If Hitler is the most memetically successful person after Jesus (who was it that said aliens would ask “take me to your Hitler”?), the holocaust is his enduring monument which everyone remembers. Naturally people seek to attribute everything to it. A recent example is at the Volokh conspiracy, commenting on Justice Ginsburg’s defense of judicial review over democracy as a bulwark against future holocausts, when it can claim no credit against the actual one.
Though he has less evidence, Steve Sailer is similarly skeptical about the holocaust resulting in John Rawls’ loss of faith. I think he’s right to be skeptical about what Rawls wrote about his own cognitive process. Rawls is most famous for writing a huge philosophical treatise about how the the society we surely must agree is just is the one that just happened to have been created in the New Deal and was still the dominant paradigm among 70s liberals such as himself. His argument for why baseball must be the greatest sport is only a more glaring example of failing to grasp the hold that provincialism rather than reason determined his conclusions.
In the spirit of Godwin’s law, I propose a moratorium on citing the Holocaust as a support for your politics. That goes for you too, Warsaw-uprising loving gun-rightsers. If you even find yourself thinking it privately to yourself, do a double-take. I also shouldn’t have used the word “paradigm”, but I’m going to leave it up as an example of bad behavior so I can make this very point.
April 14, 2009 at 11:43 am
It seems especially odd that in the U.S. slipperly slope arguments should so often conjure the specter of another Holocaust when there are candidates for forefendable moral catastrophe that are more specific to our history. People seldom invoke the possibility that, but for x, slavery might be re-instituted; or that, but for x, we might see another Trail of Tears. Perhaps such episodes are too far removed from the politics of memory to carry much resonance.
It seems likely that large chunks of Rawls’ philosophy – certainly his concept of fairness -are influenced by his early childhood, when two of his brothers died from illnesses they contracted from him:
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2008/jul/28/00024//
Rawls’ childhood experience is similar to Bradley Smith’s, as recounted in his short story, “Joseph Conrad and the Monster from the Deep,” which appends “The Man Who Saw His Own Liver.”
April 14, 2009 at 1:14 pm
Well, unlike all these pretenders to the throne, the Holocaust really does justify MY values. LOL.
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/media/rlmiller.htm
April 14, 2009 at 6:38 pm
It’s possible that we’d rather not think of our own history in a bad light, but the holocaust also seems more modern. Slavery seems anachronistic in a modern economy and the Indians died out over a long period of time, with many (like Mound Building civilization) never even coming into contact with whitey.
Smith’s story is pretty good.
Keith: I am firm, you are obstinate and he is a pig-headed fool!
April 14, 2009 at 8:40 pm
It seems especially odd that in the U.S. slipperly slope arguments should so often conjure the specter of another Holocaust when there are candidates for forefendable moral catastrophe that are more specific to our history.
Heh, that’s when you have to ask who is making the slippery slope argument – like Ginsburg, a Member of the Tribe? The trail of tears and slavery didn’t happen to them, so of course those don’t carry any resonance.
April 15, 2009 at 6:09 pm
With the exception of native americans (who comprise a tiny portion of the U.S population today) I’d expect any American to use the Holocaust as that kind of example rather than the trail of tears or slavery (so even AfAms).
April 16, 2009 at 12:39 am
It’s totally annoying when people want to arrange society by just blindly adopting the polar opposite of every value and idea of hitlerism. Yet I do find relatively convincing one of the two “great ideas” of the left: that we need world cooperation and a degree of anti-nationalism to prevent the unthinkables, namely nuclear war, nuclear winter, and perhaps global warming. I must admit that the two world wars, and nazism even more so, are very important in this connection. Not necessarily because we are in great danger of another fascism or another systematic genocide, but because those things show that man has it in him to do something unthinkable, despite modern prosperity. He may have it in him to cook the earth with CO2 or fire ICBMs.
(The other great idea on the left, strong equalitarianism and strong environmentalism regarding the development and condition of people and peoples, is largely discredited in my mind.)
The Trail of Tears lodges much less grimly in my mind than 20th century atrocities do. I find it rather easy to be pretty clement about the cruelty of the buried centuries. Now, I will admit I am mostly just riding fast and loose on intuition here. Nevertheless. Just look at Greg Clark’s stuff about pre-industrial westerners getting fewer calories than hunter-gatherers for more work. Back then poverty truly equaled death, by tuberculosis (quite a bit more prevalent in the poorest) or by something else. To a significant extent, if you weren’t into slavemaking and exploitation, then you were into having your own flesh and blood starve. If you weren’t an expansionist, you were a contractionist. If you weren’t into belligerence, pre-emptive war, and colonialism, you were into getting shorn and devoured yourself and having your daughters carted off over the hills. So people got used to doing stuff that sucked. Even after prosperity returned to the levels found before agriculture, it seems reasonable for it to have taken a few generations for the grim mindset of ten millennia to fall away. Maybe people sense this context, though it wasn’t really a big part of the various “trials” of T Jefferson, Slaveholder, et al that I was privy to at various points in my recent American education. We didn’t really learn that the ancients of King George III’s day were short on food as well as DVD players (especially in Europe), or that the ravages of infectious disease did not strike at random – you might pick that up from Dickens or les Misrables to an extent, but not so much in history classes. Nor was the destructiveness of the 30 Years War something that we were made to understand. Anyway, those excuses don’t seem to apply to the nazis in anything like that magnitude, as much as they may have hated life in the Weimar era.
April 16, 2009 at 7:03 pm
Nationalism is a disaster but I don’t think it’s a good tradeoff if nationalism is replaced by internationalism. Better Stalin than Trotsky, better Putin than PNAC.
April 17, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Nationalism, and it’s extensive variations should be thought of as basically transitional “isms.”
Somehow, it’s difficult to see internationalism as the last “ism.”
April 18, 2009 at 2:35 pm
[...] The Holocaust Justified My Values by TGGP [...]
April 20, 2009 at 5:37 am
all -isms gives a bad smell, better stay far away…
April 26, 2009 at 10:04 am
Wasn’t PNAC nationalistic (Project for a New _American_ Century), even if they were awfully pro-Israel? They don’t become anti-nationalists just because you disagree with them (and they f***ed up big-time)…
April 26, 2009 at 2:05 pm
Not anti-nationalist, but a particularly internationalist version of nationalism then.