Carrol
I'm overposted but I could not let this pass.
JKSCHW at aol.com wrote:
> Brad hits the fundamental problem with G on the head here, lies, sloppiness, awful prose, and other defects aside.
>
> * * *
>
> My view has been that Goldhagen's biggest flaw is his widening of the
> gap between the Nazi regime and other regimes. It's my view that if
> authority figures tell adolescent males with guns to shoot people,
> they shoot people--that you don't need a complicated and unique
> German *sonderweg* to explain this: it happens not just with Germans
> and Jews but with Americans and Vietnamese peasants, Communist cadres
> and kulaks, NKVD agents and old Bolsheviks or "wreckers," Hutus and
> Tutsis, Khmer Rouge and Cambodians who wear eyeglasses, and Yale
> students who think they control the magnitude of an electric shock
> administered to another human being.
>
> Goldhagen's view of Nazi Germany as somehow special--rather than the
> most extreme example of a more general 20th century phenomenon of
> large scale genocide--seems to me to be the biggest flaw in _Hitler's
> Willing Executioners_, and the root of most of what is wrong with the
> book.
>
> Brad DeLong
> >>