UBC: Hitler and the Holocaust
Feb. 5th, 2009 11:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyWistrich, Robert S. Hitler and the Holocaust: How and Why the Holocaust Happened. London: Phoenix Press, 2002.
This was not the book I was hoping for from the title; instead, it's an overview of the Holocaust, including a discussion of collaboration and resistance in the various occupied and Nazi-allied countries (that part was helpful to me, especially with regard to Italy). As such, it's probably a good introduction to the subject and to the scholarship on same, since Wistrich discusses the various historians (Broszat, Goldhagen, etc.) and seems to have a rational and balanced assessment, insofar as I myself have done enough reading to tell.
I had a problem with the book (aside from it not being the book I had hoped for), so I'm uncertain about recommending it. My problem is that its style is polemical, value-judgments being made overtly and the reader openly asked to feel pity and outrage.
Now, my problem is not that I disagree with Wistrich's polemics. Because, in fact, I believe that it may be completely impossible to overstate the evil of the Nazi leaders (Hitler, Himmler, Göring, Goebbels, Heydrich, Bormann), who did not merely do evil in the full knowledge that it was evil, but who lied and bullied to ensure that evil was done, and who forced not merely their allies, but also their victims to participate in the doing of evil.
So I was actually kind of thrown when I realized I was mentally pulling back from statements I agreed with. But I thought about it, and I know why I'm uneasy.
The first reason is the general one: emotional language can be, and frequently is, used to manipulate. Hitler himself is a really stunning example of this. I find that kind of manipulation ethically questionable, regardless of how good the cause is. And whereas in spoken communication, the expression of emotion may be, in fact, spontaneous--not manipulation, but passion, and passion is valuable and necessary and I am not in the slightest denigrating or rejecting it--in written communication, the writer always has the chance to think about what she has written. The moment before you hit Send or Post or stick a stamp on the envelope and drop it in the mailbox. In many cases, since the world we live in is not a rationalist Utopia (and, in fact, I'm grateful it isn't, because OMG what a way to live), people don't stop and think. But a published book is different. Believe me, you see those words over and over and over again. You have more time than you could ever want to think about the words and the choices you made with them and the message they send. And it is also true that an author can convey his passion without using language that demands an emotional response from the reader. So an appeal to the emotions in a published book is there as a result of a deliberate choice, and that's a manipulative choice. That's the author trying to tell me what to feel. And even when I agree with that author, the manipulative intent makes me uneasy. It makes me worry about what other things I may be persuaded into.
Which leads me to my second reason for concern, which is a personal one. I am deeply wary of emotional rhetoric because I know, from painful personal experience, that when I lead with my emotions, I get things wrong. I do stupid, embarrassing things. I behave badly. I say stupid things, indefensible things, things I don't even believe. Because when I am emotional, I don't think clearly. As a side effect, if my emotions are doing my thinking for me, I am very easily led and can be persuaded of just about anything. Because my critical faculties have completely jumped out the window. (They'll come back later, sheepishly, but by then it may be too late to prevent the stupidity from manifesting itself.) And thus I am, and need to be, very cautious and alert about my emotional responses to what I read.
Thus, Wistrich's polemics make me uneasy; I wonder if what seems like a factual historical account with polemical comments is in fact a historical account with an agenda--if what he presents as fact is merely interpretation. And so I don't know if this overview of the Holocaust is entirely trustworthy. Certainly, in the places where I have enough knowledge to judge, I can see over-simplifications and a tendency toward Manichean morality. So I am left unsettled and dissatisfied and uncertain.
This was not the book I was hoping for from the title; instead, it's an overview of the Holocaust, including a discussion of collaboration and resistance in the various occupied and Nazi-allied countries (that part was helpful to me, especially with regard to Italy). As such, it's probably a good introduction to the subject and to the scholarship on same, since Wistrich discusses the various historians (Broszat, Goldhagen, etc.) and seems to have a rational and balanced assessment, insofar as I myself have done enough reading to tell.
I had a problem with the book (aside from it not being the book I had hoped for), so I'm uncertain about recommending it. My problem is that its style is polemical, value-judgments being made overtly and the reader openly asked to feel pity and outrage.
