A Comment on August 23, 1944

That crowded day gave me three heterogeneous surprises: the physical happiness I experienced when they told me that Paris had been liberated; the discovery that a collective emotion can be noble; the enigmatic and obvious enthusiasm of many who were supporters of Hitler. I know that if I question that enthusiasm I may easily resemble those futile hydrographers who asked why a single ruby was enough to arrest the course of a river; many will accuse me of trying to explain a chimerical occurrence. Still, that was what happened and thousands of persons in Buenos Aires can bear witness to it.
    From the beginning, I knew that it was useless to ask the people themselves. They are changeable; through their practice of incoherence they have lost every notion that incoherence should be justified: they venerate the German race, but they abhor "Saxon" America; they condemn the articles of Versailles, but they applaud the marvels of the Blitzkrieg; they are anti-Semitic, but they profess a religion of Hebrew origin; they laud sub-marine warfare, but they vigorously condemn acts of piracy by the British; they denounce imperialism, but they vindicate and promulgate the theory of Lebensraum; they idolize San Martin, but they regard the independence of America as a mistake; they apply the canon of Jesus to the acts of England, but the canon of Zarathustra to those of Germany.
    I also reflected that every other uncertainty was preferable to the uncertainty of a dialogue with those siblings of chaos, who are exonerated from honor and piety by the infinite repetition of the interesting formula I am Argentine. And further, did Freud not reason and Walt Whitman not foresee that men have very little knowledge about the real motives for their conduct? Perhaps, I said to myself, the magic of the symbols Paris and liberation is so powerful that Hitler's partisans have forgotten that these symbols mean a defeat of his forces. Wearily, I chose to imagine that fickleness and fear and simple adherence to reality were the probable explanations of the problem.
    Several nights later a book and a memory enlightened me. The book was Shaw's Man and Superman; the passage in question is the one about John Tanner's metaphysical dream, where it is stated that the horror of Hell is its unreality. That doctrine can be compared with the doctrine of another Irishman, Johannes Scotus Erigena, who denied the substantive existence of sin and evil and declared that all creatures, including the Devil, will return to God. The memory was of the day that is the exact and detested opposite of August 23, 1944: June 14, 1940. A certain Germanophile, whose name I do not wish to remember, came to my house that day. Standing in the doorway, he announced the dreadful news: the Nazi armies had occupied Paris. I felt a mixture of sadness, disgust, malaise. And then it occurred to me that his insolent joy did not explain the stentorian voice or the abrupt proclamation. He added that the German troops would soon be in London. Any opposition was useless, nothing could prevent their victory. That was when I knew that he too was terrified.
    I do not know whether the facts I have related require elucidation. I believe I can interpret them like this: for Europeans and Americans, one order-and only one is possible: it used to be called Rome and now it is called Western Culture. To be a Nazi (to play the game of energetic barbarism, to play at being a Viking, a Tartar, a sixteenth-century conquistador, a Gaucho, a redskin) is, after all, a mental and moral impossibility. Nazism suffers from unreality, like Erigena's hells. It is uninhabitable; men can only die for it, lie for it, kill and wound for it. No one, in the intimate depths of his being, can wish it to triumph. I shall hazard this conjecture: Hitler wants to be defeated. Hitler is collaborating blindly with the inevitable armies that will annihilate him, as the metal vultures and the dragon (which must not have been unaware that they were monsters) collaborated, mysteriously, with Hercules.

J.L. Borges