Civil War

In the film, Civil War (2024), Texas and California have “tecaexited” the U.S., to use the European recondite ideological parlance for secession that began with “Brexit” in order to evade “seceding from the Union.” The U.S. president in the film repeatedly lies to the public that the secessionists are on the run; in actuality, as the film progresses, the three journalists, Lee, Joel, and Sammy, along with their young protégé, Jessie, eventually witness up-close the rebel military conquering the White House in order to shoot the president in the Oval Office. The film provides only scant clues as to the reason for the secession; the rebel who shots Tony, a friend of the three journalists, obviously detests foreigners and delights in “real Americans,” such as are from Colorado and Missouri. This could be a reference to Trump’s “MAGA” movement, so the film is possibly playing out Trump’s followers revolting; historically, on January 6, 2021, some of them rioted, though admittedly did not as a revolt so to topple the U.S. Government, but rather to make a statement by temporarily stopping Congress from counting the States’ respective electoral ballots for president. Even so, it is too great an inferential leap to conclude that the two States seeking to exit the U.S. in the film are MAGA, even though MAGA ideology and the “woke” ideology clashed in early (and mid) 2020s when the film was being put together. Rather than being about contending, violently clashing ideologies, the film is about how violent our species is when not suppressed by an overarching police presence that can act as a deterrent.

In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes, a seventeenth-century European political philosopher, argues that in order to stave off a short, nasty and brutish life filled with recurrent threats of theft and violence, a person, together with the others, must cede all political (and even theological interpretive) sovereignty to a governing authority, whether a king or an assembly. The only right retained even against such a power is that of self-preservation, though the sovereign has the right to put a rebel to death. Similarly, Machiavelli wrote The Prince to give rulers strategic “Machiavellian” advice in the context of political fighting so those rulers could survive in power even ruthlessly. That philosopher’s History of Florence left out such advice because the context in the book was stable rather than violent. The message of these two philosophers is that left to our own devices in a state of political nature, we can regress to our ruthless savage nature, which is always there but latent in a societal context in which a sovereign power acts as a suppressant and deterrent.

In the film, as the three journalists and the girl drive west then south from New York, ending up in Washington, D.C. to witness the secessionist army shooting its way into the White House to kill the president, indications of small-scale violence are very evident. At a gas station, a man holding a machine gun shows Jessie where two “looters,” too bloodied to be recognizable, are hanging, while still alive, out back. The man even agrees to be photographed by Lee showing him standing between the two hanging men. The subtle message is that he has nothing to fear in being held accountable for shooting the two victims as Jesse and Lee are still there to witness. Man’s savagery goes beyond just killing other humans; not even severe cruelty is sufficiently resisted if there is no fear of having to pay a price in terms of lost freedom or pain.

After Jessie foolishly switches cars through open windows as both are being driven fast and is taken prisoner by two rebels who are operating independently in having killed a truck-load of people, one of those two men shoots Tony and Bohai because they are not “real Americans.” The sheer arbitrariness of the acts to Joel causes him to momentary react angrily before suddenly realizing that the shooter is so irrational that anyone could be shot next, even Joel. Fortunately, Sammy comes to the rescue by driving the journalists’ car into the shooter, but at a cost, for the other shooter kills Sammy as he is driving away with the other journalists.

Relative to these isolated cases of wanton, unjustified violence by individuals, the coordinated military attack on the White House by the rebel army looks civilized. In fact, it is astonishing just how embedded Joel, Lee, and Jessie are with the soldiers as they are shooting at U.S. soldiers and the Secret Service agents. That the soldiers who are about to shoot the president in the Oval Office pause so Joel can get a last quote from the president suggests that the cause is political rather than just for the sake of getting to be violent and kill. In other words, the indications and instances of isolated killings in the countryside en route reveal our species violent, unimpeded nature more so than do the scenes of army units fighting against opposing units.

