Finkelstein's background

[Brad De Long]

>Hello, all, back from holiday...
>
>But I don't think that is what F really means. I think what he means 
>is to attack a varient of cheap relativism: The Germans have 
>different values, so we cannot judge them. Now Goldhagen clearly 
>does judge them: the Germans up till the fall of Nazism are all 
>exterminist Jew-hating psychos, bad people. however, F's worry is 
>that we cannot, on G's theory, hold individual Germans morally 
>responsible for specific crimes or omissions...

But this variant of cheap relativism is not held by G, whose view is 
that Nazi-era Germans were very different from us *and* *they* *were* 
*bad*--*bad* *in* *every* *possible* *way*.

So it seems to me to be a mistake for F to say: "G is wrong because 
if you attach this variant of cheap relativism to his intellectual 
apparatus it blows up..."

Brad DeLong