Date: Sun, 23 Nov 1997 12:36:36 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: MT: Re: "Ve haff vays of making you talk"


In a message dated 97-11-22 09:03:40 EST, Jukka writes:

<< The point is that Goldhagenian argument Leo summarized above is at 
 odds with the facts: holocaust wasn't 'natural' or 'lawlike' result 
 of German cultural and social history. Instead it would have been 
 more understandable if it had happened somewhere east of Germany. 
 Holocaust had quite weird and specific genesis and history and it's 
 not explainable by German culture or German psyche.  >>

I don't think this is G's argument; in any case, it is certainly not my view.
I believe that any explanation of the Holocaust must take into account a
number of factors, starting with factors as basic as the structure of the
modern nation-state, and the dynamic of totalitarianism that lies within its
core. It must look at the specific forms totalitarianism took in Nazi
Germany, and account for the others who ended up in the concentration camps,
from gays to Jehovah Witnesses to reds. But part of that analysis must focus
on the ways in which German national culture was a fertile ground for these
developments. Could the Holocaust have happened elsewhere? Certainly, and it
still does happen, if not on the same scale, today, from Bosnia to Rwanda.
But it did happen in Germany, and some of the reasons why it did are
traceable to German national culture and the role of anti-Semitism in it.

Leo