[NYTr] "The Nazi Conscience"

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Tim Murphy (activ-l)

Lenin's Tomb - Jul 30, 2007
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2007/07/nazi-conscience.html

"The Nazi Conscience"

Posted by lenin

If you're wandering through the bookshops in a daze, collecting more
words to clutter up your untidy life with, you might want to grab a
copy of Claudia Koonz's The Nazi Conscience. I haven't time for a full
review here, but it is one of the most systematic efforts I have read
to encompass the specific set of moral claims that facilitated Nazi
atrocities, and to detail how these were produced and became hegemonic.
What is most impressive about it is how it describes both continuity
and discontinuity - that is, it is as attentive to the ways in which
the Nazis drew upon norms that were then ubiquitous as it is to the
singular range and intensity of the Nazi indoctrination programme. It
also, whether the author intended this or not, deals a sharp blow to
the Goldhagen thesis that Germans were collectively guilty for the Nazi
holocaust, that it was something embedded in their specific cultural
arrangements. Koonz shows that by contrast, Germany was among the least
antisemitic countries in Europe until the late 1930s. The Nazis, in
courting mainstream opinion, suppressed some of their vicious hatred of
the Jews - Streicher was good for the activists, but they recognised
that they would have to lay the basis for widespread acceptance of
racial 'science' through more moderate sounding, 'impartial' bodies and
journals. Even Hitler's 1939 speech, which contains what we now rightly
see as a threat to commit genocide against the Jews, spent only a few
minutes of a lengthy speech on the topic. Victims of the Nazis, like
Klemperer, described - even in their most despairing moments - forms of
solidarity and aid, even as a terrifying consensus was being
constructed against the Jews. That consensus licensed a two-front war:
a global war on those blamed for retarding German expansion, and a
domestic war on Germany's putative existential enemies.

The construction of that consensus couldn't rely on repression alone,
since recent evidence suggests that the Gestapo were frequently
ineffective and that Germans could selectively circumvent rules they
did not approve of (provided they weren't Marxists or Jews). Nor could
it rely on the blaring, vulgar output of rags like the Sturmer. And nor
were the conditions of the battlefield a sufficient cause of the
atrocities of the frontline. Rather, Koonz urges readers to see Nazi
soldiers as being something apart from conventional troops - they were
treated and indoctrinated as race warriors, selected for acceptance of
the core elements of Nazi ideology (respect for the Fuhrer, devotion to
the 'Volk', belief in the justice of conquest, and a belief in the
existence of a Jewish threat). For Koonz, there are four basic
intellectual and moral assumptions of Nazism. The first is that the
life of a Volk is like that of an organism with "stages of birth,
growth, expansion, decline and death", a motif drawn straight from the
evolutionary sociology of people like Herbert Spencer and from quite
widespread rightist doctrine. For example, the response to class
struggle was frequently to appeal to workers to sacrifice themselves
(their class interests) for the greater good, for the survival of the
national organism. The second assumption, also widespread, was that
values were specific, appropriate to the nature of the ethnic group and
their environment. This appeal to particularism, supremacism in other
words, was expressed in the high camp of love for one's ethnic comrade
(Volksgenosse) and, of course, for Germany above all else (this, for
Goebbels, was "the first commandment of every National Socialist", as
he explained it in "The Little ABC's of National Socialism"). The third
was the acceptance and promotion of outright aggression against
"undesirable" peoples, something also drawn directly from the colonial
experience, and the nation-building one. Take L Frank Baum - he of The
Wizard of Oz - who wrote that "The whites, by law of conquest, by
justice of civilisation, are masters of the American continent and the
best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total
annihilation of the few remaining Indians ... better that they should
die than live like the miserable wretches that they are." And of course
the final assumption was the right of governments to annul the legal
protections of assimilated citizens on the basis of what the government
defined as their ethnicity. The Nazis appealed particularly to
analogies with American policy in justification, hoping that their
racial codes would one day be as widely accepted as US immigration
quotas, antimiscegenation laws, involuntary sterilization programs in
twenty-eight states, and segregation in the Jim Crow south. What was
unique in Nazi persecution was that although their propaganda
frequently bestialised Jews and black people and gypsies and so on,
they considered their enemy invisible: they didn't oppress on the basis
of a visible or cultural marker of difference. Their racialism was
hopelessly inconsistent and befuddled, as all quackery is, based on
certain arbitrary considerations of lineage: but it was also based on
what was considered by US-European ruling class and rightist circles to
be the best biological (genetic) knowledge.

