more from Franz Neumann

[truepenny]

First, although Neumann is, as I said, Marxist like whoa and not always particularly nuanced in his analysis, I want to single out this passage as the point where I said, Yes. I like this man. Because it's such a relief, after one has been wading through Nazi ideology, to get a passage that combines common sense with common decency--and in fact insists that both should be common:

Hardly any other ideological element is held in such profound contempt in our civilization as international law. Every generation has seen it break down as an instrument for organizing peace, and a theory that disposes of its universalist claims has the obvious advantage of appearing to be realistic. The fallacy should be equally obvious, however. To abandon universalism because of its failures is like rejecting civil rights because they help legitimize and veil class exploitation, or democracy because it conceals boss control, or Christianity because churches have corrupted Christian morals. Faced with a corrupt administration of justice, the reasonable person does not demand a return to the war of each against all, but fights for an honest system. Likewise, when we have shown that international law has been misused for imperialistic aims, our task has begun, not ended. We must fight against imperialism.
(158-159)

The really awful thing is how completely germane this is and continues to be sixty years after he wrote it.

The second thing: I don't think I've said it explicitly, but one of the things I find most disturbing about Holocaust denial is the way in which it not only defends the Nazis in its content, but emulates them in its form. The NSDAP was a superb practitioner of Know-Nothingism, and my second passage from Neumann for today shows that they were negationists as well:

[...] there is the characteristic trick of every National Socialist criticism of a traditional Western conception. For they make no attempt to transform the socio-economic structure so as to make the formal equality real. Instead, they use a legitimate critique to abolish even legal equality. This technique characterizes the whole conceptual and intellectual framework of National Socialism.
(162-163)

It's the same thing the Holocaust deniers do: critique becomes negation, and negation becomes propaganda.

And, you know, it's not so far off what the Tea Partiers are doing. Critique leads not to reform, but to negation--in their case, secession. The content is different--and I can't stress enough that this is merely a structural comparison and does not in any way, for instance, suggest moral equivalencies--but the pattern of behavior is the same.