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The Uniqueness of the Holocaust
Reflecting on comments in this thread, here is a personal view on the Holocaust I’d like to discuss.
Ethnic cleansing, killing a group of somehow assumed "lesser value" people, has happened before and after the 1940s and such still happens today. Such has been tried or done by about each ruling powers of their time and area. There are certainly comparable deeds in history that at least, relatively to general population numbers, reached or even exceed the numbers of the Holocaust.
The historic difference of the Holocaust, the German (and cooperating others) systematic killing of their Jewish bethren, is the total amorality of using industrial methods to do so.
Evacuation orders and train schedules synchronized to be ‘just in time’ for the furnaces being ready again and cleaned from the last round of burning corps – optimization of throughput in killing – that is unique.
As a German and even an industrial engineer, that is what really personally hits me right in the stomach. To me technology must carry a promise of moral use, of some progress for mankind’s well being.
Designing a system for maximum throughput of killing people is outside of any otherwise compareable and equally despicable behavior.
That is the uniqueness, and guilt, of the Holocaust.
Aaaaakkkk! I hit the wrong button while still writing and previewing.
Yes, thanks, b, for this thread and your ability to confront “sensitive” issues with great perception and wisdom. You personify the fact that while good intelligence is nice to have, real critical thinking, in actuality, comes from the heart, not the mind. Of course, that is why so many propaganda techniques aim squarely at our emotions.
Growing up in a largely Orthodox Jewish community, the Holocaust, and its tragic narrative was all pervasive. Almost half of my friends had some family member, or all family members killed, and I saw numerous older people with numbers on their arms. In the late fifties and early sixties, in the community I grew up in, buying any product manufactured in Germany was considered tantamount to treason.
And yet, while the story was well known, and sadness and a sense of loss were felt keenly and almost constantly, the Holocaust was rarely spoken of. Today, of course, reality has become spectacle; Holocaust has become industry. The Holocaust is talked about almost constantly, and yet never really felt.
My childhood, due to my many years of Hebrew school, was saturated with pro-Israeli and Zionist propaganda. The lesson of the Holocaust was not that all people should live together in peace — after all, we watched the deaths of “Krauts” every night on TV shows like “Combat,” and killed imaginary Germans with green plastic hand grenades from the camouflage of the bushes girding our suburban front lawns — no, we were not ready to give up our hate of other humans and live in peace; the lesson was to support the creation of a paradisaical “safe-haven” in the Middle East: As Golda Meir, the universal grandmother, falsely claimed, “A land without a people for a people without a land.”
How quickly after the war another people were ignored, marginalized, objectified. How quickly the oppressed, driven by fear and ignorance, became the oppressor. Of course, as Claudia Von Werlhof so convincingly argues, all wars are just expressions of patriarchy, of the dominator culture, of a psychological sickness in humanity that began when the first tribe, deracinated by natural disaster, attacked the next tribe in order to survive. From there domination was born, and the pathology multiplied. Like a victim of child abuse who is more likely to abuse, in the same manner, the victim in genocide becomes the perpetrator.
With my old paradigm dropped and a new one adopted, I am not sure about many aspects of that War (WWII) now. I am not entirely clear why the Jews, in particular, were victimized. I am not sure what the legacy of the Holocaust is. Yes, there was a new level of industrial organization applied to the killing. But entire towns were regularly sacked hundreds of years previously — and Sherman’s march through the South, and the industrial use of gas during WWI (as avidly prescribed and endorsed by Churchill), were equally genocidal. It is hard to remove the glasses of the Holocaust industry without also poking both eyes.
I am more clear as to what lessons were learned from the Holocaust by the successors to Empire — the US military leviathan. That is, hide the evidence, keep out the press, keep the killing slow enough to bore your own population to inaction, always employ deniability, blame the victims for the violence as an example of their own lack of civilization, emphasize the suffering of noble victims to make way for slothrop and Bill Clinton’s brand of humanitarian intervention, set victim upon victim, etc. In other words, there have been no advances in humanity, despite the claims of Weisel and his ilk, only advances in camouflage, deflection, and distraction.
