[lbo-talk] The Moral Case for Health Care

[shag carpet bomb]

At 05:45 PM 7/29/2009, Miles Jackson wrote:
>Chris Doss wrote:
>>Passion and emotion are an enormous political force that can easily 
>>override cool calculation. *cough cough* the Holocaust *cough cough*
>>
>This is exactly backwards.  What made the Holocaust possible was the 
>rational, bureaucratic calculation.  If the Nazis had been "overwhelmed" 
>by passion and emotion, they wouldn't have been able to effectively plan 
>the deaths of millions of people.
>
>Miles

there was an interesting piece in the NYRB recently that I found 
interesting. Here's the kernel of the argument:

"Auschwitz is only an introduction to the Holocaust, the Holocaust only a 
suggestion of Hitler's final aims. Grossman's novels Forever Flowing and 
Life and Fate daringly recount both Nazi and Soviet terror, and remind us 
that even a full characterization of German policies of mass killing is 
incomplete as a history of atrocity in mid-century Europe. It omits the 
state that Hitler was chiefly concerned to destroy, the other state that 
killed Europeans en masse in the middle of the century: the Soviet Union. 
In the entire Stalinist period, between 1928 and 1953, Soviet policies 
killed, in a conservative estimate, well over five million Europeans. Thus 
when one considers the total number of European civilians killed by 
totalitarian powers in the middle of the twentieth century, one should have 
in mind three groups of roughly equal size: Jews killed by Germans, 
non-Jews killed by Germans, and Soviet citizens killed by the Soviet state. 
As a general rule, the German regime killed civilians who were not German 
citizens, whereas the Soviet regime chiefly killed civilians who were 
Soviet citizens. "

from "Holocaust: The Ignored Reality"
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22875