“Republicans, like the Nazis, have redefined “basic decency” in such a way that it involves the justification of disenfranchisement, segregation, and increasing extremes of violence.”
This observation just earned you my paid subscription.
100% on the money. I just subscribed so I could comment on this post. My father was German, and the way he described the progression of fascism from 1933 to 1939 is exactly the way you describe it(he left in May, 1939). I think the gradual progression was also part of what kept so many Jewish people from fleeing immediately, like the apocryphal frog in the pot of water slowly coming to a boil.
Another thing to worry about are the victim narratives and the utopian narratives. So they might not feel shame but a lot of the justification for the atrocities comes from a victim narrative --that there’s a giant conspiracy against ‘the good Americans.’ I don’t think Nazi Germany is necessarily the right model but the psychology is very similar. You tell a story where you are the victim and there are these debased people, and if you get rid of them, you will have a perfect utopian society. Some of the right seem to be self-consciously following a Nazi script but it’s also an organic phenomenon.
There's a term that was used a lot following WWII, the "Good German"—the kind of person who never ACTIVELY participated in racial violence or other Fascistic behavior, but would turn a blind eye to those who did, and would certainly turn over to the authorities somebody they knew was Jewish or other "undesirable", or somebody they suspected (or knew) belonged to The Resistance. When questioned by the Allies after WWII, they insisted none of what the questioners were telling them was true, that they never did anything like that, and that they were sure it was just a few "bad apples" that might have been actively violent toward minorities!
Der Fuhrer never said anything about killing millions of "undesirables"—they saw the railroad cars and the paintings on windows of people drinking and having a great time, and were told they were going off to work in the newly-won Eastern territories. The insistence that nothing that horrible had ever happened was so deeply ingrained that the citizens of the town of Ohrdruf were forced by Generals Eisenhower and Patton to walk through the nearby forced-labor camp (a satellite camp of Buchenwald) and see for themselves what was really going on there. (Patton, no stranger to violence or dead bodies, threw up at one point over what he saw and smelled.)
It's easy to ignore evil, especially if it's being done in the guise of lawful authority.
This is an excellent and timely discussion of Claudia Koonz's work! I had a copy in my collection for several years, right up until recently when I decided to donate my special collection that focused on the Holocaust and the Nazi Era to the Bristol Community College Holocaust and Genocide Center's special collection being housed in the College's academic library so that students at the school could have access to good academic scholarly works from which to learn from.
With regards to the topic of Nazi development on a national level scale I highly recommend "Germans into Nazis" authored by Peter Fritzsche, published in 1998 by the Harvard University Press. It is unquestionably one of the best historical studies of the topic you have brought up for discussion.
Also with regards to the aspect of "mechanism of genocide was bureaucratic" I strongly suggest that you might want to read "the Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future" by Richard L. Rubenstein, as he discusses the part that the German bureaucracy played in everything to do with the Nazi Era. He would have agreed with Koonz that it was false to presuppose that the bureaucratic mechanism was causative, instead his own argument essentially singled out the importance of the fact that it played in facilitating Nazis Germans' desires and willingness to engage in the holocaust in that bureaucracy was nothing more than a tool to be used. When he wrote the book, it is a small book, short work of about 110 pages, in 1975 he very presciently observed how modern day computers then coming into great use by societies world wide held the potential to be of even more horrific use to again perpetrate genocide or worse still as was his more germane conclusion that the Holocaust was in reality the precursor for a a totalitarian regime's enslavement of people, with genocidal actions being secondary to the first purpose of enslavement for economic maximization of subject persons.
I host a PDF copy here at Substack at the following posting:
“Republicans, like the Nazis, have redefined “basic decency” in such a way that it involves the justification of disenfranchisement, segregation, and increasing extremes of violence.”
This observation just earned you my paid subscription.
100% on the money. I just subscribed so I could comment on this post. My father was German, and the way he described the progression of fascism from 1933 to 1939 is exactly the way you describe it(he left in May, 1939). I think the gradual progression was also part of what kept so many Jewish people from fleeing immediately, like the apocryphal frog in the pot of water slowly coming to a boil.
Another thing to worry about are the victim narratives and the utopian narratives. So they might not feel shame but a lot of the justification for the atrocities comes from a victim narrative --that there’s a giant conspiracy against ‘the good Americans.’ I don’t think Nazi Germany is necessarily the right model but the psychology is very similar. You tell a story where you are the victim and there are these debased people, and if you get rid of them, you will have a perfect utopian society. Some of the right seem to be self-consciously following a Nazi script but it’s also an organic phenomenon.
Fascism was less total...but more insidious.
There's a term that was used a lot following WWII, the "Good German"—the kind of person who never ACTIVELY participated in racial violence or other Fascistic behavior, but would turn a blind eye to those who did, and would certainly turn over to the authorities somebody they knew was Jewish or other "undesirable", or somebody they suspected (or knew) belonged to The Resistance. When questioned by the Allies after WWII, they insisted none of what the questioners were telling them was true, that they never did anything like that, and that they were sure it was just a few "bad apples" that might have been actively violent toward minorities!
Der Fuhrer never said anything about killing millions of "undesirables"—they saw the railroad cars and the paintings on windows of people drinking and having a great time, and were told they were going off to work in the newly-won Eastern territories. The insistence that nothing that horrible had ever happened was so deeply ingrained that the citizens of the town of Ohrdruf were forced by Generals Eisenhower and Patton to walk through the nearby forced-labor camp (a satellite camp of Buchenwald) and see for themselves what was really going on there. (Patton, no stranger to violence or dead bodies, threw up at one point over what he saw and smelled.)
It's easy to ignore evil, especially if it's being done in the guise of lawful authority.
This is an excellent and timely discussion of Claudia Koonz's work! I had a copy in my collection for several years, right up until recently when I decided to donate my special collection that focused on the Holocaust and the Nazi Era to the Bristol Community College Holocaust and Genocide Center's special collection being housed in the College's academic library so that students at the school could have access to good academic scholarly works from which to learn from.
With regards to the topic of Nazi development on a national level scale I highly recommend "Germans into Nazis" authored by Peter Fritzsche, published in 1998 by the Harvard University Press. It is unquestionably one of the best historical studies of the topic you have brought up for discussion.
Also with regards to the aspect of "mechanism of genocide was bureaucratic" I strongly suggest that you might want to read "the Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future" by Richard L. Rubenstein, as he discusses the part that the German bureaucracy played in everything to do with the Nazi Era. He would have agreed with Koonz that it was false to presuppose that the bureaucratic mechanism was causative, instead his own argument essentially singled out the importance of the fact that it played in facilitating Nazis Germans' desires and willingness to engage in the holocaust in that bureaucracy was nothing more than a tool to be used. When he wrote the book, it is a small book, short work of about 110 pages, in 1975 he very presciently observed how modern day computers then coming into great use by societies world wide held the potential to be of even more horrific use to again perpetrate genocide or worse still as was his more germane conclusion that the Holocaust was in reality the precursor for a a totalitarian regime's enslavement of people, with genocidal actions being secondary to the first purpose of enslavement for economic maximization of subject persons.
I host a PDF copy here at Substack at the following posting:
https://robertjrei.substack.com/p/homework-assignment-for-substack
Excellent piece - And thanks for the heads-up on what sounds like an excellent and essential book.