Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2003 09:38:21 -0400
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.org>
Subject: Re: [HAB:] Re: Rational Barbarians? [Antti]


As futile as my interventions are likely to be, I can't resist attempting 
to clear up some logical confusion here.  Your argument seems to be that 
calling the Nazis irrational is like calling them crazy and thus committing 
two ideological mystifications:

(1) reducing a social phenomenon rooted in material conditions to a merely 
psychological aberration;

(2) letting us off the hook by placing the Nazis in a totally different 
category from normal people.

These would be valid criticisms indeed, but you've mixed them up with 
defending Ali's baloney.  A better way to go would be to point out the 
irrationality of ruling elites and whole populations in bourgeois 
democracies rather than letting the Nazis off the hook by mystifying them 
in the other direction.  The Nazis got every single one of their ideas, 
from advertising techniques for mass manipulation to racial theory to 
concentration camps to genocide, from the United States.  And this country 
itself is a contradictory mix of retrograde superstition combined with 
avant-garde technology and industry.

At 04:54 AM 10/15/2003 +0000, matthew piscioneri wrote:
>still think Ali's perspective is valid. afterall one of the questions 
>Critical Theory posed was how could good, church going law abiding 
>*rational* people embrace nazism.
>
>In some ways, the nazi horror is suppressed by explaining it away as 
>*irrational*. Almost like a temporary madness. The little I have read of 
>the Nuremberg transcripts informs that many nazis could quite coherently 
>*rationalize* (even in a Habermasian sense of at least give reasons) in 
>support of their actions.
>
>Isn't the moral horror heightened if some aspect of nazism is understood 
>as *rational*? I am guessing Ali is suggesting a foucauldian-type 
>perspective - what sort of rationality underlay the nazi programme? what 
>sort of bio-power was going on in Auschwitz? How far from the *good* 
>rationality of the Allies exercised in Vietnam, Cambodia and now Iraq, was 
>nazi reason?
>
>mattp



     --- from list habermas-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---