Re: Auschwitz in Bulgaria

["Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky" <Gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

En relación a Re: Auschwitz in Bulgaria,
el 2 Sep 00, a las 12:22, Johannes.Schneider@xxxxxxx dijo:

> Macdonald wrote:
>
> > Johannes:
> >
> > > I think its rather inapropiate to compare the results of
> > > capitalist privatization in Bulgaria to the Nazi holocaust.
> > >
> > > The holocaust was a consciously planned, complete and
> > > bureaucratically exectuted extermination of whole peoples. I do
> > > not think one need much
> > > intellectual capacities to understand, that its something
> > > different than what is happening in Bulgaria today.
> >
> > While you are of course right, so long as the Holocaust is used to
> > describe Yugoslavia where at most 2000 people died in the decade
> > before the war, the number of dead in reforms is a far better
> > analogy because "The reforms were a consciously planned, complete
> > and bureaucratically executed total impoverishment and dismantling
> > of an entire region".

I think that we are touching on an extremely serious issue here. Not
because I have a dram of a doubt that what is happening in Eastern
Europe today can be exposed by any other term than Holocaust (I do
not have any, words cannot be adscribed to particular instances of a
general tendency of imperialism) but because the distinction that
Johannes draws between a mass killing openly performed by sheer
display of the strength of the State and the mass killing performed
by subtle measures taken by seemingly independent private policy
makers is, in my opinion, a dangerous one and in the end a crack
through which the point of view of the bourgeoisie creeps into our
mind without our ever noticing it.

Prisoners of their State-worshipping brand of imperialist culture,
the Nazis were less intelligent, in a sense, than the modern killers.
They did not ape the clever policies by Britain and other colonial
powers (though they did ape, and stated it so in the open, their
basic policies of "racial" murder) that left the State quite clear
from the killing fields (or death camps).  German capitalism,
however, was under extreme strain, and this apparently crazed move of
affording official stamp to the gospel of racial murder might have
somehow mirrored that strain.

What remains, however, is the crude fact that the current events in
Eastern Europe are, as some have already pointed out, the consequence
of a well planned general policy. The difference, which to Johannes's
eyes looks essential and to mine minor, is that in Eastern Europe it
is the "blind, objective" forces of market which are bringing about
the same result as military and state enforced regulation brought
about in Nazi Germany. I do understand Johannes's feelings on this,
being a German as he is, and thus opposing any position which might,
in his view, diminish the criminous nature of German Nazism and their
crimes. This is reasonable, but misleading.

Because it is precisely because the Nazi crimes were just an instance
of the general murderous trend of imperialism that they were so
terrible and monstruous. This trend had been showing itself to
subject peoples in the colonial world for at least half a century
when the Nazis applied them with open sanction from a code of laws in
the "heartland of the civilized world". And in India, they had been
practiced from the times of Clive (but Clive, of course, acted on
"private" interest: the Amritsar Massacre, contemporaneous with Nazi
crimes, was officially condemned by England, even though it had not
been too different from other massacres heralded by English "private
interest" in Asia!).

Economic holocausts are on equal standing with military, police-
enforced holocausts. They are the same thing. The holocaust that has
befallen on Eastern Europe, as well as that which has been enforced
on Latin America and Africa, might look "milder" and "less political"
than the ones by the Nazis, but there is, in fact, A CLEAR CONTINUITY
between both.

We Marxists cannot set holocausts obtained by economic measures as a
class apart from those obtained by overt State enforcement. The unity
of the total whole is our methodological cornerstone. On the other
hand, it should be obvious to anyone here that even though there are
enormous gaps in the structure and cracking beams all along it, the
relationships between private enterprise and state power in the age
of imperialism don't allow us to establish such a distinction at all.


Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxx