Jim Kalb sometimes makes these VFR poll questions into real hair-splitters by the inclusion of a single word that adds a whole dimension of potential ambiguity. Here, that single word is “unique.” Had the question read, Should the Holocaust be viewed as an event of “central” importance, or as an event of “critical” importance, for our moral understanding of human society?, I would’ve voted yes. But as the question was put, I voted no, since there have been many holocausts (all of which are inescapably central or critical to our moral understanding of human society). The common observation is quite true, that where Jews were the ones who were first dehumanized, then wiped out, in the Holocaust with a capital H, in the horrific Cambodian holocaust — small h — Jews were simply replaced by “all educated people” — that is, all non-peasants.

Had the Khmer Rouge had the engineers, the infrastructure, the money to build gas chambers, they would have done the deed with those, there can be no doubt whatsoever. The intent, the act, the outcome, the moral significance, were at bottom the same.

So, the word “unique” here (clearly not inserted accidentally) must be taken into consideration.

I agree with Unadorned post, except the Jews were not the first, Stalin’s holocaust in the Ukraine was earlier, depending on what is meant by being “dehumanized”. But otherwise I agree and voted no likewise.

I think the word “unique” is very apt, and constitutes a large part of why I voted yes. The reason for this lies in the differences between the Holocaust and previous large-scale killings, be they religious or secular.

Fascism was based primarily upon moral relativism and the idea that “might makes right.” This is largely where its strong militarism came from; it used force to impose its ideals because it didn’t believe any ideology was objectively right, just objectively powerful. This also applied to moral ideologies, which permitted the large-scale killing of all dissidents and scapegoats — namely the Jewish population of Europe.

This differs from Stalin’s and Pol Pot’s killings, which, being putatively justified by Marxism, held to a moral ideology believed to be objectively correct (i.e. “Utopian and scientific”). The same is true with the religious wars in Europe, along with the Inquisition and other similar massacres. The Holocaust stood alone as a slaughter that didn’t even believe in itself, just the ramifications of its actions.

It is very fitting that it occurred in the 20th century, a time when people began to rail against any imposition of objective morality.

Forty years ago I took a poli-sci course with Raul Hilberg, the grand-daddy of Holocaust literature,and he pointed to the slaughter of the Armenians by the Turks in 1915-16 as the precursor of the Holocaust and said it (the Armenian holocaust) had many of the characteristics of the Holocaust. The Germans had better techonology (including primitive information technology bought from IBM)but the underlying immorality was hardly unique.

Charles,

I’m talking more about amorality, really… I’m certain the Ottomans at least believed that what they were doing was objectively right, however twisted their logic might have been.

We have a savage nature, which is derived either from the inscrutable, uncaring laws of natural selection or the fallen natures of Adam and Cain. I don’t see the Stalinist, Maoist, or Nazi horrors as any different from the Mongol victors who played games upon baskets containing the suffocating leaders of the defeated. Unique is that God’s Chosen People are always shunned because they express their uncommon talents and industry. Is it mutual fault? I don’t know. But we must be merciful.

Like Unadorned, I find the word “unique” to be something of a stumbling block. Certainly the Nazi destruction of the Jews was a unique _event_. The Nazis weren’t just killing a hated group whom they wanted to get rid of from their own country of Germany; they conquered every country in Europe, then would round up all the Jews, men, women and children, in that country, then ship them across Europe in closed train cars and then put them in mass killing facilities or death-by-slave-labor camps. So the event is certainly unique. But is it an event of unique significance for our moral understanding of human society? Mr. Kalb is certainly wording his question in such a way as to make it hard to answer yes. If he had said “is it a unique event for our understanding of society?” I would have said yes because it is the most extreme expression of socially organized evil and thus shows how far society can go. (That doesn’t mean it is wholly unique in all respects. But it is unique.)

