As long as we are quoting Orwell, let's see what he had to say about the topic of revenge:
Revenge is Sour
Whenever I read phrases like 'war guilt trials', 'punishment of war
criminals' and so forth, there comes back into my mind the memory of
something I saw in a prisoner-of-war camp in South Germany, earlier this
year.
Another correspondent and myself were being show round the camp by a
little Viennese Jew who had been enlisted in the branch of the American
army which deals with the interrogation of prisoners. He was an alert,
fair-haired, rather good-looking youth of about twenty-five, and
politically so much more knowledgeable than the average American officer
that it was a pleasure to be with him. The camp was on an airfield, and,
after we had been round the cages, our guide led us to a hangar where
various prisoners who were in a different category from the others were
being 'screened'.
Up at one end of the hangar about a dozen men were lying in a row on the
concrete floor. These, it was explained, were S.S. officers who had been
segregated from the other prisoners. Among them was a man in dingy
civilian clothes who was lying with his arm across his face and
apparently asleep. He had strange and horribly deformed feet. The two of
them were quite symmetrical, but they were clubbed out into an
extraordinary globular shape which made them more like a horse's hoof
than anything human. As we approached the group, the little Jew seemed to
be working himself up into a state of excitement.
'That's the real swine!' he said, and suddenly he lashed out with his
heavy army boot and caught the prostrate man a fearful kick right on the
bulge of one of his deformed feet.
'Get up, you swine!' he shouted as the man started out of sleep, and then
repeated something of the kind in German. The prisoner scrambled to his
feet and stood clumsily to attention. With the same air of working
himself up into a fury--indeed he was almost dancing up and down as he
spoke--the Jew told us the prisoner's history. He was a 'real' Nazi: his
party number indicated that he had been a member since the very early
days, and he had held a post corresponding to a General in the political
branch of the S.S. It could be taken as quite certain that he had had
charge of concentration camps and had presided over tortures and
hangings. In short, he represented everything that we had been fighting
against during the past five years.
Meanwhile, I was studying his appearance. Quite apart from the scrubby,
unfed, unshaven look that a newly captured man generally has, he was a
disgusting specimen. But he did not look brutal or in any way
frightening: merely neurotic and, in a low way, intellectual. His pale,
shifty eyes were deformed by powerful spectacles. He could have been an
unfrocked clergyman, an actor ruined by drink, or a spiritualist medium.
I have seen very similar people in London common lodging houses, and also
in the Reading Room of the British Museum. Quite obviously he was
mentally unbalanced--indeed, only doubtfully sane, though at this moment
sufficiently in his right mind to be frightened of getting another kick.
And yet everything that the Jew was telling me of his history could have
been true, and probably was true! So the Nazi torturer of one's
imagination, the monstrous figure against whom one had struggled for so
many years, dwindled to this pitiful wretch, whose obvious need was not
for punishment, but for some kind of psychological treatment.
Later, there were further humiliations. Another S.S. officer, a large
brawny man, was ordered to strip to the waist and show the blood group
number tattooed on his under-arm; another was forced to explain to us how
he had lied about being a member of the S.S. and attempted to pass
himself off as an ordinary soldier of the Wehrmacht. I wondered whether
the Jew was getting any real kick out of this new-found power that he was
exercising. I concluded that he wasn't really enjoying it, and that he
was merely--like a man in a brothel, or a boy smoking his first cigar,
or a tourist traipsing round a picture gallery--TELLING himself that he
was enjoying it, and behaving as he had planned to behave in the days he
was helpless.
It is absurd to blame any German or Austrian Jew for getting his own back
on the Nazis. Heaven knows what scores this particular man may have had
to wipe out; very likely his whole family had been murdered; and after
all, even a wanton kick to a prisoner is a very tiny thing compared with
the outrages committed by the Hitler régime. But what this scene, and
much else that I saw in Germany, brought home to me was that the whole
idea of revenge and punishment is a childish daydream. Properly speaking,
there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to
commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as
the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.
Who would not have jumped for joy, in 1940, at the thought of seeing S.S.
officers kicked and humiliated? But when the thing becomes possible, it
is merely pathetic and disgusting. It is said that when Mussolini's
corpse was exhibited in public, an old woman drew a revolver and fired
five shots into it, exclaiming, 'Those are for my five sons!' It is the
kind of story that the newspapers make up, but it might be true. I wonder
how much satisfaction she got out of those five shots, which, doubtless,
she had dreamed years earlier of firing. The condition of her being able
to get close enough to Mussolini to shoot at him was that he should be a
corpse.
In so far as the big public in this country is responsible for the
monstrous peace settlement now being forced on Germany, it is because of
a failure to see in advance that punishing an enemy brings no
satisfaction. We acquiesce in crimes like the expulsion of all Germans
from East Prussia--crimes which in some cases we could not prevent but
might at least have protested against--because the Germans had angered
and frightened us, and therefore we were certain that when they were down
we should feel no pity for them. We persist in these policies, or let
others persist in them on our behalf, because of a vague feeling that,
having set out to punish Germany, we ought to go ahead and do it.
Actually there is little acute hatred of Germany left in this country,
and even less, I should expect to find, in the army of occupation. Only
the minority of sadists, who must have their 'atrocities' from one source
or another, take a keen interest in the hunting-down of war criminals and
quislings. If you asked the average man what crime Goering, Ribbentrop,
and the rest are to be charged with at their trial, he cannot tell you.
Somehow the punishment of these monsters ceases to sem attractive when it
becomes possible: indeed, once under lock and key, they almost cease to
be monsters.
Unfortunately, there is often a need of some concrete incident before one
can discover the real state of one's feelings. Here is another memory
from Germany. A few hours after Stuttgart was captured by the French
army, a Belgian journalist and myself entered the town, which was still
in some disorder. The Belgian had been broadcasting throughout the war
for the European Service of the BBC, and, like nearly all Frenchmen or
Belgians, he had a very much tougher attitude towards 'the Boche' than an
Englishman or an American would have. All the main bridges into town had
been blown up, and we had to enter by a small footbridge which the
Germans had evidently mad efforts to defend. A dead German soldier was
lying supine at the foot of the steps. His face was a waxy yellow. On his
breast someone had laid a bunch of the lilac which was blooming
everywhere.
The Belgian averted his face as we went past. When we were well over the
bridge he confided to me that this was the first time he had seen a dead
man. I suppose he was thirty five years old, and for four years he had
been doing war propaganda over the radio. For several days after this,
his attitude was quite different from what it had been earlier. He looked
with disgust at the bomb-wrecked town and the humiliation the Germans
were undergoing, and even on one occasion intervened to prevent a
particularly bad bit of looting. When he left, he gave the residue of the
coffee we had brought with us to the Germans on whom we were billeted. A
week earlier he would probably have been scandalized at the idea of
giving coffee to a 'Boche'. But his feelings, he told me, had undergone a
change at the sight of ce pauvre mort beside the bridge: it had suddenly
brought home to him the meaning of war. And yet, if we had happened to
enter the town by another route, he might have been spared the experience
of seeing one corpse out of the--perhaps--twenty million that the war
has produced.
http://www.george-orwell.org/Revenge_is_Sour/0.html
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