As if to prove that a little learning is a dangerous thing, the naive view of genetics available to them at the time, their understanding of inheritance, derived largely from the casual assumptions of animal husbandry which, as well, informed Darwin's invention of natural selection, was inadequate to explain the range of conditions they identified as making people unworthy to have children. It's still the common conception of genetics, I've recently read a geneticist making a very similar criticism of what informs the current framing of evolutionary psychology for its ridiculously inadequate, 1970s era concept of genetic inheritance. That doesn't stop it from being the current dogma required of those in the so-called educated class, the framing of their thinking about such things. That it was inadequate was not unknown in the 1970s as the c. 1975 Sociobiology Study Group statement predicting it would generate neo-eugenics made some of those criticisms of that brand of biological determinism.
Update; And then there is the Holocaust revisionist Prime Minister of Israel, Netanyahu's claim that the Final Solution was the fault of the Arabs, that Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was the one who came up with the idea of murdering all of the Jews instead of those Nazis who planned and plotted those murders in 1941.
Is there an event in recent history which has been more crassly and vulgarly used than the murders of six-million Jews by the Nazis? The enormity of the crime magnifies the vileness and vulgarity of that use, it desecrates them, it pisses on their graves. And the persons doing that are the ones who present themselves to the world as if they were those who hold those victims in greatest reverence.
I would repeat that is what comes of those victims of the Nazis being seen as the only significant victims, of the requirement that it be held that those victims of the Nazis are more valuable than the other victims of the Nazis. The "final solution" thinking of the Nazis had already been expressed in the attempt to kill all of the disabled and in Hitler's orders to the officers who were invading Poland to kill all of the Pols. Those programs of mass murder were two years before the meeting between Hitler and the Grand Mufti took place into which Netanyahu inserts his invented lines that makes the Arab instead of the Nazi the origin of the Final Solution.
There is a price to be paid in the claim that the Jews murdered by the Nazis are more significant than the other people in other groups murdered by the Nazis. Those Jews who claim that - and I don't for a second believe it is most or even very many Jews who do claim that - give permission for people who are not Jews and who hate Jews to consider murder victims, who are not "their people" unimportant, to not care about them or see them as significant. If they would protest that that is somehow not right, they have destroyed their credibility to make that protest by doing exactly what they complain about other people doing.
I think that instead of looking at the species of Nazi thinking which focused on the Jews it is necessary to look at the thinking that led to the Final Solution in terms of its genus because the same thinking led to the murders of other people, other attempts at genocide. I'm convinced that Benjamin Netanyahu exhibits that genus of thinking when he says such things as that, which is hardly unknown in his political side in Israel, even within his cabinet. Like Holocaust deniers he looks for pseudo-historical narratives that feed his hatred and opportunistically feed his political use of hatred of Palestinians. That he would displace any of the blame for the Final Solution from the Nazis who did it in order to make use of the Jews murdered by the Nazis for current political purposes is as vile a thing as has been done with their memory by anyone, it approaches the vileness of Holocaust denial and the efforts to minimize its evil.
Update; And then there is the Holocaust revisionist Prime Minister of Israel, Netanyahu's claim that the Final Solution was the fault of the Arabs, that Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was the one who came up with the idea of murdering all of the Jews instead of those Nazis who planned and plotted those murders in 1941.
Is there an event in recent history which has been more crassly and vulgarly used than the murders of six-million Jews by the Nazis? The enormity of the crime magnifies the vileness and vulgarity of that use, it desecrates them, it pisses on their graves. And the persons doing that are the ones who present themselves to the world as if they were those who hold those victims in greatest reverence.
I would repeat that is what comes of those victims of the Nazis being seen as the only significant victims, of the requirement that it be held that those victims of the Nazis are more valuable than the other victims of the Nazis. The "final solution" thinking of the Nazis had already been expressed in the attempt to kill all of the disabled and in Hitler's orders to the officers who were invading Poland to kill all of the Pols. Those programs of mass murder were two years before the meeting between Hitler and the Grand Mufti took place into which Netanyahu inserts his invented lines that makes the Arab instead of the Nazi the origin of the Final Solution.
There is a price to be paid in the claim that the Jews murdered by the Nazis are more significant than the other people in other groups murdered by the Nazis. Those Jews who claim that - and I don't for a second believe it is most or even very many Jews who do claim that - give permission for people who are not Jews and who hate Jews to consider murder victims, who are not "their people" unimportant, to not care about them or see them as significant. If they would protest that that is somehow not right, they have destroyed their credibility to make that protest by doing exactly what they complain about other people doing.
I think that instead of looking at the species of Nazi thinking which focused on the Jews it is necessary to look at the thinking that led to the Final Solution in terms of its genus because the same thinking led to the murders of other people, other attempts at genocide. I'm convinced that Benjamin Netanyahu exhibits that genus of thinking when he says such things as that, which is hardly unknown in his political side in Israel, even within his cabinet. Like Holocaust deniers he looks for pseudo-historical narratives that feed his hatred and opportunistically feed his political use of hatred of Palestinians. That he would displace any of the blame for the Final Solution from the Nazis who did it in order to make use of the Jews murdered by the Nazis for current political purposes is as vile a thing as has been done with their memory by anyone, it approaches the vileness of Holocaust denial and the efforts to minimize its evil.
No comments:
Post a Comment