Ellipsis

Difficulties in coming to terms with a violently racist past are not confined to the nation that spawned Cecil Rhodes and Winston Churchill. The French publisher Gallimard has cancelled its proposed reissue of Céline's anti-semitic pamphlets, which in the words of one objector "influenced a whole generation of collaborationists who sent French Jews to their deaths." Just how many people got through Bagatelles pour un massacre, L'École des cadavres and Les Beaux Draps is uncertain, but it seems most unlikely that an entire generation was influenced. The essence of racism lies in optimism and romanticism: human greatness distilled in the master race, which will achieve its full potential once the vermin have been cleared away. Céline had his faults, but optimism was never one of them; and although his anti-semitism was genuine enough he never showed the least interest in making it respectable. The idea that his rants might somehow be sanctified by the mere act of publication is a strange one: by the same brilliant logic a bowdlerised Céline would be less holy than the uncensored text, and his publishable writings have been whitewashed by leaving the controversial parts just as he wrote them.