The rational
* history holocaust
Most commentators have treated Hitler's fanatic antiSemitism as beyond rational explanation. The Jewish revolutionary Ernest Mandel disagreed In its extreme form racism is congenitally linked to institutionalised colonialism and imperialism. Indeed, the one cannot function without the ideological protection of the other.
It is impossible for thinking human beings — and colonialists, imperialists and defenders of their specific "order" are thinking human beings — to deny millions of men, women and children elementary human rights without attempting to rationalise and justify these indignities and oppressions by a specific ideological sophism — "racial", or "intellectual/moral" inferiority - an attempt to "de- humanise" ideologically.
But once large groups of human beings are considered as intrinsically inferior — as Untermenschen (subhuman) - then it only takes one more ideological-political step to deny them, not only the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but the right to life
In the peculiar - and increasingly destructive - suicidal combination of "perfect" local rationality and extreme global irrationality which characterises international capitalism, this step Is frequently taken. From racism...
Anti-Semitism was widespread among most nationalist-conservative circles in France and Russia as well as in Germany, before and during World War I. It reached a paroxysm at the end of the war, during the revolutionary period. In December 1918, the German Kaiser wrote in his Diaries "let no German rest until these parasites [the Jews] have been out from German soil and exterminated." Hitler had only to pick up and systematise widely-expressed
But the seeds of the Holocaust are not to be found in traditional semi-feudal and petty-bourgeois anti-Semitism. Of course, anti-Semitism among sectors of the Polish, Ukrainian, Baltic, Hungarian, and Russian petty bourgeoisie offered fertile ground for tolerating and aiding the Holocaust. But this type of antiSemitism led to pogroms, which were to 30 International Viewpoint #309 March 1999 the Nazi murderers what knives are to the ...to genocide
The seeds of the gas chambers resided in the mass enslavement and killing of Blacks via the slave trade, in the wholesale extermination of the Central and South American Indians by the conquistadors. The term genocide is fully justified: millions of men, women and children were killed just because they belonged to a supposedly "inferior" "subhuman" or "wicked" group.
It is true that these crimes of colonialism/imperialism occurred outside Europe. But it was precisely German imperialism's "manifest destiny" to colo-
The Nazis and the most extreme proponents of the imperialist doctrine of racial superiority by no means intended the enslavement and extermination only of the Jews; gypsies and sections of the Slav people figure on the same list.
The first group of Untermenschen to be slaughtered in the gas chambers during the war were not Jews but ethnic Germans certified "mentally insane" Over 200,000 were exterminated in 1940-41 in Aktion T4.
This kind of thinking was not confined to Germany. The atrocities committed in Manchuria by Japan's Unit 731 are only one rung below Auschwitz, and can only he explained by a mentality and motivation basically similar to Hitler's Herrenvolk (master race) idea.
And what about the callous killing of 250.000 Japanese civilians by dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? While not exactly comparable to the Holocaust in the scope of its inhumanity, this act certainly reflected a contempt for human beings of a "special kind" which is not at all that far removed
Rather like the American general who reasoned that saturation bombing of German cities was justified, despite its effect on innocent children because "those innocnt German children are the potential soldiers of World War III, just as the innocent German children who had been fed [by the allies] after 1918 later served in Hitler's army and did remarkably well". From idea to action
When we say that the germ of the Holocaust is to be found in colonialism's and imperialism's extreme racism, we do not mean that the germ inevitably and automatically produces the disease in its worst form.
For that, racist madness has to be combined with the deadly partial rationality of the modern industrial system.
Its efficiency must be supported by a servile civil service, by a consistent disregard of individual critical judgment as basically "subversive" (Befehl ist Befehl - an order is an order!). It requires thousand of passive executive agents (in fact: passive accomplices of crime).
It requires the conquest of power by desperado politicians like the Nazis, with the consent of the bourgeoisie. It requires cynical realpolitik, leading to blackmail and systematic state terrorism (Goering, Hitler and co. threatening to eradicate, London, Coventry ("wir werden ihre Stadte ausradieren"); something which became credible only if such threats were occasionally implemented).
#SOLDAT
ARBEITER
Trotskyist newspaper aimed at occupying German troops.
The gradual implementation of this state terrorism unleashes an implacable logic of its own.
It also requires a fetid substratum of unconscious guilt and shame, whichmust be rationalised in spite (or better: in function) of monstrous crimes.
The Holocaust only comes at the end of this long causal chain. But it can and must be explained through it. Indeed, those who understood the chain were
Explaining and understanding a crime does not imply any apology for it: the Holocaust — the deliberate and systematic killing of six million men, women and children simply because of their ethnic origin — stands as a unique crime in mankind's sad criminal history.
But what explaining and understanding does imply is that similar causes can have similar effects; analogous crimes could be repeated against other peoples if capitalism survives long enough to unleash the totality of its barbaric potential once again.
The slave economy
But wasn't this wanton killing of potential labourers, including highlyskilled ones increasingly scarce in German war industry, totally irrational?
In general systems of super-exploitation and slavery are largely irrational. But they have existed in many places for long periods of time. Whilst not constituting the basis of capitalism (free wage labour), they are often integrated into the capitalist mode of production.
They have a partial rationality: the costs of such labour can be reduced to almost nothing, a miserable pittance which rapidly reduces the labourer's weight and health till he dies from starvation and deprivation. There is no longer any question of the need for medium-term reproduction of individual
It is true that the average productivity ot such labour is abysmally low. But as long as the supply of slaves is abundant, an operation of this order has a rationality of sorts
Ancient Roman senators and contemporary SS gangsters → not to mention 18th and early 19th century Southern plantation owners in the USA — made calculations to discover where the precise limit of that "rationality" lay.
While the SS gangsters were certainly the most criminal of all, they were by no means the least calculating.
Like the Roman slave-owners of certain periods, they forced their slaves to work themselves to death. Those who could work were not killed outright. That was the precise function of the notorious "selections" on arrival in the extermination camps.
More generally, the rationale of the extermination programme was drastically to reduce the population of Poland and the Ukraine - the German colonisation space — and to allow only those to survive who would become obedient slaves. The Jews were considered unfit for that role - something of a racist compliment. * attitude towards the individual German soldier and worker. Many of them paid with their lives for