File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9708, message 408


Date: Fri, 29 Aug 1997 22:20:22 -0400 (EDT)
From: Andrew Wayne Austin <aaustin-AT-utkux.utcc.utk.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: Hitler's willing executioners


Comrades, Hartin, and Heartfield,

In this post I answer both James Heartfield and Tony Hartin.

Tony,
 
On Fri, 29 Aug 1997, you wrote:
 
> The debate, I believe, is whether the holocaust can be explained by the
> cultural values of the German people, or by a class analysis of fascism
> primarily.

Why does it have to be exclusively one or the other? Why cannot the
Holocaust be explained by taking into account both sets of variables? 
Might it be possible that the Holocaust was the intersection of Nazism as
an authoritarian solution to the contradictions of capitalism (for the
ruling class) *and* eliminationist anti-Semitism?

But this question aside, it seems that the Holocaust is one of those
events where ideas are very important. There was felt a need in Germany
that the Jews had to be eliminated. The Jews were targeted because they
were Jews. The Holocaust is not explained by the rise of fascism or by
class analysis. Racism is a structure, too. Ideology is a structure, too.
And so other structures must be examined to explain the Holocaust. There
are a plethora of reasons why this must be done.

Fascism did not cause genocide in other contexts. In fact, it was where
fascism occurred where there was eliminationist anti-Semitism, such as in
Germany and in the Balkans, that genocidal activity took place. It is
simply a matter of looking at what was the basis for the murder of Jews
and other "undesirables." Anti-Semitism, as well as hatred for gays and
Gypsies, and the eugenical philosophy of eliminating "defectives," are not
intrinsically fascist. These ideologies are unique to certain countries
where these ideas flourished for reasons that cannot be reduced to class
relations, although clearly class had something to do with it, e.g., in
the connections between social class and the intellectual production of
social Darwinism. (Lukacs has an interesting account of the evolution of
racism in this region in his *Destruction of Reason*, particularly German
anti-Semitism. Rather than synopsize his argument, which I have here, I
simply refer you to the source. It is consistent with Goldhagen's thesis. 
Actually, on this point, Goldhagen's analysis is not new; we have always
known that eliminationist anti-Semitism lies at the core of the cultural
and ideological impetus for the Jewish Holocaust, and the transformation
of religious characterizations of the Jew into biological race theory.
What Goldhagen adds to our understanding is an account of what motivated
ordinary Germans to participate.) But this is a narrow matter. Genocide
has occurred down through history, the vast majority of times there were
no fascists movements associated with it. Genocides occur for religious
reasons, all sorts of reasons, generally a complex of reasons. The
genocide of the American Indian on two continents had nothing to do with
fascism. Columbus' elimination of the Arawaks was not fascism. The mass
slaughter of East Timorese--these have nothing to do with fascism. And
stretching definitions by suggesting regimes were "fascist-like" won't
advance the debate. Interestingly, these events had more economic bases
than did the Holocaust. 
 
Thus, one cannot reduce the Holocaust to fascism. This is similar to the
oft seen reduction of fascism to racism. It is a false conflation to call
a racist a fascist. These alleged equivalents--racism = fascism or fascism
= genocide (or Holocaust)--are false equivalents. This leads to all sorts
of errors.
 
Therefore, it is not so in my imagination that genocides happen for
reasons other than fascist regimes, but rather a matter of historical
fact. The sorts of simplistic assessments of complex historical events
that are being offered up here have very little to do with Marxian
analysis, which it seems that they are meant to represent by virtue of the
dogmatic sloganeering about class analysis. These are vulgar attempts to
oversimplify for ideological purposes (what other reasons could there be?)
matters that deserve no less than full consideration of all the nuances of
social reality. Social phenomena cannot be reduced to class structure and
relations anymore than they can be reduced to technology. Both class and
technology are important variables in social analysis. But there are other
things. There are lots of other things. Class analytical frameworks are
models of a feature, granted one of the most important features, of
society. They are not to be confused with society. They are not recipes
that always turn out perfect cakes. 
 
And taking account of the full range of social variables does not
(cannot?) take place in a single book. Each book that is written on a
subject as massive and complex as the Holocaust can only take up a domain
of social reality. Goldhagen took up the matter of cognition. One cannot
legitimately run around condemning a book which takes as its question, and
very specifically so, the matter of what German men were thinking about
when they blew other men's brains out simply because its author didn't
perform a class analysis of the rise of Nazi Germany. Similarly, one
cannot dismiss a book that takes as its question social class in Germany
for not getting inside the men's heads who slaughtered children. Both
books will, however, advance our understanding of this complex historical
event. 
  
