Autumn 1994
Volume 21, Number 1

Throwing a bomb that kills hundreds of thousands of people can sometimes generate remorse, as the case of Claude Eatherly, the Hiroshima pilot, suggests. But it does not require training ordinary people to perform the grim details of butchery. Even when such a training is fully successful (and this is often the case) some frictions may occur, as Christopher Browning has shown in his book Ordinary Men, which presents thoughtful, deeply disturbing research on a German reserve police battalion that was involved in the extermination of Jews in Poland. Normal German citizens who were turned into mass murderers were slightly disturbed by the perspective of performing their usual job when by chance they came across Jews they had known in the past. To project the stereotypes provided by the Nazi propaganda into tens or thousands of unknown Jews was apparently easier for them.

The sharp distinction between us and them that was at the core of the Nazi racist legislation was related, on a theoretical level, to an explicit rejection of the idea of natural law. In this sense, the formulation of the juridical notion of crimes against humanity that emerged at the end of the Second World War can be regarded as a belated victory for Antigone. "It is just, though forbidden, to bury Polynices, as being naturally just": these words, in Aristotle's view, implied the supremacy of general laws over particular laws, of allegiance towards humankind over allegiance towards a particular community, of distance over closeness. But as Aristotle himself remarked, both distance and closeness are ambivalent concepts; moreover, they are submitted to temporal and spatial constraints. As we have seen, distance, if pushed to an extreme, can generate a total lack of compassion for our fellow humans. We may ask, How can we trace the boundary between distance and extreme distance? Or, to put it another way, What are the historical limits of an alleged natural passion such as human compassion?

Carlo Ginzburg is Franklin D. Murphy Professor of Italian Renaissance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. His two most recent books are Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath (1991) and Il giudice e lo storico (1991). His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry was "Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It" (Autumn 1993).