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Oblivion or Disclosure, What Naming Informers Can and Cannot Heal
In Brief
- Informing thrives where governments pay for accusations and protect the accuser's anonymity, and its deepest damage falls on trust among neighbors, not only on the people denounced.
- Punishing informers can serve the regime that used them: the Roman historian Cassius Dio reports that the emperor Domitian destroyed his own rewarded informers so that they would appear solely responsible for crimes he had urged.
- Forgetting is never complete: memory pursues those who did evil and weighs on those who suffered it, and a society that forgets the laws that keep it straight loses the means to name the wrong.
- Opening an informer regime's files does not by itself deliver the truth, since they record accusations no one ever tested; disclosure repairs only when it examines institutions and patterns of abuse and gives every person named a hearing.
Main authors
In the prisons of revolutionary France, the worst of it was not knowing. Charlotte Biggs, who lived in France from 1792 to 1795, records a detention without a face: the denunciation was secret, and the prisoners could learn neither their crime nor their accusers [1]. They could not answer a charge they had never heard, nor challenge a witness who stayed hidden and was “paid perhaps for his information.” A note gives the tariff—fifty to a hundred livres per accusation. Everything that makes a regime of informers durable is in these lines: secrecy, payment, the impossibility of defense. So is everything that makes its aftermath so hard. When such a regime falls, it leaves behind neighbors who denounced and neighbors who were denounced, and the knowledge of who did what stays locked in the very secrecy that made the system work.
Two answers have long faced each other. One is oblivion: close the book and let former enemies live side by side again. The other is disclosure: open the record, name the informers, let the victims know. The oldest exit from tyranny in these texts is silent on the question. An account of Athens freed from its “domestic tyrants” dwells on relief—the city and Attica regained, a renewed democracy, foreign enemies bound by treaty—and on the power that was lost, but the passage says nothing of any reckoning [2]. Read together, though, the texts on informing suggest that the choice is badly framed. Naming informers can repair something only if it also judges the machine that recruited and paid them. A disclosure that stops at the names repeats the informer's own gesture—an accusation without a hearing—and lets the system go free.
A den of wild beasts, how governments make informers
Informing is an institution before it is a vice. It answers a need of power, and its scale measures how far a government distrusts its people. Asking why citizens should be made to believe themselves watched, Johann Gottlieb Fichte finds two motives: to make them betray their own thoughts about the government, or to make them betray what they know of other people's secret acts [3]. The first, he argues, is needed only where government and citizens live “in perpetual war,” the citizens unjustly oppressed and seeking to regain their freedom by every trick of war. The second is needed only where the police are not watchful enough. The distinction matters. In this account, a network that turns citizens into their own betrayers is not ordinary policing but the symptom of a state at war with its subjects.
Its deepest damage falls on trust between neighbors rather than on any single victim. John Moore, a traveller in Italy, judged that one government's encouragement of anonymous accusers and secret informations did far more harm than good [4]. Such practices, he wrote, destroy mutual confidence, breed suspicion among neighbors, and make all ranks fearful while encouraging them to be malicious. His remedy is telling: the law should protect the man who accuses another openly and boldly. A wartime administrative note preserved in the records of the Nuremberg military tribunals reaches the same diagnosis from inside the machine [5]. Its author accepts anonymity where direct state security is at stake, but not for reports on public opinion. There, he warns, people will be trained to snoop, unjustified denunciations will follow, and an atmosphere of mistrust will settle.
The system also corrupts the institutions that would one day have to judge it. Robert Green Ingersoll, attacking what he calls the informer system, says it “makes a court a den of wild beasts” [6]. Under its brood come spies to watch witnesses, counsel and jurymen, until a juror cannot leave his house without the shadow of the spy falling on his doorstep. Government, he insists, exists to protect its citizens, not to spread nets. The image reaches beyond a protest against one abuse. Where accusation has become a trade, the courtroom itself is part of the net, and a society leaving such a regime cannot assume that its courts were untouched by it.