The continuities are not only in the elements of the 'Nazi conscience',
but especially in the conception of global war as a 'race war'. Gerald
Horne's recent book 'Race War: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack
on the British Empire' investigates some unexplored dimensions of the
Pacific War, specifically the way in which both the Japanese and the
Allies understood that war as in part a 'race war', in which the
Japanese empire sought to subvert (or more correctly, reverse) the
colonial racial hierarchy, and very conscientiously utilised the sense
of outrage and hostility that populations in South East Asia felt
toward centuries of white supremacy. This was manifest in the notorious
atrocities carried out in the camps. They encouraged non-Japanese
guards of the internment camps to see Europeans as they had always seen
others - as inferior, subjugated people. The records show that London
and Washington were deeply alarmed about this, and particularly worried
about the potentially powerful propaganda appeal. After all, the main
allies were all engaged in state-sanctioned supremacist policies,
either through colonies (US, Britain, France) or domestic annihilation
and domination (US, Australia, Canada). It became a crucial element of
Allied propaganda to avoid any public statement that hinted at white
supremacy, even while a 'race war' was pursued domestically - and it
seems British officials bear partial responsibility for America's
internment policy during World War II, advising their US counterparts
of the 'lessons' of the attacks on Hong Kong and Pearl Harbour, which
essentially involved the claim that America had been lax in allowing an
Asian-American hybrid community to develop. Of course, America's own
escape from some form of fascist rule was in some ways quite narrow: it
is reasonably well known that business leaders in the US plotted a coup
against Roosevelt, but there was also a mass, nativist, authoritarian
racist movement that was flourishing in the States long before the
Nazis were more than a cuckoo clan in Germany. Although they were not
the centre of KKK obsessions, Jews were being lynched, or hounded out
of institutions, or attacked in the United States, long before that
horror began in Germany. The scale of their violent operations, the
extent of collusion in the political elite, their ability to penetrate
local office, and the unity they achieved between the upper class and
'white collar' workers, points to something that could have been
American Fascism - had it not been for multiracial working class combat
and resistance against the Klan in the urban centres.

Years of anti-racist struggle, the decolonisation movement,
anti-imperialist solidarity campaigns, victories by the oppressed, and
so on, have so radically altered official political culture that a
world-view which was once only marginally challenged in Europe and
America by socialists contesting the capitalist system (and not by all
of them either) is now only marginally accepted by cranks.
African-Americans destroyed southern apartheid, South Africans
destroyed white supremacy, and while the dregs of antisemitism are
reconstituted and re-valourised as the official ideology of Israel, it
doesn't have much going for it beyond the Levant. So, we're safe,
right? Not a chance. After all, imperialism hasn't gone away. European
and North American states are still racial hierarchies, with
increasingly aggressive anti-immigrant campaigns. The global class
hierarchy is still intersected by a racial one. Far right parties have
been making electoral gains across Europe, all galvanising antagonism
to migrants and especially to Muslims (who are blamed in noxious
literature for drugs, rape - of white women and children, of course -
for sexual deviancy, crime, and terrorism), all preying on the sense of
betrayal and breakdown that comes with the neoliberal assault on
society. America still treats black life as cheap, regards young black
men as prison material, applies a racist death penalty, and still
indulges the occasional spot of ethnic cleansing, as in New Orleans.
And, of course, no ruling class is going to hesitate to cancel
bourgeois democracy, even as they now don't hesitate to curtail it in
the name of a 'war on terror' (revoking the rights of subjects on
grounds of suspect loyalty, spying on domestic dissenters, interning
and torturing citizens etc). If fascism returns, it may not require the
specific apparatus of 'race science': it will surely feed on the
darkest excrement in the 'zeitgeist'. The existential threat is now,
after all, an immaterial force, something called values, the binds
populations and states, guides global agents, turns babies into suicide
bombers and statesmen into freedom fighters. The revanchist racism of
the Bell Curve may only be a fringe partner of a coalition that could
involve minutemen, Christian fundamentalists, deranged 'secularists',
militarists etc. The toxic elements are present, and could easily be
convoked in a graver crisis than we are presently experiencing.

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