Just to start with. Never mind that mass killing on ethnic and other bases was the rule in war for millenia, as Chris and I have discussed. And Then there are the Turks in Armenia, the Japanese in China, the Russians and Volga Germans and the Polish intelligentsia -- and the Stalinist were working up to the Jews in the Doctor's Plot, this was _after_ Auschwitz. AS if the charge of "rootless cosmopolitanism,: i.e., Jewish ancestry, wasn't enough to get you 25 in Kolyma, Never mind that ethnic cleansing and racially based mass murder has continued almost unabated since -- Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Palestine (eerk, or is it bad to say that because it shows that I am a non-Zionist, therefore a anti-Semitic self-hating Jew?), the Japanese, French, and US in Vietnam, Democratic Kampuchea, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, Sudan, it.s hard to know where to stop. Except you can't say that because the Holocaust is _special_.
Never mind the Milgram and other research, ethnically indifferent (based, in fact, on American subjects) about obedience to authority. Never mind the fact that most enthusiastic Jew-killers were Poles, Ukrainians, Romanians, Lithuanians, Estonians, and Latvians -- not Germans. Never mind that the thesis that the German's were uniquely gripped by an exterminist anti-Semitic frenzy makes no sense in view of two millenia of pan-European anti-Semitism. Remember Ferdinand and Isabella? The expulsion of the Jews from practically every country in Europe? Their confinement in the pale and the continual pogroms by nationalist leaders like Bogdan Chmielnitsky, whose name was still a bogyman to frighten children with in my youth, 400 years later? Or that the idea that it was something about the German specially makes no sense in terms of the fact that before the war Germany was not particularly anti-Semitic and after the war it has been (unlike, say Poland or
Russia or Ukraine) determinedly anti-anti-Semitic, like slipping a switch?
Goldhagen offers a non answer to a false problem, supported with bad, sloppy research of the kind of Holocaust sacralization that Norman Finkelstein rightly decries. I resent every second of the wasted time I put into reading and thinking about his crappy book. And it got him tenure at Harvard, which tells you more about Harvard than Goldhagen, while David Abraham was run out Princeton and the historical profession because of a few questionable footnotes in an otherwise sound book, and Finkelstein was fired from DePaul for raising in what I consider to be an understandably abrasive way issues like the ones I am raising here.
Oh, why bother.
What's good in Goldhagen's book you can find elsewhere, what's new isn't new and isn't good. I can understand why some Germans would feel it necessary to rake the book seriously, but it's trash. And it's not for a 14 year old anyway.
> And while I realize he is not really beloved by
> American leftists because of his Zionism, Daniel J.
> Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners has
> played a
> a good role in public debate in Germany. At least as
> far as demolishing the German cult of victimhood which
> sees the population as merely passive objects of a
> personal dictatorship. Ignore the dishonest polemics
> which portray this book as promoting a "collective
> guilt" thesis.
>
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