January 29, 2023

Inhumane Systems: “This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen”

The power of literary discourse to shock us is on display in Tadeusz Borowski’s “This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.” The power of the narrative is how it combines the banality of evil with the utter chaos and inhumanity that it enables and encourages. Borowski shows how the camps are run with a bureaucratic efficiency that establishes a hierarchy of inhumanity with the bueiness-like efficiency of the Nazi officers who reduce human beings to mere cattle for the abattoir and mere notations in an accountant’s ledger.

In re-reading gas today, I can’t help but see the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols at the hands of five policemen as a reflection of the psychology of fascism on display in “Gas.” Nichols, a black man, was savagely chased and beaten by five Black Memphis police officers as he was driving home on January 7, 2023, and he died three days later in the hospital. A video of the incident was released just days ago, and according to NPR:

“ In the videos, officers are seen dragging Nichols from his car and shouting profanities throughout the confrontation. An officer tries to deploy a Taser at Nichols and then begins to chase him on foot. “I’m just trying to go home,” Nichols is heard saying. Later, officers are seen repeatedly kicking, punching and using a baton to strike Nichols as he lies on the ground. At one point he’s heard yelling “Mom.” Lawyers for the Nichols family say this encounter happened within 100 yards of the family’s home. ”

“Gas” in the style of Zdzisław Beksiński // Midjourney 2023

Police killings of Black men seem to be a daily occurrence in the US, and precipitated the Black Lives Matter movement after the acquittal of George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin in 2013. BLM became an international movement after the choking death of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. The fact that Nichols’ murder happened by Black cops echoes the circumstances of “Gas.”

The men, including the narrator, are part of a prisoner work crew who are required to separate new prisoners from the last vestiges of their humanity. These workers are from “Canada,” a privileged camp of prisoners who are allowed to collect food and clothing from the people going to the gas chambers in exchange for expediting that process. These men, too, will likely end up in the gas chambers at some point, but their position on the hierarchy gives them position above those condemned to an immediate death, thus making them a complicit part of the system. The narrator describes his first day of work, and he can barely hold it together in the hellscape he’s presented with. The work is so taxing, at one point the narrator asks the more experienced Henri, “are we good people?” He goes on to explain his question:

“ I don't know why, but I am furious, simply furi­ous with these people—furious because I must be here because of them. I feel no pity. I am not sorry they’re going to the gas chamber. Damn them all! I could throw myself at them, beat them with my fists. It must be pathological, I just can’t understand . . . ”

Henri answers, “The ramp exhausts you, you rebel-and the easiest way to relieve your hate is to turn against some­ one weaker. Why, I'd even call it healthy. It’s simple logic, compris?” Indeed, hell imposes its own logic and hierarchy that has no room for morality and humanity in its bureaucratic efficiency. If these people are just numbers, cattle, lesser-than, one either joins them or or acts like another cog in the machine. In other words: the narrator and his fellows, though they are themselves prisoners, find they have a slight advantage in the Nazi hierarchy, and become complicit in its operation. After a time, Henri seems to suggest, you get used to it and are even able to separate the true outcomes of your actions by following orders—orders that separate you from the cattle going to slaughter.

The only way, it seems, for these men to deal with this inhuman situation is too become part of the inhumanity of the system which removes them from being the victims. Yet, the threat that they could become victims at any time motivates them to disregard any scruples that might still their hands or allow them to sympathize. Therefore, their rage at the untenable situation is not directed upwards toward their oppressors—they, too, are part of the system—or the abstract system itself—their inhumanity is directed toward those who most suffer because of the system.

The banality of evil happens when otherwise good people are compelled to live or survive within an inhuman system. While they may not directly pull a trigger, their actions in supporting that system allow it to continue to victimize those at the bottom: the human cattle according to the camp administrators—black men according to the police. Just like the Nazi system could not be rehabilitated, perhaps, too, the system of policing in the US—a system born out of pacifying and controlling slaves—needs to be replaced.

Yes, five Black police officers beat a Black man to death; Borowski’s “Gas” helps us to understand the logic that leads to such atrocities.

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