How to face monstrous world events and not turn your heart into stone

There are many world events now that are hard to take.

Many horrors that are hard to watch.

Many histories that are difficult to comprehend. 

Many chasms between viewpoints that are hard to span.

Many emotions that overwhelm us.

In fear, we can freeze. Our hearts can turn to stone.

Monstrous world events in Gaza

No doubt, the most difficult of these events are unfolding in Israel, Gaza, and Palestine. In due course, the International Court of Justice will decide the question of whether those events represent a genocide. In time, History will judge, as it always does, with ambiguity.

But the daily witness of horrors has provoked moral dilemmas for us all. How are we responding to these events occurring on the watch of our lives?

How do we face such monstrous world events, and not turn our hearts to stone?

To witness these events has many effects on people. They sadden. They shock. They sap the will. They paralyse. For a few, they galvanise. They confirm the righteousness of a cause. They deepen beliefs that the enemy is a monster. They incite and justify more violence.

I hear many people say world news is too much to bear. The world is depressing. We yearn for escape. The escape may be fantasy. It may be fiction. It may also be distorted history, which reassures our consciences that we are the exception to Solzhenitsyn’s dictum: that the dividing line between good and evil runs through every human heart.

Others say people who refuse to bear the tragic news, who avert their eyes from evil, are irresponsible. For some, it is shameful. To sit back and let Gaza happen is to commit the mistakes of ‘Hitler’s willing executioners’ in the 1930s and 1940s. How can they permit such events to happen when atrocious images are shared ubiquitously on antisocial media? Why do they - it is never we - refuse to gaze into the eyes of the monster?

Others react to the accusation that they permit crimes against humanity, with outrage and indignation. People like us cannot do things like that. The protestors are the true evil ones. They share a bed with the monster. They are antisemites. In Australia, the Government and universities have even established an investigation into antisemitism among critics and protestors on campus. Will it chill the free, open inquiry necessary to understand morally complex history and the many-sided conflicts of Israel and Palestine. One of Australia’s leading historians, Henry Reynolds, thinks so.

Then there is the mystery of why nobody in a position of power can seem to stop the killing. Why does the United Nations complain, but not intervene? Why does the USA wring its diplomatic hands, but stage standing ovations in Congress for the main authoriser of the killing? Our institutions have turned into stone, rather than respond humanely.

Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust & the Gorgon Effect

I have been reluctant to comment on the Gaza events. There are more than enough better-informed people than me. But, over the last two weeks, I have been reading Reading the Holocaust by the great Australian historian, Inga Clendinnen. It seems remarkably relevant. It shows us a way to sob with sorrow and not let our hearts turn to stone.

Her book uses the term the ‘Gorgon effect’ to describe the moral dilemma I have been sketching. It describes the way our hearts can turn to stone when contemplating the worst that we can do in war, in power and in our imagination. 

It refers to the paralysing inability to observe reality and horror, honestly and responsibly. It is based on the old Greek myth of the Gorgon or Medusa, the snake-haired monster whose face, if gazed upon, would turn even the toughest culture warriors into stone.

In the beginning of that book, she wrote:

“I want to dispel the ‘Gorgon effect’—the sickening of imagination and curiosity and the draining of the will which afflicts so many of us when we try to look squarely at the persons and processes implicated in the Holocaust.”¹

This Gorgon effect has paralysed the humane feelings of too many on all sides of too many conflicts. Overcoming the Gorgon effect is the moral challenge of our times, and, perhaps, of all times in history. It can be done with the greatest virtue taught by history. That is, empathy.

