"Lessons" of the Holo caust
One "Holocaust " or Many ? The destruction of the Jews of eastern Europe did not become a "holocaust" until the mid-sixties. Who first proposed the term is unclear, but it was adopted, in all likelihood-and not only by the Jews -in the hope that it would distinguish acts of monumental inhumanity from routine killing and warfare, even from other incidents of mass murder. The label carries with it the implication that what th� Nazis did to the Jews remains unique. It registers a protest against (even as it contributes to) the debasement of political rhetoric, which turns every injustice into another example of "genocide." "I know what is a holocaust," Menachem Begin said in 1982, in reply to those who applied the term, all too easily and predictably, to the Israeli bombardment of West Beirut and the subse
quent massacre of Palestinian refugees by the Christian party in Lebanon. Begin's statement served, unfortunately,
The Discourse on Mass Death: "Lessons " of the Holocaust I 101 not only to emphasize the peculiar horror of Nazism but to absolve his own government of responsibility for actions deplorable by any standard of international morality. Yet the impulse behind it-misguided as it may have proved in practice-ought to command respect. The Final Solution marked a turning-point in human affairs, the crossing of a hitherto unapproachable moral barrier; and the language that seeks to describe this appalling event and to capture its unparalleled, cold-blooded ferocity must not be allowed to become routine, lest cold-blooded killing become itself rou
tine.
The trouble is, of course, that words fail in the face of evil on such a scale. As many survivors have argued, silence is the only fitting tribute to the three and a half million who died in concentration camps and death camps, to the two million exterminated by mobile killing units on the eastern front, and to the half million more who died in the ghettos of eastern Europe of hunger, disease, terror, and Nazi repris
als. Words fail, but it is nevertheless necessary to speak.
Who can remain silent, having witnessed such events? But a language of extremity, the only language appropriate to extreme situations, soon loses its force through repetition and inflation. It facilitates what it seeks to prevent, the nor
malization of atrocity. The massacre of the Jews became a holocaust because the word "genocide," in an age of geno
cide, had already lost the capacity to evoke the feelings appropriate to the events it tried to characterize. Searching for a language still more extreme, historians of the Holo
caust have themselves contributed to the debasement of
"genocide." Thus one of them, Yehuda Bauer, has recently explained that "genocide" refers only to "forcible denation
alization," as opposed to the "total murder of every one of the members of a community." Against the Poles and other captive peoples of eastern Europe, Hitler practiced what can be called genocide, according to Bauer. "Their institutions
102 I THE M I N I M A L S E L F
of learning [were] closed, their political leadership deci
mated, their language and national culture discarded, their churches eliminated from a free exercise of their functions, their wealth despoiled, and they were subjected to killings of groups and individuals as the Nazis pleased." Only the Jews experienced a holocaust, however.
We can agree that such distinctions seem essential, even if they drain "genocide" of its accepted meaning; but we shall nevertheless find it impossible to apply them with any rigor. If numbers mean anything, the Holocaust was not unique. Estimates of those who died in the forcible collectivi
zation of Soviet agriculture range as high as twenty-two million. If we include the victims of other policies pursued by the Stalinist regime-the political purges, the massacre of nationalities, the persecution of religious believers and other dissidents, the slave labor camps-the figure reaches sixty million, on a conservative estimate. If we pay less attention to numbers, on the other hand, and emphasize the system
atic destruction of a whole class or nation, we can hardly ignore the holocaust inflicted by the Turks on the Armeni
ans during World War I, which provided a foretaste of twentieth-century genocide, or the extermination of the en
tire urban population of Kampuchea in 1975, which left two million dead, according to the American estimate-as many as three million, according to the Vietnamese--out of a total Kampuchean population of seven million. Killing on such a scale has prompted one authority, Richard L. Rubenstein, to conclude that the upheavals associated with industrialism, beginning with the enclosure movement in early modern England, have created vast numbers of superfluous people and that systematic extermination represents only the culmi
nation of a long process of population removal, deportation, harassment, and persecution. Hannah Arendt, another thinker who saw the problem of superfluous populations as endemic to modern society, regarded the "factories of
anni-The Discourse on Mass Death: "Lessons " of the Holocaust I 103 hilation" constructed by Hitler and Stalin as an "attraction [as well] as a warning," since they "demonstrated the swift
est solution to the problem of overpopulation, of economi
cally superfluous and socially rootless human masses."