> *You* keep wanting to reduce the debate to the status of analysis of the
> Holy text according to Goldhagen. Well in the real world the debate
> moves on.
 
No, you and others want to criticize Goldhagen for things he did not set
out to do and therefore did not do. I never said in this debate that I
wanted to debate fascism generally, or that I disputed Marxian accounts of
the rise of fascism, including Nazi Germany. I have discussed fascism on
many occasions on this list. I have no problems engaging in a political,
class-dialectical, culture-ideological debate on the matter of fascism if
I have the time to do so. It is a well-understood subject and one upon
which there rests a monumental glut of excellent to awful literature, a
great many volumes of both sorts I have in my personal library. This was
not what promoted the debate. This debate was started about Goldhagen's
analysis. You cannot criticize me for actually staying on topic (well, I
guess you can, but I don't see what purpose it serves).
  
> Fascism arises primarily out of capitalism and its periodic and long
> term crises. It is based in the middle class and the de-classed, not the
> ruling class, not the working class. It comes to power with the backing
> of the ruling class in order to crush the organised working class. It is
> the disparate class nature of fascist forces which require an
> all-encompassing ideology like racial purity and/or religion and/or
> nationalism in order to unite it. Anti-semitism in the 30's fitted.
> Today, in Australia at least, it is anti-asian and anti-aboriginal
> racism.
 
Imperialism also relies on racist ideology to justify the exploitation of
subjugated people. Nationalism, religion, racial purity, etc., are very
useful organizers of men's thoughts for the purposes of de-classing
society ideationally. This is all well-understood. But there is no theory
here and the reasoning is functional teleological. There are deeper
theoretical questions. 
 
Where do racist-fascist movements get the raw ideological materials? Where
do the nationalist, racist, and religious sentiments come from? Thin air?
Created by the fascists themselves? Anti-Semitism is a fascist creation?
The fascists created nationalism? Religion? Can whole cultures be conjured
out of the imagination of two-bit Nazi racialists? Can ordinary German
people be completely brainwashed into a worldview they did not previous
hold, within a matter of a decade, or within a single year, as is supposed
in a post by Proyect (quoting somebody else's falsehood), a worldview in
which Jews were defined as the essence of evil and were considered
biologically predisposed to this essence and therefore must be eliminated,
in any number of ways, before Germany could be great again? Or might it be
that there were longstanding cultural beliefs and racist institutions
through which each generation of Germans were indoctrinated into a core
set of values and attitude, whose amplification through the enabling
mechanism of the Nazi regime, however that regime came to power, permitted
ordinary Germans to act in ways that we can hardly, if at all, imagine
ourselves acting. Could it be possible that ordinary Germans were, in
part, acting on the basis of a deep-seated racism? And if so, why would
this strike any of us as something so unusual as to be rejected as
nonsense? 
 
So, yes, of course, fascist forces require an all-encompassing
ideology--this is not something unique to fascism, of course, most ruling
elites require such all-encompassing ideologies to legitimate their
rule--but the question that Goldhagen asks and answers is this: Where does
the ideational foundation for these ideological necessities come from? 
And what is the process by which these idioms roll themselves over
generation after generation. His answer, it seems to me, is not an
outrageous one--from HISTORY and through CULTURE. 

Most Americans accept the core values of capitalism in the same way, for
the same reasons.
  
> Fascism leads to mass murder IMO because it can't dominate (for long)
> the means of production, like the ruling class or the working class. In
> Germany it lead to murder on the scale of the holocaust because of the
> backing of the ruling class, the ability to utilise an advanced
> capitalist state, and frustration (thanks to James H for this) at losing
> WWII. Not, repeat not, because of "German culture", popular or
> otherwise, ordinary or otherwise.
 
Then why didn't fascism in Italy lead to mass murder?
_______

James,

I wrote that

> >What Chatterjee is putting forward *explains what Goldhagen is
> >explaining*. Siddharth is with it. Jeff isn't even in the ballpark. Jeff
> >has reduced the Holocaust to fascism.