The most remarkable thing about Clendinnen’s book is how she practised empathy. She sought to understand both victim and perpetrator, both witness and silent bystander. She looked into the face of the real Gorgon, not some sentimental, ideological myth, which we claim can never happen again; as if the Bengali famine, the Partition of India, Hiroshima, Cambodia, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, and endless wars have not happened since. She wrote:

“Humankind saw the face of the Gorgon in the concentration camps, petrifying the human by its denial of the human both in itself and its prey. The shadow of the Holocaust has lengthened with the years. In that shadow, none of us is at home in the world, because we know the fragility of our content. If we are to see the Gorgon sufficiently steadily to destroy it, we cannot afford to be blinded by reverence or abashed into silence or deflected into a search for reassuring myths. We must do more than register guilt, or grief, or anger, or disgust, because neither reverence for those who suffer nor revulsion from those who inflict suffering will help us overcome its power to paralyse, and to see it clearly.”²

She wrote this profoundly empathic book after a cultural scandal in Australia that made her doubt the depth of her own empathetic engagement with the Holocaust. She wrote the book after the Australian intelligentsia were sucked in by a literary hoax, the prize-winning novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper.

This book was authored by Helen Demidenko who claimed to come from a Ukrainian family. She presented the Ukrainian nationalist viewpoint on their participation in mass killings including at Babi Yar and Treblinka. It excused them as a response to Jewish, Communist, Soviet or Russian oppression. Demidenko was celebrated as an authentic voice of multicultural Australia, before she was exposed as a pretender. Her real name was Darville. She had no bond to Ukrainian blood and soil. Her novel was a mishmash of trite tropes. But progressive, liberal-minded Australia had swallowed this nonsense whole.

A conservative, Jewish intellectual, Robert Manne lamented Australia’s culture of forgetting. As Clendinnen wrote, the affair exposed:

“not only a dangerously low level of political and historical understanding in Australian intellectual culture, but a disturbing lack of critical acuity and moral poise.”³

She wrote Reading the Holocaust in part because she too had been seduced by The Hand that Signed the Paper. She felt she had slipped too easily into disengagement with the moral challenge of the Holocaust and like events. She had refused “full imaginative engagement”. She treated them as ‘unthinkable.’ She wrote her book so readers could feel them.

Her book was written not as a specialist or a guru. She wrote as a reader, for other readers. She contemplated the ‘unthinkable for the layperson who felt a moral obligation to stare into the eyes of the Gorgon, and not be petrified. Her book was written:

“For perplexed outsiders like myself, who believe with me that perplexity is dangerous. In the face of a catastrophe of this scale so deliberately inflicted, perplexity is an indulgence we cannot afford.”⁴

Her book is profoundly relevant today, not only in Australia, but many parts of the world. In the face of wars, lies and horrors, who does not suffer a draining of the will? Who does not seek a scrap of courage to face the monsters of history?

I regret it may be beyond the moral capacity of the Australian Cabinet, our leadership class in politics and culture, or many leaders across the world to pick up this admirable book by a great, empathetic historian.

But it is not beyond your moral capacity, dear reader.

I have been rereading Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust, including excerpts in my audiobook mini-series, to make sense of the reaction to events in Gaza. I highly recommend you read this book if you can amidst these monstrous events. If you cannot get her book online or at a library, check out my reading of excerpts in my audiobook minis - Beginnings and Representing the Holocaust.

Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob

Clendinnen’s concluding chapter, Representing the Holocaust, discusses how poorly most fiction - in books and film - have dealt with the Holocaust. A recent example is the novel and television drama, The Tattooist of Auschwitz. 

As I read this chapter into the audiobook reading, I thought of one exception to Clendinnen’s rule. It is a novel of historical fiction. It is a remarkable feat of imaginative empathy by the 2018 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Olga Tokarczuk. It is The Books of Jacob.

The Books of Jacob begins in the seventeenth-century Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, including the territories of Poland and Ukraine today. It follows the story of a group of unorthodox Jews in the wake of the proto-nationalist, antisemitic Khmelnytsky uprising that killed tens of thousands of Jews, and during the birth of the European Enlightenment. It ends in a cave in Korolówa in 1945, from which 38 Jewish people walk after years of hiding from the Nazis. They survived the Holocaust and European dogmas. It is a celebration of plurality.

