Life & Wisdom Quote by James Laughlin

Laughlin’s line slices into one of the most combustible postwar arguments: who, exactly, owns an atrocity. Written in the cool, qualifying cadence of someone used to literary nuance, it pushes back against collective guilt as a blunt instrument. “It’s all well and good” is doing quiet rhetorical work here, signaling that the speaker recognizes the moral satisfaction of sweeping blame while preparing to withdraw consent from it. The sentence doesn’t deny the camps; it disputes the moral accounting.

The intent is partly humane, partly self-protective. By narrowing culpability to “a small group of fiends,” Laughlin tries to preserve a distinction between perpetrators and a broader population that may have been complicit in murkier ways: acquiescence, careerism, fear, indifference. The subtext is that mass condemnation can become its own kind of laziness, a way for outsiders to feel righteous without tracking how ordinary institutions, neighbors, and bureaucracies enable “fiends” to operate at scale.

But the phrasing also reveals the risk of this move. “Fiends” mythologizes perpetrators as monsters, not men, which can actually soften the indictment. Monsters are anomalies; bureaucrats with signatures and train schedules are systems. Laughlin’s poet’s instinct is to isolate evil in vivid figures, yet the Holocaust’s terror is its administrative normality: the way cruelty was made routine, legible, and broadly serviced.

Context matters: Laughlin, an American poet and publisher shaped by mid-century Europe, is speaking from the postwar tension between reconciliation and remembrance. His sentence is an argument against permanent ethnic indictment, but it also inadvertently tests how easily “not all” can become “not us,” and how quickly moral responsibility shrinks when it’s framed as someone else’s pathology rather than a society’s choices.