***
As for Bauman, I think he wants to have it both ways in Modernity and the Holocaust. It's true that he writes that 'one can be easily tempted...to proclaim the Holocaust a "paradigm of modern civilisation, its "natural", "normal" (who knows - perhaps also common) product, its "historical
tendency". In this version, the Holocaust would be promoted to the status of truth of modernity (rather than recognised as as a possibility that modernity contains)...' (pp5-6). Two pages later, though, he suggests that 'The truth is is that every "ingredient" of the Holocaust - all those many things that rendered it possible - was normal... in the sense of being fully in keeping with everything we know about our civilisation...' (p8).
He then quotes approvingly from Stillman and Pfaff's comparison of the Holocaust and the factory system:
'There is more than a wholly fortuitious connection between the applied technology of the mass production line and its vision of universal material abundance, and the applied technology of the concentration camp, with its vision of a profusion of death. We may wish to deny the connection, but Buchenwald was of our West as much as Detroit's River Rouge - we cannot deny Buchenwald as a casual aberration of a Western world essentially sane.'
He also quotes Richard Rubinstein to the effect that the Holocaust 'bears witness to the advance of civilisation.'
Bauman himself writes that 'In the Final Solution our society has disclosed to us it (sic) heretofore unsuspected capacity. Taught to respect and admire technical efficiency and good design, we cannot but admit that, in the praise of material progress which our civilisation has brought, we have sorely underestimated its true potential.' (p9)
Bauman, as I suggest in my piece, confuses modernity (or civilisation) and capitalism, and hence swings between seeing the Holocaust as a possibility of capitalism, and as inherent in civilisation.
Kenan
----- Original Message ----- From: Willy Greenfields <filthydirtyunwashed at yahoo.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2002 10:17 PM Subject: RE: spiked-politics | Article | All cultures are not equal
>
> >As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues:
> >'Every ingredient of the Holocaust... was normal...
>
> Kenan Malik's reading of Bauman is both poor and
> unfair. It's been several years since I read Modernity
> and the Holocaust, but I recall his argument was that
> the Holocaust was but one of many possibilities
> inherent in Modernity, and that the same 'rationality'
> that allows us to build progressive social formations
> was the same rationality that could order the
> deployment of resources necessary to perpetrate a
> holocaust - as well as condition the mindset that
> would allow people to accept it. The book was a
> broadside against linear history, and is still read as
> a cautionary against social complacency. It fairly
> outraged large parts of the Holocaust studies
> establishment.
>
> Bauman himself is a remarkable fellow. He was chased
> out of Poland by the Nazis, fought in a Polish Red
> Army brigade, and was bounced out of both the Army and
> Poland by anti-Semites. Yet he was never shaken of his
> fundamental convictions.
>