Comparing Genocides and other Category Killings

A question that recurs in genocide studies is whether or not the crimes of Stalin and Mao can be classed as genocides. In the strictest sense, it would be difficult to justify such a classification, because the millions of victims murdered by these regimes were chosen on political and economic grounds, not ethnic or racial in most cases. However, a continuity between these killings and genocide can be found in the theme of pollution. I have already applied this concept to the Nazis here and to the Khmer Rouge here.

As Eric Weitz has noted, the revolutionary, utopian nature of Stalinism and Maoism, and their ultimate origins in world wars, made them prone to seek cleansing missions. Whilst such cleansing did not seek partial or total biological extermination in the Nazi sense, it had the potential to be unlimited in its effects, as occurred ultimately with the Khmer Rouge. I would argue that exploring these connections may be more fruitful than confining the field to events that fit a definition of genocide.

The Khmer Rouge

Ben Kiernan, p.38, cites an announcement on Phnom Penh Radio dated May 10th, 1978, which stated that the Cambodian army would kill 30 Vietnamese for every Cambodian, and thus sacrifice "2 million troops to crush the 50 million Vietnamese," leaving 6 million Cambodian survivors. This revealed three essential features of the Khmer Rouge (KR) regime, which can also be found in its genocidal domestic program.

Key Concepts in Nazi Antisemitism: 5. Paranoid Nihilism

In this final blog of the series, I address the nihilistic nature of Nazism: the fact that it was a state whose central aim was to destroy other systems, cultures and physical beings. Such nihilism was not unique to the Nazis - it can also be found in Communism, Italian fascism, and some episodes in the history of European and American imperialism - but it was applied more systematically by the Nazis, and was framed in racial terms that made it more genocidal in its effects, deliberately targeting millions of women and children as well as adult males, for no other purpose than to destroy their group. Moreover, I argue below that Nazi nihilism was more paranoid than the other destructive systems, and this explains why it was more willing to undertake a high risk, pre-emptive total 'war of annihilation' rather than the limited wars that are associated with the other regimes.

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The origins of nihilism have been studied by such seminal figures as Franz Borkenau, George Orwell, Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin. Borkenau observed that Bolshevik and Nazi oligarchies were akin to a "religious order of professional revolutionaries" (cited in Erika Gottlieb, "The Orwell Conundrum", 1992, p.108) Their Messianic faith in the perfection of their political philosophy removed all moral constraints from using state power to kill those who did not share it. Orwell argued that totalitarianism stemmed from the failure of modern societies to replace religious morality with a socialist-humanist one. Instead, Orwell argued, these societies (in which he included Britain and the US) were obsessed with "orthodoxies" which made them indifferent to mass murder. Obedience to systems became an excuse to cast aside one's conscience and humanity in pursuit of conformity to a political utopia.

Orwell's view was similar to Hannah Arendt's argument, in the "Origins of Totalitarianism" (1951), that recourse to the "laws of nature" (Nazism) or "laws of history" (Marxism) gave a charismatic leader unlimited arbitrary destructive power, because he could claim that any act of violence was historically necessary. Liberal or religious qualms about mass killing could thus be dismissed as irrational or sentimental. Eric Voegelin echoed this view in his concept of 'radical alienation', or 'deculturation', defined as "a sort of apocalyptic construction by which all past history is thrown out as more or less irrelevant..." Voegelin went a step further, however, by arguing that totalitarianism is a form of gnosticism that seeks to "immanentize the eschaton"; i.e. to create utopia, redemption and salvation in this life rather than the afterlife. This utopianism, especially when placed in a Manichean political context in which two potential utopias are fighting against each other, creates the potential for unlimited slaughter and genocide because any group that is viewed as a barrier to utopia (Jews, 'the bourgeoisie', 'infidels', Communists) is now, not only 'polluting the body politic', but preventing that body from fulfilling its destiny.

These political theorists can therefore point to common causative features of genocidal potentials in Hitlerism, Maoism and Stalinism; but what about the features that made Nazism more systematic and universal in its genocidal killing than the others?

I would argue that two points stand out. Firstly, under Communism, ultra-conservative western imperialism, ultra-Zionism or radical Islam, the blockage to utopia is a rival ideology or system. It is not placed in a biological system in which the body of every political opponent must be exterminated, including the possibility of future generations. Thus it was only the Nazis whose ideology led them to insist that:

The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as a the seed of a new Jewish revival (see the experience of history.)