By implication, political movements in the early 2020s to “defund” local police departments in some of the American States seem wrongheaded, for even if police-power is too much for human nature to wield properly, human nature itself, as depicted in the film, attests that having a police department is a necessary evil that a society cannot (and should not) do without, and, furthermore, that the strictures that only being in a society can provide are also necessary, for in the proverbial state of nature, which can exist even within a society (e.g., neighborhoods on the south side of Chicago), human nature is too prone not only to violence, but also to cruelty—even to the point of enjoying it. Nietzsche argues that the origins historically of punishment lie in the debtor-creditor relationship, wherein creditors found pleasure in taking “a pound of flesh” strangely as if that pleasure from inflicting pain were equivalent and thus sufficiently compensating. Nietzsche states that the rendering of such an equivalence is “strange,” but he may simply be discounting or ignoring the savage nature of our species underneath the patina of civilized Man.

It should not be lost on the viewers, however, that glimpses of the finer qualities of human nature are included in the film. In the camp in the stadium, for example, camera shots showing people being docile, even kind to each other, are likely meant to show this contrast to the film’s leitmotif. Lee’s self-sacrifice at the end of the film in saving Jessie’s life by taking the bullet herself when Jessie is in the line of fire in a hallway in the White House attests to the sheer normative distance that exists within human nature, for, building on a famous line that is in the book, The Killer Angels, which is about the U.S. Civil War, if we are angels, then we are surely killer angels, though this does not mean that violence and cruelty exhaust human nature for we are capable of self-sacrificial love for other human beings. Though even if we are “made” to be creatures of love, still we have not managed to shake our innate penchant for violence and even cruelty. The true civil war is perhaps that which exists within each of us. 

Eichmann

There comes a point in the film, Eichmann (2007), which is based on Avner Less’s series of interviews with Adolf Eichmann in an Israeli jail, when the man who was in charge of transport to the Nazi death camps realizes that he will lose the upcoming trial and be hanged; the hitherto unemotional Eichmann instantly tears up in front of Avner Less in the small, windowless room and laments never being able to see his children again. Less points out that Eichmann has sent many children to their deaths, “but they were Jews,” Eichmann counters. The inroads into the psyche that Nazi propaganda reached was suddenly obvious, even odd. Ideology with the machinery of state as a proponent and enforcer can short-circuit the human mind without the mind being aware of its own cognitive distortions. Eichmann states, “but they were Jews” as if anyone would understand because he takes the validity of the statement as a given. Translation: Jews were not only enemies of the state; they were also subhuman. In an earlier interview, Eichmann disclaimed being antisemitic with a tone that conveys to the audience that he really believes his statement. At the very least, the mental pathology of disassociation seems to have been caused by the earlier Nazi propaganda. State ideology can indeed be mentally invasive, and this may say as much about the vulnerabilities of the human brain as the danger latent in political power than can manifest in massive states as not only war crimes, but also the more severe crimes against humanity.

Ironically, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, the Israelis would adopt the same subhuman stance (the stance itself being subhuman as well as regarding people deemed to be subhuman) towards the Palestinian people living in Gaza especially, but also in the West Bank (and Lebanon). Can the infliction of one holocaust be understood as an instinctual aggressive reaction on an intergenerational collective basis to an earlier one that has been inflicted on ancestors? The misfiring is obvious because the Palestinians and Germans are two different peoples, so the adage, two wrongs don’t make a right applies. Another adage reads, “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.” The biblical intent is to keep vengeance out of the hands of (God’s?) children. But whose Lord is that?  

Eichmann was evidently an atheist; the Nazi party was officially so. Had Eichmann regarded himself as a Christian, the man’s cognitive dissidence would have been too much even for him to ignore and manage, though admittedly the Crusades were committed by “Christians” in the name of Christ without enough dissidence for them to turn back and go home. Ironically, Eichmann had studied Hebrew, which is why, according to Avner Less in the film, Eichmann was selected to head his department that was oriented to the Jewish problem in transportation. Even though Eichmann repeatedly insists in the interviews that he was just a cog in the massive Nazi state machine, and therefore wielded no significant power of his own for which he should be held morally responsible, being the head of all the transportation to the death camps came with too much power to be labeled merely as bureaucratic.

