[PEN-L:1459] Re: Nazi link with medical experimentation in Ca

[Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol@xxxxxxx>]

At 05:08 PM 9/2/98 +0000, James Craven wrote:
>Dear Marco,
>
>Thanks for the note. I hope that you continue serious scholarship on
>some of these vital questions. When I was a Tribal Judge at a recent
>UN-sponsored Tribunal in Vancouver, B.C. we had some solid evidence
>of torture techniques used on Indians that were employed by "religious
>elements" with ties to the Nazis during and after World War II. We
>also had some evidence of escaped Nazis winding up in Canada,
>protected, and winding up working in remote Indian Schools doing
>their same old crimes.


---- snip

My reply (WS):

To begin with,  torturing people is a horrible act in itself, whether
perfomed by ex Nazis or not.  Thus focusing on the "nazi connection" does
not add anything to the moral condemnation of the practice in question.

Moreover, looking for the "Nazi connection" can be politically harmful to
the Left.  The hunt for ex-Nazis in America and Canada who, like Dr.
Strangelove, are hiding to continue their "mission" can have a very
undesirable - from the Left point of view - effect of psychologizing Nazim.
 It seems to suggest that Nazism was created by psychologically deranged
individuals (who are still hiding to pursue their mad goals) rather than by
social forces and class structures that created monsters out of otherwise
ordinary people.

Such an approach furthermore reduces the Holocaust to identity politics (it
is the "German-Jewish thing").  It tends to explain Holocaus by the
feelings of members of one identity group (the Germans)  toward another
Identity group (the Jews): "it happened because the Germans hated the
Jews."  The other causal direction, the Germans hating the Jews because
their ruling elites had economic and political interests  in such "national
feelings" as well as the material means of instigating those feelings in

Again that runs against the general view of the Left  that explains
individual-psychological phenomena by social-economic forces.  The focus of
psychological feelings as the cause of the Holocaust obscures the
structural-economic dimension that can lead to the reproduction of the
Holocaust anytime and anywhere - if the structural conditions are favorable.

Of course, the "reproductability" of the Holocaust by the forces of
reaction in different times and ethno-geographical settings is an anathema
for those who use that historical event, or rather their own spin on it
(either by denying its existence or making it the central axis of world
history), for their own variety of identity politics.

To summarize, seeking the "Nazi connections" reinforces the
psychological/id politics interpretation of the Holocaust, while obscuring
the social-economic interpretation of it.  Therefore it is politically
countereproductive from the Left's point of view.

Best regards,

Wojtek Sokolowski