Judgement Here

On Star Trek: Deep Space 9, Season 1 Episode 19: 'Duet' (1993)

I wrote this for the forthcoming collection of DS9 essays from ATB Publishing Outside In Can Live With It.  This is D1.  A version of this will appear in the finished collection but it'll probably be shorter.

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In 1985, a prosperous, middle-aged, wage clerk in a small glass factory in West Germany was chatting with a fellow member of a local stamp-collecting club.  His friend began to ‘explain’ to him that the Holocaust never happened.  This bothered him, because he knew it was not true.  That chance event was why the clerk, Oskar Gröning, began to speak publicly about his experiences during the war.

Gröning had been a volunteer member of the SS.  After being assessed for his suitability, he was stationed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.  He was an accountant there.  His job was to keep meticulous records of all the money and possessions that the SS stole from the prisoners.  He did not participate in any murders directly.  But he witnessed them.  He knew what was going on.  Everyone there did.  As the most concentrated and coldly systematised mass murder in human history was going on under his nose, he assisted its smooth-operation with his clerical skills, and enriched himself by embezzlement and fraud, pilfering from the stolen money and possessions of the victims as it flowed through his filing system.

In his testimony many years later, he claimed to have been bothered by the screams he heard.  He claimed to be haunted by them.  Though he considered the extermination of the Jews justified at the time, he felt “ambiguous” seeing lines of people being taken to the gas chambers.  He claimed to have requested transfers owing to the cruelty he witnessed.  Even in his telling, his main objection to Auschwitz was the methods employed there, not the goal.  Later, Gröning was personally bothered by Holocaust denial when he learned of it.

Reading between the lines of his self-reports, his concern was always for his own comfort.

Once, when confronted about his role in the SS by his then father-in-law, he was outraged and indignant.  “I am an honourable human being!” he retorted.  When he testified against others he underlined the phrase "summoned to testify as a witness" in court documents, to emphasise that he was not a defendant.  He called himself a “small cog in the gears”.  He said he felt shame but called his guilt “inadvertent” and described himself as “not one of the perpetrators”.

Laurence Rees, in his book Auschwitz: the Nazis and the 'Final Solution', wrote that Oskar Gröning had separated himself into two people.  After the war, he spoke about the Oskar Gröning who had been an SS guard at Auschwitz as almost a separate entity, for whose actions he, Oskar Gröning of the present, ought not to be judged.

An attempt was made to try Gröning in the 1980s but by the legal standards at the time it was felt that there was not enough evidence against him.  Later, John Demjanjuk - originally misidentified as the dreaded sadistic ‘Ivan the Terrible’ of Treblinka, owing to faulty photographic evidence - was tried and convicted in Germany simply for having worked as a guard at Sobibor, another death camp.  The legal standards had changed.

In 2014, Gröning was put on trial as an accessory to mass murder.

Like Albert Speer - Hitler’s friend and armaments minister, tried at Nuremburg in 1945 - Gröning pleaded not guilty, but admitted to “moral guilt”.  But he denied that he was an ‘accomplice’.  He stuck to what he told Der Spiegel in 2005: “Legally speaking, I am innocent".  He asked God, and “the Jewish people”, for forgiveness, but he did not think he should spend a day in prison.

Albert Speer served 20 years in prison and then made a career for himself as ‘the Nazi who said sorry’.  He always maintained that he did not know about the Holocaust, but admitted to moral guilt in general terms.  It transpired after his death that Speer had carefully covered up aspects of his wartime record, and dishonestly curated a fake version of himself.  In reality, Speer knew about the Holocaust, and was actively involved in using it to his advantage.  Arguably, he continued to do this until the day he died.

Oskar Gröning was eventually sentenced to four years in prison, but died of natural causes while the judgement was on appeal.

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It is remarkable how ‘Duet’ takes it for granted that a filing clerk in a concentration camp is innocent of any crime.  This simply seems obvious to everyone.

It is not.

