'The Cunning of History – The Holocaust and the American Future' by Richard L. Rubenstein
I've only read a few books that have given me that sense of 'revelation', that sense of pieces of a puzzle snapping into place. Laura's book was one and 'The Cunning of History' is another. It's a slim book, more like a long essay but don't let that fool you. This work is practically a masterpiece of objective analysis regarding a subject that is by nature an emotional minefield. This book was published almost thirty-five years ago however it seems to have become more relevant with every passing year. The event that has been the implicit or explicit “excuse” for much of the happenings in the Middle East has never been examined so clearly, at least that's the way I see it. For those who would like additional understanding of why Israel is the way it is and why the West panders to this tiny Mediterranean 'state', please read this book. Rubenstein's work is essential reading for understanding the phenomenon of Auschwitz objectively, the phenomenon that has shaped so much of 20th century history. 'The Cunning of History' leads the reader to an understanding of the possible future implications of the existence of that institution, an institution which arose in a technologically sophisticated, 'civilized' Western state in the heart of Europe. The traditional explanations for the disaster and existence of the death/labor/concentration camps range from the Jews suffering karmic/divine retribution to some particularly brutal and sadistic tendency in the German psyche. These kind of explanations have always left much of the picture unclear or skewed. Rubenstien focuses on the sort of 'hidden hand' of unseen mechanisms that made much of what happened possible. He also shows the reader why we need to be ever vigilant, and not deceive ourselves into thinking that what happened in Germany/Poland during WWII could never happen again in a 'civilized' Western country. I've included a few excerpts I thought would be useful for a general understanding what Rubenstein is saying.
William Styron Introduction –
Styron said:
Rubenstein is forcing us to reinterpret the meaning of Auschwitz- especially, although not exclusively, from the standpoint of its existence as part of a continuum of slavery that has been grafted for centuries onto the very body of Western civilization. Therefore, in the process of destroying the myth and the preconception, he is making us see that the encampment of death and suffering may have been more horrible than we had ever imagined. It was slavery in its ultimate embodiment....the etiology of Auschwitz – to some a diabolical, perhaps freakish excrescence, which vanished from the face of the earth with the destruction of the crematoria in 1945 – is actually embedded deeply in a cultural tradition that stretches back to the Middle Passage from the coast of Africa, and beyond, to the enforced servitude in ancient Greece and Rome. Rubenstein is saying that we ignore this linkage, and the sleeping virus in the bloodstream of civilization, at risk of our future.
Chapter 1 – Mass Death and Contemporary Civilization
Rubenstein said:
Scholars have invariably failed to recognize the phenomenon for what it was, a thoroughly modern exercise in total domination that could only have been carried out by an advanced political community with a highly trained, tightly disciplined police and civil service bureaucracy. The process was a highly complex series of acts which started simply with the bureaucratic definition of who was a Jew. Once defined as a Jew, by the German state bureaucracy, a person was progressively deprived of all personal property and citizenship rights. The final step in the process came when he was eliminated altogether. The destruction process required the cooperation of every sector of German society. The bureaucrats drew up the definitions and decrees; the churches gave evidence of Aryan descent; the postal authorities carried the messages of definition, expropriation, denaturalization, and deportation; business corporations dismissed their Jewish employees and took over “Aryanized” properties; the railroads carried the victims to their place of execution, a place made available to the Gestapo and the SS by the Wehrmacht. To repeat, the operation required and received the participation of every major social, political and religious institution of the German Reich.
In this chapter Rubenstein illustrates how the transformation of war in the early 20th century led to a new kind of relationship between world powers. This led to the ultimate expendability of large numbers of people on a scale that would have been unimaginable just a few years before WWI. Consider 9-11/ the war on terror and Guantanamo Bay in conjunction with the following quote used by Rubenstein to further illustrate his points –
Rubenstein said:
Goebbels wrote in his diary that “the war made possible for us the solution of a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times.”
It's easy to forget sometimes, but we've been at war for the last five years, and a lot can happen in five years while people are distracted by the Super Bowl, American Idol, the Paris Hilton sex tape and so forth.
