> 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
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>
I was glad I read it (I was about to say "enjoyed," but that sounds wront)
too. N.B. that Snyder emphasizes the economic rationality of the mass
murders, which is something I hadn't really considered in reference to the
Nazis.