[lbo-talk] Ahmadinejad's letter

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Thu May 11 12:44:23 PDT 2006


As a child I was extremely confused about how my german surname associated me with the holocaust. Pictures of desolation and shrines to atrocity are not very enlightening about the processes that were employed to bring about the event. Popular history of the holocaust and the social attitudes that permitted it to happen are missing. Exposing the devices that were used to generate the social prejudices is necessary. Shirer's "Rise and Fall ..." is the nearest that I've come to any attempt in this direction... martin

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While it is indirect and based in philosophy, you could try Cassirer's Myth of State. It outlines a series of background developments in European intellectual history that were involved in the construction of the German state. The last section is the most relevant, The Myth of the Twentieth Century: Carlyle, From Hero worship to race worship, Hegel, The technique of the modern political myths.

It was written in closing years of WWII just before Cassirer died in 1945, so it is dated and a lot of the material has been covered elsewhere in a more developed fashion. But the central premise, is that the national socialists fabricated the state is a mythological creation, which means it was an abstract ideal besides also being a institutionalized bureacracy. As a mythological construct, it had an animous of its own at least in our world view and operated very much as if it were a giant creature---not at all unlike the monsters, fairies, and spirits of non-technological societies. As such a creature, it had enemies, friends, associates, familiars, a geneology, and other attributes that were entirely at home in the world of mythological systems.

What Cassirer failed to see was that all national states are such a mythological system and most fabricate whole swaths of their `identity' which if examined with a cold and jaundiced eye are completely incompatible with their factual histories.

The US, France, England, Germany, Italy, Russia, Israel, Iran, Iraq, China, and on and on. They all have a central myth of state, of who that `is' and how it should `behave' as if such an entity were an animated spirit....

(More lunch time thoughts....)

CG



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