Several hundred thousand people may have been involved in the Holocaust, from the politicians and bureaucrats in Berlin down to the people who kept the trains running and did the paperwork.  As Mary Fulbrook explains in Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice, only a few thousand ever faced legal punishment.  And the punishments were often scandalously lenient.  The point to remember is that, without the people who kept the trains running and did the paperwork, none of it would have been possible.  It was a staggering logistical and practical task.  It needed filing clerks and bookkeepers.  Without them, it would have ground to a halt.  But the filing clerks and bookkeepers kept doing what they saw as their job, no matter what personal qualms they may have had.  Their discomfort at the time, and their guilt later - real, feigned, or somewhere in between - is really irrelevant to anyone but themselves.  They were active, knowing accomplices to the Holocaust.  They deserved to be punished.  Oskar Gröning  deserved to be punished.  It doesn’t matter that he felt uncomfortable.  It doesn’t matter that he spoke out later against Holocaust Denial.  It doesn’t matter that he was old and regretful.  He did what he did.  And he made excuses for himself.  And he got four years.  And he never served a day.  And he died in bed.  And that’s wrong.

Oskar Gröning was probably the closest thing to a Nazi who volunteered for punishment out of guilt - a thing otherwise unheard of.  And yet, as we have seen, Gröning didn’t really fit that template at all.  He never expected to be tried, and when he was tried he pleaded legal innocence.

Marritza is a fictional version of something and someone who never existed.  He is a lie.  By representing remorse, and a willingness to take responsibility, where there was none, he is a distortion of the historical and political truth.

It’s true that his scheme is – at least on a conscious level - a kind of backhanded recognition that, in reality, the war criminals, and the guilty societies, do not face their guilt, do not accept responsibility, do not atone.

And yet is that what he really wants?  Is any of this what he really thinks?  He supposedly sympathised with the screams of the Bajorans.  Yet he throws himself into the hands of the Bajorans precisely because he believes the Cardassian view of them, that they are unreasoning inferior creatures.  He can fool them easily, and thus use their courts as a suicide weapon.  They will kill him in vengeful frenzy because they are nothing but the animals that Darhe’el - i.e. the part of his mind that he calls Darhe’el… because, like Oskar Groning, he has separated himself into two people - believes them to be.  He wants to be executed, not for his stated reasons, and certainly not from a feeling of remorse, but because he cannot bear that he was, as he himself puts it, “a coward”.  He is not ashamed of ignoring the screams.  He is ashamed of having been affected by them.  He does not consider himself guilty of anything, except a lack of proper, manly, fascistic brutality.  That is why he pretends to be a man who, in his mind, was guilty.  Because he wants to be guilty.  Because by guilty, he means strong, powerful.  He would rather be a monster than a filing clerk who cried when he heard Bajoran screams.  He would rather be the great Gul Darhe’el than Aman Marritza, even if he has to die for it.

The end of ‘Duet’ is replete with ironies.  Marritza gets part of what he wanted.  He gets to be murdered by a Bajoran, thus justifying his own prejudices about them, and thus maybe - in his mind - justifying his involvement in Galatep.  But he dies as the coward Marritza, whereas he wanted to die as the monster Darhe’el.

It is extremely unfortunate that ‘Duet’, an acute piece of television in many respects, seems to accept the idea of the real-world conflicts to which it refers as powered not by material issues like imperialism but by decontextualised and abstract ‘ethnic hatreds’ and ‘cycles of violence’.  It is even more unfortunate that it seems to accept “I was just following orders” as a valid defence, at least for some.  It accepts personal conscience - private feelings - as the most important issue at stake.  A cultural product of the high neoliberal period, it seems to be saying that the privatised, atomised self is the unit of moral accounting, even when it comes to issues of genocidal imperialism.  But, to quote Macbeth as he overcomes his own conscience only to run up against judgement from others, and against morality itself, “we still have judgement here”.

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And here are 'offcuts' that I wrote in response to the episode but which didn't end up in the finished essay.  You'll have to pardon their disconnectedness.

