[lbo-talk] Genocide, Holocaust ("from below"/Callinicos)

Grant Lee grantlee at iinet.net.au
Fri Jun 6 19:07:11 PDT 2003


Hi Yoshie,


> If the Holocaust, too, was a "cumulative spiral of radicalization," a
> "piecemeal process driven to a large extent, 'from below,' by
> initiatives from rival power-centres within the highly fragmented
> Nazi bureaucracy," perhaps it's time to revise the common sense
> understanding of the term genocide.

Perhaps it is. However, I think Callinicos has underestimated the "efficiency" of the Holocaust. It's simply not possible to kill millions of quite specific individuals in the space of a few years without some kind of centralisation. Edwin's Black's _IBM and the Holocaust_ has its faults, but his core theses have not been challenged:

"The Nazi goal of disenfranchising, impoverishing, enslaving, and, finally, eliminating the Jews required the processing of information at every stage. Hitler was obsessed with census after census in Germany, and later in conquered territories. Jews could not be persecuted unless they could be identified, especially since many assimilated Jews no longer practiced the religion of their forefathers. As early as 1933, IBM's German subsidiary, Dehomag, contracted with the Hitler regime to conduct a census of Prussia, Germany's largest state. Jews could not escape the whirring "clickety-clack" of IBM's punch cards, cards that recorded and collated names from one generation to the next, address changes from one town to another, baptisms and religious conversions, and all manner of personal data. Hollerith cards inventoried slave labor resources to assure their most efficient deployment. Box cars and locomotives, scheduled through IBM technology, transported millions to their final destination." http://cla.uconn.edu/reviews/IBM.html

"The Holocaust, Black stipulates, would have occurred with or without the Hollerith tabulating machines and punch cards IBM/Dehomag leased to the Nazis. But he raises the important if ultimately unanswerable question of whether Hitler's destruction of the Jews would have happened as rapidly and claimed as many victims without the harvest of deadly information recorded by the Hollerith machines, on IBM punch cards, by IBM/Dehomag employees working for the Nazi death bureaucracy.

On the efficiency question, he provocatively contrasts Holland and France. The Nazis ordered censuses in both countries soon after they were occupied. In Holland, a country with "a well-entrenched Hollerith infrastructure," out of "an estimated 140,000 Dutch Jews, more than 107,000 were deported, and of those 102,000 were murdered-a death ratio of approximately 73 percent." In France, where the "punch card infrastructure was in complete disarray," of the estimated 300,000 to 350,000 Jews in both German-occupied and Vichy zones, 85,000 were deported, of whom around 3,000 survived. "The death ratio for France was approximately 25 percent." http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/polipro/pp2001-04-04.htm


> It's important to recognize that primitive accumulation entailed mass
> murders and mass deaths. It's not so important whether or not you
> call them genocides.

I couldn't agree more. Minority races/cultures/religions/etc are easy targets --- but not the only ones -- for both primitive accumulation and/or unfree labour.



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list