Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site psc70.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!bonnie!akgua!mcnc!decvax!dartvax!psc70!tos From: tos@psc70.UUCP (Dr.Schlesinger) Newsgroups: net.politics Subject: Re: Responsibility for the Holocaust: Reply to Saumya Debray Message-ID: <130@psc70.UUCP> Date: Tue, 28-May-85 11:27:21 EDT Article-I.D.: psc70.130 Posted: Tue May 28 11:27:21 1985 Date-Received: Thu, 30-May-85 04:26:38 EDT Organization: Plymouth State College, Plymouth, NH Lines: 62 A ecreaction to the Wingate response to S. Debray: The general thrust and conclusions of the Wingate argument, one can quibble, but -- in my view -- not take much exception to. However, Wingate's historical analogies (which he happens to use to arrive at those conclusions) are pretty hard to swallow. Firstly, YES, people have always killed other people, and yes, sometimes so indiscriminately, that it amounted to killing whole peoples (that's supposed to be the meaning of the term "genocide"); however this generally occurred in the context of wars. There doesn't seem to be any precedent for a ruler to decide that a particular race or "people" with which his people has never been at war and was not at war at the time, doesn't deserve to live. Second, the Nazis then meshed modern industrial capacity -- railroads, potent gas, specially designed incinerators, modern bureaucracy (which is what caused Hannah Arendt to refer to Eichmann's deeds as "Banality of Evil"!) witht that desire to eliminate the existence of the Jews, and to calmly go about accomplishing this. To the tune of about four million of them. To be sure, it occurred in the context and partly under the cover of WWII, but had no really direct connection with the war as such, except that there would have been no access to the Jews of Russia, and other parts of eastern Europe, had they not been conquered first. Thirdly, the comparison with PolPot is absurd. Sure he was a mad killer, but he never conquered a continent, and if he had killed all the people of Cambodia, which he fortunately didn't quite manage, then the statement that next to him Hitler was a lesser killer, is still a gross distortion. Finally, the implied comparison with the threat and the possibility of nuclear catastrophy is utterly unhelpful to any better understanding of either problem. The commonality there amounts to something like original sin... yes, man is capable of all sorts of horrow, much of it onto fellow man. So what else is new, and what do we learn from that. Unfortunately there is a certain relative -- and very awesome -- uniqueness to the Holocaust. And surely no one I know will deny that an even more gruesome possibility looms over all of our heads in the form of nuclear war. To fudge them into one, and lump that "one" in with the Punic Wars and Pot Pol amounts to little more than "tsk, tsk... aren't we humans baddies anyway." The latter is true, of course -- I'm a real baddie, for one -- but when discussing history and politics, I believe one can learn more by careful distinctions rather than broad generalizations. For one thing, it seems that the gents rattling missiles at one another are awfully prone to those broad categories, and would in my view help all of us more if they thought and acted more in terms of specific countries and peoples and problems, rather than imperialists and communists, totalitarians and free enterprisers, etc etc. Tom Schlesinger Plymouth State College Plymouth, New Hampshire D D D D D D D D horror, most of it perpetrated onto fellow man.