Rubenstein said:
As Hannah Arendt pointed out, in spite of the treaty guarantees, none of the national minorities could either trust or be trusted by the states of which they were technically citizens. To make matters worse, the unfortunate fact that the minority guarantees were deemed necessary was itself recognition that only people belonging to the dominant state nationality, such as the Poles in Poland, or the Hungarians in Hungary could count upon the full protection of the political and legal institutions of the states of which they were citizens. Ms. Arendt has observed that with the signing of the minorities' treaties after World War I, the transformation of the state from an institution of law into an instrument of the dominant national community had been completed.
This transformation of the fundamental nature of the state is an unfortunate and enduring legacy of WWI and WWII, and a reason why during times of strife especially, it would behoove minorities of any kind to pay extremely close attention to everything and not be lulled into a false sense of security. Part of this lulling here in the US is currently being played out in the realm of politics. Ignoring or unaware of the alarming health, imprisonment and economic statistics, many minorities think the appearance of someone somewhat like them on the national stage points towards some glorious rosy future. The rise of Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish Jew, to high prominence in the German Parliament during WWI could have pointed towards a greater level of tolerance towards Jews in Germany, however her assassination negated such claims. In addition, regardless of any debate as to the origins of the people living in Europe calling themselves Jews during WWII and regardless of the relevance of that origin to the current fact of Israel's existence, it must be remembered that those people, whoever and whatever they were - were minorities. It also bears remembering that so called 'Aryan' German citizens were the first minorities imprisoned and murdered in the Nazi concentration camps; they were political dissidents, Jehovah's Witnesses, gays and other "anti-socials".
Rubenstein said:
The Nazis insisted that the protests emanating from the so-called democracies concerning German treatment of Jews were not without a strong element of hypocrisy. This theme recurs frequently in Nazi sources. For example, on December 13, 1942, Goebbles wrote in his diary, “At bottom, I believe that both the English and the Americans are happy that we are exterminating this Jewish riffraff.” The more one studies the literature of the period, the more difficult it is to avoid the conclusion that Goebbles was right, at least in his estimation of the British, but also to some degree the American government. When we look for the problem the British were attempting to “solve” by their not entirely passive cooperation with the Germans in the extermination of the Jews, it is clear that they were seeking to protect their disintegrating imperial domain east of the Suez, especially in India. Beneath all pretensions to imperial glory, the British had their own economic and political reasons for being in India. The Indians understandably wanted to be rid of them, and the problem of maintaining Britains position in India was for a long time a preoccupation of English statesmen. At one point, some British bureaucrats in India contemplated “administrative massacres” as a means of terrorizing the Indians and maintaining their own tenuous hold *Al Carthill (Bennet Christian Huntington Calcraft Kennedy), The Lost Dominion (Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood, 1924), pp. 93 ff and Arendt, The Origins, pp. 210 – 12, 216, 221
Chapter 2 - Bureaucratic Domination
Rubenstein said:
In order to understand how the moral barrier was crossed that made massacre in the millions possible, it is necessary to consider the importance of bureaucracy in modern political and social organization. The German sociologist Max Weber was especially cognizant of its significance. Written in 1916, long before the Nazi party came to prominence in German politics, Weber observed: “The decisive reason for the advance of bureaucratic organization has always been its purely technical superiority over any other kind of organization. The fully developed bureaucratic mechanism compares with other organizations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of organization. Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of the files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs – these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic organization.”
Almost from the moment they came to power, the Nazis understood the bureaucratic mechanism they controlled...Himmler does not seem to have been a sadist. During the war, he did not like to watch killing operations and became upset when he did. But, Himmler was the perfect bureaucrat. He did what he believed was his duty sine ira et studio, without bias or scorn...Under Himmler there was no objection to cruelty, provided it was disciplined and systematic. This preference was also shared by the German civil service bureaucracy. According to Hilberg, the measure that gave the civil service bureaucrats least difficulty in exterminating their victims was the imposition of a starvation diet. In a bureaucratically controlled society where every individual's ration can be strictly determined, starvation is the ideal instrument of “clean” violence.
(I'm observing with dismay the current world wide skyrocketing cost of food products, especially wheat, corn and other commodities...will this all eventually lead to ration cards which some will receive and some won't? Ration cards that can be invalidated or unhonored at the discretion of a particular government?)
Rubenstein said:
It was only possible to overcome the moral barrier that had in the past prevented the systematic riddance of surplus populations when the project was taken out of the hands of bullies and delegated to bureaucrats.
