> Nathan Newman wrote:
> >The Germans suffered serious injustice following World War I; so should
be
> >just "explain" the Holocaust as a misguided overreaction to justified
> >grievances?
>
> Of course not, but it's a start, isn't it? Otherwise you're in Elie
> Wiesel territory - to analyze is to defame the memory of the dead -
> or Goldhagen territory - some mysterious characteristic of Germans.
> Or do you agree with them?
My position on the Holocaust? First, that there is evil and hatred in all our hearts that despair may unleash but never excuses. The turning to hatred as a substitute for real resistance to oppression is not a realm of justification but of the dark areas of the soul. And yes, I use the metaphors of religion for the very precision of social science and historicism are usually used to blot out the essentially human, good and bad, of contingent responsible actions for which we all should be held accountable.
But the Germans did as a society resist Hitler, if ultimately ineffectually. They voted overwhelmingly against him in the vote for President and then, as it became clear what Nazi policy would likely be, the vote total of the Nazis fell from previous highs in the last free parliamentary election. The conservatives stupidly took that as a sign that they could control Hitler if they made him Chancellor, but the fact that Hitler had to burn the Reichstag, jail every opponent, and repress every dissident view shows that even he did not trust the free actions of the German people to support his broad goals.
Once Histler was in power, hatred and cravenness did encourage massive collaboration with the evil of the regime, but while all those who did collaborate deserve the Goldhagen scorn, that scorn would likely fall on large parts of any population in the same situation, for such weakness is prevalent in us all. But the architects of the Holocaust, like those in control in any act of evil, deserve far worse than scorn-- to talk about any grievance, any "cause" in their actions is to dignify the worst evil of our natures, the hatred and violence.
It was an interesting rhetorical slight of hand to move from my comparison of the Taliban, who have oppressed their own people far more than anyone else, and the architects of the Holocaust to make my comments a blood libel against the Germans. No one is arguing for the evil of the Afghanis in general - tough son-of-a-bitches though they are - but of the Taliban leadership that was foisted on them partly with US support.
But to "analyze" the actions of the architects of evil acts, to implicitly search for the sins of the victims of evil, is to defame the dead and cheapen the struggles of those who fight oppression without caving into their worst impulses of hatred and inhumanity.
-- Nathan Newman