The Authoritarian Cyclop

Reading Journal – Day 2
Israel Centeno

Reading this chapter on Auschwitz, I can’t help but ask myself how far evil goes. To what extent can it take form with total naturalness, dehumanizing one part of humanity and overvaluing another, the one that claims for itself the authority to eliminate—without moral tremor—those it deems unworthy of existence. The horror of Auschwitz is not just historical: it is present. It lives on in the current forms of power, in their discourses, in their extermination strategies that justify themselves through the language of legality, revenge, or preemptive defense.

I cannot avoid thinking of all the wars I have witnessed throughout my life. Vietnam, the multiple conflicts in the Middle East—no longer events, but an endemic disease—Iran, Iraq, Rwanda. Each of those tragedies was a school of dread. And yet, here we are again: Myanmar. Ukraine. Gaza.

Where does moral authority end in an armed conflict? At what point does legitimate defense become unlimited vengeance? The war in Ukraine, with its crossed narratives and symbolic machinery, has almost entirely lost any ethical coordinates. It is no longer clear who is the victim and who the aggressor. The same could be said of the war in Israel. At first, after the attacks of October 7, the State of Israel held, in many eyes, an indisputable moral authority: it had been brutally attacked, had hostages in enemy hands, was wounded in its flesh and memory. The response was understandable. Some will say disproportionate; others will justify it as national defense. The debate was legitimate.

But time passes, and with it, that initial legitimacy dissolves. The death toll rises, bodies pile up, children are buried before they learn to speak, and something in the language begins to fracture. It is no longer retaliation. It is no longer even reprisal. It is extended punishment. It is displacement. It is demolition. And here arises a question that tortures me: at what moment did the Star of David—a symbol of resistance, dignity, of “never again”—cease to be a mark on the chest and become an insignia stamped on tanks advancing over civilian populations? Shouldn’t we also ask whether that star—a symbol of identity, pain, and pride—has now been placed, without many noticing, in another place, perhaps a darker one?

Nelson Rivera anticipates it with brutal clarity. He speaks of the silence of the camp as a broken tongue. Of that moment when the echo is canceled, the atmosphere expropriated, humiliation institutionalized. He cites Ivan Klíma, Antelme, Elie Wiesel. Not for erudition, but because their words are keys that open the door to the unspeakable: the ruin of the human soul. War, Rivera tells us, is not an exception. It is the normalization of infamy. The construction of a grammar where killing ceases to be a crime and becomes destiny.

And as I read these pages—so rigorous, so painful, so true—an immense sadness overwhelms me. Because we are not safe. Because we keep manufacturing enemies. Because the cycle repeats itself. Because hate always finds new ways to express itself, to legitimize itself, to celebrate its efficiency.

This book, far from being a treatise, is a mirror. Not of what we were, but of what we could still become. Reading it in 2024 is not an academic exercise: it is an act of conscience. And, at times, of mourning.

Another point I cannot stop interrogating, in the light of these dark pages, is that of the presence or absence of God. Was He truly absent? Or, more disturbingly: was He there, but silent?

From the moment the Nazis came to power, they did not hide their intentions. Extermination was announced, written, shouted. There were no subtleties. Many Jews—perhaps those with a more acute survival instinct, or less attachment to the tangible—fled. And in doing so, they saved their lives. They were not heroes, nor martyrs, nor prophets: they were simply men and women who read the signs of the times and chose flight.

And yet, what about the others? Those who did not flee. What about those who stayed, not out of clumsiness, but out of emotional or intellectual fidelity to an idea of Germany, of Europe, of civilization? They believed, in naivety or despair, that such a nation could not descend into horror. That something in its roots—music, philosophy, language, literature—would prevent absolute delirium. They thought a moral brake still existed. That the night couldn’t be that long.

But Kristallnacht came, the Night of Broken Glass. And even then, many hesitated. They waited. They clung. They kept believing. Was it hope? Was it pride? Was it an instinct of attachment stronger than fear?

This is not a question to judge. It is a question that haunts us all. Because if history teaches anything, it is that fleeing also requires faith. And faith, as Wiesel reminds us, is not always luminous. Sometimes faith is the refusal to see.

When I read Rivera speak of the silence of the camp, of the “robbery of the atmosphere’s right to echo,” I also think of another silence: the one that arises when an entire people fails to react in time, still believing in the possibility of a pact with reason.

And God? Where was He? Perhaps in the voice that whispered to each: “Flee.” And that some could hear, and others, out of love, or while preparing armed resistance, or out of attachment, or culture, could not or would not obey. And so, they were devoured by the machinery of the unspeakable.

And the other thing—the thing I cannot keep quiet about—is this guilt that gnaws at me: the guilt of judging from here, from this quiet community where I have water, shelter, safety, internet, and coffee. From this century that no longer feels like a century, but a fragment, parody, shadow. I wonder whether I have the right to think the unthinkable from this place, from this peace that so closely resembles indifference. Because all the alarms are going off. Not in the streets, but in the information flows, the digital contracts, the invisible architecture of obedience.

Everything indicates we are being turned into data, and that data doesn’t hurt when deleted.

Deleting data doesn’t cause screams. It leaves no trace. It has no blood. It just takes a click.

And with that click—efficient, clean, unresisted—it ends.

Then I go silent. Or I write. I don’t know whether it is to resist, or merely to not disappear as well.