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This episode seems to reject and invert Hannah Arendt’s idea of “the banality of evil”.  Arendt saw Adolf Eichmann, the practical architect of the Holocaust, as a “terrifyingly normal” man, bland to the point of being ludicrous, who had internalised Nazi ethical norms, and who never questioned them as he tried to further his career by meeting the demands of the regime.  ‘Duet’ seems to take a figure like that and absolve him, positing instead that the true guilt lies with the Darhe’els of the world, the consciously and pathologically sadistic fanatics.  But we need to remember two things.  Firstly, Eichmann was actually a cruel and dedicated antisemite who relished exercising life-or-death power.  There is no contradiction between this type and the desk-jockey who angles for promotion by efficiently pursuing the wicked yet normalised aims of his society.  Secondly, in ‘Duet’, the account we get of the thinking and personality of Gul Darhe’el comes entirely via Aamin Marritza.  Marritza portrays Darhe’el as an unashamed, vainglorious, sadistic, fanatical psychopath who relished his butchery both as patriotic duty and as personal pleasure, considering the Bajorans both personally contemptible and a lesser race deserving of extirpation.  This is actually more like the historical Eichmann than the bloodless, grey and nondescript, deskbound technocrat of legend.  It is an irony that so much of our conception of the Nazis derives from their own self-image and self-report, be it Leni Riefenstahl’s pre-war propaganda film Triumph of the Will or captured Nazis’ self-serving, post-war performances as nobodies who had simply followed orders from above.

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The Cardassians are, at least partly, a portrait of neo-conservative America in the 1990s.  They are, from the broadly liberal perspective of the series, the other version of America, the version of America that stands in opposition to that optimistically expressed in the Federation.  In ‘Duet’, the Cardassians are repeatedly shown positioning themselves as the innocent targets of unreasoning hatred from those who spuriously claim to be their victims.  The Cardassians treat the anger of the Bajorans as a kind of petulant, childish fury, and as unjustifiable prejudice.

This is a picture of the US culture war, of a reactionary America engaged in a self-righteous political and cultural counter-assault against the progressivism of the 1960s onwards.  It embodies the ‘backlash’ against feminism that Susan Faludi described in 1991, the concerted efforts of neoconservatives to overcome the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ (the US public’s reluctance to get involved in military adventures abroad), and the attack upon the gains of the civil rights movement.  Marritza performs several signature reactionary culture war manoeuvres in his debates with Kira, accusing her of wallowing in victimhood (as Black people are believed to do in the reactionary imagination), and essentially playing the race card in reverse, responding to her version of “Bajoran lives matter” with “All lives matter, including Cardassian ones”.

In reality, “All Lives Matter” is a dishonest and obfuscatory reply to “Black Lives Matter” because the problem that “Black Lives Matter” addresses is a society that privileges white lives qua white lives, and disregards the humanity of black lives qua black lives.  Essentially, in a white supremacist society, nobody is saying that white lives don’t matter.  “Black Lives Matter” means Black lives matter as well, a message that the white supremacist society needs to hear even as it pretends to hear it too much.  In ‘Duet’, however, we are shown a situation in which many people are saying that Cardassian lives do not matter.  The Cardassian characterisation of the Bajorans as possessed by mindless ethnic hatred of Cardassians is shown as basically accurate, even if the historical context makes it understandable.  Kira’s journey in the episode is to overcome her prejudice against all Cardassians.  She repudiates the Bajoran who murders Marritza at the end simply for being a Cardassian.  This gives the very impression of moral equivalence that the oppressor wishes to create.  It reduces the conflict between Bajorans and Cardassians down to a squabble of ethnic grudges.  Ahistorical views of conflicts like this make them seem impossibly complex and intractable.  The Israel-Palestine conflict is routinely said to be just that: an incomprehensibly complicated, centuries-long, near-insoluble argument over the metaphysics of competing religions, or an endless cycle of mindless racial revenge and counter-revenge.  This is an obfuscation of a conflict that is actually about very material and, in principle, addressable questions of national, social, economic justice.

The pattern that the Western media has established with regards Israel-Palestine is repeated across such issues of festering political, social, and economic injustice that Western governments do not wish to address.  The problem of racial injustice and tension in American society, for instance.  The TV show Law & Order (and its various franchises) loves to depict racial issues in this way.  In one episode of Special Victims Unit, a detective comments on a racial revenge killing with the line “welcome to the Gaza Strip”.  In this view, material - and therefore addressable - issues of deprivation, oppression, and injustice are ignored in favour of a view of racism as a kind of eternal grudge match, a ‘war of all against all’, with mindless prejudice a tragic but inevitable fact of life.  A very convenient view for those who do not want, for whatever reason, to see a social reckoning with material inequality and structural injustice.