To which James wrote:
 
> Well I'm sorry Andrew but that seems about as clear as mud to me!

And the reason, James, that it seems to you about as clear as mud is
because this you wrote here--

> Siddarth charges responsibility for the genocide to a variety of
> abstractions: 'Nazi Germany [is 'Germany' the subject, or does the
> predicate 'Nazi' play the active part?] ... killed millions'; 'this
> culture and ideology ... played a main role in perpetrating genocide' -
> as if it was ideas that killed people!

--is premised on a ridiculous assumption: That ideas play no main role in
history, specifically in mass slaughters. Your Marxism is dead from the
neck up, James. Technically, you're right, I suppose--of course IDEAS
don't kill people. Neither do GUNS, or GAS CHAMBERS, or DEATHCAMPS. It
takes P E O P L E ACTING ON IDEAS and with GUNS and GAS CHAMBERS in
DEATHCAMPS. Goldhagen is interested in the IDEAS that ordinary Germans
acted upon that permitted the mass slaughter of innocent Jews. Sounds like
a very interesting question to me, one that is asked in any number of
other fields of inquiry. 

We all know that gang violence is ultimately (as in the primary exogenous
factor) a product of socioeconomic forces--I mean, these are what create
the conditions in which gangs flourish in all sorts of ways, both
materially and ideationally. But another interesting question is the way
in which gang members neutralize or rationalize away the moral value
against killing (obviously they have this moral value, since they don't
generally kill their homeboys, and they have families and they feel love
for others). That they do this through a number of identifiable
techniques, and that these techniques are learned through socialization in
their cultural milieu, is not important here; what is important is that it
advances our understanding considerably regarding gang violence to ask and
study this particular question. 

Guess what? Marxists are interested in IDEAS, too. We are interested in
the IDEAS that ordinary working people have that prevent them from acting
consistent with their objective interests. Marxists are interested in the
IDEAS that are produced and controlled by the ruling class in order to
maintain domination over the whole of society. Of course, we are
interested in other things, but we aren't so naive as to believe that
IDEAS are inconsequential. It is all in the type of question we are
asking.

All this is as clear as mud to you, James, because this argument-- 

> You put much store on distinguishing between Fascism and the Holocaust -
> it is true that they are distinct, but the former is a precondition for
> the latter. 

--is irrelevant to this debate in the same way that Jeff Sparrow's
argument is irrelevant to the debate. First, that Nazism was a
precondition to the Holocaust is acknowledged by Goldhagen. He
acknowledges this as a given. It is NOT his research question. As I told
Sparrow and Hartin, one cannot blame Goldhagen for failing to do that
which he never set out to do. Nazism enabled the Holocaust; does anybody
dispute this? But also eliminationist anti-Semitism was a precondition for
the Holocaust. This is Goldhagen's question. Do you, James, deny that
anti-Semitism pervaded German culture during this period? Is it your
contention that the Germans were not anti-Semitic? How do you explain how
ordinary Germans routinely and frequently gleefully went about murdering
Jews? The explanation you provided does nothing to answer this question.

Preconditioning and enabling do not justify reduction. Genocides do not
happen whenever fascism appears. Fascism doesn't appear whenever there are
genocides. Most genocidal moments in history were quite apart from
fascism, as I already explained. Looks like you will have to expand your
explanatory model, James, or you aren't going to explain very much at all. 

The Holocaust wasn't an accident. It wasn't a random historical anomaly. 
It wasn't mindless automatons driven to murder other human beings by
Nazis. Ordinary Germans didn't kill Jews on a whim, with no thoughts about
what they did and what they were doing. German people were living,
breathing, thinking human beings. They had beliefs. They understood what
they were doing. They knew what it meant to roam from village to village,
forcing the inhabitants out of the village and into the woods, forcing
them to dig a mass grave, and then, one by one, and sometimes all at once,
put a bullet in the backs of their necks. Sometimes they gassed them in
specially designed mobile death units. These human beings, the Germans,
knew what it meant when blood spattered their faces. They understood the
meaning of women and children pleading for their lives, women pleading for
their children's lives. They knew what it meant to hear people banging on
the inside walls of the gas chambers. They knew the sounds and the silence
of death. They were family men, these ordinary Germans, some with deep
religious conviction, upstanding men in their community, men with little
children of their own. And still they killed. And still they took pictures
of their deeds, smiling, boasting, savoring. In their minds, they were
hunting animals. And they took trophies.

