Just Because "It's Always DARKEST Before The DAWN", Can One Justify Darkness?: A Close Read of Harry Mulisch's "The Assault", Page 38, By Your Fellow Comrade, Tessa "T' Dawg" Robinson

   
     "'In the poem I wanted to compare love to the kind of light you sometimes see clinging to trees right after a sunset: the magical sort of light. That's the kind of light people have inside them when they're in love with someone. Hate is the darkness, that's no good. And yet we've got to hate Fascists, and that's considered perfectly all right. How is that possible? It's because we hate them in the name of the light, I guess, whereas they hate only in the name of darkness. We hate hate itself, and for this reason our hate is better than theirs.
     'But that's why it's more difficult for us. For them everything is very simple, but for us it's more complicated. We've got to become a little bit like them in order to fight them-- so we become a little bit unlike ourselves.'" (Mulisch 38)

     At this point in the novel, the protagonist, Anton, and the women in which he is speaking, have their views on the situation conveyed, due to the conversation they are having. In this particular passage, the woman is debating why it is acceptable for a good person to do something not-so-good. It is very difficult to get to the conclusion, but she decides that in order to "beat" the Nazis, one must become a little bit more like them. The author juxtaposes "lightness" and "darkness" at first, to represent the Underground as the "light", and the Nazis as the "dark", and how they are two complete opposites. Yet, in order to defend themselves, the Jews had to use darkness to assert their light, in which the author tries to almost compare "darkness" and "light". Mulisch is using the woman to show that the Jews weren't just oppressed, and they did assert themselves; even in the "dark" acts they may have committed, it was all to get at least a glimpse of hope during this horrific time. It seems preposterous to nearly compare the Jews to the Nazis during the period of the Holocaust, yet from a Nazi standpoint, they hated the Jews as much as the Jews hated the Nazis. Today in society, we have justified the Jews "hate" for the Nazis, since they initiated the cruelty. In the end,  the offensive is always blamed, not the defensive.