Jesters, the common wisdom insists, can say anything. Perhaps this is true; but whether they can and whether they should are sometimes two quite different things. In this instance, the jester is best spared.
Sixty-four years ago, in a pretty chateau two hours from Paris, a Prussian major announced that an ironclad racial destiny required a show of ironclad will. For those cultures not privy to the ecstasies of the sublime will, such a demonstration needed to involve violence, for the French — besotted with the castrating abstracts of defeatist humanist philosophy — would not understand subtler signs. Furthermore, a demonstration of undiluted terror was required: in violent times brutality is practiced enough to become orderly and formulaic, and if the message is to strike home, the medium must be equally visceral.
His reasoning is irrelevant: he was probably insane, and certainly long lost to chaos. However his orders were very clear: from then on, 50 French citizens should be chosen at random every day, and murdered.
The major was an educated man, and briefly flirted with classical allusions: like Athenians for the labyrinth, he told colleagues in the first days. But even they lost their taste of heroic echoes when the major decreed that three children should be among those killed every day, to ensure the greatest moral outrage.
In the first weeks the groups were driven into a quarry. Wrenched from warm beds and cots; flung off bicycles into trucks; abducted during a quick lunchtime walk in a park; they stood alone and terrified, disbelieving. The machine-gunners were practised, and it was usually over within a minute. Sometimes a smaller lover, a frail child, would be sheltered for a minute under a corpse. They were dispatched with a pistol, shielding their faces with paper-thin, shattered hands.
But machine guns were expensive, and trained gunners in demand, and two years later the quarry was abandoned, and the 50 victims were shot with whatever was at hand, dying of ragged glancing wounds; or else simply beaten to death. Most of the children went this way, split open and trampled. The old women often had their throats cut. The old men were defiled: sometimes a bullet brought release.
And so it went, 50 every day.
The injustice and vileness of his abomination still have the power to appal, two generations later. The major’s eventual death, however it occurred, cheats us of the antediluvian vengeance we require where Nazis and other monsters are concerned. A trial and a hanging are not enough, the brute in our tribal memory cries. We want slow dismemberment.
Even discovering that the major and his atrocities are a fiction does little to lessen the overarching outrage we tend for future generations. He may have been invented in the previous paragraphs, but his kin and his methods were ubiquitous. Surely, the modern witness asks, 50 a day is by no means an unlikely scenario? In a time of unchecked, mechanised, inspired evil, anything seems possible.
Our Nazi-emotions are peculiar. Regardless of our experience of history, we reserve the bitterest indictments our anaemic age can muster for an ever-renewed damning of that genocidal horde. Fifty a day, and obscenities like it, become the hallmarks of a wickedness without equal. Nothing, our collective unconscious mourns, has ever come close to the nightmare world of 50 a day.
Which is strange, because every day 50 South Africans are killed in precisely the same way that a traumatised, bestial murder squad would have done it 64 years ago. The requirements of the new occupation force are the same: three children in each day’s lot, as well as a good representation of the aged. But there are differences.
We are not allowed to fight the occupation. Our generals seem ambivalent as to whether or not it even exists. The resistance — a maligned police force slowly retreating through an unrecognised war zone — get nice funerals and purple eulogies. The liberation army is fat, old and corrupt. D-Day is not coming, and still we reserve our Nazi-emotions for a distant past, refusing to be viscerally appalled by today’s South African atrocity. And every day, there are 50 fresh corpses.