In fact, the narrative’s pivot, or inflection point, is on Eichmann’s own abuse of power, which is to say, an abuse that he cannot claim to have been merely following orders on pain of death. He was sufficiently high in the Nazi hierarchy to have wielded power of his own and thus to be held responsible for any consequent suffering and death. Whether the latter two can become so massive and severe that even just following orders even on pain of death cannot obviate being morally responsible is an interesting ethical question without an easy answer—perhaps answering the related question of whether self-sacrifice is not only a virtue, but also a duty if many people would suffer severely and unjustly die otherwise is prerequisite. In suggesting that Indians stand up to invading Nazis were they to invade India, Gandhi advocated such a duty and even claimed that it has much moral power in resisting evil.

Although Eichmann strangely volunteers to sacrifice his life as a lesson to anti-Semites, Avner Less dismisses the offer as disingenuous. As a policeman, he is savvy. Crucially, anticipating the film’s pivot, it is clear that he is clever in detecting the nuance in Eichmann’s pattern of minimizing the fact that he took orders directly from Himmler rather than from Hitler himself. Eichmann is hiding something, and Avner Less senses this, so he immediately has his staff focus exclusively on pulling all of the written correspondence between Eichmann and Himmler that the department has. Avner Less’s abrupt shift in his investigative strategy is in line with having realized the utter futility in getting a confession from the devoted, high-ranking Nazi. Having been in the SS, Eichmann too is savvy to say something self-incriminating. Avner Less too is savvy; he notices that Eichmann covered his tracks well by having retained written documentation of the orders he was obeying. No one is perfect, however, and in giving the order that over 70,000 Hungarian Jews walk from Budapest to a death camp in Poland, Eichmann actually defied Himmler’s order that such a march not take place! Visually precise for viewers, Avner Less places the papers of both orders side by side on the desk in front of Eichmann. The two orders contradict each other—crucially with Himmler’s order having an earlier date. Eichmann, being a firm believer in the value of written documentation, can only slump silently in his chair, knowing that he had not sufficiently covered his tracks as an SS man, and therefore he would be convicted and put to death. Given the historical accuracy of the film, this means that during the entire trial, which is not depicted in the film, Eichmann knew he would be convicted and die.

The film ends with Avner Less mailing the letter than Eichmann had begged be mailed to his family. That Avner’s own father died in a Nazi camp makes the generous nature of the gesture all the more astonishing, especially given the violent protests by Israelis of the interviews happening at all, and thus of Avner Less’s involvement, on the grounds that Eichmann does not deserve even a trial, given the monstrosity of the crimes against humanity—a label that was coined at the famous Nuremburg trial.

In the film, and perhaps in the historical record too, Avner Less does not ask Eichmann why he violated Himmler’s order and gave the order to proceed with the march anyway. Perhaps Eichmann was more realistic than Himmler and Hitler that time was limited for the Nazis in November 1944, given the military progress of the Allies, so desperate means were needed to quickly kill as many Hungarian Jews as possible.  Perhaps Himmler (or Hitler) was worried so late in the war that the evidence of thousands of bodies left along the way could be used by the Allied victors after the war to prosecute the Nazis. Eichmann was likely frustrated with the slow pace with which his superiors were ridding Europe of Jewry. This is precisely why it is so strange that he repeatedly resists the label of anti-Semite in the interviews with Avner Less. Impatience with ridding Europe of the subhuman “race” is of course highly anti-Semitic, but, strangely, and here the nefarious, dangerous power of a state-sponsored ideology should be flagged for future reference, Eichmann does not appear to “connect the dots” in his (brainwashed?) mind. “But they were Jews.”

In The Reader, released in 2008—a year after Eichmann—Hanna Schmitz, a former death-camp guard on trial in Germany, astonishes the chief judge with just such a line. To the judge, Hanna’s rationale is astonishing to the point of utter disbelief that anyone could use such a warped justification for standing by while other people needlessly die. Meanwhile, to her, the justification is something that presumably anyone would simply take for granted as being entirely reasonable. The pathos of distance is incredible. To paraphrase her rationale: Of course, we let the Jewish prisoners burn in the locked church; they were our prisoners; we were responsible for them; we couldn’t just open the doors and let them escape. This line, plus Eichmann’s, reveal the visceral depth with which the propaganda of a state can insidiously damage the human mind without it having a clue as to its own warped condition. Therefore, it behooves each human being to routinely self-check for having gone too far in one’s own ideological commitments, as well as to critique the ideology itself with the understanding that no human ideology is or can be perfect, for we are human, all too human.