File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9709, message 393


Date: 	Sat, 20 Sep 1997 03:12:29 -0800
From: bhandari-AT-phoenix.princeton.edu (Rakesh Bhandari)
Subject: M-I: Goldhagen


 I have not read Goldhagen, but did read Geras' and Finkelstein's essays in
the latest NLR. Having rejoined the list, I find it impossible at this
point to determine what the criticisms of Goldhagen are, much less their
validity. Finkelstein's review only concludes with an external criticism of
how Goldhagen's contemporary politics have influenced his reconstruction of
German fascism. I think it best that we follow his lead and focus on
internal criticisms of the book.

It does seem clear however that the anti-semitism of the Nazis was more
advanced than that of the German population as a whole (Louis P's survey
data from Erich Fromm seems clear here) and that Nazi anti-semitic actions
allowed it to do several things:

*develop counterrevolutionary weapons it could then use on a broader
population to which the costs of official disfavorment had thus been
demonstrated;

*to cover up internal class contradictions through a war against an enemy
which could be invested with some mythic power while remaining eminently
defeatable (unlike, say, the Catholic Church); and

*to press more and more Germans into anti-semitic crimes so horrible that
they would be forced out of collective guilt to follow the Nazis in the
brutalized attempt to redivide the world.

It seems that the Nazis were in the vanguard in anti-semitism and that out
of the terror of their anti semitism they were to induce a great number of
Germans to become barbaric executioners of Jews and brutalized
imperialists.

I just don't see how the willingness of Germans can be understood
independently of the anti-semitic terror of the Nazis since this revealed
the consequences of beind disfavored by fascist regime. If we want to say
that there must have been something exceptional about Germans since many
really believed their enemy to have been Jews--instead of the
superexploitative industrial ruling class and the bourgeois state-- then
which people then or now are not psychologically predisposed to avoid
confrontation with such real material power, especially since in the Nazi
case its terroristic nature was clear for everyone to see. Which people
then or today do not willingly obey the parameters set to resistance by
real material power?

Are we so heroic that we can look down upon Germans with arrogance? Or are
we just a bunch of puffed up cynics, content with the cheap and soft so
called critiques, who are indeed mustering up less real resistance to the
intensifying brutalizations of bourgeois life than many of those putatively
stupid, willing German masses?

Rakesh

ps I have relied above on Franz Neumann's appendix on anti-semitism in his
Behemoth. I presently reading another Frankfurt School work Rehearsal for
Destruction by Paul Massing, a study of the political uses of antisemitism
in Germany before World War One. I believe both studies are missing from
Goldhagen's bibliography.




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