Upon losing the war the nazis did make some statements that they were shown to be the weaker race and were unworthy of survival.
Some Nazis made such statements. Others booked trips to Argentina.
Well Arend is wrong. The scientific / factual aspect is not secondary, but a consequence of selectionist thinking, which results in objectification of everything.
If Arendt is wrong about history, what are the precursors to the killing?
I think I already explained that. What was the majority response of philosophers to the holocaust? What lesson is taken from the history of the holocaust? What lesson should be taken? Make a substantive argument.
OK, you are totally getting it wrong here. I think what your confusion comes from is the idea that the ideology publicly claimed that it was based on “scientific objectivity”, the whimsical idea of there being a “racial science”. This is absolute garbage. The subjectivity is evident even from the idea of German’s being “übermenschen” and Jews/Slavs etc. being “untermenschen”. Furthermore, the ideology and it’s execution relied heavily on subjective psychological factors. Which are evident in the idea that the war was lost and Germany was held back because of Jews / a Jewish conspiracy. There is absolutely no “objectivity” in the idea that Jews were biological parasites that were hell bent on destroying the German nation within. But that was what the nazi ideology was all about.
My initial evaluation yet applies.
You are confusing several issues. The issue of what nazi ideology is and how the ideology functions. The issue of your critique that what the nazis said wasn’t true. etc. It is a very important aspect in nazi ideology, that it is based on asserting personal character as fact of racial science, as I already explained.
Also, marginalization of subjectivity, which nazis engaged in, is extremely widespread among people in general. But really your argumentation seems to amount to that the holocaust has no special significance. Do you consider that any lesson of any import should be learned from the history?
It is not really nazism that was new. Supremacist ideas are as old as mankind itself and have been used time and time again to justify conquests and atrocities. In fact, historically mankind often didn’t even bother with justifications.
What was new was totalitarianism - ergo the totality with which such ideals could be disseminated and imposed upon a society.
The key to totalitarianism was mass media, mass manipulation and propaganda.
That is what changed, and what continued to spread its influence throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, all the way to today.
And I should add one more major casual factor which is often overlooked: the clinical study of human psychology. We really opened Pandora’s box with that one.
I don’t think that was particularly new either, and in my explanation of it there is also nothing absolutely new.
The new thing is the new science, and the increased education. Which increases the conceptual error of selectionist thinking, which was already prevalent throughout human history.
What do you mean? The field of clinical psychology stems from the end of the 19th century, as did the invention of radio and film.
These were gigantic leaps when it came to the ability of the elites to manipulate the masses.
Fritz Stern puts your observation into sharp relief:
The very term “anti-Semitism” was first invented in Germany in the 1870s and came to connote a principled unshakeable hostility to Jews and the intent to translate that hostility into political action which would curb their power or remove their presence. After two decades of relative public silence, the “Jewish question” was raised loudly and insistently–and in many quarters. There were many variations on anti-Semitism, but at the core of all was the belief that the pariahs had become the true power in the new Germany, that Jews were not only despicable but mortally dangerous–because Germans were peculiarly vulnerable to Jewish subversion. From the beginning to the end of German anti-Semitism was this paranoid fear of the power of the Jews: at first, they were depicted as the economic masters of the Germans, but gradually, and long before Hitler, there developed the myth that Jews had the power to destroy the German character, to corrupt Germans, economically, morally, eugenically, sexually.
Fritz Stern,Gold and Iron, Bismark and Bleichroder and the Building of the German Empire, page 495
Any relevance to the subject at issue?
It is just general likes and dislikes, as with any identity, in this case all dislikes.
The book is arguing to the contrary. Do you have a competing narrative of what was happening in the 19nth century?
Do you contest that? Or are you saying that the nazis were right?
Look, many 20th Century ideologies wanted eagerly to pin down their reasoning on objective facts stated by science, not the normative aspirations they had based on human emotions and fears. When an ideology doesn’t have anything to do with science, with using scientific method or objectivity, it is hardly appropriate then to treat their fallacies as genuine logical reasoning.
You have to treat the ideology as what it in reality was, not what it attempted to paint itself to be. Nazi propaganda about itself isn’t as important as the effects of the ideology on the actions Germany took. How the nazis came to power has little to do with how the nazi ideology portrayed itself to be on some “academic” discourse (attempting to say that it is based on science).
And anyway, postmodernism is a response to modernism, which is quite far from holocaust, especially when modernism refers first to a literary and art movement. Authoritarian ideologies (nazism, fascism, Marxism-Leninism and Maoism) have killed huge amounts of people, yet linking them to modernism as we know it is rather far fetched. Postmodernists may talk about WW2 and the holocaust, but that isn’t their focus.
It’s a pretty common link, I think.
And—and I know you didn’t deny this—if we take modernism to refer to other aspects of modernity aside from art, it’s a very common link indeed. See Zygmunt Bauman, Jeffrey Herf, Detlev Peukert, and obviously Adorno and Horkheimer.
You are just mistaken that there would be a difference beteen nazi racial pseudoscience, and academic science about people.
You aren’t arguing towards the subject at issue. It’s like you are saying that there was no meaningful or big response of philosophers to the holocaust. And that no lessons are being drawn from the history of it.
I think there’s a difference between pseudoscience and science. Even if with science we talk about the humanities and not only the natural sciences. Human sciences aren’t pseudosciences. One of them, history, is quite important to us.
Philosophers surely have made various responses to the holocaust.
Your argument that “the holocaust has become the main reason for wideranging surpression of free speech” seems a bit exaggerated. As if everybody immediately jump to the Hitler-card.
Uh people kind of do actually immediately jump to the hitler card, it is very common.
Nazism is rejection of subjectivity. Postmodernism then re-asserts subjectivity. Creationism validates subjectivity. That is my argument. The lesson from the holocaust should be to learn the basic logic of fact and opinion. As opposed to, the lesson should be to ban hatespeech.