The Onerous Shrug

If we didn't already consider "witnesses" an essential part of our discussion of history, I'm certain most of us do now. 

Nadezhdha Mandelstam is the ultimate witness in Hope Against Hope. Her account of her life with Osip Mandelstam is laden with information about what life was really like during these described times in the Soviet Union, and what those in power were really doing. I was at first shocked by the way people lived, and then by the fact that she remained so committed to what she saw to be her duty as a witness. 

There's so much to discuss of this lengthy narrative, but, right now, what's most pressing in my mind is the idea that deluding one's self--excusing one's self of responsibility by claiming the circumstance to be less severe than really is or too large for an individual to have any influence over--was, has been, and continues to be the cause of atrocity (and the vicious, repetitive cycle of those atrocities). 

Nadezhdha Mandelstam remarks on this delusion many times, but I want to point to some of these sections that particularly struck me: 

1) pg. 89: "We all became slightly unbalanced mentally--not exactly ill, but not normal either: suspicious, mendacious, confused and inhibited in our speech, at the same time putting on a show of adolescent optimism. What value can such people have as witnesses? The elimination of witnesses was, indeed, part of the whole program." 

That those in power--those responsible for this mental manipulation--seem to have been so intentionally eliminating these witnesses by way of the mind, startles me.

2) pg. 64: "There are those who want to be blind, but even among those who think they are not, how many are left who can really see? Or, rather, who do not slightly distort what they see to keep their illusions and hopes alive?"

How much of this shrugging--this eye shutting--is a completely conscious effort? How can we discern reality from illusion?

3) pg. 59: "In our sort of life people of sound mind had to shut their eyes to their surroundings--otherwise they would have thought they were having hallucinations. To shut your eyes like this is not easy and requires a great effort. Not to see what is going on around you is not just a passive activity. Soviet citizens have achieved a high degree of mental blindness, with devastating consequences for their whole psychological make-up. This generation of people who chose to be blind is now disappearing for the most primitive of reasons--they are dying off--but what they passed on to their children?"

And: how much effort will it take for those children to reverse this blindness? Can it be reversed? Can revealing any and all known facts and aiming to uncover truths as Nadezhdha does in this book contribute to this effort?

4) pg. 172: "Many of my contemporaries who accepted the Revolution went through a severe psychological crisis. They were trapped between a reality which could only be condemned and the need for a principle by which to justify it…at the sight of what it mean in terms of everyday life, they were horrified and looked away."

Think slavery, the economic reliance on slaves, the principle created to justify…

5) pg. 359: "…we were all so well disciplined that we took part in the killing of our own kind and justified ourselves by reference to 'historical necessity.'" 

To claim responsibility for this killing, even if the initiation of that killing was not our own doing, seems imperative to the halting of said killing.

6) pg. 373: "It was not, indeed, a question of fear. It was something quite different: a paralyzing sense of one's own helplessness to which we were all prey, not only those who were killed, but the killers themselves as well. Crushed by the system each one of us had in some way or other helped to build, we were not even capable of passive resistance. Our submissiveness only spurred on those who actively served the system. How can we escape the vicious cycle?"

With books like these, I think, we begin to remove ourselves from the unending orbit of that vicious cycle; we begin to actively step out of the path that has been made so easy for us to follow--to so passively live our lives out on.