I am pressing on through The Exception, by Christian Jungersen.

This is a terrific novel. It is set in a small Danish NGO of experts on war crimes. The team there, almost all women, start falling out when some threatening emails arrive. The ensuing suspicions and intrigue are described in a gripping way, the more so for being delivered in a deadpan, almost banal present tense.

As their anxieties edge upwards, their wider wellbeing away from the office edges downwards. Everything seems to shrink:

She had an orgasm this time, though a small one.

What is especially impressive is the sense conveyed by the author of rising hysteria and claustrophobia as their mutual misperceptions develop. Who would ever work in an office again after reading this?

Yet the point of the book is much deeper than just this fascinating, dark story. The author ingeniously works into the text a series of short essays written by the war crimes experts, which analyse different academic/scientific and moral theories of what makes hitherto normal people behave towards others with unspeakable cruelty once the context changes abruptly.

Upbringing? Compulsion? Fear of the Other? Group-think? Power-lust? Justifying the crimes by seeing the victims as sub- or even non-human? All these explanations and more are summarised in a most readable way.

And thus the stage is set. The group of decent, rather humourless but well-meaning women who have joined an organisation whose raison d’etre is exposing and denouncing massive war crimes themselves start behaving in a loathsome, menacing way towards one another. The descriptions of their own clueless self-awareness attempts to analyse what is happening in the office are alone worth the price of admission.

Which brings us effortlessly to Andrei Lugovoi MP, chief suspect in the UK murder investigation into the murder of Alexander Litvinenko:

He told the Spanish newspaper El Pais: "If someone has caused the Russian state serious damage, they should be exterminated.

"It’s my firm belief and the belief of any normal Russian. Do I think someone could have killed Litvinenko in the interests of the Russian state?

"If you’re talking about the interests of the Russian state, in the purest sense of the word, I myself would have given that order.

"I’m not talking about Litvinenko, but about any person who causes serious damage."

This is a vivid example of the totalitarian imagination in practice. The idea that alleged damage done to the ‘purest’ abstraction is a sufficient justification for ‘exterminating’ another human being.

The moral/philosophical question is, "how/where does such reasoning originate?".

The practical question is, "how can we continue to have normal relations with a European Parliament containing someone who talks like this?"

The political question is, "what happens to us (and to them) if we do continue to have normal relations with a European Parliament containing someone who talks like this?".

To help you grapple with these issues, read this magnificent analysis of Russia’s rehabilitation of Stalin:

… the memory of Stalinism in Russia is almost always the memory of victims. Victims, not crimes. As the memory of crimes it does not register, as there is no consensus on this …

… The state has produced no legal document which recognizes state terror as a crime. The two lines in the preamble to the 1991 law on the rehabilitation of victims is clearly insufficient.

There are no legal decisions that inspire any confidence – and there have not been any trials against participants of the Stalinist terror in the new Russia, not a single one…

… unlike the Nazis, who mainly killed "foreigners": Poles, Russians, and German Jews (who were not quite their "own" people), we mainly killed our own people, and our consciousness refuses to accept this fact.

In remembering the terror, we are incapable of assigning the main roles, incapable of putting the pronouns "we" and "they" in their places. This inability to assign evil is the main thing that prevents us from being able to embrace the memory of the terror properly.

This makes it far more traumatic. It is one of the main reasons why we push it to the edge of our historical memory…

… Today the memory of the war has been replaced by the memory of Victory. This change began in the mid-1960s. At the end of the 1960s, the memory of the terror was banned – for a whole 20 years! By the time this changed, there were virtually no soldiers left, and there was no one left to correct the collective stereotype with their personal recollections.

… To simplify drastically, this conflict of memories goes like this: if state terror was a crime, then who was the criminal? The state? Stalin as the head of state? But we won the war against Absolute Evil, and so we were not the subjects of a criminal regime, but a great country, the embodiment of everything good in the world.

It was under the rule of Stalin that we overcame Hitler. Victory means the Stalinist era, and the terror means the Stalinist era. It is impossible to reconcile these two images of the past, except by rejecting one of them, or at least making serious corrections to it.

And this is what happened – the memory of the terror receded. It has not disappeared completely, but it has been pushed to the periphery of people’s consciousness…

So there it is.

From a fictional account of the pettiness of evil lurking even in a modest NGO with the highest intentions, all the way through the smirking viciousness of a Russian MP and on to the greatest criminal cover-up in world history.

Is Evil really big, or really small?

Which is larger – the tiny spark of hope, or the surrounding impenetrable blackness?

Long posting.

Big Questions.

Buy the book.