‘Christian theology never advocated extermination of
the Jews’, writes George I. Mosse, ‘but rather their exclusion from society as
living witnesses to deicide. The pogroms were secondary to isolating Jews in
ghettos.’ ‘A crime’, Hannah Arendt asserts, ‘is met with punishment, a vice can
only be exterminated.’
Only in its modern, ‘scientific’, racist form, the age-long repellence of the
Jews has been articulated as an exercise in sanitation; only with the modern
reincarnation of Jew-hatred have the Jews ben charged with an ineradicable vice,
with an immanent flaw which cannot be separated from its carriers. Before that,
the Jews were sinners; like all sinners, they were bound to suffer for their
sins, in an earthly or other-worldly purgatory – to repent and, possibly, to
earn redemption. Their suffering was to be seen so that the consequences of sin
and the need fore repentance are seen. No such benefit can possibly be derived
from watching vice, even if complete with its punishment. Cancer, vermin or weed
cannot repent. They have not sinned, they just live according to their nature.
There is nothing to punish them for. By their nature they are evil, they have to
be exterminated. Alone with himself, in his diary, Joseph Goebbels spelled this
out with the same clarity we previously noted in the abstract historiography of
Rosenberg: ‘There is no hope of leading the Jews back into the fold of civilized
humanity by exceptional punishment. They will forever remain Jews, just as we
are forever of the Aryan race.’ Unlike the ‘philosopher’ Rosenberg, Goebbels
was, however, a minister in a government wielding an awesome and unchallenged
power, a government, moreover, which –thanks to the achievements of modern
civilization –could conceive of the possibility of a life without cancer,
vermin or weeds, and had at its disposal material resources to make such a
possibility into a reality.
It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to arrive at the idea of extermination of
a whole people without race imagery; that is, without a vision of endemic and
fatal defect which is in principle incurable, and, in addition, is capable of
self-propagation unless checked. It is also difficult, and probably impossible,
to arrive at such an idea without an entrenched practice of medicine (both medicine
proper, aimed at the individual body, and of its numerous allegorical
applications), with its model of health and normality, strategy of separation
and technique of surgery. It is particularly difficult, and well-nigh
impossible, to conceive such an idea separately from an engineering approach to
society, the belief in artificiality of social order, institution of expertise
and the practice of scientific management of human setting and interaction. For
these reasons, the exterminatory version
of anti-Semitism ought to be seen as a thoroughly modern phenomena; that
is, something which could only occur in an advanced state of modernity.
These were not, however, the only links between exterminatory designs and the
developments rightly associated with modern civilization. Racism, even when
coupled with the technological predisposition of the modern mind, would hardly
suffice to accomplish the feat of the Holocaust. To do that, it would have to
be capable of securing the passage from theory to practice – and this would
probably mean energizing, by the sheer mobilizing power of ideas, enough human
agents to cope with the scale of the task, and sustaining their dedication to
the job for as long as the task would require. By ideological training,
propaganda or brainwashing, racism would have to imbue masses of non-Jews with
the hatred and repugnance of Jews so intense as to trigger violent action
against the Jews whenever and wherever they are met.
According to the widely shared opinion of the historians, this did not happen.
In spite of the enormous resources devoted by the Nazi regime to racist
propaganda, the concentrated efforts of Nazi education, and the real threat of
terror against resistance to racist practices, the popular acceptance of the
racist program (and particularly of its ultimate logical consequence) stopped
well short of the level an emotion-led extermination would require. As if further
proof was needed, this fact demonstrates once again the absence of continuity or natural progression between heterophobia
or contestant enmity and racism. Those Nazi leaders who hoped to capitalize
on the diffuse resentment of the Jews to
obtain popular support for a racist policy of extermination were soon forced to
realize their mistake.
Yet even if (an unlikely case, indeed) the racist creed was more successful,
and volunteers for lynching and throat-cutting were many times more numerous,
mob violence should strike us as a remarkably inefficient, blatantly pre-modern
form of social engineering or of the thoroughly modern project or racial
hygiene. Indeed, as Sabini and Silver have convincingly put it, the most successful
–widespread and materially effective- episode of mass anti-Jewish violence in
Germany, the infamous Kristallnacht,
was
A pogrom, an instrument of terror . . .
typical of the long-standing tradition of European anti-Semitism not the new
Nazi order, not the systematic extermination of European Jewry. Mob violence is
a primitive, ineffective technique of extermination. It is an effective method
of terrorizing a population, keeping people in their place, perhaps even
forcing some to abandon their religious or political convictions, but these
were never Hitler’s aims with the Jews: he meant to destroy them.