What is unique to the Jewish Holocaust, and all other Holocausts, far more than a numbers game, far far more than a “who had it worst” contest,” is the individual human stories, the details of time and place — the pathos of suffering and the nobility of resistance. But the organized violence of our all-pervasive patriarchical dominator culture? That story is as old as the myth of the snake and the apple. And it will continue as long as we maintain our “gnostic” belief in a hereafter of greater import than a “herenow,” and “progress” as a way of getting there. In other words, until we get to the place where there is no longer a “there” left to get to: either through the utmost of heart-recovering precaution, or more likely, through the ultimate catastrophe.
Posted by: Malooga | Jul 20 2007 7:12 utc | 32
based on article 51, the US is an aggressor conducting an illegal war. This is certain. i’m attempting to point out that the states’ rights conception of justice is clearly inadequate to respond to the problem of saddam. all too often i think, people here unwittingly defend this form of justice which can only be used to dislodge a tyrant when he attacks another country.
Slothrop, I hope you don’t mind me butting in here, but I feel somewhat included in your reference to ‘people here’ defending article 51.
I take it from your comments on MoA that you are not a big fan of the concept expressed in article 51. If I understand you correctly, then you fault it for protecting dictators as it prevents any outside help for the oppressed people by disallowing military intervention as long as the dictator does not attack other nations. And, as shown in this thread, you list the Allied war against Nazi Germany as an example for how the past should have taught us this lesson.
I’m inclined to believe that if Hitler would have limited his actions to killing and enslaving only Germans or Austrians, keeping his insane fascism pretty much a domestic affair, no Churchill, Roosevelt or Stalin would have come to their rescue. As someone above already pointed out, the Allied declaration of war was not a reaction to Hitler’s draconian internal politics, its primary goal was not to liberate the German concentration camps, but to stop a war of aggression against other countries, threatening their power. So I’d be careful using WW2 as an illustration of how the international community joined together to help oppressed people.
You wrote above that according to article 51 and the majority of MoA posters interpretation of it, applied to the WW2 scenario no intervention to stop Hitler before his invasions would have been justified. That’s crap slothrop, and other comments have made that clear, but you tend to ignore this argument, citing shock and awe as the only means of practical intervention. Following your logic the only way of dealing with the dictators of the soviet period should have been to just bomb the living shit out of East Europe, and then invade the joint.
This is however not how the wall came down, it was smashed to bits by people who gained their freedom of a totalitarian regime by defying it, by despite the threat of death and long time incarceration marching the streets in the hundreds of thousands. Be that Poland or East Germany, not a single bomb was needed to oust a brutal dictatorship. South Africa, how many B1 bombers were needed to end apartheid? Rosa Parks, was it bombs from an invading force which enabled her to make a stand? People need to liberate themselves. The best we can do is assist them in their endeavours.
It’s no different in Iran, invading or bombing the country makes as little sense as it did with Iraq or as it would make with Burma or N Korea. The number of victims of such a military action could by far outweigh the victims of the dictators themselves. To topple a totalitarian regime the aim should be to assist in conjuring up an implosion, rather than make the country’s people victims of countless explosions.
At #51 above, based on a reasoning which would excuse almost ‘unlimited collateral damage’ you dismissed CluelessJoe’s opinion that the sheer number of deaths caused by the bodged Iraq invasion is cause enough to discount the “help and assist” motive to almost nil. To me, and possibly other readers, that indicates that you might have a problem with incorporating the term ‘proportional’ in your line of thoughts, subscribing instead to the idea that sometimes you have to destroy a village in order to save it. Should you really be unable to recognise that an invasion which causes hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths in four years is at least as horrible as the dictator it set out to eliminate, who killed hundreds of thousands in 30 years, then you might want to apply for a job at some neo-con think tank, maybe as Wolfowitz’s assistant. At least then you would get paid to come up with grand scale invasion plans.
Wrt your question of
…what about intervening to remove a murderous tyrant in iraq, whose victims are many? what kind of justification for such intervention is moral?