The Books of Jacob stands out from the sentimentalised fiction on the Holocaust because it treats the subject indirectly. It is not set in the camps, but in the European imagination that fuelled anti-Semitism and persecution. Yet it provides more insight into why and how the Holocaust occurred, and why persecution of Jews and ethnic or religious minorities occurs. It is historical fiction, but, like Tolstoy’s War and Peace, it reflects deeply on questions of history. The Books of Jacob counters the Gorgon effect. The hero who slayed the Gorgon used a metal shield to look indirectly at the monster as if through a mirror. In the same way, Tokarczuk offers us a mirror of horrors, and so frees our imagination to strike at the worst that we do in history.

Tokarczuk commented there is no Polish culture without Jewish culture. She criticises antisemitism and nationalism in Poland. Yet The Books of Jacob was a national best-seller for months. She freed many to counter the Gorgon effect. But it came at a cost. She received death threats. She was accused of being a self-hating Pole. Some accused her of really being Ukrainian. Many Poles believed they were history’s victims, and they could not bear being portrayed as the perpetrators of horrors. One Polish professor, Roma Sendyka, commented 

“Poles, tormented time and time again throughout history by episodes of radical turmoil, maintained their identity on the basis of such immaterial qualities as ethics, culture and religion. We will not part easily with the image we have of ourselves as righteous, honourable, upstanding.”

Do we observe a similar reaction today among many Jews, supporters of Israel and opponents of antisemitism when faced with the Gorgon of events in Gaza? People like us, people who have suffered as our ancestors have suffered, cannot do things like that. We are the victims. We are the righteous people. We have suffered unique evil. To accuse us of being perpetrators is to restore that evil to the world.

I sense such defensive responses from many authorities to the horrific events in Gaza and charges of genocide against Israel. You see it in Keir Starmer’s declaration that every child should learn about the Holocaust, and that “For the first time, studying the Holocaust will become a critical part of every student’s identity.” He might more simply recommend adults read Clendinnen’s book. You see it in the responses of Australian and international universities to student protests; when authorities claim they spring from antisemitism, not sadness and shame at being a bystander to atrocities. You see it in the shrill attacks of culture warriors like Jordan Peterson or Douglas Murray; who defend a cherished American idea of “Judaeo-Christian Civilization” as uniquely good and free from any taint of barbarism. They defend relentlessly their belief that they cannot be perpetrators of evil too. Their minds have turned to stone because of the Gorgon effect.

How not to turn your heart into stone

But you can release yourself from the Gorgon effect by reading with empathy. Read Inga Clendinnen. Read Olga Tokarczuk. Extend your empathy to perpetrator and victim, witness and silent bystander, even to all the hands that have signed all the papers. See no monsters. See only flawed humanity.

You can make a start on Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust by listening to my audiobook mini readings - Beginnings and Representing the Holocaust.

“Read-Along’ of Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob

And from January 2025 I will be doing a slow-read ‘read-along’ of Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob here on the Burning Archive substack. 

I will provide more details of the reading schedule in two weeks. In brief, you can read this masterful novel with me over 32 weeks - one chapter a week - and together we will explore its historical connections and imaginative vision. 

Our reading will be “a fantastic journey”, in the words of Olga Tokarczuk in the epigram of The Books of Jacob

“Aided by imagination, the which being the greatest natural gift of any person that the wise might have it for a record, that my compatriots reflect, laypersons gain some understanding, and melancholy souls obtain some slight enjoyment.”

If you want to listen to my audiobook minis of the best essays on history and join my 2025 ‘read-alongs’ of the best historical fiction and world history books, then become a paid subscriber now. 

It will offer you understanding, imagination and courage to make sense of this puzzling and sometimes paralysing world.

1. Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust, p. 7.

2. Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust, p. 205.

3. Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust, p. 6.

4. Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust, p. 8.