There was not enough ‘mob’ to be violent; the sight of murder and
destruction put off as many as it inspired, while the overwhelming majority
preferred to close their eyes and plug their ears, but first of all gag their
mouths. Mass destruction was accompanied not by an uproar of emotions, but the
dead silence of unconcern. It was not public rejoicing, but public indifference
which became a reinforcing strand in the noose inexorably tightening around
hundreds of thousands of necks. Racism is
a policy first, ideology second. Like all politics, it needs organization,
managers and experts. Like all policies, it requires for its implementation
a division of labor and an effective isolation of the task from the
disorganizing effect of improvisation and spontaneity. It demands that
specialists are left undisturbed and free to proceed with their task.
Not that the indifference itself was indifferent; it surely was not, as far as
the success of the Final Solution was concerned. It was the paralysis of that
public which failed to turn into a mob, a paralysis achieved by the fascination
and fear emanating from the display of power, which permitted the deadly logic
of problem-solving to take its course unhampered. In Lawrence Stoke’s words,
‘The failure when the regime first set insecurely in power to protest the
inhumane measurers made prevention of their logical culmination all but
impossible, however unwanted and disapproved his undoubtedly was.’ The spread
and the depth of heterophobia [hatred of
difference] was apparently sufficient for the German public not to protest against
violence, even if the majority did not like it and remained immune to racist
indoctrination. Of the latter fact the Nazis found numerous occasions to
convince themselves. In her perfectly balanced account of German attitudes
Sarah Gordon quotes an official Nazi report which vividly expressed Nazi disappointment
with public responses to Kristallnacht:
One
knows that anti-Semitism in Germany today is essentially confined to the party
and its organization, and that there is a certain group in the population who
have not the slightest understanding for anti-Semitism and in whom every
possibility of empathy is lacking.
In the days of Kristallnacht these people ran immediately to Jewish businesses
. .
This is to a great extent because we are, to be sure, an anti-Semitic people,
an anti-Semitic state, but nevertheless in all manifestations of life in the
state and people ant—Semitism is as good as unexpressed . . . There are still
groups of Spiessern among the German people who talk about the poor Jews and
who have no understanding for the anti-Semitic attitudes of the German people
and who interceded for Jews at every opportunity. It should not be that only the
leader and party are anti-Semitic.
Dislike
of violence – particularly of such violence as could be seen and was meant to
be seen – coincided, however, with a much more sympathetic attitude with
administrative measures taken against the Jews. A great number of Germans
welcomed an energetic and vociferously advertised action aimed at the
segregation, separation, and disempowering of the Jews – those traditional expressions
and instruments of heterophobia or contested enmity. In addition, many Germans
welcomed the measures portrayed as the punishment of the Jew (as long as one
could pretend that the punished was indeed the conceptual Jew) as an imaginary
(yet plausible solution) to quite real (if subconscious) anxieties and fears of
displacement and insecurity. Whatever the reasons of their satisfaction, they
seemed to be radically different from those implied by the Streicher-type
exhortations to violence as an all-too-realistic way of repaying imaginary
economic or sexual crimes.
From the point of view of those who designed and commanded the mass murder of
the Jews, Jews were to die not because they were resented (or a least not
primarily for this reason); They were
seen as deserving death (and resented for that reason) because they stood
between this one imperfect and tension-ridden reality and the hoped-for world
of tranquil happiness. As we shall see in the next chapter, the disappearance
of the Jews was instrumental in bringing about the world of perfection. The
absence of Jews was precisely the difference between that world and the
imperfect world here and now.
Examining neutral and critical sources in addition to official reports, Gordon
has documented a widespread and growing approval f ‘ordinary Germans’ for the
exclusion of Jews from position of power, wealth and influence. The gradual
disappearance of Jews from public life was either applauded or studiously
overlooked. Unwillingness of the public to partake personally of the
persecution of the Jews was, in short, combined with a readiness to go along
with, or at least not interfere with, the actions of the State. ‘ If most
Germans were not fanatical; or ‘paranoid’ anti-Semites, they were ‘mild’,
‘latent’, or passive anti-Semites, for whom the Jews had become a ‘depersonalized’, abstract, and alien
entity beyond human empathy and the ‘Jewish Question’ a legitimate subject of
state policy deserving of solution.
These consideration demonstrate once more the paramount importance of the
other, operational rather than ideological, link between the exterminatory form
of anti-Semitism and modernity. The idea
of extermination, discontinuous with the traditional heterophobia and dependent
for that reason on the two implacably modern phenomena of racist theory and the
medical-therapeutic syndrome provided the first link. But the modern idea
needed also suitably modern means of implementation . It found such means in
modern bureaucracy.
The only adequate solution to problems posited by the racist world view is a
total and uncompromising isolation of the pathogenic and infectious race – the
source of disease and contamination- through its complete spatial separation or
physical destruction. By its nature, this is a a daunting task, unthinkable unless
in conjunction with the availability of huge resources, means of their
mobilization and panned distribution, skills of splitting the overall task into
a great number of partial and specialized functions and skills to co-ordinate
their performance. In short, the task is inconceivable without modern
bureaucracy. To be effective, modern exterminatory antisemitism had to be married
to modern bureaucracy. And in Germany it was.
