Holocaust discussion, or, Let It Bleed

["Jurriaan Bendien" <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Einde wrote:

Is it not possible to debate issues without descending into this sort of
childish personal abuse?

Yes. Abuse is basically anti-social, and anti-social behaviour generates
abuse. I felt under personal attack again by miserable middleclass hypocrisy
and descended into Leninism. I would have been better off using another
word. You will notice that John Cox accused me of making the term
"holocaust" a "worthless and false analogy", which is a very serious
personal accusation going well beyond swearing, and he claimed I wrote "a
silly polemic about 'morality", but he does not engage with what I said at
all, proving thereby his statements are vacuous and have no content. In
other words, he postures as an infantile leftist, and he should run away and
play. Recommending that is not abuse.

But for the rest, I don't want to buy into his middleclass ideological
hypocrisy either, because getting trapped into disputes as to whether or not
I did, or did not, advance a worthless and false analogy about the term
"Holocaust", I am distracted from my tasks. By asserting without proof, that
I have made the Holocaust "worthless and false analogy", he implies that he
has a deep and meaningful understanding of it himself. But he shows that he
hasn't, through historical falsification, and by failing to see the wood for
the trees, namely (1) Jewish deaths were one-tenth of total war deaths, (2)
Non-Jews killed, tortured and imprisoned in the Nazi camps and prisons
outnumbered Jews, (3) the Holocaust which describes the experience of Jew
only in abstraction from everything else, is not a historically unique event
except for the sheer scale of it as an ethnic slaughter and the specific
methods used to do it, (4) the events of sixty years ago are being thrown
about these days to condone, justify and legitimise genocidal thinking and
practice, and all sorts of oppression, such as "the right of Jews to exist"
on top of Palestinian corpses, which dehumanises both Jews and Palestinians
in one go, (5) if the Christian fundamentalist neo-conservatives justify
their Mid-East policies with Holocaust analogies then we ought to apply
those analogies where they really belong, namely the real situation of
Iraqi's and Palestinians, which can be acted upon, and examine very
precisely what Nazi practice, Zionist practice and American practice have in
common and how they differ. All these points are essential to socialist
policy, because socialist policy emphasises what Jews have in common with
other humans rather than what differentiates them.

But as I have said many times on this list, I don't really want to go into
this, and I agree with John Cox that such comparativism is unnecessary to
understand inhumanity, but I am also aware that justification of genocidal
policy in the present by reference to worse genocide in the past (or
somewhere else) is a popular pasttime by reactionaries, and we ought to rub
their noses into the real killing, the real injuries, the real deformities,
and the real diseases that result from their policies, and we ought to ask
ourselves whether these Holocaust mongers pontificating about inhuman
cruelty are not in fact perpetrating inhuman cruelty with the loftiest of
"humanitarian" rhetoric.

At least among the Dutch working classes, discussions about morality are not
"silly" at all, but a vital part of socialist politics which requires
political clarity. People like John Cox will be disparaging and contemptuous
about socialists debating morality, but that is just because Marx hadn't
written a treatise in 1867 specifically expounding on that topic, which he
could easily buy in the local bookshop. The real socialists are vitally
concerned with moral issues, based on the insight, as I have said many
times, that "the market" does not provide any morality of its own beyond
what is technically necessary to fix a transaction, something which is a
weighty issue in a world where the bourgeois want to deregulate everything
and marketise everything, i.e. reduce human morality to a commercial
bargain, and reduce moral action to bargain hunting, which exploits the
moral position of other people to advantage their own material position, as
shown in Iraq.

Every Holocaust is always supposed to be the last ethnic slaughter, just as
every capitalist crisis is always supposed to be the last crisis. I am
saying that was not the case, is not the case, and will not be the case, and
people who sow illusions in this area are political misleaders.

J.




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