Holocaust & Genocide

One of the great challenges in understanding the Holocaust is the degree to which so many became active participants or apathetic bystanders. One approach is to conceptualize a kind of Holocaust morality. Peter Haas in his book, Morality After Auschwitz, offers a model of ethics to explain how such a Holocaust morality could develop. The following is that model:

Ethics: a complete and coherent system of convictions, values and ideas that provides a grid within which some sorts of actions can be classified as evil, and so to be avoided, while other sorts of actions can be classified as good, and so to be tolerated or even pursued.

An ethic must meet certain formal criteria, that it must provide a standard against which its adherents can declare certain goals to be good or bad and so judge particular types of actions to be right or wrong.

The hypothesis is that any formal system that enables evaluations of this sort is an ethic, no matter what its particular judgments or content might be.

An ethic must be coherent and non-self-contradictory and must allow people who think in its terms to understand clearly the distinction it posits between good and evil.

The concepts of good and evil are never merely different from each other but are mirror images, each reflecting the logical structure of the other.
The binary opposition operates only at the foundational conceptual level of an ethic.

On the conscious level, in confrontations with reality, actual moral judgments are usually much more ambiguous and nuance.

At the subconscious level of basic category formation, the conceptions of good and evil take on diametrically opposite contents.

Two ramifications of above: 1-in any ethic we come to understand how good operates by observing evil and vice versa and 2-if ethical thinking is pushed to its logical limit, good and evil wind up being mutually exclusive.

This phenomena leads to the idea that some characteristics of good will be deemed totally good, and some characteristics of evil will be deemed totally evil.

Ultimately, the logical limit of any ethic is that the cosmos can be fully divided up into forces of good and forces of evil.

An ethical system, besides being logically coherent must in some way be perceived as advancing individual or group values and interests.

The Nazi ethic gained adherents because it provided a scheme of behavior which was deemed by Germans to address appropriately the problems they imagined to be of greatest threat to themselves and their culture.

The criterion of appropriateness depends on the particular social situation in which the ethic is asked to operate.

This is concerned with the way the public describes reality and cultural norms are expressed in the real world.

This is a function of how the particular content of an ethic is understood and applied by its practitioners.
The vehicle for this is language, the system of signs and symbols we use publically to express meaning.

It is through ethical discourse that we move from the implicit values and convictions to conscious thought and analysis.

If an ethic can generate and sustain a coherent and internally reinforcing evaluative discourse, and if it produces results that seem to conform to and address the needs and hand, people can be motivated to adopt and conform to whatever evaluation it generates.

The general argument is that the Nazi ethic was able to impose itself on Europe because it maintained a formal continuity with the conventional Western system of ethical convictions and symbols that had evolved since the Enlightenment.

The Nazi decision to murder all the Jews in Europe did not, after, all, develop overnight, it was a policy that gradually emerged out of the intellectual and ethical history of Modern Europe.

By 1940, Treblinka and Auschwitz were possible because they were ethically defensible.

If we are to understand the Holocaust, we must focus not only on the particular events, but on the long chain of attitudes and policies which formed its justification in ethics and which gave it it's sanction.
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Stages in the sanctioning of collective violence
(Fein,1977).

Beginning at the region of indifference, acts of violence can be treated in two ways:

Positive Sanction--Recognize act as "excess" or "error"., Condoning specific acts, Legitimating specific acts that have occurred, Authorizing specific acts of violence, Institutionalizing periodic acts of violence and finally, Institutionalizing elimination of a group.

Negative Sanction--Recognizing act as an offense, Labeling acts as crimes, Indictment, Trial and conviction, Sentencing, Imposing mandatory repressive sanction.

Whichever direction is taken could be an early indicator of possible future genocides.
Possible theories of Genocide:

Mazian(1990) A cumulative interacting set of determinants of genocide:

1. Creation of 'Outsiders'
2. Internal Strife,
3. Destructive uses of Communication {composed of aggressive ideology and propaganda war}
4. Powerful Leadership with Territorial Ambitions Forming a Monolithic and Exclusionary Party,
5. Organization of Destruction and
6. The Failure of Multidimensional Levels of Social Control {powerlessness and weakness of the victim and the lack of checks by the state committing genocide and other states and religious institutions.

Porter attempting to synthesize the contributions of Dadrian, Fein, Horowitz, Hilberg, and Porter, recapitulates the conditions favoring genocide--

1. Minority groups have previously been and are presently defined outside the universe of moral obligation of he dominant group.
2. Pervasive racialistic ideologies and propaganda are found in the nation-state society.
3. There is a strong dependence on military security.
4. Powerful, monolithic exclusionary political parties are present.
5. The leadership has strong territorial ambitions.
6. The power of the state has been reduced by defeat in war and /or internal strife.
7. The possibility of retaliation for genocidal acts by the kin of the victims or interference by neutral nations is at a minimum.

The Nature of Movements and their dynamics is crucial for understanding the Holocaust and genocide. The following is drawn from the work of Eric Hoffer. The True Believer (an analysis of the nature of movements).

A. Factors promoting self-sacrifice:
1-Identification with the collective whole.
2-Make believe (rituals, paraphernalia, mass spectacles).
3-Deprecationj of the present.
4-Things which are not (visions of what could be).
5-Doctrine (certitude, infallibility, key to everything)
6-Fanaticism (intensity, passion).

B. Unifying Agents:
1-Hatred (emotional focusing, directional, scapegoat).
2-Modeling/Imitation
3-Persuasion/Coercion
4-Leadership-(charismatic/functional).

Action (shared doing)
Suspicion (not being right enough)
Effects of Unification--1-Obedience to authority, 2-Dimunition of self, 3-Escape from autonomy, 4-Total dependence.