How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (and Found Inner Peace) by Harry Stein

Author:Harry Stein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: humor, satire, common sense, conservative, harry stein, liberal brainwashing, rightwing conspiracy
Publisher: Harry Stein

I picked up another life lesson during my time in Paris. As one might imagine, there are a fair number of interesting types to be encountered as a journalist in the City of Light—writers, filmmakers, politicians and activists of various kinds—but this one came from an unexpected source: a middle-aged French lawyer, the friend of a colleague, who happened into the office one day.

We'd gotten to shooting the breeze—his English put my okay French to shame—and at some point he mentioned that growing up in the Paris suburbs, he'd been the mid-fielder on a local junior championship soccer team. "Of course," he added amiably, "that was quite a while ago."

The reference had to do with more than just age. The guy had a cane and walked with great difficulty.

A little later it came out why. When he was sixteen, during the war, he and a group of high school friends got involved with the Resistance; not in any major way, he stressed, nothing heroic, just delivering messages at night on their bikes. In fact, he made it sound almost like a lark, the wartime equivalent of trying to get away with smoking behind the gym.

Except one of their number got caught and betrayed the rest of the group.

He recalled that when the Gestapo came, he was having dinner with his parents and sisters. Held in a Parisian police station that had been taken over by the Germans, over the next couple of weeks he was systematically tortured; his foot and ankle were smashed with a club and left untreated. When it was decided he had no information to impart, he was sent off to a work camp. It was only through the kindness of others that he managed to survive at all.

All in all it was a helluva story, the sort of firsthand history that I, as a young American, had never before heard. But what really stuck with me was an observation he made almost casually.

I'd asked if he was surprised the guy betrayed the group. No, he said, he wasn't really surprised by anyone's behavior during that desperate period. Not by those who showed character and courage, nor those who ended up actively supporting the Germans, nor by the majority who merely stayed quiet and kept their heads down. "Even the kids in my high school," he said, "I could have predicted beforehand how almost every one of them would act. It wasn't so different from how they'd always been before."

At the time it seemed a stunning thought: that by our routine behaviors and seemingly banal choices, we reveal what we're ultimately made of. But of course it is absolutely so. It is by the incidental tests, day by day and hour by hour, that we establish what we are about; and, indeed, how we will respond when most severely tested.

Years later, I heard very much the same thing from someone else in a position to know—a former Israeli agent named Peter Malkin, with whom I was writing a book on the capture of Adolf Eichmann.

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