The Kindly Ones

by Jonathan Littell

we are stronger than other living beings and we do as we please with their lives and their deaths, cows, chickens, ears of wheat are on earth to serve us, and it’s normal that among ourselves we act the same way, that each human group wants to exterminate those who challenge it over land, water, air, why, indeed, treat a Jew better than a cow or a Koch’s bacillus, if we could, and if the Jew could he’d do the same with us, or with others, to guarantee his own life, that’s the law of all things, the permanent war of all against all, and I know there’s nothing original about this thought, that it’s almost a commonplace of biological or social Darwinism, but that night in my fever its force of truth struck me as never before or since, stimulated by that dream where humanity succumbed to another organism whose life power was greater than our own, and I understood of course that this rule was true for everyone, that if others turned out to be stronger than we, they would do to us in turn what we had done to others, and that faced with these drives, the frail barriers that men erect to try to regulate common life, laws, justice, morality, ethics count for little, that the slightest fear or the slightest strong surge bursts them like straw fences, but that then too those who took the first step should not expect that the others, when their time comes, will respect justice or the laws, and I was afraid, for we were losing the war.