The Boer War?

No. Then it will be too late to talk.

Amidst the wholly laudable cries of ?never again? we should not lose sight of what it was that made Auschwitz and the social and political movement which produced it unique. Auschwitz was not simply genocide (which heaven only knows is bad enough), it was also the turning of death into a minutely calculated industry.

This can be be (mis?)understood to mean that the evil of the ‘Nazis’ can be reduced to and defined by the holocaust and only the holocaust.

But the million-fold evil done by the Nazis compromised much more than the holocaust:

- creating a racist ideology that regarded much of humanity as subhumans “unworthy of living”
- erecting a totalitarian dictatorship in their own country, imprisoning, exiling or killing any of their countrymen who did not go along
- waging wars of aggression against all and sundry
- waging those wars with no regards for the Geneva convention, the protection of civilians and other “niceties”
- enslaving, starving and exterminating the population of the countries of Eastern Europe, notably Poland and the Soviet Union.

While the Holocaust was indeed unique, it could hardly have been possible without those other evils, certainly not in the numbers we have to commemorate now. Most Jews killed lived outside Germany. And while we are speaking of numbers, more people died due to those other evils than were killed in the holocaust (compare, for example the 20+ Million Soviet dead in WWII to the 6 Million Jews killedd in the holocaust ).

The holocaust is indeed, the “nadir of human achievement” and, thank God, so far, unique.

But the other evils are, unfortunately, not so unique throughout history, nor can we really say they are only a distant memory. Without constant vigilance and without building institutions and attitudes reinforcing that vigilance, they may return, even to well-established democracies.

A related problem I have with what Edward wrote is that it, in effect, argues that you can call nobody today “a Nazi” or say that somebody behaves “like a Nazi”. Edward is right to warn against using it as a cheap slur, but there are real neo-Nazis out there, and there are groups and forces who can legitimately be said to behave like Nazis (see, for example, the recent wars in Jugoslavia).

Look, I want to be clear, I am certainly not saying that everything is now so fantastic in a modern democracy that nothing bad can ever happen again.

There are risks to democracy, we should be aware of them, and we should be vigilant.

I think, eg, that the fiscal burden associated with ageing populations could put our democracies at risk. But I think it is unlikely that we will experience the Nazi thing in the same way again. In part because the problems are different and we are different. Truth is nearly always in the details.

We have yet to see a modern democracy regress to dictatorship, and we have yet to see two democracies fight a war with each other. When we have one or other of these on the table, then we will have something to talk about

Unfortunately, Edward, I don’t buy it.

It is rather ironic that the latest Star Wars film, released this coming week, is being criticised in the US for being political satire. Was it really written by Michael Moore? Actually, it was written about 30 years ago and based more on mid-Roman history than on current events, but it does seem to be striking a chord or two among some on both sides of the Atlantic.

The results of Nazism is clear and something so negative that no superlative currently captures it. However, the origin and progess towards this nadir of human achievement is neither clear nor obviously evil. There are lots of recognised ingredients in the pudding, including:

- a population desperately looking for something to believe in

- somebody offering populist fear of another people to unite his own

- use of military spending as an economic stimulant

- an economy that is isolated from those around it

- etc.

So, when does this recipe turn into a disaster? And, when are warnings mere fear mongering? Thinking that we are now so good at ensuring that we can never get on that track again is shear arrogance. So if the Economist or a Spanish politician or anybody else wants to draw parallels between some current actions and those taken in Germany during the rise of Nazism, let them. Maybe we should think about it rather than simply dismissing them.

Say what?

…the germans have gone from Hitler to building
culverts for frogs under the road…

With the implication being that this is some
kind of profound transformation, that going from
voting for Hitler to being concerned about frogs
being able to safely cross a road is some kind
of opposite.

Here’s a quote from a book, “The Approaching Storm:
One Woman’s Story of Germany 1934-1938,” published in
1939 and written by Nora Waln, an american who lived
in germany from 1934 to 1938. The quote below is
about the new roads the nazis were building.

“No telegraph poles, advertisements, rows of refreshment
stands, gasoline stations, or ugly houses line their
banks. Grass strips separate the two ways of traffic,
and these often divide around hills to meet and run side
by side…In forest places, signs which light up at
night ask one to be careful of the deer.”

The truth is that the nazis were for their day and
age, and unusually so, environmentalists. Far from
being a change, building culverts under the roads
for frogs was more of the same.

Does this mean that being concerned about wildlife
is somehow wrong? No, it does not. What it
clearly means though is that being pro-wildlife
hardly proves that one is not a nazi.

Let’s look at Gunter Grass’s reasoning, or what
I imagine to be his reasoning again:

Being nazi is clearly bad, being pro-wildlife is
clearly good. Good is not bad and look what
a dramatic transformation that germans have gone
through!

Except of course the whole thing is based on faulty
premises.

So what does this have to do with Edward Hugh’s
comment?

It is not just that all of these are bad arguments,
they also fail to show sufficient respect for the
very specificity of Nazism, and if we fail to do
this, then how can we be sure it will never happen again.

Here’s something I’ve been wondered about for
some time:

Why is it so hard to find contemporous accounts
of people in nazi germay. Like for instance that
of Nora Waln above. With so many people literate
people, there should be a lot of diaries shouldn’t
there?

There were certainly newspapers, and they certainly
reflected nazi thinking didn’t they? (Because
non-nazis sure didn’t publish.)

Of course these things exist or once existed.
But why are these primary sources so hard to find
in the modern world when people clearly seem
interested in the subject?

My guess would be that in most cases these primary
sources will show dismaying juxtapositions.
Loving wildlife and hating the jews. Is that
fair to the environmentalists? No, someone
thinks and that account gets censored.

And so it goes on and on, one thing after
another the people in power (in this context, the
universities) think it’s unfair to associate with
the nazis. Memory after memory gets deleted; primary
source after primary source disappears.

Yes, I recognise this. Indeed I was thinking about this - or at least its more modern variants - as I was writing the post. Maybe the distinction between the death industries and the “Industrialization of Death” appears to be an overly subtle one.

In the context of the holocaust what we are talking about is applying the technology to the explicit extermination of people.

I obviously think the first world war was another barbarity, but it was a different one, even though millions also died pointlessly.

“”I say those people should come here and see where that old road leads? would be a war memorial.”

Well again, I think that would be rather unfair on those who don’t want to belong to the EU. Neither Norway or Switzerland are participating in the EU process, but I don’t think anyone would suggest that there was a danger of war here.

In the 50’s, when the EU was first conceived, then this was a real danger. Today the justifications for the EU are different. The argument has moved on.

Of course the reasons why the argument has moved on, and why these risks no longer seriously exist is interesting, but perhaps this is not the time to explore them.