However, I’m not out of the woods yet, because the nuanced wording of the question (“Should the Holocaust be viewed as an event of unique significance for our moral understanding of human society?”) makes it seem to be about the philosophical question of how human society should be organized, what is the moral purpose of human society, what should be its norms, and so on. And there I tend to think that the Holocaust is not of unique significance, or even of any particular significance at all, precisely because the Holocaust is so extreme and atypical that it doesn’t tell us much about the moral purpose of human society as such.

So, given the nerve-wrackingly fine tuning of Mr. Kalb’s question, and having messed my head up with this for the last fifteen minutes, I’m regretfully going to have to vote No.

I voted yes, not because the Holocoust stands alone as a genocidal mass murder, but because it was the first that came to the attention of the modern world that I inhabit. It was unique in the sense that for the first time the nature and extent of such an event was publicized far and wide by the very people that were supposed to be the subjects of the “final solution”

The jews themselves had to carry the torch of world wide publicity and refused to allow it to become a become a back page “historical” item. They alone successfuly informed the post holocaust world societies of the nature of the holocaust horrors.

The Roman Catholic church and governments everywhere tried to sweep it under the rug, but the Jews themselves, with little outside assistance perservered and continued to publicize holocaust in word, picture and in performance art pieces everywhere.The search for Adolf Eichmann and the publication of Anne Frank’s Diary are just two events that helped shape world opinion.

We seem to lack that kind of moral clarity these days.

Posted by: sandy on January 25, 2003 05:02 AM

I voted no without hesitation because the question specifically asks if the Holocaust “should” be viewed as unique. I think that it IS viewed as unique, and that setting up the Nazi as the utterly evil Other is part of what allows liberalism to perpetuate itself. There is no question in my mind that liberalism SHOULD NOT be granted that ideological crutch.

Other perhaps less interesting questions could have been asked. One might be “is the holocaust actually VIEWED as unique…”, to which the answer is a simple yes. Another is “was the holocaust in an objectively, morally unique category” to which the answer is a simple no. Still another is “was the holocaust a unique hostorical event” to which the answer is tautologically yes, since every historical event is unique and particular.

But as to whether liberalism SHOULD be granted the ideological crutch of using the Nazi (ironically itself created by liberalism) as a unique foil representing transcendent evil, next to which the horrors of communism are treated as minor historical matters, and as a bucket into which liberals place every Other which they wish to dehumanize (see the Donahue interview Mr. Auster published and how Donahue attempts to paint Jared Taylor as a white supremecist, by implication one step away from a Nazi), the answer to my mind is a clear no.

I suppose part of the reason the answer is so clear to me is that my understanding of liberalism differs somewhat from what others have articulated. I don’t see liberalism as starting with a rejection of the transcendent. Rejection of the transcendent is a consequence of liberalism, but there have probably been more Christian liberals than atheistic liberals. If liberalism starts with rejection of the transcendent then it amounts to materialist atheism; but to understand liberals as materialist atheists is to miss the mark entirely.

I don’t thinks someone has to reject the transcendent to become a liberal. The doorway into liberalism is not nearly so narrow as that. In order to be a liberal one simply has to see freedom and equal rights as the proper highest priorities of immanent politics. Many liberals have been and are Christians who think that if everyone is politically free and equal then Christianity will naturally win. The reason liberalism ultimately rejects the transcendent is that political freedom and equal rights is an incoherent concept. When an incoherent concept is enshrined as the most authoritative immanent authority the result is the destruction of everything (including religion, the objectivity of truth, etc) pursued aggressively as a positive good. Freedom and equal rights when not taken too seriously engender narcissism; when taken seriously they produce nihilism. That may be the real difference between the liberal and the leftist. Nietzsche concedes everything to nihilism and then rejects it based on a pure will-to-power; the result is the Nazi, and the vestigial remains of the desire to right the wrong of the oppression of those who ought to be free and equal lives on even in the Nazi.