Even the attempt to distinguish genocide from ordinary warfare encounters the difficulty that warfare is no longer ordinary, having itself taken on some of the characteristics of genocide. It is important to remind ourselves that the Nazis had no military or political reason for their extermina
tion of the Jews; that modern totalitarianism distinguishes itself from earlier forms of tyranny in directing its violence not only against external enemies but against its own citi
zens; and that even these have perished, most of them, not because they were political enemies of the state but merely because they got in the way of some program of racial purification or forcible industrialization or population con
trol-because, as it was said in Kampuchea during the as
cendancy of the Khmer Rouge, "There is nothing to gain by keeping them alive, nothing to lose by doing away with them." The exigencies of war cannot explain such events;
but neither can they provide a satisfactory explanation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fire bombing of Dresden, or strategic bombing in general, which makes no distinction between military targets and the extermination of civilians and serves more as an instrument of terror than as an instru
ment of warfare in any conventional sense. Historians of the Holocaust are right to insist that Auschwitz cannot be com
pared with Dresden or Hiroshima, either in terms of the numbers killed or the motives behind them. But if it is unwise and even morally obtuse to make facile comparisons, it seems equally unwise to ignore the growing destructive
ness in modern society as a whole or the possibility that all these atrocities-however incommensurable in their origins and specific effects-prefigure even more radical atrocities, including, perhaps, the annihilation of humanity itself. By
104 1 T H E M I N I M A L S E L F
locating the Holocaust in the past, by reserving it for the Jews, and by associating it with insane racial policies now universally condemned (officially at least), the most sober and responsible historians of the Holocaust, seeking to pre
vent the routinization of the language of atrocity, unavoid
ably obscure the point that the United States and the Soviet Union, in pursuit of legitimate national goals, under the leadership not of criminals but of ordinary men in full pos
session of their mental faculties, even now prepare them
selves to commit genocide against each other in the event of a nuclear war. As Jonathan Schell points out, nuclear war, like genocide, represents a "crime against the future," which attacks not merely "existing people and things but . . . the biological or the cultural heritage that human beings trans
mit from one generation to the next." Hitler's war of exter
mination against the Jews warns us that "gigantic, insane crimes are not prevented from occurring merely because they are 'unthinkable.' '' The warning is lost, however, whenever we consider the "Holocaust"-however rightly -as a unique and unparalleled atrocity committed by a uniquely monstrous and criminal regime.
"Totalitarianism ": From Radical Evil to Comparative Political Typology The attempt to understand Hitler's Final Solution of the Jewish problem confronts us, then, with a choice between equally compelling and equally un
satisfactory lines of explanation. If we insist on its unique
ness, we lose the ability to place it in a wider perspective.
If we try to use it as the basis for larger generalizations about modern politics and culture, on the other hand, we obscure its particular horror.
Consider the concept of totalitarianism, the history of which illustrates the difficulty of doing justice to both sides of this question. It first took shape, in the late thirties, in the writings of those who had begun to question both the
social-The Discourse on Mass Death: "Lessons " of the Holocaust I 105 ist credentials of the Stalinist regime and the Marxist inter
pretation of fascism as the final stage of capitalist decay.
