spiked-politics | Article | All cultures are not equal

Willy Greenfields filthydirtyunwashed at yahoo.com
Wed May 29 13:17:05 PDT 2002



>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.

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