So it may be that rejection of the transcendent good occurs early in liberalism, but it does not take precedence over political freedom and equal rights as the highest immanent good. Liberalism needs the transcendently evil oppressor in order to justify itself. When it didn’t find one, it became Nazi and pretended that the Jew was one; and now the transcendently evil Nazi, in delicious irony, occupies the chair that it created for the Jews; and unlike the Jew, the Nazi has earned it. Liberalism does not rest on the rejection of transcendent good; it rests on and draws its strength from transcendent evil.

Is all this unique? Well, sure. Maybe the answer is that the Nazi and the holocaust ought to be viewed as unique; but not in any way remotely resembling the usual interpretation. If we are to view the Nazi as unique it is only because liberalism created the Nazi in order to fulfill a unique and necessary role in the liberal ideology.

The Holocaust seems to be uniquely significant from the point of view of the 19th-century-style believer in Progress, since it that it represents the reversion one of the most “advanced” societies to a state of savagery. For someone without a belief in Progress it doesn’t seem to be unique.

Concerning liberalism and transcendence (Matt)…

The fact that liberalism needs an ABSTRACT moralist “evil” to fill with some enemy, in part derived from semi traditional concepts of “good” and “evil” does not really mean that liberalism is, or even is capable of, relating to transcendence in the word’s true meaning.

What liberalism does is that it places the sphere of “society”, and the physical well-being of it’s individual parts (the priority of the latter over the former is really the only distinction between liberalism and marxism, a minor one at a higher plane, but of course enormous in practical, day-to-day existance), ABOVE the transcendant. This, in effect, amounts to nothing less but exactly the “rejection of the transcendent”. It is of little or no consequense whether the people formulating liberalism called themselves “christians” or not; after all many of the concepts of equality that is formulated in liberalism as well as communism has many of their roots in the judeo-christian world of thought, this being an indicator of inherent flaws and dangers (or least potential flaws and dangers) in the christian world view, seen from a traditionalist point of view.

That someone calls himself a christian does not indicate actual spirituality any more than hysteric hatred of foreign traditions/religions paired with a narrow economic self interest indicates actual conservatism.

This post is not to be understood as a rejection of Matt’s entire post, given the fact that it held many valid points, but I am unable to share the view that liberalism (in the word’s original and broader sense; the division in “conservative” and “liberal” political standpoints in the United States are of absolutely no interest to me what so ever, as the use of them really is only losely connected to the description of concepts that the words should represent) can be anything less than “infernal”, to use a general term. After all, Satan is “the lord of this [material] world”, and the various eastern traditions all subordinate the world of matter to the world of the Divine. References to Plato, Hinduism, Sufism, any authentic christianity and so on ad infinitum shouldn’t even be necessary to illustrate this point: any ideology/society that places the realms of economy or even the social above the transcendent are essentially atheist/materialist (and thereby,from a traditional standpoint, “satanic”), and individual belief in Jesus/Muhammed/Shiva or whatever cannot change this fact.

“This post is not to be understood as a rejection of Matt’s entire post, given the fact that it held many valid points, but I am unable to share the view that liberalism […] can be anything less than ‘infernal’, to use a general term.”

Martin and I may disagree even less than he thinks. There are a number of ways to discuss liberalism. As traditionalists we tend toward the ontological discussion — what liberalism IS, what a liberal IS, etc. I don’t object to rejection of the transcendent as an ontological ground of liberalism. On the ontological discussion I simply add (or point out) that this rejection of ordering toward transcendent good results in shepherding by transcendent evil and the creation of immanent evils in order to make that shepherding concrete.

The other point is phenomenological (that is, from the perspective of the individual liberal). If we say that liberalism is grounded in rejection of the transcendent as a phenomenological matter it becomes impossible to explain why there are far more nominally religious liberals than atheist liberals. Although it may be true ontologically that liberalism is grounded in rejection of the transcendent, one need not reject the transcendent in order to develop strong liberal loyalties, that is, to become a liberal.