Date: Fri, 21 Nov 1997 22:06:34 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: MT: Re:Re: Goldhagen 



I think jukka is having an attack of what we here call "political
correctness." He is worried that slamming German irrationalsim is a sort
of "essentialism," as the pomos say, which smears the whole nation as
guilty of Nazism, even retrospectively, sweeping in Lessing and Goethe,
Marx and Nietzsche, Beethoven and Wagner, not to mention Heidegger and R.
Struauss, who actually _were_ Nazis. 

This is sort of silly. Let's agree that Goethe, et al. are Not Guilty.
Wagner of course was an irrationalsit and an anti-semite, but not a Nazi.
Personally I think blaming Nazism on irrationalism, a real tendenct in
German culture, is absurd, the most lowbrow sort of idealism in Marx's
sense of the term. 

At the same time, I think that nations have a sort of responsibility for
their history. As an American, I can't just say, slavery is over and done
with and anyway no one alive is responsible for its wrongs, so why don't
we just forget it. Actually a lot of Americans (resentful whites) do say
that, but I think that's wrong. If we can claim any good from our national
heritage, we have to take responsibility for what's bad. The Constitution
that embodied the Bill of Rights also licensed slavery. I just mention
slavery as an example.

Moreover, I think it's good if the Germans feel a sting of conscience. I
mean, not just right that they should, but that it also has good
consequences. It makes them less likely to go on the warpath again, and
that's important. Personally I thought the Americans who howled that
Germans weren't doing their share in the Gulf Wat (the Japanese too) when
they declined to fight were doubly nuts. In the first place the Gulf War
was an imperialist war that we had to resist because of that. But second,
have people forgotten what happened the last time the Germans mobilized to
fight? It's better for everyone if they feel a powerful inhibition against
that. And of course American imperialism has been bloody and frightful
more recently. But the Nazis were the _real_ Evil Empire, and the world
had best not forget it; least of all the Germans.

On Fri, 21 Nov 1997, Jukka Laari wrote:

> Well... 
> 
> perhaps there is something to that? 
> 
> > So my sneers at "French" philosophy are neo-racist? Incidentally I disavow
> > any general contempt or dislike for the French. Paris is one of my
> > favorite cities. But recent French philosophy is for the birds. I think
> > James H's remarks about "German irrationalism" are in the same vein. All
> > of us here honor, among other Germans, one Karl Marx and his pal Engels.
> 
> No, the point is not with a 'race', but rather with 'nation' or 
> 'culture' that is put under the same kind of procedures as earlier 
> was done with different 'races'. After ww2 it's been clear that in 
> Europe Germans have been under certain scrutiny. And not only that, 
> actually they've been stigmatized: they've been made questionable 
> figure's in whole European imaginary, all the way from popular 
> entertainment to modes of "higher culture". It may be that in North 
> America such stigmatization haven't been so forceful?

Maybe not, although we do have the imagine the shrieking SS officer, "Ve
haff vays of making you talk." But remember that the Germans didn't do us
here in America that much harm, sunk a bunch of ships, killed a few
hundred thousands soldiers. In Europe they enslaved the continent and
murdered 12 million people. It makes a difference.
> 
> "Race science" wasn't exactly German invention, 

No, alas, it was largely an American and British invention. A curiority
for ya'll: the science of statistics, invented by the Brit Galton and
formalized by the American Pearson, was originally a device topromote
eugenics and ensure the breeding of a "higher stock." See inter alia
Stephjen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man.

though German 
> scientists were one leading group involved. English and Swedish 
> scientists were heavily involved in it. - Today it's seen as one 
> shameful thread with Swedish welfare state that they continued forced 
> sterilisation of handicapped and such persons up until sixties... it 
> has popped up to publicity once again recently. 

Here too. 

> 
> After the breakdown of Berlin wall, when the reunification seemed to 
> make sense, one of the first questions expressed, also publicly, was 
> whether Germans will try *it* again... meaning conquering the world, 
> Holocaust & such.

Yeah, the thought has occurred to me too. Maybe it's because I'm Jewish. I
like Germany. I love Berlin. But when I was there I kept seeing the wrong
flag fluttering out of the corner of my eye.

 Psychologists have explained it: own feelings of 
> guiltiness (and such) are processed by projecting to Germans own 
> aggressions and (more or less well-known) cruelty of own group 
> ('nation' or whatever). I think that sort of social psychological 
> phenomena must be taken under consideration in order to make sense of 
> the status of Germans in western imagination.

Maybe. But as long as the Germans feel guilty, I'll feel better. I don't
think this is a national prejudice. As I say, I don't include pre-Nazi
Germans in this, and I don't suspect most of todays' German of harboring
Goldhagen's "exterminist antisemitism." But the German record in this
century makes you wonder, doesn't it? The more inhibitions they have
against violence and aggression, the better. As far as projection goes, I
don't have to project my own view of the American government and our
singularly cruel and violent national culture on the Germans. I only wish
my countrymen (and _men_ is the operative word here) felt as guilty
about what we've done as the Germans do. It would make the world a better
place, anyway, a safer one.  
 
> 
> I don't pretend to know what really was behind nazism and holocaust. 
> Sad part of the story is that, throughout the centuries, in German 
> countries anti-semitism wasn't at all that strong and widespread as 
> in some other countries, esp. in eastern Europe.

Weoll, yes. Though it was very bad in Germany. Still, it's not an
exculpation to say of a murder, well, before I did that all I everdid was
beat and torture, and anyone other people were worse when I was beating
and torturing.

 Yet exactly some 
> Germans did what they did. To me it's dubious to blame all Germans 
> for that and to refer to it as some unique process, whatever term we 
> may use to characterise such "remembering". 

If "blame" means to regard the postwar generation of Germans as
responsible for mass murder in exactly the way that the Nazis who carried
it are responsible, that is of course ludicrous. But there has to bee some
sort of collective responsibility. If the Germans want credit for Goethe
they must take responsibility for Hitler. As I say they are not unique in
this: Americans have a lot to answer for, and so, I fear, since WWII, do
Jews. What's called for isn't an apology, which wouldn't do anyone any
good, but something deeper and more complicated.

--Justin