)—he apparently forgets there’s always been bubblegum pop, elevator music, and other types of comfort sound. Since I occasionally play lo-fi in the background have I somehow become a cog in the machinery of corporate dehumanization? Well, I have, but not because of the music. He goes on to make a case for hip-hop as the sole music that embodies resistance, buttressed by Kevin Young’s argument that “American culture is black culture.” The revelation here (with an assist from Freud) is that whatever is most forcibly suppressed necessarily becomes dominant: it must be heard somehow. Black experience preceded everything America was or became.
 
Image Control is more successful when it is descriptive than when it attempts to be prescriptive, but that might be my cynicism talking. What does Nathan believe is to stop our slide into unthinking collaboration with power systems that require a pliable and unitary populace that will accept subjugation to corporate dictatorship—the endgame, I would maintain, of fascism?
 
“What is needed is a queering of compassion,” he avers. “To move beyond the truly rare (but extant) binaries of perpetrator and victim, it’s important that every individual recognize their existence in a continuum of conflict”—conflict being the primary driver of the capitalist marketplace and thence autocracy.
 
But how to accomplish this? How to dislodge the image from its current primacy in the public sphere, with its reductive and capitalist-friendly gentrification of the difficult and different? Can it really be as simple as . . . words?
 
He’s not proposing a law that all photos be accompanied by captions of a minimum of 300 words. Rather, our redemption, and our resistance, will come from literature. Imagining ourselves into the lives of others is the wellspring of compassion, Nathan believes.
 
To read fiction is to risk being moved by someone who may have done or said terrible things. It is to risk facing the wholeness, the humanity, of those whose actions may have harmed us or others. It is to risk knowing that no one can be seen as in a photograph, consumed in a glance.
 
That fiction is requisitely complex and essentially human is indisputable. Yet here Image Control unwittingly promotes another binary, the very structure the book is devoted to dismantling. It might be hard, but it’s humane to take it case by case. Image bad, writing good? No, it’s all good. Except when it isn’t.
 
Photography and Its Hidden Power. By Melissa Holbrook Pierson. Hyperallergic, September 8, 2021.

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