>Good God!
>
>Whenever I've talked to or read anything by Danny Goldhagen, he has been
>very clear to distinguish his position--that practically any ordinary
>German would have enthusiastically carried out the genocide--from the
>position that ordinary Germans were *guilty* of the genocide and deserved
>to be killed.
>
>Goldhagen has been quite clear that responsibility attaches only to those
>who did the deeds--not to those who didn't do the deeds but only (probably)
>would have had they been put in the perpetrators' position.
>
>So why smear the guy? Goldhagen has a much stronger sense of how agency and
>responsibility work than Tom Friedman.
Me smear DJ Goldhagen? I may be quilty of a piling on penalty, but certainly the thesis (and technique of discourse) of his book has been already much more savagely denounced by his own peers.
In any event, I thought Goldhagen's brand of all-embracing cultural mega-history went of date with Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee. But then I was trained on the works of Foucault, Le Roi Ladurie and Keith Thomas, so admittedly my appraisal is deeply biased (although, I think, quite correct).
JSC
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