Date: Sun, 24 Aug 1997 19:08:10 -0400 (EDT)
From: Andrew Wayne Austin <aaustin-AT-utkux.utcc.utk.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: Hitler's Willing Executioners


James, Chris, and Others,

DG's analysis is not Marxist. True. It lacks a materialist foundation. 
This is our task: to demonstrate the material and the deep-structural
basis for the phenomenon that DG analyzes very well albeit at *a specific
level of analysis*, i.e., cultural, organizational, and ideological
analysis.

But it is not a collective guilt thesis. It is about Hitler's willing
executioners, those who willingly aided in mass murder, and the cultural
and ideological predispositions put in place by generations and
generations of indoctrination in anti-Semitic beliefs (including
eliminationist and exterminationist anti-Semitisms). Those Germans who
resisted, who struggled against the Nazis should not feel guilty, are not
necessarily guilty, and should not be made to feel so. Those who knew, and
knew it was wrong, and did nothing will have to search their consciences. 
And it is important to understand that many of those who carried out these
acts did so believing that they were doing the right thing, in the same
way that marauders from distant city-states felt that the extermination
of whole villages was the appropriate behavior.

I saw a recent special on Germany's reaction to the book. They had a mass
demonstration in one of the major cities. Thousands of people showed up. 
There were those older Germans who came out to protest greatly the
insinuation that they were mass murderers. They were, of course, relying
on newspaper accounts of the book, nationalistic editorials whipping up a
knee-jerk frenzy. But in equal numbers where other Germans, of all ages,
many of them with DG's book in hand, condemning anti-Semitism and
understanding that the guilt was not directed against those who did not
participate, but that the book was a clear and needed demonstration of the
power of racist structures.

The mistake that is being made in these posts is the treatment of racism. 
It is being implied that racism is about individuals acting in certain
ways to other individuals, that Germans as a people are not responsible
for anti-Semitism, only those who actually act on that belief. But this is
a misunderstanding of what racism is (it is confusing racism with
prejudice). Racism is a STRUCTURE. If you do not actively fight against
it, you are preserving it. Changing social structures is all of our
responsibility. Therefore, to show up and whine about somebody pointing
out that Germany has been a deeply anti-Semitic country, in the same way
that the US has been a deeply white supremacist country, is the near
equivalent of whites organizing a patriotic march after white officers
kill a black man and charges of racism go up. Their message is: This is
not a racist country, so only blame those who act our of prejudice. 
Bullshit, this is a deeply racist country. The other half of the crowd
were those people who held the more subtle and more true view of what
racism is and what it is capable of doing. 

It is important to remember that structure, a totality of a set of
persisting relations, structures interactions. The mass murder of Jews and
others in Europe during this time was a societal phenomenon. Let's don't
by arbitrarily atomistic in our interpretation here. Individuals who
murdered did so because they believed they were acting in a correct
manner. One is rewarded when one acts consistent with the logic of the
structure of society. For the same reason, most Americans support
capitalism, without nary a clue that it is fundamentally premised on
exploitative relations. This is deep psychological structuring.

One more thing. It is consistent with Marxism to consider social
formations in their totality, understanding not only the structure of that
society at that stage of development, but the history of that development. 
DG should be recognized for producing what is an extraordinary attempt to
analyze the cultural totality of a people in order to understand how so
many people could, at this point in the history of a nation, commit acts
that seem so impossible to us now. That DG is not a political economist or
a class-dialectician, and therefore failed to do a material and
social-structural analysis, while admittedly insufficient for
understanding the nature of Nazi Germany at this time, his offering is
still far superior to most of the superficial crap that is put out by
elite academicians, and it advances our understanding substantially.

I find the book to be major step forward in understanding the importance
of culture and ideology in explaining certain sociohistorical phenomena,
and also extremely useful as a systematized methodological approach to
recapturing mass psychological movements in historical systems.

Andrew Austin




     --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---