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Turning a Blind Eye to Genocide
Real Holocaust Denial
By Sam Smith
02/22/06 "Counterpunch"
-- -- The jailing of Holocaust denier
David Irving in Austria is a reminder of how easy it is to
imitate evil even as one excoriates it. The law that convicted
Irving is of the sort the Nazis would have invoked, albeit for
far different purposes, and was a routine offense in Orwell's
1984.
Many fail to see this irony because they are engaged in the
greatest Holocaust denial of all: a refusal to look seriously at
why there was a Holocaust in the first place. To blame it all on
anti-Semitism is as dangerously ahistorical as to deny its
existence. Yes, Jews were the victims, but why did an ancient
and widespread prejudice produce such an extreme result in this
case?
We avoid this question because it takes us places we don't want
to go. Like the role of modern bureaucracy and technology in the
magnification of evil. Like the commingling of corporate and
state interests in a way the world had never seen before. Like
the failure of Germany's liberal elite to stand effectively
against wrong eerily echoed today in the failure of America's
liberal elite to do likewise.
Some of the most important lessons of the Holocaust are simply
missed. Among these, as Richard Rubenstein has pointed out, is
that it could only have been carried out by "an advanced
political community with a highly trained, tightly disciplined
police and civil service bureaucracy.
In The Cunning of History, Rubenstein also finds uncomfortable
parallels between the Nazis and their opponents. For example, a
Hungarian Jewish emissary meets with Lord Moyne, the British
High Commissioner in Egypt in 1944 and suggests that the Nazis
might be willing to save one million Hungarian Jews in return
for military supplies. Lord Moyne,s reply: "What shall I do with
those million Jews? Where shall I put them? Writes Rubenstein:
"The British government was by no means adverse to the final
solution, as long as the Germans did most of the work. " For
both countries, it had become a bureaucratic problem, one that
Rubenstein suggests we understand "as the expression of some of
the most profound tendencies of Western civilization in the 20th
century.
How many school children are taught that, worldwide, wars in the
past century killed over 100 million people? In World War I
alone, the death toll was around ten million. Much of this,
including the Holocaust, was driven by a culture of modernity
that so changed the power of institutions over the individual
that the latter would become what Erich Fromm called homo
mechanicus, "attracted to all that is mechanical and inclined
against all that is alive. Becoming, in fact, a part of the
machinery -- willing to kill or to die just to keep it running.
Thus, with Auschwitzlike efficiency, over 6,000 people perished
every day during World War I for 1,500 days. Rubenstein recounts
that on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the British
lost 60,000 men and half of the officers assigned to them. But
the bureaucratic internal logic of the war did not falter at
all; over the next six months, more than a million British,
French and German soldiers would lose their lives. The total
British advance: six miles. No one in that war was a person
anymore. The seeds of the Holocaust can thus be found in the
trenches of World War I. Individuals had became no better than
the bullets that killed them, just part of the expendable
arsenal of the state.
But we don't talk about this do we? We don't teach our children
about it, do we?
The problem with using the outcome rather than the origins of
the Holocaust as our metaphor and our message is that we are
totally unprepared for those practices, laws, and arguments that
can produce similar outcomes. We study the death chambers when
we should be learning about the birth places.
Sam Smith is the editor of the Progressive Review.
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