Instead of a post about Anders Breivik

If you tuned in to talkback radio late the other night you may have caught a caller or two denouncing Anders Breivik and demanding his painful execution, and then seguing effortlessly into similarly vituperative attacks on the 'illegal immigrants' and 'Muslimists' who are supposedly besieging New Zealand.

I don't mean to sneer at the sort of hypocrisy such a juxtaposition of subjects represents: I feel it in myself, whenever I try to issue a ringing denunciation of the evils of the world.

I wrote this poem a couple of years ago, after reading an account of the ways in which Parisian intellectuals adjusted to the occupation of their city by the Nazis in the middle of 1940 and realising how cowardly I would also have been when threatened with a visit from the Gestapo and deportation. I don't think we're any less adept at accommodating evil today than we were in 1940.

The Barbarians

Barbarism can never triumph over
civilisation: barbarians are inferior
to civilised men and women.
The conquerors cannot be barbarians, then,
despite their high fires of books
and the wire round the transit camps.
We must be the barbarians.

It is true that we resemble
civilised men and women,
relaxing on the sidewalk
of a potholed street,
warming our spare hands
on chipped cups of tea,
enjoying our lunchbreak,
enjoying the break in the rain,
sharing our rations of cigarettes,
our rations of gossip.

None of us mentions
the day the guns grew hoarse,
the day the whole town
had to stand to attention,
the day Olaf forgot to close his shop,
refused to stand outside, on the dirty kerb,
while the conquerors called their roll -
the day that Olaf got dragged
out of his bakery,
away from his half-kneaded sculptures,
the loaves and croissants
arranged on steel trays -
the day Olaf's knees hit the kerb together,
and the fists went
into his mouth
like bread.

Each of us remembers Olaf
in a different way.
One of us scribbles poems -
witty satires, and tubthumping
polemics - and publishes them
in his drawer.

One of us keeps his grandfather's pistol
in a shoebox,
under the bed
in the spare room
upstairs.

One of us turns tadpoles
into frogs, in the bathtub
she is forbidden to fill
with tapwater.

One of us drafts orders
for new consignments
of boots.

One of us supervises
a thesis
on Nietzsche.

One of us stares out of his study window
for days, watches his hedgerow growing
higher.

One of us is coopted
onto a textbook committee.

We lean forward in our chairs
and watch the civilised men
marching past, in triple file,
on their way back to barracks
or the city wall.
They stop.
They turn towards us.
Each of them stares straight ahead
like a man in the dock
about to be sentenced
or a judge staring down
a familiar defendant.

One of us smiles slowly
and begins to wave,
then looks around him
and stands up
with the rest of the table,
with the rest of the street.
My arm extends itself,
stiffens into a salute.

The soldiers turn
and march away,
and I sit down quickly,
thinking of Olaf
and his half-baked bread.