So, yes, of course, Nazism enabled the slaughters. The Nazis provided the
necessary organization for the Holocaust, the technology, the death camps;
this has all been well-understood for a long time. But what has not been
so well-understood, and even worse, what has been excused for so long by
seeing Hitler as the spell-binder, is how regular German men could
slaughter human beings in the millions. This doesn't seem like such a
bizarre question. And the answer Goldhagen gives doesn't seem so bizarre
either.

> "The point of "Why the Heavens Did not Darken" is to establish the
> difference between the genocide and the type of antisemitism that
> preceded it. He makes a convincing case that the reversals on the
> Eastern Front in the ill-fated Barbarossa Campaign caused the German
> ruling class and the Nazi top echelons to embark on an irrational self-
> destructive course. The shock of losing important battles to the
> Russians and the recognition that the Third Reich was doomed threw the
> state apparatus into a frenzy. In this period, from 1943 on, a decision
> was made to exterminate the Jews. Mayer argues that there was no signs
> of such a plan beforehand."

This is simply wrong. I missed this before. Hitler and other Nazis planned
of extermination of the Jews earlier than this, probably before 1939, but
1939, for sure. And no later than 1941 did the systematic slaughter begin. 
Eliminationist anti-Semitism, with open advocacy of eliminating the Jews,
extends back even further, and Hitler advocated, along with other future
Nazis, cleansing Germany of Jews before 1920, and in the language of
blood-spilling. Hitler was a product of eliminationist anti-Semitism. He
carried out what many Germans had sought for decades or longer, to
vanquish the Jew from Germany. The elimination of the Jews was in Hitler's
mind long before he ever rose to power, and many of his actions were
specifically designed to bring about the end result of eliminating, and
quite possibly quite early on, exterminating the Jews. Nazis were
experimenting, for example, on how to most efficiently kill the Jews long
before 1943. Racial apartheid was instituted just a couple of years after
Hitler and the Nazis took power, and many of the steps to this end began
before this. There is much more, of course.

There are generally two views taken on this matter. There is the
functionalist view and the intentionalist view. The more evidence that
comes to light pushes the former interpretation of events further and
further into implausibility. In fact, the former view was largely
generated from a lack of evidence and a great need for understanding. Some
people argue that determining history becomes more problematic the more
time passes. This is not always so.

> The advantage of Mayer's argument is that it does distinguish between
> the holcaust and anti-semitism in general, but still situates the
> holocaust within the specific historical conditions of its day. 

Goldhagen situates the Holocaust within the specific conditions of its
day. That is the whole point of the book, to explain the Holocaust by
understanding it in context.

> The hidden moral of this argument is this: more than most others the
> German working class resisted national chauvinism and racial policies.
> They pulled Germany out of the first world war, and they fought fascism
> when the European ruling class was courting it. Arguably, the American
> and British working classes were much more acquiescent to the imperial
> and racial policies undertaken by their ruling classes. 

And why was this? Because Britain and the United States were governed by
charismatic dictators? Or was it because Britain and the United States
were deeply racist countries? During this period there was apartheid in
the southern United States (in fact, segregated black US army troops
fought against Nazis!). Was this the result of a charismatic leader or
did it have to do with racial structure and cultural traditions that saw
the black as inferior and therefore deserving of being segregated from the
rest of society?

I could go on with this. It's an easy argument. The point is that IDEAS
matter. They are important. What separates human beings from the other
animals, Marx argued, is that we can visualize something in our heads
before we carry it out. Human beings can rationalize, justify, and explain
why they do things. Human beings can lie and feel guilt. The Black Widow
doesn't know why she cannibalizes her lover. Scorpions don't consider why
they kill and eat other scorpions. These events have no meaning to these
animals. But while human beings may not always understand the larger
intersection of events that compel them to kill other human beings, they
do understand that they are killing other human beings. They therefore
need a reason to justify doing what they otherwise know is wrong. And when
soldiers, human beings like you and me, go beyond the horror of killing
their enemy (an act which itself relies on cultural beliefs such as
patriotism, racism, ethnocentrism, dehumanization) and go onto the
pleasures of raping and killing innocent civilians, up close and personal,
then there is something else in operation, and what that something else is
a legitimate research problem.

Andy Austin









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