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The spiel that Marritza originally gives Kira, when he is - so to speak - pretending to be himself, is a fictionalised version of Holocaust Denial.  Marritza does not outright deny the existence of camps or mass death or slave labour, but downplays, decontexualises, and normalises Cardassian atrocities using omissions, half-truths, and spurious arguments containing just enough of a germ of truth to seem convincing.  The aim is to confuse the listener, to obfuscate, to dilute genocide down until it looks like a ‘normal’ horror of war, to neutralise the extra guilt of the genocidaire, to create a false impression of moral equivalence between the perpetrators of organised mass slaughter and their victims.  It does not lessen the egregiousness of Holocaust denial to say that it is ‘only’ a more flagrant version of something done by all imperial governments and cultures with regards their crimes, or the crimes of their allies.  The essential tactic may be seen, to one degree or another, across the Western media as I write, regarding the ongoing genocidal attack on Gaza by the state of Israel.

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The Historikerstreit was a debate sparked by an attempt on the part of various conservative West German historians - most especially Ernst Nolte - to recast the historiography of the Nazi era and the Holocaust, relativizing the Nazis and their crimes with reference to other atrocities committed by others.  They claimed - amongst other things - that the Nazi dictatorship was a defensive reaction to the horrors of Soviet Communism and the threat it posed to Europe, and that there was a profound separation between the Nazi leadership and other sectors of German society - in particular, the regular army, which, they argued, behaved with superior morality and largely without Nazi ideological commitment.  In his brilliant debunk, In Hitler’s Shadow, the historian Richard J. Evans shows not only that these claims are without merit, resting on grotesque misrepresentation of the historical record, but that they also serve a reactionary political agenda.  Moreover, they are disturbingly reminiscent of the very claims made by the Nazis themselves, and by subsequent ‘revisionists’ who deny the Holocaust and seek to retroactively absolve the Nazi regime.

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The initial scenario is that Darhe’el went into hiding after the Cardassian withdrawal from Bajor, taking over the identity of his filing clerk, Marritza.  But, as Gul Dukat later reveals, Darhe’el is buried under his own name, with full public honours.  Unlike so many escaped Nazis - who took advantage of the so-called ‘rat run’ and made themselves new lives in South America under false names - Darhe’el never had to go into hiding.  He was honoured by his society, not despite his war crimes but because of them.

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During one of their Silence of the Lambs-inflected conversations, Kira remarks to Marritza “We could never understand why you had to be so brutal”.  It’s a good question.  In reality, colonial oppressors act brutally towards conquered native populations for a combination of material, ideological, and psychological reasons.  The material reason is that the conquered population occupies land that the oppressor either wants or has taken and wants to keep, represents a workforce who may be subject to hyper-exploitation via slavery or near slavery, and represents a physical/numerical threat to the political and economic domination of the oppressor.  In all aspects of the material situation, the oppressor needs to exercise extreme violence.  The logic of the colonial situation - the extreme degree of expropriation, subjugation, and exploitation - makes brutal suppression of any disobedience into a practical necessity.  Psychologically, it is hard for normal human beings to visit extreme brutality upon other human beings directly without first convincing themselves that their victim is in some sense not human, or a lesser form of human.  They must also generate within themselves the necessary levels of disgust and contempt which makes the violence not only tolerable to inflict but also, sometimes, enjoyable.  The dehumanisation which allows one to see another person as vermin not only gives psychological permission but also creates a psychological impetus.  It is not only permissible to exterminate, it is a duty, an honour, a satisfaction, a moral good, a constructive accomplishment, and thus a pleasure.  Buried under all this is the libidinous delight of power and control.  The necessary psychological ‘permission slips’ are generated at the level of ideology.  A key part of any colonial and imperial project, let alone one which escalates to the level of genocide, is the creation of a coherent and hegemonic ideology which seems to enshrine the physical, mental, and moral inferiority of the victims - and thus the corresponding superiority of the oppressor - into the strata of scientific, political, and moral common sense.  This is why the ideology of scientific racism arose: as a justificatory ideology to permit, normalise, and sacralise colonialism and slavery.  That is why scientific sexism arose to justify patriarchy.  That is why antisemitism moved, in the modern era, from a set of prejudices based on religion to a pseudoscience based on the construction of Jewishness as a supposed racial identity.  That is why today’s fascist movement calls anyone they don’t like paedophiles.  You don’t believe you can subjugate and maybe kill the people you hate because they’re inferior and bad; you believe they are inferior and bad so that you can subjugate and maybe kill them.  This is why the Cardassians constructed the Bajorans as a racially, culturally inferior people.  They used the relative economic and technological underdevelopment of Bajor as a pretext to justify their invasion and occupation.  They used the resistance of the Bajorans as evidence of their innate savagery, just as colonial oppressors have always used the (of necessity) violent resistance of their victims as evidence of the need to subjugate and punish such inherently wicked people.  Marritza as good as says all this, albeit in the voice of Gul Darhe’el.  But he does not raise the issue of race specifically.