In order to broaden your perspective, I recommend you turn it around and ask yourself how many innocent people are you prepared to kill in your intervention? You do the maths on that one. Each to their own. You might arrive at Albright’s conclusion that half a million dead Iraqis was worth the price of sanctions, or maybe at Rumsfeld’s or Cheney’s, I don’t know, but the way I read your comments it seems to be in the hundreds of thousands, millions if it has to be, as long as the dictator gets hung at the end.
Ask yourself as of which point does become military intervention a necessity? Who draws the line? Are you prepared to? Should we have bombed China after Tienaman Square? Putin’s Russia for the murders on opposition journalists and the inhumane gulags they run, for the war crimes in Chechnya? Or maybe Zimbabwe? What about Egypt, they don’t muck around with human rights there. Plenty of mass graves in Burma too, why not bomb and invade it? Come to speak of mass graves, how about a coordinated military response against the US to oust the leaders responsible for countless numbers of mass killings across the world? What would you suggest? Blow up New York of LA first? Nahh, would have to be Washington.
Or should the world community better employ more humane and peaceful means to achieve regime change and improved living conditions for oppressed people? Think about and come up with diplomatic and non-violent ways to prompt change? Have you spend much thought on other means than bombs that could be used to stimulate regime change in dictatorships, if only the world’s governments would be willing?
As someone above has written, as long as the US exports the weapons and ammunitions used by the very same dictators and groups who oppress their fellow men, in other words refuses to implement the first step in the right direction, it has no right to use military force to bring about the end of dictators. It’s hypocrisy of the highest order, and I guess any advocate of such policy will have to live with being mocked on sites like MoA.
Posted by: Juan Moment | Jul 21 2007 5:09 utc | 70
Judeophobe, now why didn’t I think of that? I shall adopt it.
As for the rest, the anger of people who think the Holocaust is pushed down their throats is the same as that of American racists who complain about how the blacks wont get over slavery. Not creditable.
I disagree. First, the ppl doing the pushing are not in the main, or not only, the victims or their descendants. They are for ex. democratically elected Gvmts. of secular states (meaning, not jewish -as a religious term-, or as a ‘racist’ term.) And the point is not the throat shoving but the seeming obligatory acceptance of what has become a potted history of cruelty.
Those who complain are very various. A few have a clear underlying agenda or mind set: typical example is a neo-nazi youth of my acquaintance, I needn’t spell it out, on the face of it pleas for historical accuracy are a wedge for nothing less than a Hitler cult (to summarize, of course, delving in would make it more complicated.) Such a stance should be, is, rightly condemned.
Many are legitimately disturbed, or even anxious in their daily lives, at having to accept, today, the Holocaust as the epitome of evil and horror, an example that dwarfs all others and must never be questioned, relativized, set aside..
For ex. teachers here find it hard going, or even impossible, to teach the ‘Holocaust.’ Any class on it immediately provokes the students to mention their family’s experiences – the nightmare is to have a grand child from the communist block, two Bosnians, an Algerian, a lonely Ruandan, who usually does not speak but may freak out. Mayhem, chaos. The clued in ones will have read Finkelstein, in the original, if you please.
What is the teacher to do? Get the po-lice in, a nurse as well, so that she can ‘discuss the Holocaust’? One of my acquaintance gets around it by having a survivor come speak; respect for the person keeps the mayhem at bay – but it is not a history lesson, it is akin to the seropo (aids) person who comes in to talk of his/her experience, to stress tolerance, condom use, and so on.
These children or young people do not support any form of what one might call Nazism. They loathe Hitler or don’t care / know about him, their political orientation has moved on, if they can be said to have any that is. (The teacher who complains is no different.)
They embrace their jewish peers (meaning those students who say they are ‘juif’, very few of course) and if they have opinion about Israel it is that “Israel has the right to exist” and “the Palestinians are being screwed.” Arguments may rage, as the two seem incompatible.
On the ground, outside the isolated imperialist US, Western propaganda and policies are having a tough time of it. And the ppl who object are deserving of consideration.
Posted by: Noirette | Jul 21 2007 14:12 utc | 74
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