Secondly, Nazism took more risks with its own survival in order to carry out an all-or-nothing war of extermination. This was racist paranoia gone berserk. There was no need to take on Stalin (who had purged his officer corps) in 1941. Stalin and Mao did not take reckless risks in order to export their revolutions. They believed that the global historical laws of Marxist-Leninism would work themselves out over generations. Hitler, by contrast, believed that he had to be pre-emptive and risk the entire German state and economy in an all-out gamble for supremacy.

This, in turn, can be explained by the Nazi obsession with biology and Pollution. The Nazis could not live with a Cold War in which Superpowers faced off for decades. Their eschatology was more urgent and required a more immediate return. Nazism could not defer political and religious gratification. Hitler's greater intensity of genocidal impulse, generated by a more intense eschatology and racism than was felt by Stalin and Mao, created a short-termism and addiction to reckless gambling that they never shared. This is why they lived a natural lifespan and he did not.

Key Concepts in Nazi Antisemitism: 4. Chimeria

The term 'chimeria' comes from Langmuir and is useful for identifying beliefs that are purely delusional, rather than stereotypes or xenophobias that are developed by taking a 'kernel of truth' then exaggerating and distorting it. 'Chimeric' beliefs portray Jews as physical embodiments of Satan, and as a conspiratorial force of darkness that plots world domination. This, in turn, gives the antisemite a Messianic mission of redemption. Thus, as Saul Friedlander argues, Nazi antisemitism has to be understood as 'redemptive': a pseudo-religion.

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So far so good, but what are the limits of the concept? I would identify two major ones. Firstly, 'chimeria' only really tells us about the Nazi "true believers", such as Hitler and Streicher. There is no conclusive evidence that the bulk of the Nazi Party's membership believed in Streicher's wild imaginings. Secondly, antisemitic beliefs that build on stereotypes, or which are used to disguise instrumental motives, can be just as genocidal in their effects. Infact, beliefs which can point to a "kernel of truth" (no matter how exaggerated or distorted) are more likely to convince waverers, so may be more useful in a radicalization of policy setting such as Germany in 1939-42. It would be unwise to assume that only "true believers" can participate in genocide. Indeed, such an assumption would take us dangerously close to Goldhagen territory.

For this reason, I would prefer the concept that I discussed in Part 3 of this series, namely Pollution. The advantage of Pollution over Chimeria is that Pollution can have stereotypical or chimeric contents. Pollution helps us to explain how a 'reality-based' concept such as fear of disease or anger at defeat in warfare (the mood of 1918) can be exploited to generate entirely chimeric beliefs. For example, the belief that Bolshevism has some Jewish members is 'reality-based' because some revolutionaries were secularized Jews, but the belief that it was a Jewish conspiracy against gentiles is chimeric because these Jews were not acting from religious or cultural motivations but from political ideas that they shared with their gentile partners.

I would therefore argue that, by separating Chimeria from any "kernel of truth", Langmuir misses the methodology of Nazism, which is to create chimeric beliefs from perverse readings of empirical observations. Delusions are created by converting reality into fantasy, not by generating fantasy entirely independently of real circumstances.

Key Concepts in Nazi Antisemitism: 3. Pollution

On 13 March 1942, a Nazi court delivered a death sentence against Lehman Israel Katzenberger, whose age at that time was over 68 years, for the crime of 'racial pollution' under Article 2 of the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor. Katzenberger was beheaded by guillotine at Stadelheim Prison in Munich on 2 June 1942. The presiding judge, Oswald Rothaug, declared that “It is sufficient for me that the swine said that a German girl had sat upon his lap.” He also stated that:

Together with his offense of racial pollution he is also guilty of an offence under paragraph 4 of the ordinance against people’s parasites. It should be noted here that the national community is in need of increased legal protection from all crimes attempting to destroy or undermine its inner cohesion.

Rothaug thus admitted that a key political strategy of the Nazi state was to maintain the 'cohesion' of its mythical racial identity by accusing Jews of polluting the body politic. Why did the Nazis pick this particular strategy and what were its historical antecedents?

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Pollution is a syncretic political strategy which exploits a myth that appears historically in three different but overlapping contexts: religious, medical and nationalist. The strategy enabled the Nazis to overcome resistance to their political authority among religious believers, doctors, academics and the armed forces by tapping into their mentalities and igniting themes that were part of their institutional histories but were often marginalized during the century of relative liberalization that preceded the Nazi rise to power. Uncovering the genealogy of the myth therefore gives an insight into how the Nazis melded old and new prejudices into a dogma of genocidal force.