Star Trek is, on a basic level, about race in the United States.  It is about the foundation, negotiation, renegotiation, and maintenance of a multi-racial society.  It is a comforting tale that a liberal capitalist, white supremacist, settler colonial, imperial society founded on slavery, genocide, and ethnic cleansing, tells itself about itself, in order to convince itself - using Orientalist techniques - that it is an assimilationist ‘melting pot’ with a bedrock of justice and democracy, in which the white dominated system of imperial government, property, and military power is ultimately utopian, in the sense of being ‘for the best, in the best of all possible worlds’.

The aim of so many of the texts within the Star Trek corpus is to tell salutary, liberal parables about the folly of racism, the need for racial justice, tolerance, etc.  It uses the concept of ‘alien races’ as analogues for the racial divisions in the real world.  Yet the achilles heel of this project - as so often in the liberal version of SF, a genre constructed from colonialism - lies in the mismatches between metaphorical and literal textual strategies, and between the strategies of the texts and the material realities upon which those texts attempt to comment.  In attempting to comment metaphorically on real world politics and history, Trek creates essentially magical or Fantasy creatures and then, in line with Fantasy like The Lord of the Rings, gives every genus of such creatures a specific nature.  But because it positions itself, at least on the routine narrative level, as taking place within a material universe which functions by scientific physical laws, its posited fantasy races are inherently possessed of species-natures via material factors.  At the very least, these species-natures are enforced by cultural traditions of extraordinary strength.  If we take the example of Vulcans, we see a race who are ‘logical’ and unemotional by definition.  The only examples of Vulcans who are not entirely like this are literal ‘half-breeds’.  Within the lore, the Vulcans are not genetically incapable of emotions.  Indeed, they conquer their emotions using social, cultural, and religious techniques.  Even so, the degree of force attributed to the cultural factors which cause them to have a particular nature is so extreme that it amounts to an innate and total species nature.  As a metaphorical way of talking about race in the real world, this is fatally flawed, doomed to forever have a reactionary import lurking inside it, no matter how liberal and progressive the particular narratives in which it appears, owing to the simple fact that, in the real world, the real ‘races’ which are the metaphorical referent of the alien races in Star Trek, are unreal.  There is absolutely no scientific basis to ‘race’ as we have socially constructed it in our material history and our current societies.  That does not stop many clinging to the pseudoscientific idea of race.  And those who do so are generally reactionaries who wish to preserve an established racial hierarchy by pretending - via rubbish about average I.Q. points, etc - that the existing racial hierarchy is correct, inevitable, or both, based in innate and profound biological inequalities.  (As it happens, this is a non sequitur, even if you accept the existence of the alleged biological inequalities, which you should not.)  The secondary form of the same argument is to withdraw from ‘strong’ claims about racial difference based on biology to a ‘weak’ form of the same argument, the cultural argument, based on a supposed impermeability of races based on irreconcilably divergent cultures.  Those advancing such arguments will often feel free to brazenly make moral value claims as to the superiority or inferiority of the supposed different cultures, and then claim they are not racist because they are not talking about biology.

It is hard to imagine the Cardassian occupation of Bajor without a Cardassian racial theory of Bajoran inferiority, and yet no such theory appears to exist - at least not in ‘Duet’.  There is a general sense that the Cardassians considered Bajorans inferior, but it seems like a generalised attitude rather than an elaborated ideology like scientific racism.  As such, the episode misrepresents the histories upon which it metaphorically comments.  But it really cannot bring in such a scientific racial ideology.  Because a SF/Fantasy version of the scientific racism that was the ideological basis of all Western imperialism and colonialism, including the construction of the United States and its racial order, is integral to Star Trek, and is accepted as a reality at the very core of Star Trek’s narrative system, its metaphorical reflection of white American power as the Federation and Starfleet, and the racial system of the United States as their relationship with myriad alien ‘races’.  It cannot, and can never, really critique racism, because it is racist to its core, because it is constructed upon an adaptation of white supremacist racial theory.