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