Read carefully. Michael is not saying that the Nazis didn't keep the records of their victims. He's saying that concrete details of humanity were stripped away from them and that they were reduced to categories -- Jews, Homosexuals, etc. -- in the eyes of the Nazis bent on dehumanization.
On 5/18/06, andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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 agree with you, of course. I'm just pointing out that many people -- even many leftists -- in the United States today find just blaming the system emotionally unsatisfying. Hence the popularity of narratives of planned, intentional genocides. And that popularity actually plays into the hands of the Right.
-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>