The link between pollution and social cohesion strategies has been noted by anthropologists. The most famous of these, Mary Douglas (1966), argued that pollution myths concerning the body were projected on to the entire group in order to symbolize dangers to its unity. Dirt signified "matter out of place" (p.36) and came to represent pollution of the entire social order (p.5):

Reflection on dirt involves reflection on the relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death

Pollution thus came also to represent social death in certain caste systems. For example, Lifton (1986: 482) notes that the Japanese outcaste group, the Burakumin, used to:

bear the name "Eta", whose literal meaning is "full of filth", "full of pollution" or "abundant defilement".

However, anthropologists like Douglas were referring primarily to the social cohesion of minority sects, such as the Israelites in the Biblical era. Pollution myth only became genocidal when it was used by a majority against a stigmatised minority. In Europe, that process dates from the eleventh century, when the Church and state united to form a 'Persecuting Society' (R.I. Moore, 2001). From around the time of the First Crusade in 1096, Jews began to be accused of crimes such as 'ritual murder' and 'usury'. An example of the pollution discourse used to frame these accusations is provided by Robert Chazan (1997: 122):

William of Chartres, in concluding his report on the discussion between Louis IX and his advisers with respect to Jewish usury, has the king speaking of Jews as infecting his land with their poison. The discussion ends with the king telling his advisers: “Let those prelates do what pertains to them concerning those subject Christians, and I must do what pertains to me concerning the Jews. Let them abandon usury, or they shall leave my land completely, in order that it no longer be polluted with their filth”

However, at this point, the alleged pollution was spiritual, not biological. The Jew was usually allowed (or forced) to convert to Christianity. This began to change in the aftermath of the Spanish Inquisition, when converted Jews were accused of being false converts or 'Marranos' (pigs). Pollution began to find expression in peculiar beliefs about the Jew's Body (Gilman, 1991). For example, Beusterien cites this claim by a royal physician:

In 1632 Doctor Juan de Quiñones, an official in the court of King Philip IV, devoted an entire treatise to Jewish maladies, focusing on the allegation that Jewish males menstruated. He wrote: "every month they suffer from a blood flow as if they were women."

Even before the emergence of racial science, therefore, there was already a potential for the syncretic merging of religious and medical delusions about Jews. It was not necessary to invent biological racism from scratch, as its seeds were already in the culture of post-Inquisition Europe. The fact that was unique to the post-1800 period was the inclusion of classes below the ruling elites in the definition of the 'body politic'. This was due to the fact that race and nation functioned as tools of vertical integration. This had the effect of multiplying the numbers of groups eligible to be included in the myth of the nation, until it became a concept that was amenable to socialist and liberal applications as well as reactionary ones. We therefore find that, by 1900, Jews could be blamed by a range of political groups for a variety of national ills across the European continent, expressed in terms of biological degradation.

For example, in France, Jews were blamed for the loss of the Franco-Prussian war (Brustein, 'Roots of Hate', p.121), and this fuelled the Dreyfus Case two decades later. French and German nationalism borrowed from the 'degeneracy' theories of Gobineau, whilst German Volkish discourse took on a virulently antisemitic tone in the work of Wilhelm Marr and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Marr had been a socialist in his youth. In Italy, Cesare Lombroso was an assimilated Jew and a socialist who nonetheless believed that the "white race" was threatened by the innate criminality of degenerate breeds. In Britain, the Eugenics Society included such liberal figures as the Webbs, Beveridge and Keynes. Beveridge, the future founder of the Welfare State, wrote in 1905 that:

It is essential…to maintain the distinction between those who, however irregularly employed, are yet members, though inferior members, of the industrial army and those who are mere parasites, incapable of performing any useful service whatever…[The unemployable] must be removed from industry and maintained adequately in public institutions, but with the complete and permanent loss of all citizenship rights - including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood [cited in Rose, 1999: 254-255]

The influence of these ideas on antisemitism became apparent in the passing of the 1905 Aliens Act, which was designed to keep out East European Jews (Gainer, 1972). Beatrice Webb, a leading Fabian, had referred to "the greed of the Jew" in her research into the textile industry in the East End; and the liberal economist J.A. Hobson had blamed financiers, "chiefly German in origin and Jewish in race" for the Boer War.

