GRGR: Todorov and Clendinnen on the Holocaust

[rj]

> >
> >In most cases the Jews of the
> > > Ghetto sacrificed themselves for a very different reason: to choose the
> > > manner and moment of their own deaths, rather than to remain passive
> > > victims of systematic extermination.
> > >   "For Todorov the latter mode of heroism is morally preferable.
> ---------------------------
> A slight over-generalization.  

I'd say it is the reviewer's rather than Todorov's. (That "most cases"
seems to imply examples either way in the book.)

> 
> what the heck is  morally preferable mean?

Yes, that's going to be my stumbling block with it as well, I think.
More from the review:

" .... What [Todorov] calls ordinary virtues -- caring, compassion, a
regard for one's integrity rather than fame -- take precedence for him
over large-scale national, ethnic, religious or cultural aspirations.
  "The particular is always to be preferred to the abstract, the
individual to the corporate or communal.
  "That leads him, then, to the testing of these preoccupations in the
terrible crucible of the camps. None of the material is new; all of it
is drawn from the extensive testimony of the survivors and also of a few
of the perpetrators.
 "Where *Facing the Extreme* is sharply differentiated from other
accounts is in Todorov's insistence on applying moral criteria to every
facet of behaviour in such circumstances -- to scrutinise, in other
words, the moral complexion of the victims as much as the implications
of the well-documented barbarism of the torturers and exterminators.
  "Inevitably, therefore, he challenges or dissents from several widely
held beliefs about the camps and also about the differences between the
Nazi laagers and the Soviet gulags.
  "Most significantly, perhaps, he questions the common notion that the
camps represented circumstances and environments without counterparts in
everyday experience."


best