In his famous Wandsee briefing Heydrich spoke of the ‘approval’ or
‘authorization’ of the RSHA Jewish policy by the Fuhrer. Face with problems arising from the idea and the purpose of
this idea determined (Hitler himself preferred to speak of ‘prophesy’ rather
than of a purpose or a task), the bureaucratic organization called Reichsicherheithauptamt set about
designing proper practical solutions.
It went about it the way all bureaucracies do: counting costs and ensuring them
against available resources, and then trying to determine the optimal
combination. Heydrich underlined the need to accumulate practical experience,
stressed the graduality of the process, and the provisional character of each
step, confined by as-yet-limited practical know-ho: RSHA was actively to seek
the best solution. The Fuhrer
expressed his romantic vision of a world cleansed of the terminally diseased
race. The rest was the matter of a not so romantic, coolly rational,
bureaucratic process.
The
murderous compound was made of a typically modern ambition of social
design and engineering, mixed with a typically modern concentration of power,
resources and managerial skills. . . .
The reader today,to be sure, has no need
to look to French authors in search for quasi-racist, segregationist language
in the service of the mobilization of popular heterophobia and boundary fears.
However abominable they are, and however spacious is the reservoir of potential
violence they contain, heterophobia and boundary-contest anxieties do not
result, directly or indirectly- in genocide. Confusing heterophobia with racism
and the Holocaust-like organized crime is misleading and also potentially
harmful, as it diverts scrutiny from the genuine causes of the disaster, which
are rooted in some aspects of modern mentality and modern social organization,
rather than in timeless reactions to strangers or even less universal, yet
fairly ubiquitous identity conflicts . . . .
___________________________________
The Paradox of Sequential Actions
(origin: Stanley Milgram) by Zygmunt Bauman
In the course of sequential action, the actor becomes a slave of his own past actions. This hold seems much stronger than other binding factors. It can certainly outlast the factors which at the start of the sequence seemed much more important and played a truly decisive role. In particular, the unwillingness to re-evaluate (and condemn) one’s own past conduct will still remain a powerful, and ever more powerful stimulus to plod on, long after the original commitment to ‘the cause’ had all but petered out. Smooth and imperceptible passages between the steps lure the actor into a trap; the trap is the impossibility of quitting without revising and rejecting the evaluation of one’s own deeds as right or at least innocent. The trap is, in other words, a paradox: one cannot get clean without blackening oneself. To hide filth, one must forever draggle in the mud.
________________________________________
As comprehensive as Bauman's account of Modernity
and the Holocaust is, there are fault lines in his argument. My first clue: '
that there are intellectually unprocessed responses to the context of daily
interactions'. . . which is similar to the assertion that some people have a
philosophy and others don't which is an elite class view. Second, his rigid
division between those who theorized the
innate goodness of human nature and those who theorize it as bad, or perhaps
abbreviated better, between the Hobbesian
view of the state and the others*. Third, his misreading of Adorno as
attributing too much to the "Authoritarian Personality" in the rise
of fascism as if he was just another Reich. Fourth, failure to recognize that
Anti-Utopian thinking is also Utopian, as Jameson shows in "Archaeologies
of the Future. Never-the- less, despite theoretical extravagance, Bauman's
history of the Holocaust and geography of Holocaust Studies is invaluable.
* perhaps its best to transcribe what Bauman says:
There are two antithetical ways in which one an approach the explanation of the
Holocaust. One can consider the horrors of mass murder as evidence of the fragility
of civilization, or one can see them as evidence of its awesome potential. One
an argue that, with criminals in control, civilized rules of behavior may be
suspended, and thus the eternal beast always hiding beneath the skin of the socially
drilled being may break free. Alternatively, one can argue that, once armed
with the sophisticated technical and conceptual products of modern civilization,
men can do things their nature would otherwise prevent them from doing. To put
it differently; one can, following the Hobbesian tradition, conclude that the
inhuman pre-social state has not yet been fully eradicated, all civilizing efforts
notwithstanding. Or one can, on the contrary, insist that the civilizing process
has succeeded in substituting artificial and flexible patterns of human conduct
for natural drives, and hence made possible a scale of inhumanity and destruction
which had remained inconceivable as long as natural predispositions guided
human action. I propose to put for the second approach, and substantiate it in
the following discussion.
. .
. . .
. . .
. . . .
‘One name signs the end of the modern ideal: Auschwitz’
-Gilles Chatelet , ‘To Live and Think Like Pigs’, glossary entry under ‘Postmodern’-
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