File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9709, message 164


Date: Wed, 10 Sep 1997 08:45:57 +0100
From: Chris Burford <cburford-AT-gn.apc.org>
Subject: Re: M-I: Hitler's Willing Executioners


At 12:52 AM 9/9/97 +0200, you wrote:
>At 22:11 24.08.97 +0100, Chris Burford wrote:
>
>>I want to ask contributors especially from the USA and Germany to help
>>clarify a debate that has got very complex on several levels. The battle
>>lines are far ranging and they have many implications for marxists. 
>
>Hinrich: Chris, before starting this thread you should have read the
>following:

and quoted for the list in English the 

Foreword to the German Edition - reprinted in the Abacus resp. Vintage
paperback edition of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners.
Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, published 1997 (9.99 Pound Sterling),
p. 477-483.]


Well there may never be a perfect way to open a thread, and I thank Hinrich
not only for obtaining the English reference of the text that he thinks is
important, but for quoting my introductory remarks.

I think this has been a very important thread and despite the fact that
people have gone over the top at times I think there has been a strong
attempt on both, on all, sides, to approach this in an internationalist
spirit. Indeed some of the arguments occur because of the concern of
different writers to guard against any chauvinism for their country.

I certainly assume Hinrich, you have thought a great deal on this subject
and perhaps have powerful indirect experience of it. 

You also enlarged the debate by posting a poem, which is another way, of
understanding the incomprehensible. 

In starting this thread I by no means thought that everything Goldhagen
said was nonsense. I had bought the book after perusing it. I had seen him
perform on television. Finkelstein's criticism (which presumably is mainly
available in German only in a form edited by Der Spiegel) does seem to me
mainly to be influenced by a Zionist-anti-Zionist polarisation of the
debate. Neither text as they stand seems to me to be an attempt at a
rounded marxist approach, Goldhagen's explicitly so.


It is not clear what this argument is about. Goldhagen is both a book and
now a social phenomenon. Are we for him or against him? 

I respect that you may be coming from quite a different angle, but for my
part as an Englishman I have been puzzled and uncomfortable long before I
ever heard of Marx, about the contradictions in a fairy story of Europe
being divided between a nation of monsters and a nation of angels. Guilt is
in many ways a necessary emotion but it is counter-productive if it is not
about learning lessons, and I know you would not disagree with this. So as
an Englishman I am always uncomfortable when the burden of guilt appears to
be carried disproportionately by German people, not just because that is
largely unfair, but it blinds us and deprives us of a wider discussion that
would really learn lessons. 

Every time there is a shocking story about the Holocaust it obscures the
less terrible but pretty terrible fact that concentration camps on any
scale were invented by the British and 20,000 Boers died in them. So not
only has British imperialism profited massively by the super-exploitation
of the black people of South Africa, (whose infant mortality was running
under apartheid at the unprintable rate of 30,000 a year) but itself
contributed to the cycle of perpetrator-victim which fuelled the racist
nationalism of the apartheid government. Apartheid was after all in part a
response to the sense of extermination of the Boers. If if not marxist, we
have to break the cycle of victim-perpetrator and horror stories do not do
that and may well continue it, which is the connection that Finkelstein
seems to fear with the exterminationist Zionist policies in Israel.

So to come to Goldhagen's preface to the German edition, although I did not
read it specifically before I opened the thread, I had read the character
of the book, and my attitude was not dismissive, but that the book was
probably seriously flawed.

So to accept the invitation to comment on that preface, I will respond to
just a few points.

I have already commented in this debate on my objection to Goldhagen
describing the insitutions of the German state as "abstract structures"
(second sentence). There is no reason why he should be an expert on the
interrelationship in marxist dialectics between the abstract and the
concrete, the general and the particular, but these bodies like the German
police force were *concrete*, *concrete*, *concrete*. 

I think I see where he is coming from, giving him the benefit of the doubt,
against even more simplistic accounts. But such institutions were concrete,
and the concrete reality is that even while some police brigades under
certain conditions of power and ideology exterminated whole Jewish
communities, as a force they were sufficiently *un*-willing executioners,
for the Nazi regime to have to build gas ovens as a different solution.
There is also the riddle that in the heart of Berlin the main synagogue was
defended on Kristalnacht in 1938 by the local police chief, who retired
apparently normally on a pension in 1943. 

The more I pick up about the concrete detail of the Nazi period, the more
it seems that part of the picture was the difficulty the Nazis had in
totally destroying civil society, which gradually found ways of resisting.
The Nazi method was the blitzkrieg in internal politics as well as
external, but it was usually carefully calculated to be in conditions where
it would win with overwhelming shocking force. It was constrained by this
calculation. Hence the programme was not one of open extermination but of
very strict discpline and then harsh and even lethal punishment for what
could be presented as transgressions. 

The second paragraph of Goldhagen's introduction emphasises his desire to
focus on the choices people made either individually or collectively. My
objection here is that the headlines come over as if it was a matter of
clear conscious choice. I think these things come about as a result of
millions, trillions, of fuzzy, sometimes barely understood choices,
hesitations and certainties. 

So not a single member of this list, including myself, has come back with
any information about anything we can do about the slaughter going on at
present in Algeria in defence of western cultural values. There may be an
undercurrent of unease, unfamiliarity or distrust of muslim
fundamentalists. I certainly recognise prejudices in myself. But also each
one of us had something better to do. These were concrete choices in a
concrete situation in which the social and economic power structures are an
inseparable part of the equation. For numerous reasons there is perhaps
still no web site about civil rights atrocities *against* muslim
fundamentalists.

Third and last point before I try to get to work: I think Goldhagen
misplays with a syllogism. He argues correctly that atrocities were
committed by "ordinary" Germans. Most atrocities and tortures are committed
by "ordinary" people in fact. In terms of numbers who directly executed the
Nazi's secret death plans, he cannot show that this was the majority of the
German people. But the implicit completion of the syllogism is that most
German's are ordinary, therefore all Germans were Hitler's willing
executioners.

And though in reading he is more subtle than that, Goldhagen as a social
phenomenon comes over with this as the headline story. Such headlines
trivialise exceptionally important lessons, and have concrete political
implications now. 

I am very keen on integrating psychological processes into marxist social
and political analysis, but Goldhagen's methods that says in words that he
takes all other analyses as read - including the loss of civil liberties
for the left - does not integrate these insights into the actual concrete
social and political structures. That is my impression.

But so everbody is not repeatedly arguing past each other, perhaps Hinrich,
you might just say the two or three points which you find most illuminating
in Goldhagen's analysis and I am sure I am not the only one, who would give
them a serious reading.

Chris Burford

London.




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