Willing Executioners

Daniel Goldhagen, in his popular book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, holds all Germans responsible for the Holocaust. He describes Germany as “a society that produced a cataclysm, the Holocaust, which people did not predict or, with rare exceptions, ever imagine to have been possible.” The Holocaust, he says, “was a radical break with everything known in human history” (p. 28). He argues that, to understand the Holocaust, Germany under the Nazis “must be approached as an anthropologist would a previously unencountered preliterate people and their beliefs” (p. 45). It is terribly wrong to suppose the Germans were modern, post-Enlightenment people who think as we do.

German civilization, he argues, has always been anti-Semitic to the core. “European anti-Semitism is a corollary of Christianity,” he claims (p. 49). “Antisemitism has been a permanent feature of Christian civilization” (p. 39).

What seems most apparent to me from all this is that Goldhagen is guilty of exactly what he blames the Germans for: he dehumanizes the Germans just as they, he claims, dehumanized the Jews. He demonizes Christianity just as Christians, he claims, once demonized Judaism.

In doing so, he undermines his entire argument.

Goldhagen is also wrong to think that the Holocaust was all about the Jews. Simple blunder; this is a common error. We forget that less than half of the inhabitants of the concentration camps seem to have been Jewish: an estimated 6 million Jews died in them, but an estimated 13 million overall. Not to mention the enslavement and planned enslavement of many millions more, including essentially the entire Slav race.

But, this being so, Goldhagen’s thesis that it was all made possible by a permanent grudge against the Jews in German civilization, or Christian civilization, just does not work. It is dead on arrival.

But oddly enough, quite inadvertently, in his tirade against Christianity and against Germany, he demonstrates how the Holocaust really happened.

People need scapegoats. Scapegoats are what makes social life possible.

All you need is a group that is “outside,” in some sense, the given society, outside present company.

When such a group can be found, and all evil thrown upon them, it lefts a great burden off the shoulders of everyone else. Everyone else can feel good about themselves, and avoid guilt. Better yet, they can avoid blaming one another, or getting blamed. No matter what they do. Because they are members of the elect, they cannot do wrong.

The next step, working together to destroy the source of evil, becomes an objective around which society per se can form.

In Hitler’s time, the Jews were handy. As Goldhagen intimates, as a group, they were quite successful. It was therefore possible for people to believe conspiracy theories about their “limitless power” and that they were “responsible for nearly every harm that has befallen the world” (p. 28).

But there is, sadly, nothing unique about the Jews in this regard. It is completely wrong to see the Nazi Holocaust as something unique. Would that it were. But we have actually seen bigger holocausts since. Cambodia, Darfur, Bosnia, Stalin, Mao, Idi Amin, Zimbabwe, and on and on. Far from being the exception, it is the rule. Societies run on scapegoats, from small groups all the way up to civilizations.

Goldhagen does not actually claim that Germans were uniquely “primitive” and irrational in their thinking. Obviously, he also thinks that all of Christian civilization is, or was, primitive and irrational, And, of course, he must think the same of “primitive” cultures per se. Indeed, he says, “most societies throughout history have been governed by absurd beliefs at the center of their cosmological and ontological notions of life, which their members have held axiomatically” (p. 29). Unfortunately, he does not see the obvious paradox here: if all other societies but modern secular society, and perhaps Judaism, have been nuts without knowing it, how can he possibly be confident that he himself, and our society, are not also nuts without knowing it?

We should, on the one hand, have more respect for the dead. They themselves become a very common scapegoat, because they are never present to defend themselves; they are necessarily never part of present company.

We should, on the other, be careful to avoid any doctrine that tends to exempt ourselves from guilt. Suspect a scapegoat. What if, for example, far from being wholly different from the Germans of the 1930s, we ourselves, put in the same situation, would probably react in exactly the same way? Either participating in the killing and enslaving ourselves, or, if we were not involved, at best shrugging our shoulders and considering it no moral issue?

I’m confident we would. And the reason I am confident, is that we are. For one thing, we are as sanguine as most Germans were about the holocausts happening on our watch. When Idi Amin started slaughtering everyone, most foreign reaction seemed to be to think it was funny. Nobody is doing much about Mugabe in Zimbabwe, or Darfur, right now. Perhaps not close enough to home.

But it is even worse than that. We have our own scapegoats. Societies always do. Most obviously, we feel no moral qualms at all, at least as a society on the official level, over abortion. But this is in itself a bigger mass murder, in numbers, than Hitler’s. And we are willing executioners: an estimated quarter of all Canadian women have themselves now had at least one abortion performed.

The trick is the same one used against the Jews: children are painted as the source of evil. Really: all that stuff about “overpopulation” we’ve been hearing since the fifties. Children were/are going to destroy the world. They also supposedly keep good Aryan women enslaved, axiomatically barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. And anyone too fond of children is suspected of pedophilia. Unborn children are portrayed as less than fully human, just as were the Jews. They are spoken of in terms of disease, as the Jews were: compared, for example, to tumors.

A corollary factor, of course, is that there is visibly some advantage to the rest of us to killing them: in the case of the Jews, it meant their wealth could be confiscated, their high positions filled by eager others. In the case of kids, abortion gave freedom to have sex whenever and with whomever we wanted—without financial risk.

We have other scapegoats. But let’s not dilute the point. Time to look at the beam in our own eye.