Art & Duty

Art & Duty:

What do we make of a case like this? (H/t: Arts & Letters Daily.)

[Children's book author Remi] chose to spend the war in his German-occupied homeland, where he continued to work unmolested, thanks to longtime links to right-wing figures. The help of powerful collaborators enabled him to publish new adventures in spite of a severe wartime paper shortage. Most damningly, he accepted work with a Belgian newspaper, Le Soir, which had been confiscated by the authorities to serve as a propaganda organ. The German-controlled paper published, among other things, defenses of fascism and anti-Semitic screeds. Hergé’s cartoons provided a great boost to the paper’s popularity in the face of a boycott of its pages by many well-known Belgian writers and artists. Indeed, his role led the resistance, on the eve of the liberation, to brand him one of the forty leading journalist collaborators....

Even as a collaborator, Remi was relatively innocuous. His worst crime was going along where he ought to have resisted. He is a study not in the banality of evil but simply in the banality of the banal.

A citizen has a duty to defend his nation, but it's worth remembering how quickly the Belgian government collapsed. Indeed, the whole war gets one sentence in the Wikipedia article on Belgium: "The country was again invaded by Germany in 1940 during the Blitzkrieg offensive and occupied until its liberation in 1945 by the Allies." That's the whole war, right there, from the perspective of Belgium. Notice that the sentence is in the passive voice -- Belgium "was invaded... and occupied" until it 'was liberated.'

So, if the government collapses entirely, and there is now lawful army nor authority to which you might apply as a defender of your country, what really is your duty as a citizen? I think we might say that, in such cases, a man who is inclined to fight in the resistance might be praised for his courage -- but he is praiseworthy because he is doing more than his duty requires.

The laws of war, meanwhile, will not necessarily recognize him as a lawful combatant. Depending on his mode of fighting, he may be committing what are technically war crimes. Some of what the French resistance did was clearly against the laws of war, such as shooting soldiers while pretending to be civilians. We excuse this because they were Nazi soldiers, but the action is a war crime all the same. It undermines the principle of noncombatant immunity just as much when the French did it as when the Taliban does.

Finally, from the perspective of a Belgian, this was hardly the first time this had happened! The French and German governments had been invading each other since Napoleon's day. Joining the resistance to the German occupation, in any of these previous wars, was likely to lead only to French occupation instead of German. One can imagine a quiet-minded man, the sort who likes to sit and write children's books, for not feeling like he wanted to get killed over the ping-pong game of two poweful neighbors. 'Fine, let them fight each other if they must! I'll carry on with my books.'

All that would be fairly satisfying, if the Germany of the 1940s had not been Nazi Germany. Had it been simply a resurgent Imperial Germany, bent on reasserting German pride and claims, and revenging itself on France -- but not on extermination of peoples nor racist totalitarianism -- we could say that he had no further duty but to sit out the war. His country was caught between two powerful neighbors who were always fighting; there was no lawful army he might join, since his government had collapsed, and the resistance there was had chosen to fight in sometimes unlawful ways; and fighting against one of his country's neighbors would probably only lead to a new occupation by the other. Bad times, you might say, and let it go: except for the matter of evil.

A citizen needs only to defend his nation, but a gentleman has a duty to defend his civilization. Countries come and go, and governments; but evil is eternal, and we must always resist it. An artist, specially placed to be able to resist in powerful but subtle and nonviolent ways, is not excused from this duty. If anything, his power gives him a special duty.