Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship

From Hannah Arendt's Responsibility and Judgement 

Excerpted and presented by Amy Bernstein

“[T]he total moral collapse of respectable society during the Hitler regime may teach us that under such circumstances those who cherish values and hold fast to moral norms and standards are not reliable: we now know that moral norms and standards can be changed overnight, and that all that then will be left is the mere habit of holding fast to something. Much more reliable will be the doubters and skeptics, not because skepticism is good or doubting wholesome, but because they are used to examine things and to make up their own minds. Best of all will be those who know only one thing for certain: that whatever else happens, as long as we live we shall have to live together with ourselves.”

[Untitled] "And it's scary, Lord, it's scary--" 

By Irina Gumyrkina 

Translated from the Russian by Katherine E. Young

And it’s scary, Lord, it’s scary—

There’s no more escape to be had:

The tower showing black on the square,

And snow falling as if dead.

Beyond the edge, heaven, the howl,

I can’t see You, I can’t hear.

We’ve been remade against our will—

Will You recognize us, grieving?

Spell out every SMS,

Hush, like Telegram: go dormant.

It’s near impossible, but if

You can: release us all till morning.

This poem was first published in SUSPECT.

from "The War on Error" 

By Toni Morrison 

Excerpted and presented by Lauren Francis-Sharma

“We live in a world where justice equals vengeance. Where private profit drives public policy. Where the body of civil liberties, won cell by cell, bone by bone, by the brave and the dead withers in the searing heat of 'all war, all the time,' and where facing eternal war, respect for, even interest in, humanitarian solutions are dwindling....

Constitutional rights are facing impoverishment and annihilation as the biggest, most undertold story in the US is the looming disenfranchisement of the electorate...with voting machines....any astute hacker can gain access [to].

Withdrawal from treaties, preemption, dismantlement, mass arrests minus charges or legal representation, judges taking instructions from the Justice Department...Draconian censorship—all these actions are all taking place in an atmosphere of aggression, panic, greed, and malice reminiscent of the oppressive political architecture we believed we had demolished.

But all of this you already know.

It seems to me that among the several wars being waged around the planet, one is paramount and surpasses in urgency all the others. That is the War Against Error. This is a phrase originated to describe the 15th century efforts...on the part of institutional religions to correct those whose beliefs were different...The lesson to be learned was acceptance or death. A hard education in a difficult school, the doors to which are still ajar....

[So]...I think it is time for a modern War Against Error. A deliberately heightened battle against cultivated ignorance, against enforced silence, against metastasizing lies....A hugely funded and intensified battle of rescue from the violence that is swallowing the dispossessed." 

The full essay can be found in The Source of Self-Regard.: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations by Toni Morrison.

Refugees

circa 917 AD  

By Leeya Mehta 

“It will be well if we leave this country…and run away towards Ind for fear of life and religion's sake,” said the head priest. Then a ship was made ready for the sea. Instantly they hoisted sail, placed the women and children in the vessel and rowed hard. – The Qissa-i Sanjan

The boat is too small for so many

and only the twin babies sleep,

drunk on milk and swaddled tight

rocking against their mother Armaiti

as the men row hard into the familiar waters

of the Gulf of Hormuz for the last time,

the starlight on the receding mountains

dimming fast until what is left

of this new moon night is the abiding

light from their holy fire, fed carefully

by their priest with sticks of sandalwood

pulled from deep in his white robes, as he looks east

into the black Arabian sea.

All the joy and blood that had come before

already turning to myth,

he counts how many generations

it takes to go from conqueror to refugee.

Gold bangles ring out as the twin babies are given

to their grandmother, then great grandmother,

and passed back to their mother, seventeen,

back erect, molten copper hair,

fawn brown eyes flecked with green,

hiding tiger, quick to anger,

as quick to forgive the everyday abuses girls

seem not to know they carry.

The father Sorab, twenty-five, son of Bezon,

named after his grandfather Sorab,

the same names alternating and

reaching back into the oldest Persian towns

winding up rivers into orchards,

where they planned this winter voyage,

had four boats in sight ahead,

and six behind him,

but now they are hidden by night

as they row with speed, the wind still,

the vessels arrows through the air.

So, when tired eyes stir with the new dawn

and the babies Bezon and Avan tug with little hands to drink,

steam from their breath against her chest,

their mother lifts her head as the men cry “Hindustan!”

she does not expect rose petal beach, like silk shivering before her.

Armaiti pulls herself to her knees to look

at this land at the waters edge that shifts and stirs

as if it is made of wings disturbed by the coming of her people

only to gasp, as flocks of long limbed flamingos

rise up into the sky and scatter,

revealing a sanctuary of white beach. 

Wedding in Constantinople

An excerpt from Irmtraud Morgner's 1968 novel.

Translated from the German and presented by Stephanie Bastek

Robert Muezzin—I named him Robert because I imagined him with a red beard—the city spirit Robert Muezzin was equipped, as his assistants assured me, with the most sensitive Japanese-built listening devices. Through these he received my detailed requests via very high frequency. And within three seconds one of his assistants stood at my service. He was in any case certainly red-bearded, reserved, fairly old; his sallow head, round to crescent-shaped, was darkly flecked. Actually he was all head: a thinker. He pondered for a moment. Then he ordered me to pull off the quilt and tie the corner of it to the steel rails rimming the foot of the bed. Said and done. I had barely pulled the ticked cover over my chest when the wind caught itself in the pillowcase. And inflated it, and blew it up like a discharged parachute, and blew and blew ear-piercingly through the window. And before you even noticed it my bed was out the window and rolled through the corridors over the stairs and past the concierge and straight away out into the street. 

from A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture

(Oxford University Press, 2013, 1999, 1998)

By Marguerite Feitlowitz, excerpted from an interview with Mario Villani

“I got to a point during torture where I’d think to myself, `This torturer, this guy torturing me now, is a man like me.’ I mean, I knew very well that I had never and would never use an electric prod on anyone. But it was important for me to realize that he was not a martian, not a cockroach, but a man like me… This attitude was important on two levels. It helped me get along with them, to talk with them. And it was crucial for my identity. Because if I looked at them like martians, I was doing the same thing they were. I was like them. So it helped me to survive day to day, but even more important, I could inhabit my self.”

“Rather than some form, some mutation, of them?”

“Yes. That terrified me.”

Foundlings

By Paul Jaskunas

No tree only a tree.

Crown to crown, oaks talk of wind,

fall and rot, then give slow way

to groves of greener sapling.

No man only a man.

In every city, tired folk

joined by rusted nail and hinge

are ever becoming newer things.

Hear downtrodden working men

put lips to battered tubas of hope

and purr strange, secret tunes

that set their skins to molting.

See weaklings with sticks for arms

curl up their fists and enter the ring

where even they are immune to hurt

and box the ears of wooden kings.

In every forest, metamorphosis

a matter of course. On every block,

a revolutionary in disguise walks by,

and dreams take seed in foundlings. 

Originally published in Drawing Lessons (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, 2024)