However, it should be noted that radical antisemitic parties fared poorly in national elections in Britain in 1906 and Germany in 1907, so there was no immediate risk prior to 1914 of such ideas leading to mass killing. It was Germany's defeat in 1918, followed by the displacement of educated elite groups by Germany's economic problems in the 1920's, that allowed the Nazis to intensify these ideas into forms of hatred that could appeal to mentalities that would be amenable to its policies.

The result of these alliances was support among carefully chosen elites for the kind of state murder discussed in the opening paragraph. Hitler declared that Jews were a "race of criminals" and was able to recruit enough doctors to carry out sterilizations, judges to pass death sentences, and SS men with PhD's to lead the Einsatzgruppen (Stahlecker, Rasch, Ohlendorf).

It was thus a simple exercise to escalate from individual judicial and medical murders to a mass genocide. The willingness of doctors and judges to knowingly conspire in individual murder leading to genocide is made clear in primary sources. On 11 May 1942, Dachau doctor Rascher wrote to Himmler that:

For the following experiments Jewish professional criminals who had committed race pollution were used.

Similarly, the correspondence from the Reich Minister of Justice Thierack to Reichsleiter Bormann dated 13 October 1942 revealed that:

With a view to freeing the German people of Poles, Russians, Jews, and gypsies and with a view to making the Eastern territories which have been incorporated into the Reich available for settlements for German nationals, I intend to turn over criminal proceedings against Poles, Russians, Jews, and gypsies to the Reichsfuehrer SS. In so doing I base myself on the principle that the administration of justice can only make a small contribution to the extermination of members of these peoples. The Justice Administration undoubtedly pronounces very severe sentences on such persons, but that is not enough to constitute any material contribution towards the realization of the above-mentioned aim.

Pollution had thus escalated from a 'crime' that warranted individual death penalties to a menace that required the extermination of all Jews.

Key Concepts in Nazi Antisemitism: 2. Biological Racism

George L. Mosse noted famously that Nazism was a scavenger ideology. This was especially true in its conceptions of nation and race. The Nazis borrowed a "Volkish" ideology that had been evolving since the work of Fichte a century previously (pioneered in his Reden an die deutsche Nation of 1807-1808), and synthesised it with eugenics and Aryanism. Contrary to Goldhagen, therefore, Nazi ideology was not uniquely German in most of its elements: it took lessons from the French (Gobineau), British (Galton), Americans (the first compulsory sterilizations, which Hitler deliberately copied) and, ironically, from Jews (Lombroso, the Italian theorist of innate criminality, was an assimilated Jew).

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In industrial societies, racism is a crucial instrument of power because it separates status from class. It is counter-revolutionary because a person's social status and identity is not totally determined by their exploited class position but can instead be elevated by membership of the privileged racial group. Race thus provides a 'vertical integration of social honour', in which a proletarian has access to social honour that, in a pure class system, would be reserved for an aristocrat or bourgeois. The Nazis perfected this instrument by highlighting the myth of the Volksgemeinschaft, an ideal community in which no Aryan was exploited, alienated or excluded. A German was no longer defined merely as an academic, a pen-pusher, a petit-bourgeois or a labourer.

This contributed towards the Holocaust specifically in the sense that it was especially crucial in the recruitment of volunteers for SS duty in anti-Jewish actions. An SS officer who killed Jews was, in his self-image, simply preserving the Volksgemeinschaft. In this respect, contrary to the Browning-Goldhagen debate, there was no such thing as an 'Ordinary German' in the Order Police and Einsatzgruppen, as those men had been taught to see themselves as privileged, not ordinary, and this privilege exempted them from the moral norms associated with mass murder.

However, the key question raised by this blog is the degree to which the depiction of Jews in Nazi antisemitism was a product of these Volkish and racist influences.

