GRGR (15): Good & Evil (was Enzian...)

[Derek C. Maus]

On Sun, 12 Dec 1999, Tim Thomas wrote:

> But the Nazi program of genocide was carried out by real people who had real
> support for their actions - this is the moral relativism, their actions seem
> evil to us, but obviously not to them.

While I agree, essentially, that there is a definite moral relativism and
slipperiness of judgments like "good" and "evil" in GR, I really think
that this is one of the instances in which a difference between the
Holocaust and other atrocities can be singled out profitably. If you read
a work like Miron Bialoszewski's "Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising" or
Tadeusz Borowski's "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen" you can
quickly see that one of the major differences in the way that the Nazis
carried out their nefarious business was to make the victims complicit in
the violence. In Warsaw, the Nazis frequently forced the Judenrat to make
the decisions about who lived and who was sent to the camps. 

If you read the journals that survived this period, you see the
destruction that this kind of tactic can have on not only the psyche but
the morals and ethics of those being forced to participate in their own
(collective)  extermination. Borowski's stories, like those of Ida Fink
(who, admittedly, was not a survivor personally) demonstrate that moral
relativism is not even a question after an experience specifically
designed either to kill or morally debilitate its victims. The
psychological aspect of the final solution points out that the Nazis were
creating a self-fulfilling prophecy by "demonstrating" that the Jews were
perfectly willing to participate in the abuses perpetrated upon them out
of selfishness (since the Jews who were willing to perform duties like
sorting the belongings of those getting off the trains at Auschwitz were
often given relative perks).

In short, I think I agree that there is some criticism of the freed
prisoners from Dora going ona rampage, but I would hardly say that they
are equally as dangerous to Slothrop as Marvy's Mothers. If they are, it
is because they have ceased to be anything other than what the systematic
program of conditioning (if one can call it that...I think perhaps total
deconditioning might be more apropos) in the camps has made them: a tool
which has now lost its user and is therefore out of control.

I'm not really sure anymore who I'm agreeing with and who I'm disagreeing
with, so I hope no one feels personaly indicted by this.

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Derek C. Maus               | "My fondest hope is to die at the hands
dmaus at email.unc.edu         |   of a murderer. In America, the truly 
UNC-CH, Dept. of English    |       famous are always murdered."
http://www.unc.edu/~dmaus/  |                   --Quentin Crisp
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