Now, my problem is not that I disagree with Wistrich's polemics. Because, in fact, I believe that it may be completely impossible to overstate the evil of the Nazi leaders (Hitler, Himmler, Göring, Goebbels, Heydrich, Bormann), who did not merely do evil in the full knowledge that it was evil, but who lied and bullied to ensure that evil was done, and who forced not merely their allies, but also their victims to participate in the doing of evil.
So I was actually kind of thrown when I realized I was mentally pulling back from statements I agreed with. But I thought about it, and I know why I'm uneasy.
The first reason is the general one: emotional language can be, and frequently is, used to manipulate. Hitler himself is a really stunning example of this. I find that kind of manipulation ethically questionable, regardless of how good the cause is. And whereas in spoken communication, the expression of emotion may be, in fact, spontaneous--not manipulation, but passion, and passion is valuable and necessary and I am not in the slightest denigrating or rejecting it--in written communication, the writer always has the chance to think about what she has written. The moment before you hit Send or Post or stick a stamp on the envelope and drop it in the mailbox. In many cases, since the world we live in is not a rationalist Utopia (and, in fact, I'm grateful it isn't, because OMG what a way to live), people don't stop and think. But a published book is different. Believe me, you see those words over and over and over again. You have more time than you could ever want to think about the words and the choices you made with them and the message they send. And it is also true that an author can convey his passion without using language that demands an emotional response from the reader. So an appeal to the emotions in a published book is there as a result of a deliberate choice, and that's a manipulative choice. That's the author trying to tell me what to feel. And even when I agree with that author, the manipulative intent makes me uneasy. It makes me worry about what other things I may be persuaded into.
Which leads me to my second reason for concern, which is a personal one. I am deeply wary of emotional rhetoric because I know, from painful personal experience, that when I lead with my emotions, I get things wrong. I do stupid, embarrassing things. I behave badly. I say stupid things, indefensible things, things I don't even believe. Because when I am emotional, I don't think clearly. As a side effect, if my emotions are doing my thinking for me, I am very easily led and can be persuaded of just about anything. Because my critical faculties have completely jumped out the window. (They'll come back later, sheepishly, but by then it may be too late to prevent the stupidity from manifesting itself.) And thus I am, and need to be, very cautious and alert about my emotional responses to what I read.
Thus, Wistrich's polemics make me uneasy; I wonder if what seems like a factual historical account with polemical comments is in fact a historical account with an agenda--if what he presents as fact is merely interpretation. And so I don't know if this overview of the Holocaust is entirely trustworthy. Certainly, in the places where I have enough knowledge to judge, I can see over-simplifications and a tendency toward Manichean morality. So I am left unsettled and dissatisfied and uncertain.
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Date: 2009-02-05 08:56 pm (UTC)How do we judge whether a cause is good? It could be said that "survival" is a good cause, but is that always the case? Obviously it doesn't always work for individual, personal survival, because that can always be played against survival of a greater number -- it's ethical to sacrifice my survival for the survival of others. But is personal survival expendible in the service of a goal that is not the physical survival of others? Dying for liberty, for example?
But if that's so, then the same logic should work on a macro level -- a town can/should sacrifice its survival for sake of overthrowing tyrrany, for example. And it would follow that the survival of a nation is sometimes secondary to other concerns.
But what concerns? It would depend on how the nation defines itself. In the case of the U.S., which claims to be defined by a specific set of principles (see Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, etc.), it should follow that the nation's physical or institutional survival -- survival of the individual persons within the country, or survival of the country as a political entity -- is secondary to the perpetuation of those principles.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-07 09:41 am (UTC)I would have interpreted this experience as a very successful analysis led by emotions. The book caused you to feel uneasy. Further examination of the unease revealed potentially harmful manipulation.
I consider this a survival skill. If it feels wrong, there's something wrong with it, and somehow most people don't seem to have figured that out. Those who have will probably have some really annoying experiences in school, but they also get a good edge in such games as Spot the Sociopath in Time to Perform Evasive Maneuvers.
I suppose that my idea of leading with emotions is to use them like scouts, or maybe like a coalmine canary. If the canary starts to wheeze you pin it down and you analyze the hell out of it until you know exactly what kind of problem you've got and where it came from.
I think where it all ties in with what you were saying is that emotions are great scouts and terrible delegates. They'll tell you, under heavy questioning, exactly where the conversation went off the rails, but usually not in time to get it back on again.