My first answer to this question is that racism and antisemitism have often evolved in largely separate domains, and could not therefore be combined without creating contradictions that Nazism could not resolve. The clearest explanation of this separation was provided by Oliver C. Cox in his classic study, Caste, Class and Race. Writing in 1948 in an American context, Cox (p.90) put forward this schema:

The dominant group is intolerant of those whom it can define as anti-social, whilst it holds racial prejudice against those whom it can define as subsocial…Persecution and capitalist exploitation are the respective behaviour aspects of these two social attitudes...[The] dominant group or ruling class does not like the Jew at all, but it likes the Negro in his place. To put it in still another way, the condition of its liking the Jew is that he cease being a Jew and voluntarily become like the generality of society, while its condition of liking the Negro is that he cease trying to become like the generality of society and remain contentedly a Negro

The Nazis therefore created a logical problem when they adopted a racial hierarchy, because the historical status of Jews was meant to be, not underneath society (subsocial) but as a hostile alien outside it (anti-social). The status of 'subsocial' required a myth that the victim group was stupid, lazy and submissive, and reflected the fact that the mythical status was designed to reinforce and justify slavery. Its victim group was the colonial subject, usually defined by skin colour. Jews, by contrast, were subjected to a baggage of myths that portrayed them as conspiratorial, wealth-hoarding, controlling, secretive and demonic. Jews were thus, in most racial systems, more of an 'outcaste' group (Orlando Patterson, 1982: 50) than a racial one, and the Nazis had to over-ride this contradiction in order to treat Jews as a race.

Paradoxically, therefore, I conclude that Nazi racial antisemitism relied extensively on 'extra-racist' elements. It had to scavenge outside the normal terrain of racist discourse in order to generate a new racial category in which only Jews could fit. An example of this scavenging is presented in the next blog in this series.

Key Concepts in Nazi Antisemitism: 1. Social Death

This is the first of several blogs in which I evaluate the usefulness of theoretical concepts in understanding the nature of Nazi antisemitic beliefs. This initial study looks at the notion of "social death", which was first employed by Orlando Patterson in "Slavery and Social Death" (1982) and then adopted in Daniel Goldhagen's infamous "Hitler's Willing Executioners" (1996). I argue below that "social death" was a key factor in the ability of the Nazis to generate indifference to the fate of Jews, but that Goldhagen abuses Patterson's original usage and fails to understand its real applicability to the Holocaust.

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As Claudia Card notes, the infliction of social death on a group prior to its murder is a feature of genocides that distinguishes them from other mass murders:

Social death, central to the evil of genocide (whether the genocide is homicidal or primarily cultural), distinguishes genocide from other mass murders. Loss of social vitality is loss of identity and thereby of meaning for one's existence. Seeing social death at the center of genocide takes our focus off body counts and loss of individual talents, directing us instead to mourn losses of relationships that create community and give meaning to the development of talents.

However, it should be noted that social death can be inflicted without physical death. If this distinction is not made, social death loses all analytical power, because it simply becomes a synonym for genocidal acts that involve murder. It ignores the fact that, for example, medieval Jews and lepers sometimes existed in a state of social death without being subjected to killing; pogroms occurred in some times and places but not others. This is one of the errors that Goldhagen makes when he abuses the concept, because his model assumes that social death must be accompanied or followed by extreme violence in all cases. This leads Goldhagen to make the abusive claim (p.169) that:

In a fundamental sense, slaves did not suffer complete "social death"...Jews were really socially dead.

Goldhagen (ibid.) makes the totally unsupported assertion that:

slave societies depend upon slaves for production and even honour...and some, if not many, of them have had ongoing social relations and ties to their oppressors, including intimate and even loving sexual relations.

This was clearly not Patterson's meaning when he originated the term. Goldhagen's hypothetical slaves, if they ever existed, bore no relation to most of those described by Patterson, whose lives were a "living death" (p.8) and who were "Formally isolated in their social relations" (p.5). Goldhagen thus denies the reality of slave experience in order to privilege the social death of Jews. He ignores the fact that the Nazis did not just inflict social death on Jews but also did so on all groups who were defined as 'non-Aryans'. Social death was a racial schema for the Nazis, not a concept that they applied uniquely to the Jews. Instead, Jews were subjected to a social death that was combined with specifically antisemitic forms of dehumanization that must be analyzed in their own right, rather than simply being conflated with Patterson's concept.

Goldhagen thus fails to understand that the uniqueness of the Final Solution lies, not in the infliction of social death, but in the escalation in policy from social death to total extermination, a radicalization that social death enabled (by making the general public indifferent to the fate of non-social beings) but did not determine. Social death was a necessary, but not sufficient, precondition for the implementation of eliminationist antisemitism by the Nazis. To understand why this escalation occurred with Jews but not with Polish gentiles, it is therefore necessary to examine the additional ideological themes of Nazi Jew-hatred. This will be the task of the remaining blogs in this series.