I YOU WE THEM

A massively detailed account of the good bureaucrats who follow orders and thereby kill millions.

British arts and political activist Gretton has long puzzled over the worse angels of our nature. In this long, dense narrative, the author begins by recounting such things as a communications manager’s protest that she and her colleagues have nothing to do with the evil their corporation has undeniably committed; a flash of conversation with an interviewer of Nazi architect Albert Speer who heard him confess, “I loved machines more than people’; and news of the death of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian activist who tried to stop oil conglomerates from devastating his homeland. These all have in common a struggle between violator and victim largely enacted by “desk murderers,” a term that traces loosely to Hannah Arendt and her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, with its coinage of the more famous phrase “the banality of evil.” The evil these people commit is banal indeed, but the crimes are extraordinary. Over the course of hundreds of pages, Gretton tells stories of Nazi functionaries such as Eichmann himself, presiding over “a bafflingly detailed discussion over exactly how Jewishness is to be defined.” That definition, of course, would condemn millions to death, a process begun by the legal maneuverings of another team of Nazi desk murderers to deprive German and then all subject Jews of their citizenship—and stateless people are susceptible to awful state crimes, as are the anonymous inhabitants of faraway lands. That eventually brings Gretton to the torturers of the George W. Bush administration and, beyond, drone pilots and others who “can stroke their child’s sleeping face in the night, and in the morning send the email that kills people they have never met.” The text, which is one of a planned two volumes, is too long by half and wildly diffuse, with digressions into philosophy, the psychology of storytelling, and the like. However, the subject is tremendously important in a time grown ever darker—and ever more reminiscent of the darkest days in modern world history.

For philosophically inclined—and patient—readers with a bent for resisting institutional evil.