In the twenties and thirties denaturalization and denationalization were increasingly used by governments as ways of getting rid of citizens they deemed undesirable. One of the first large groups to suffer denationalization were the White Russian opponents of the Bolshevik regime who escaped to the West...The denationalized White Russians were followed by the Spanish republicans, the Armenians, and of course, the Jews...Unfortunately the Nazi's clearly understood the importance of the question of statelessness. When they began to deport Jews from such occupied nations as France, Bulgaria, and Hungary, they insisted that the deportees be stripped of citizenship by their respective governments no later than the day of deportation...In the case of German Jews, the Nazis used a very simple bureaucratic device to strip them of citizenship...Men without political rights are superfluous men. They have lost all right to life and human dignity. Political rights are neither God-given, autonomous nor self-validating. The Germans understood that no person has any rights unless they are guaranteed by an organized community with the power to defend such rights. They were perfectly consistent in demanding that the deportees be made stateless before being transported to the camps. They also understood that by exterminating stateless men and women they violated no law because such people were covered by no law. Even those who were committed by religious faith to belief in natural law, such as the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, did not see fit to challenge the Nazi actions publicly at that time.
Chapter 3 – The Modernization of Slavery
Rubenstein said:
Without the complete depersonalization of human relationships, which Weber identified as the “specific nature” and “special virtue” of bureaucracy, it is impossible to create a true society of total domination.
Slavery in North America was thus an imperfectly rationalized institution of nearly total domination under conditions of a shortage of productive labor. The death camp was a fully rationalized institution of total domination under conditions of a population surplus...In North America, the slaves were an important part of the slave owners' capital...In the German camps the inmates had neither political status nor long term economic value.
The slave was a human being who was treated as a thing and defined as such in law. Every system of slavery until the twentieth century experienced a certain tension because of the contradiction. The Nazis were the first masters to resolve it. They were able to turn human beings into instruments wholly responsive to their will even when told to lie down in their own graves and be shot. That is perhaps the supreme “achievement” of their society of total domination. Unfortunately, if it is true that every system of domination has an inherent tendency towards the expansion of its power, then the society of total domination may prove to be a permanent temptation to future rulers, especially in stressful times. Every ruler seeks affirmative response to command. As long as a residue of unpredictable freedom of action is possible in his subjects, the ruler's assured response to command escapes him.
Chapter 4 - Health Professions and Corporate Enterprise at Auschwitz
Rubenstein said:
As we have noted, had the Germans won the war, mass sterilization would have been an important aspect of their program for the subject peoples. It must be remembered that with both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks, victory invariably led to an intensification rather than a diminution of terror.
(Hmmm...seems familiar. Note the rapid acceleration of the erosion of our civil liberties and the expansion of military actions even though we here in the US are supposedly winning the war on terror. Victory after WWII also brought an intensification of violence all over the world. Korea, Vietnam, the CIA in South America and Iran, and on and on and on.)
Rubenstein said:
If one wishes security against real or imagined enemies, it is not enough to defeat them in war. A defeated enemy may rise again and seek vengeance. Total security can only be achieved by biological means. The enemy must either be killed or sterilized. And, no antique Christian prejudice must be allowed to interfere.
(Consider for a moment the possible implications of SARS and the “Bird flu” in Asia, HIV/AIDS in India and Africa)
Rubenstein said:
Another recent American parallel to the Nazi experiments was the decision of welfare authorities in Georgia to sterilize several mentally deficient black girls. Their illiterate parents were allegedly compelled by representatives of the welfare bureaucracy to sign papers permitting the sterilization. The syphilis experiments and the sterilization of the black girls are in all likelihood but the tip of the iceberg.
During World War II, the great German pharmaceutical corporation Bayer A. G. of Leverkusen, made extensive use of death camp inmates for their experiments on human beings. Today, Bayers American corporate counterparts such as Lederle, Bristol Myers, Squibb, Merck, Sharp and Dohme, and Upjohn have found plentiful supply of subjects (objects?) in America's prisons for their “voluntary” experiments on human beings. The experiments in American prisons have the cooperation and approval of such federal bureaucracies as the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and the Food and Drug Administration.
