The notion of genocide emerged from an understandable sense that Nazi crimes were somehow unlike the crimes of the past and must never be repeated. But it remains too closely tied to those crimes, and to a particular explanation of them, to be of any use in today's world...
Michael Steinberg
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I've spent a far amount time reading German history (and Zionist history) and a long list of writers and philosophers going back to Spinoza trying to figure out how Germany came to ruin. While the Germany of the 1930s was a unique series of events it was by no means unprecedented. The deepest conceptual problem and mistake in my view is to see those events as utterly unique and completely irrelevant to the current world. The key elements can be reduced to a series of identity crisis on a mass scale among both German Jews, as Jews, and Germans as Germans.
For various historical reasons Germany did not undergo unification as a national state in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. The Treaty of Vienna in 1812 divided up European state influence between the English, Austro-Hungarian, and the Russians, holding a gun to the head of the French, sign or else, and leaving central Europe and the Balkans a mess.
Through the 19thC particularly in philosophy and literature the Germans became obsessed with German identity as a national ideal, as a potential state, as a constant theme in literature and philosophy, and most of all as a language---finally as a pseudo race defined in various ways in archology, anthropology and the social sciences.
Final unification wasn't achieve until Wilhelm II appointed Bismarck chancellor and brought all the large and small states together under Prussian rule in 1871(?). Among the consequences was the so-called emancipation of the Jews. In fact it was a de facto emancipation since the Jewish provisions retained by various states were left over from the Napoleonic Code, the Code Civil--a reactionary legal code written under Napoleon to assuage the Pope (so he could be married and crowned emperor) and it explicitly contained anti-Semitic provision to re-install the Catholic clergy after the radical secularization under the Reign of Terror (Jews were French citizens under the Terror). Under German unification, a national legal code was enacted that simply dropped the various Jewish provisions of the Code Civil on taxes, business licenses, employment, travel, ownership of land and commercial enterprises. The society moved from overt legal discrimination and second class citizenship to de facto discrimination as custom rather than law.
After twenty years of de facto discrimination and no republican reforms on the horizon various Jewish leaders decided that Enlightenment equality and assimilation (going back to Spinoza) was a farce and founded the Zionist movement under Herzl. Enlightenment assimilation was equivalent to the disappearance of Judaism, Jews, and Jewish identity as a people. Simultaneously with the early Zionists were also a swath of German identity movements, mostly deriving from German Romanticism and various other reactions to what was seen as the French Enlightenment. These followed back to nature, national boy scouts or the Wandervogal movements and so forth teaching German poetry, literature, theories of nature and so forth (Jews were explicitly excluded). These groups were not at all unlike the US Boy Scouts who were created in the US at about the same, stressing patriotism, protestantism, and that all American clean shit. The Zionists founded similar youth groups for adolescents and taught Hebrew, some read the Torah others Marx, and stressed Jewish heritage...
Are we getting the picture yet?
The concept of a people, its language, its culture, its history, in short its identity, its Being as such, is the prerequisite to founding a nation and it was no accident that what became the national socialist horror was intimately link to these identity movements that proceeded the 1930s by half a century. It is also no accident that Israel is stuck with the same legacy, precisely because it was founded as only a Jewish state, for only one people. It can not accommodate the Arabs and Palestinians (secular, Christian or Muslim) exactly because Israel's own national identity depends on being only for Jews.
>From Thomas Mann to Martin Heidegger, from Hannah Arendt to Leo
Strauss, you can read the same message over and over. These writers
were obsessed with defining a people, creating their voice---German or
German Jew, or finally only German and only Jew.
When Weimar arrived in the wake of WWI German capitulation, its parliament had more than a dozen political parties and was always desperate to form a coalition government out of the morass of desperate voices. German Jews voted consistently for SPD, social democrats and German Jewish immigration to Palestine was very low--the vast majority voted for assimilation, which Weimar made possible through systematically removing various customary discriminatory practices, particularly in civil service jobs---most notably in the university system. By custom Jews had been excluded from academic depts that privileged German identity, especially language, philosophy, history, the humanities and to a lesser degree the social sciences. As a consequence from the 1870s through the 1920s the best Jewish students mostly enrolled in the hard sciences, mathematics, physics, chemistry etc. That is why the US universities inherited German mathematics, physics and chemistry---because most of the stars were Jewish and were removed from their academic and professional posts in 1933.
Okay, dot, dot, dot. We are in the middle of a global level morass of nations forming themselves into some unitary national system from India and China to Africa, to Latin America, and the Muslim world stretching from Morocco to Indonesia. They are all grabbling with their elites, their traditional power structures, their minorities, their languages, histories, identities as a people, as a unique voice in world history. They all have to come to terms with the impossibility of creating a homogeneous and clearly defined union. Borders are arbitrary, language distributions are arbitrary, sub-national groups, clans, religious views, traditional cultures (almost erased by colonialism and modernity) and their histories---all arbitrary.
Am I getting through? We are all in Weimar, over and over and over, teetering back and forth.
The US can not get over the fact that it is not Yankee America, it isn't the South, or the West, or Anglo or White, or European or Christian. It can not be a people. It has no national identity, as the millions of mostly Mexican Americans demonstrated for the last two months. They are here and they decided they were members of the United States. What are we going to do about it? Make them all criminals, or build a fence. Oh, that works...
And as we have seen in the last decade, sooner or later somebody comes up with the bright idea to kill off the people who don't fit whatever racial, ethnic, religious, linguistic, or cultural parameters were defined by the national power elites.
Hell, we are in the middle of Iraqi disintegration over exactly this issue and the clueless US government and locally anointed death squads are trying to `build' Iraq by killing as many people as possible.
If we don't see the need for international legal provisions on what is permissible to build a national state and what isn't permissible, then I guess... I don't know. It's pretty simple stuff. It is not permissible to engage in mass killings to build a national state. Such activities are crimes against humanity. For better or worse Germany in the l930-40s is the historical example. The US through most of the 19thC is another example with slavery, the Civil war, and the Indian wars as the arguments. Almost all other countries can cite their own examples.
National states can not achieve their ideal as an organic unity. The world, histories, and the vagaries of people are just too complexly interwoven to form such ideological purities as national identities.
We have to go to plan B: arbitrarily formed national entities with representative governments where political, economic, social, religious, cultural, and ethnic minority issues and ideological battles can be hashed out in legislatures and laws, with the emphasis on tolerance and equality.
In the ultimate reduction then we have plan A, an endless series of genocides each promising a more pure national state, or plan B, we give up on the purity angle and deal with the gritty mess of human existence as it is.
My personal view is that plan A is un-survivable.
CG