Even leaving the Holocaust and its 12 million victims (including the Red Army POWs, Communists, homosexuals, Roma, _and_ Jews), who on earth would say that WWII with its remaining, say 40 million dead, was "all for the best"? Also conisdering that "increasing the rate of technology advance" led to the creation and use of atomic weapons? This is bizarre. It would be cruel and insensitive to say to a Jew, "the destruction of European Jewry is an insignificant footnote;" worse to say "it was justified by its unintended consequences" -- just as it would be insulting to say to a native American similar things. Or to assert them inother contexts. Because, after all, the destruction of the Native Americans (far more certainly that WWII) did lead to the unification and modernizing of the US and increase in the rate of technological progress. Do you think that makes, e.g., Wounded Knee or the Trail of Tears justified? I don't think so.
The Nazi atrocities were really
> only unique
> in their technological application.
I'm not an advocate of the theory that the Holocaust of the Jews was uniquely evil, not comparable to any other evil act, etc. But first, please note that a great lot of the killing -- maybe half of it -- was not done in the killing factories with any specially advanced or unique technology but by old fashioned methods of mass shooting by the Einsatzgruppen in the invasion of Russia. The Red Army POWs (3 million of them) were simply left to starve or worked to death as slave labor. (Stalin had most the survivors shipped offto the gulag, btw.) It is really the scale of the Holocaust (including all the victims, Jews and others) that in part makes it unique as well as the application of mass production -- destruction? -- techniques to many millions of deaths, also the wierd irrationality of the thing -- the killing machine was kept running while Germany was on the ropes, essential war resources like trains were devoted to its ends taht could have been used to, for example, attain the end of the saner Nazis of a seperate peace with the West by holding off the Russians; valuable slave labor simnply wasted.
Steinberg is
> wrong when he writes:
> "And it was part of the special horror of the
> Holocaust that everything about its victims but the
> bare datum
> of their Jewishness was obliterated before the
> actual living Jews, personal lives and family
> histories
> stripped away with their clothing, were obliterated
> themselves."
This is demonstrably wrong. THe Nazis kept scrupulous records of all the victims of the camps. Theyw ere German, after all, bureaucratic and pendantic to a fault. At the Jewish Burial Societ in Prague I saw an exhibit of Children's art from Theriesenstadt (their model camp,a tansit poiunt to Auschwitz for many W. European Jews) with the names, birthplaces, birthdates and death dates of the artists: Francois Rubel, b. Lyon 1930, d. Auschwitz, 1943, and so forth. All from German records. In a synagogue nearby there is inscribed on the wall the names of the Jews "transported" from Prague -- where do you think they got those names? German records. I've seen exemplars of the cards the Germans used to record the data on their victims, processed on IBM machines, btw, there's a book on IBM's complicity in the Holocaust; they took a lot more data than that. Very Teutonic.
The victims of the Einsatzgruppen were another story,
they were simply erased, shot and dumped in mass
graves, but these also included Communists (see the
"Komissar Befehl" or Commissar Order) and others in
Russia as well, even if the Jews were the main victims
there.
>
>
> > Another reason is that a combination of moralism
> and capitalism tends
> > to have us believe that intentional wrongs are
> more of a problem than
> > unintentional wrongs. A case can be made that,
> morally speaking,
> > intentional wrongs are worse than unintentional
> wrongs.
Well, it makes the people who commit them worse people and more culpable.
But, in terms
> > of consequences, unintentional wrongs are often
> much worse than
> > intentional wrongs. Some can be induced to
> understand this point
> > intellectually, but many find it unsatisfying,
> trapped as they are in
> > conventional morality.
The distinction is this: unintentional or unintended wrongs, if sytstematic, indicate a bad system, regardless of whether the people who benefit friom it or run it are bad people. Intentional wrongs indicate (though they are not conclusive proof) that the people commit them are bad. We may be interested for various reasons in punishing intentional wrongs (as I have argued), but the main target for the left is the bad system.
> >
> > I suspect that these two reasons led Ward
> Churchill to develop his
> > apparent belief in, for instance, a case of an
> intentional spreading
> > of smallpox where he couldn't find written records
> for it. (I don't
> > think he deliberately tried to lie -- he probably
> talked himself into
> > believing it, as many -- including scholars -- do
> about what they want
> > to believe.)
Self deception is no excuse for scholarly sloppiness.
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