“Decency” and Genocide

Some thoughts on moral and intellectual perversion

If you translate the English word “decent” into German, the result is “anständig.” Likewise, the German word for “decency” is “Anstand” or, sometimes, “Anständigkeit.” The reason why I – a speaker of both English and German – have had to think of this fact is the speech given by the comedian Colin Jost at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. Doing his best to look like every 1950s middle-class mum’s dream son-in-law, Jost kept it safe, chummy (with President Joe Biden), and boring, putting embarrassing sycophancy before even the most moderate idea of fun. Or perhaps he just can’t do any better. But that is not the aspect of his performance that intrigues me.

What I find revealing is the terms in which Jost paid obsequious reverence to the president. “My grandfather,” the comedian recalled, “was a Staten Island firefighter” who “voted for you, Mr. President because you’re a decent man. My grandpa voted for decency and decency is why we’re all here tonight. Decency is how we’re able to be here tonight.”

Decency, Anstand. There it was. I am a historian, and I have written, among other things, about the Holocaust and its legacies and memory. The White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, has, of course, taken place against the backdrop (for want of better words) of the ongoing Israeli genocide of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. That’s why the dinner guests, on arrival and before safely ensconced inside the venue, had to face protesters who shamed them by reminding them that the “elites” of the USA and its president – now with the well-deserved moniker “Genocide Joe” – have become accomplices or even co-perpetrators in this crime.

How does one, how does anyone speak of “decency” in such a context? Obviously, much of the answer to that question must be sought in the speaker’s very deeply flawed character. Yet let’s not treat Jost as if he were original. Instead, let’s try to make him useful by considering him as an example, as typical of one way in which genocide warps the mind and soul.

In October 1943, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and the key architect of the Holocaust gave two infamous speeches, addressing his SS officers who had already carried out much, though not all, of the German genocide of the Jews. After their location, in a city in occupied Poland, they are commonly known as the Posen Speeches (Posen being the German version of the city’s Polish name, Poznań).

Perhaps the single most disturbing passage of the first of these speeches, delivered on 4 October, runs as follows: For Himmler, for his SS men “to have gone through [the extermination of the Jewish people] while remaining – apart from exceptions of human weakness – decent [anständig] has made us tough. That is an unwritten and never-to-be-written glorious page of our history…,” and “we have not been harmed inside, in our soul, in our character.”

Clearly, Jost is not Himmler, and it would make no sense to equate them. That is not the purpose of my remarks here. But it does make sense to recognize a pattern. Himmler’s actions and position cannot be equated with that of a dull comedian apparently out to curry favor. Himmler’s statement was far more extreme. And yet, in both speeches we find a very specific and disturbing figure of thought in a very specific context: The invocation of “decency” in a context of either perpetrating genocide (Himmler’s case) or of flattering an accomplice or even co-perpetrator of genocide (Jost addressing Biden).

What is that idea of “decency” that lends itself so readily to such misuse? I think there are two aspects that deserve attention here: One is fairly obvious – the reduction of the notion of “decency” to decorum, a meaning that the term also has but that, among human beings with a conscience should always be secondary.

Think of it this way: Assume you witness a murder in broad daylight, and you could intervene, but you would have to shout, and your clothes would get rumpled in a fight. So, you choose to do nothing because yelling and looking disheveled don’t correspond to your idea of decorum. That is mistaking decorum for decency. (Don’t mistake this, please, for an analogy of the US’s behavior toward the Gaza Genocide, which is much worse again. American elites have not “merely” not intervened, they have taken part in the murder. But you get the idea about decorum.)

The other, less obvious manner in which this perversion of attaching talk of “decency” to genocide is coming about is a radical privileging of an in-group. For Himmler, that in-group were the Germans, and within that collective, his very own SS. His vicious message was that the mass murder of the Jewish victims was justified by the needs of the Germans, and that the “decency” of his SS could not be affected – apart from a few exceptions – by murdering the victims. Indeed, Himmler argued that their capacity to commit these murders somehow served as a proof of their “decency.”

In Jost’s case, once again, we are seeing nothing so extreme. But the fundamental act is there, the radical privileging of the in-group: As long as Americans can talk to each other in civil and decorous terms, for instance at a swanky dinner, they are “decent” by that very act. And Joe Biden, by the same logic, deserves thanks for having facilitated that adherence to polite conversation. Against a backdrop of American participation in the mass-murder of Palestinians, who, to this kind of mind, clearly, do not matter enough to make a difference to all that “decency.”

It is obvious that the only genuinely decent response to genocide is to abandon decorum and to privilege one – and only one – group: the victims, in this case, the Palestinians. A “decency” that consists of maintaining a genteel tone among accomplices and co-perpetrators will, one day, be as infamous as the “decency” Himmler praised in Posen.