Thanks to the Moscow trials, the Spanish Civil War (in which the Soviet Union helped to abort a democratic revo
lution led by anarchists), and the Nazi-Soviet pact, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Franz Borkenau, James Burnham, and other former Marxists had come to see Stalinism as a new form of domination: neither a return to an older type of autocracy nor the perverted socialism described by Trotsky as bureaucratic collectivism but a system of total control that sought to regulate not only the individual's public life but his inner life as well, thereby abolishing the very distinction between the public and private realms and between society and the state. Meanwhile it was becoming increasingly clear that the Nazi regime in Germany could not be understood, as Orwell himself characterized it as late as 1939, during his brief flirtation with Trotskyism, as a further "development of capitalism" or even as a revival of old-fashioned autocracy. "The terrifying thing about mod
ern dictatorships," Orwell wrote a few weeks later, "is that they are something entirely unprecedented." Not only did they enjoy a good deal of popular support, but their use of terror, culminating in systematic programs of mass murder, seemed to go far beyond anything required by the practical exigencies of gaining and holding power. One of the earliest students of National Socialism, Hermann Rauschning, de
scribed Nazism as a "revolution of nihilism," a movement without "fixed political aims" and based only on "impulse."
This perception crystallized in the concept of totalitarianism advanced, for example, in Orwell's 1984, which depicts a state that exercises total power for its own sake without even the pretense that its power serves the interests of humanity as a whole.
After publishing reports on the Nazi concentration camps by Bruno Bettelheim and Hannah Arendt, in 1945, Dwight
106 1 T H E M I N I M A L S E L F
Macdonald wrote in his magazine Politics that "the extermi
nation of the Jews of Europe was not a means to an end one can accept as even plausibly rational. . . . No military pur
pose was served by their extermination; the 'racial theory' behind it is scientifically groundless and humanly abhorrent and can only be termed, in the strictest sense of the term, neurotic." A growing fund of information on the Stalinist terror prompted a similar set of conclusions. In 1984, totali
tarian terror no longer serves even the rational objective of intimidating opponents, since it continues to flourish when opposition has been effectively silenced. According to John Strachey, Orwell's novels, 1984 and Animal Farm, suggested that communism, often misinterpreted as the "culmination of rationalism," had "lost almost all touch with objective reality and pursued psychopathic social objectives."
Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, first pub
lished in 1951, owed its remarkable hold over the postwar mind to the insight, sustained over five hundred pages and supported with a wealth of horrifying detail, that crimes on such a scale as those committed by Stalin and Hitler marked a decisive turning-point in history, "breaking down all stan
dards we know" and signaling the arrival of a world to which the civilization of the past could no longer serve as a guide or even as a reliable moral standard by which to condemn it.·
Neither a satisfactory explanation of the rise of Nazism and Stalinism nor a comparative analysis capable of doing justice to the difference between them, Arendt's book derived its value from its understanding of the mentality that "every
thing is possible." Totalitarianism differs from earlier forms
• Alfred Kazin, reviewing Elisabeth Y oung-Bruehl's recent biography of Arendt in the New York Review, writes: "What made Hannah Arendt's name a specter and a bugaboo to many, an everlasting consolation to a few, is that she invested her expressiveness . . . in the conviction that there has been a 'break' in human history.
She lived this. That there has been a 'break,' that we live in truly 'dark times,' no one confronted by her was allowed to doubt. Arendt's greatest value, her distinct example, was that she could not accept this break, as most of us do."
The Discourse on Mass Death: "Lessons " of the Holocaust I 107 of autocracy, according to Arendt, because it carries to its limit the logic that can dismiss whole categories of people as historically superfluous. Thus the death camp, the ultimate expression of totalitarianism, seeks not so much to exploit the labor of a captive population as to provide the most vivid demonstration of its dispensability. In her attempt to identify the "burden of our time" -as the book was called when it appeared in England-Arendt repeatedly emphasized the danger that "political, social, and economic events every
where are in a silent conspiracy with totalitarian instruments devised for making men superfluous."