Yet the word informer covers figures that have little in common. Jonathan Swift grants that everyone is naturally inclined to think ill of an informer, then objects that an honest man may bear the name [7]. Whoever knows of a great evil threatening his prince, his country or his neighbor, he writes, is bound in conscience to reveal it. An American court, much later, treated the informer as a vital part of society's defenses and made the protection of his identity a rule [8]. This is the first difficulty of any list of names. It sets the paid accuser of the revolutionary prisons beside the witness of conscience, and whoever reads the list cannot tell them apart.
Domitian's lesson, or the disposable informer
Rome had already learned that informing could be graded. The historian Samuel Dill takes his reader into the secret tribunal on the Palatine, where Domitian, after his devotions to Athena, sits as a despot as timid as he is brutally truculent [9]. Here, Dill writes, in spite of all scepticism about Philostratus, is the heart of the Terror. Beside such base espionage, even the trade of the delator, the accuser by profession, becomes almost respectable. Delation itself, he notes, had a history too long to trace. The Roman informer was not an accident of one reign. He was a recognized figure, with a trade, a rank in disgrace, and a master.
The master, in turn, knew how to use his informers twice. According to Cassius Dio, those who served Domitian received money, honors and offices all at once, yet lived in no greater honor or security than anyone else [10]. The very offenses the emperor had urged them to commit commonly became pretexts for their destruction. His aim, Dio explains, was to make the actual perpetrators appear “solely responsible.” The scapegoat was built into the machine. Destroying the informer was not a break with tyranny but one of its instruments, a way for the power that commissioned the crime to wash its hands of it.
This is the risk of any settling of accounts that stops at the executants. The reflex to expel the informer is old and popular. In George Smith's Gipsy Life, a voice calls for two informers to be thrashed and driven out of the community, branding them cut-throats and murderers whose misdeeds will bring everyone to grief [11]. Purge can also be a political program. Writing in 1945 in defense of the Communists, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn presents their demand that traitors be executed or imprisoned as a demand the liberated peoples cheer [12]. Her targets, however, are traitors rather than informers: the puppet rulers Quisling, Pétain and Laval, but also countless others, while the officials and rich families who fled are simply no longer wanted. A purge that reaches the summit judges a system; one that begins and ends with the small denouncers repeats Domitian's trick.
For those who were accused, repair has taken slower forms: the clearing of a name and the verdict of history. The Younger Pliny describes a man accused under Vespasian by two private individuals, his case referred to the Senate [13]. He stayed on tenterhooks for a long time before he was acquitted and his character cleared, after a career that ran from friendship with Domitian to banishment by him and recall by Nerva. A Masonic manual, Albert Pike's, appoints another tribunal for the same age. Citing Tacitus and Juvenal, who held no office, it asks History and Satire to punish the pretender as they crucify the despot, for the revenges of the intellect are “terrible and just” [14]. Both remedies aim where Domitian did not: at the honor of the victim and at the memory of the master.
Lethe on trial, from Euripides to Nietzsche
The case for oblivion is strongest at the scale of a single soul. For the mystic John of the Cross, even if forgetfulness and emptiness of memory brought no other benefit than freedom from troubles and storms, it would be a great gain, since such disturbances never bring peace and usually make things worse [15]. A novel of 1880, Edward Bellamy's Dr. Heidenhoff's Process, pushes the idea further. In its argument, the memory of past sins is what demoralizes, through weakness and loss of self-respect, so that a bad act stripped of memory would leave its author no worse than before [16]. Transposed to a society, the reasoning changes meaning. It becomes the informer's best plea, since it promises him a clean slate without asking what his act did to anyone else.
Against this, an ancient voice reproduced by George Saintsbury answers Euripides directly. It cites the line in which the poet hails a “blessed forgetfulness of woes,” then rejects it: Lethe helps little or nothing and hurts the best and greatest things of life [17]. Ingratitude, the most hateful of sins, thrives where memory fails. Above all, men who forget the laws and doctrines that keep them straight become poor creatures, bad and shameless. Memory here is not a private burden but a civic bond. What a society forgets is not only the wrong that was done, but the rule that named it a wrong.
