File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9708, message 311


Date: Sun, 24 Aug 1997 17:51:08 -0400 (EDT)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: Hitler's Willing Executioners


On Sun, 24 Aug 1997, Chris Burford wrote:

> 
> But this theme has international significance. Can anyone shed further
> light on this complex battle?
> 
> 

There is an interesting ideological war over Goldhagen taking place at
Harvard where a Holocaust Studies department has been endowed by a former
partner at Salomon Bros., one of my former employers.

He is being nominated as department chair by the endower but it is being
fought--I believe--by another faction that is backing the nomination of
another scholar whose approach to German collective guilt is diametrically
opposed to Goldhagen's. The affair was written up in Lingua Franca but
unfortunately I don't have the copy any longer.

The other scholar is strongly influenced by Hannah Arendt's banality of
evil theory. He examines in rather close detail the behavior of a police
department that was involved in some aspects of the genocide. His
conclusion is that antisemitism was not at work at all, it was mostly a
desire to be good policeman. The torture of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima
in Brooklyn's 70th Precinct should make us pause before labeling one
people more intrinsically brutal than another. Or My Lai, for that matter.

The other scholar was influenced by 60s radicalism and tends to analyze
brutal behavior from a social perspective rather than the psychological
perspective of Goldhagen. Goldhagen's real goal of course is to provide
ideological justification for the Zionist state, the closest thing to
fascism on the planet today.

Louis Proyect



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