In a world of chronic unemployment, automation, and overpopulation, her warning remains just as important as ever. But it was exactly this element in Arendt's work-her insistence that totalitarianism represents a solution, however irrational, to the unsolved problems of industrial society
that was most quickly forgotten as the concept of totalitari
anism began to work its way into political discussion in the 1950S. Arendt herself contributed to misunderstanding of her book by presenting it as a typology or anatomy of totalitarianism as a "novel form of government." Accord
ingly social scientists misread The Origins of Totalitarianism as a contribution to comparative political analysis and then proceeded to criticize it on the grounds that it failed to pursue the comparison with scientific rigor or to extend it to Fascist Italy, Communist China, or to the Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe. The work of a writer deeply at odds with the whole tradition of the social sciences, The Origins of Totalitarianism entered the mainstream of sociological dis
course and became at once the inspiration and the target of a long series of studies attempting to strip the concept of totalitarianism of its "normative" and ethical implications, to
"operationalize" Arendt's "findings," and to anatomize the general characteristics of "totalitarian democracy," as J. L.
Talmon called it.
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By generalizing the concept of totalitarianism in the hope of making it more systematic, social scientists obscured the original insight behind it. They made totalitarianism a syno
nym for revolutionary change or "direct democracy" and gave it a long history. Talmon traced its antecedents back to Rousseau. Karl Popper identified Plato as the first totali
tarian, on the grounds that he founded the tradition of "Uto
pian social engineering." In The Pursuit oJ the Millennium, Norman Cohn took the tradition of "revolutionary chili
asm" back to peasant revolts in the late Middle Ages. "For all their exploitation of the most modern technology," Cohn argued, Hitler and Stalin revived a revolutionary "faith"
that originated in the medieval dream of a world turned upside down and continued to lead a "dim, subterranean existence down the centuries, flaring up briefly in the mar
gins of the English Civil War and the French Revolution, until in the course of the nineteenth century it began to take on a new, explosive vigor."·
• Arendt, o n the other hand, went out o f her way to point out that the social preconditions of totalitarianism "did not result from growing equality of condi
tion, from the spread of general education and its inevitable lowering of standards and popularization of content." Orwell too took the position, even more emphati
cally, that the most effective defense against totalitarianism remained the egalitarian ideal, unrealized but still honored by the "whole English-speaking world." Both Orwell and Arendt directed their attack much more against the culture of intellec
tuals than against popular culture. Orwell's view of totalitarianism took shape in a period of his life when he was gaining new respect for the common sense and
"common decency" of the ordinary Englishman. "My chief hope for the future,"
he wrote in 1940, "is that the common people have never parted company with their moral code." His insistence that "intellectuals are more totalitarian in their outlook than the common people" distinguishes his position from that of many of his admirers, including the Partisan Review intellectuals in New York, who pro
moted Orwell's work but found the counterweight to totalitarianism not in the good sense of the common man but in the "intellectuals' tradition" of critical modernism. For Orwell, the critical thinking on which the intelligentsia prided itself had become an automatic reflex, an expression of its "extraordinarily negative outlook, its lack of any firm beliefs or positive aims, and its power of harbouring illusions that would not be possible to people in less sheltered places." Similar views can be found in Arendt's Origins oj Totalitarianism: for example, in her masterly account of the literary avant-garde in the Weimar Republic with its "protest against society," its cult of violence, its delight in unmasking hypocrisy, its
"pas-The Discourse on Mass Death: "Lessons " of the Holocaust I 109 This kind of work succeeded only in demonstrating that the concept of totalitarianism had become completely use
less for the purposes of historical analysis or for the compar
ative study of dictatorship. Even the more limited concept of fascism does not stand up to rigorous comparative analy
sis. The attempt to find fascist or totalitarian features in a variety of regimes stretches these terms so thin that they become meaningless. A typology of totalitarian regimes, moreover, obscures the very developments that Arendt wanted to call attention to in the first place: the disastrous collapse of political morality, the growth of moral and politi
cal nihilism, and the embodiment of this nihilism, this indiff
erence even to elementary considerations of political utility and expediency, in the "death factories" set up under the Nazi and Stalinist regimes. Scholars who have tried to find
erence even to elementary considerations of political utility and expediency, in the "death factories" set up under the Nazi and Stalinist regimes. Scholars who have tried to find