In 1933 I. G. Farben was not an anti-Semitic cooperation. It employed many Jews...By 1939 I. G. Farben was fully integrated into the new German order. I. G. Farben's decision to locate at Auschwitz was based upon the very same criteria by which contemporary multinational cooperations relocate their plants in utter indifference to the social consequences of such moves: where ever possible costs, especially labor costs, must be minimized and profits maximized. In February 1941, Auschwitz appeared to be an excellent corporate investment to some of Germany's most respectable business leaders. The mentality was not very different from that of executives who close down plants in such high labor cost areas as Stuttgart and Philadelphia and relocate them in Manila and Singapore...About 35,000 slaves were used at I. G. Auschwitz...The workers knew the moment they were no longer capable of meeting work schedules, they would be sent to the gas chambers. No other incentive was required. None was given...As Weber could not have foreseen the ultimate potentialities of systematic domination given twentieth century technology, neither could Marx or Engels have foreseen the extent to which terror could replace all other incentives in human exploitation. One wonders what refinements might have been added had the SS possessed computers.
Chapter 5 - The Victims Response: Bureaucratic Self-Destruction
Rubenstein said:
The question of the Jewish response to the Germans is one of the most painful that arises out of the Holocaust...Within the Jewish community there has been an understandable tendency to regard those who perished as martyrs whose sanctified memories must not be soiled by the cold blooded objectivity of political reflection. Regrettably, those who avoid objective reflection on the Jewish response add to the confusion concerning what took place.
The process of taking over the Jewish communal bureaucracies and transforming them into components in the extermination process was one of the organizational triumphs of the Nazis. In the face of the German determination to murder all Jews, most Jews instinctively relied on their own communal organizations to defend their interests whenever possible. Unfortunately, these very organizations were transformed into subsidiaries of the German police and state bureaucracies.
When the doomed remnant of the Warsaw Ghetto finally decided to organize and fight the Germans, it's first task was to create a non-collaborating organization that could destroy the Judenrat's (Jewish Council) authority over the Jewish community. Only after they had violently displaced the Judenrät could they move against the Germans...The Warsaw resistance was atypical. Almost everywhere else the Judenräte maintained their authority until the leaders of the Judenräte, their usefulness to the Germans at an end, were themselves sent to their deaths.
In his essay on bureaucracy, Max Weber observed that “the apparatus, with its peculiar impersonal character...is easily made to work for anybody who knows how to gain control over it. A rationally ordered system of officials continues to function smoothly after the enemy has occupied the area: he merely needs to change the top officials.”
With the Jewish community it was not even necessary to change the top officials, even when they were revered and distinguished rabbis. Here as elsewhere, Weber's observations are prophetic, although it is doubtful he could have realized the extremities to which they could apply. If nothing else, the fact that the best and most selfless Jewish leaders represented no greater obstacle when the Nazis took over their communities than did th most opportunistic raises some very terrifying questions about the potentialities of bureaucratic domination in modern society. And, as we have noted, the Nazis didn't even have computers.
Chapter 6 - Reflections on 'A Century of Progress'
Rubenstein said:
Once a system of domination has been proven to be a capability of government, it invites repetition. There are a number of circumstances in which a future ruler of a modern state might be tempted to install his own version of such a system. At the crudest level, government by bureaucratically organized, rationalized terror simplifies the problem of command, especially in a bitterly divided society. Those classes or groups who for economic, racial, religious, or social reasons oppose the program of the dominant elite could find themselves condemned to detention camps or eliminated altogether.
Whatever the future may bring, it is certain that the pressure of population on resources will continue to grow.
In a multi-ethnic society, the dominant ethnic majority might retain scarce jobs and resources for itself and eliminate competing minorities. That, in effect, is what the Germans did. We know to what extremes men with power can be driven under conditions of stress. Is it possible for example, that some future American administration might solve the problem of non-white “welfare loafers” who are “too lazy to work” by such measures?...Today resentment at supporting the poor takes verbal expressions. However, such resentment could become draconian should the resources available to sustain the poor disappear. There could come a time when bureaucrats might attempt to eliminate all of the ills associated with urban blight such as crime, drugs, and unsafe streets by eliminating those segments of society that are regarded as most prone to social pathology.
My purpose in suggesting these unpleasant scenarios is neither to play the prophet nor to predict the future...My purpose is rather to point out that the explosive combination of surplus population, finite resources, and the expanding sovereign powers of government suggest that the Nazi extermination program may yet foreshadow other exercises in the politics of total domination by future governments as they face catastrophic population problems arising out of mankind's very success in mastering nature.