Decreed oblivion is, in any case, a postponement. The moralist Newell Dwight Hillis writes that no sin is ever buried, except as a murderer buries his victim under thin sand: let him pass that way, and a skeleton arm starts up and points at him [18]. William Ware's novel of Rome in the third century shows the other side of the image [19]. Memory there is a Nemesis that pursues those who have done evil, yet the speaker turns at once to friends who have not done evil but suffered it, and who struggle in vain. No amnesty commands that second memory. It can silence the courts; it cannot silence those who were denounced.
Nietzsche knows that memory can be made to forget. In one aphorism he observes that, after delicate deeds—actions of love and of an extravagant magnanimity—some people obscure and abuse their own memory to take revenge on the only witness to their secret, because “shame is inventive” [20]. Elsewhere he defends a critical history in the service of life: man must have the strength to break up the past, bring it to the bar of judgment, interrogate it remorselessly and condemn it [21]. But he adds at once that it is not justice that sits in judgment here. The warning cuts both ways. A society may need to condemn its past in order to live, and still mistake that vital condemnation for justice.
Half the truth, or the trouble with lists
The case for disclosure rests on a sound suspicion: those who resist publication usually have something to protect. Writing in 1861 in The Cotton Kingdom, Frederick Law Olmsted saw the humane part of his compatriots forever calling for facts, publishing and discussing the facts of their own country's evil [22]. Only those whose selfish interest seemed served by negligence, he wrote, resisted investigation and publication. Applied to a fallen regime of informers, the principle is strong. A sealed archive shelters the denouncers and those who ran them, and leaves the victims to guess who betrayed them.
But the archive of an informer regime is the informers' own work. Felix Frankfurter, dissenting in an American case, warned that secret evidence offers a cloak to the malevolent, the misinformed, the meddlesome and the corrupt, who play the informer undetected and uncorrected [23]. Those uncorrected voices are precisely what such files contain. To open them wholesale is to publish accusations that were never tested, now carrying the authority of an official document. In his history of Bismarck's Germany, James Wycliffe Headlam adds a second caution about illicit disclosures of confidential papers [24]. Prompted by private revenge or public ambition, they reveal only “half the truth,” and a portion of the truth often misleads more than complete ignorance.
Naming without a hearing thus reproduces the method it condemns. In a concurring opinion, William O. Douglas held that once secret charges are used to destroy a man's reputation, they must face the test of due process, and that faceless informers are wholly at war with it [25]. To relax that standard, he wrote, is to “ape the tactics of those whom we despise.” A published list of informers does exactly this: it ruins reputations on the strength of documents the named cannot question. Motives raise a further difficulty. In a different controversy, over slavery and abolitionism, Catharine Esther Beecher asked who could make himself the Searcher of Hearts and turn the tangle of another man's motives into the basis of public reward and censure [26]. Fear, greed, conviction: a name on a list cannot say which, and the pillory does not ask.
The texts point instead toward a judgment of the system. A United Nations panel describes truth commissions as official, temporary, non-judicial bodies that investigate a pattern of abuses committed over a number of years [27]. Their object is the pattern, not the individual name. Long before, Harriet Martineau had made the case in method: a nation's institutions and records reveal more of its morals in a day than conversation with individuals in a year [28]. For what belongs to persons, Horace B. Day's The Opium Habit offers a discreet rule. Never publish the secret history of anyone with living connections; place such papers in the hands of the nearest relations, and let them weigh what is owed to the public [29]. Opened in this way, the file goes first to those it concerns, and the institution goes before the public.
When a regime that ran on secret denunciation collapses, the choice seems to lie between forgetting and naming. The old texts complicate both. Informing appears in them as an institution—accusations paid by the piece, anonymous reports, spies at the courthouse door—whose real damage is to trust among neighbors. The Roman emperor Domitian already showed that destroying informers can serve the power that used them, letting it pin its own crimes on its instruments. Forgetting, for its part, is never complete: memory pursues those who did evil and weighs on those who suffered it. And secret files hold accusations no one corrected, while disclosures prompted by revenge or ambition deliver only half the truth.
Disclosure heals, then, only when it takes the form of a trial of the system: an inquiry into patterns and institutions, papers returned first to those they concern, a hearing for every person named. Otherwise it borrows the informer's oldest tool, the accusation no one can answer. A society does not recover from its informers by finding new names to denounce. It recovers when it refuses the secret accusation—its own included.
