GRGR: Todorov and Buchanan on the Holocaust (long)

[davemarc]

> From: rj <rjackson at mail.usyd.edu.au>
> 
> Mr Maus chose to divert
> discussion from the book to the "tone" of a few words from the review,
> though ambiguously even so, and by resorting to emotive rhetoric and
> sarcasm thereby ridiculed and belittled any such advocacy of Todorov's
> book that the reviewer or I were attempting to make. There is a real
> burgeoning of this type of emotive condemnation by using false
> association: 'Because Paul de Man was once a member of this organisation
> then all pomos are suspect'; 'Edward Said isn't really a Palestinian so
> don't trust anything he ever wrote' etc etc. It's nearly as bad as the
> McCarthyite witch-hunts, except nowadays the persecutions are being
> carried out in the popular media (i.e. populist, just like Buchanan
> operates.)

Depends on the definition of "nearly." I think it's hyperbolic to suggest
that the comments cited--are all of them attributable?--are part of some
kind of trend that is "nearly" as bad as the McCarthyite witch-hunts, in
which the full bullying force of the U.S.  Senate and numerous local
governments and associations were applied in an attempt to enforce
ideological conformity as well as bolster the power of Senator McCarthy and
his cronies.

> > On another topic, I would hazard a guess that one "difference" between
> > being a "race" prisoner and a "class" prisoner is that those in the
former
> > category are literally born guilty.  In comparison, being a "class"
> > prisoner may be more contingent.  
> 
> Say wha? The distinction still eludes me, and the attempt to justify it
> concerns me. Many are also born into a class. For some, that class is as
> indelible as their ethnicity. Still others marry into a "race". And then
> there's the issue of creed (not to mention the concept of Original Sin.)
> I'll stick with Todorov on this point I think.

Just to make clear:  I'm not trying to justify the distinction.  I was
taking a shot at explaining a distinction being made in the NYTimes article
available on the Web.  The author of the article recognized that there were
great similarities between the two types of prisoners, but asserted that
there were distinctions that should have been recognized.  The author did
not elaborate; I took a shot at it.  Under the Nazi system, a Nazi party
member with one parent who could be "proven" to have been Jewish was
therefore a race "criminal."  A "non-Jewish" spouse of that party member
could avoid punishment via Nazi racial law, but the children of the couple
qualified as race
criminals. In the Soviet Union, it was conceivable that a son of an class
criminal father could, say, avoid criminal status by denouncing his father,
and that his spouse and offspring could do the same, etc. While it is true
that in many instances of application, the quack Soviet determinants of
"class" were as arbitrary as the quack Nazi determinants of racial
identity, it seems to me that a case could be made that there were
structural differences such as the one I hazarded.  Too bad the person who
made the assertion in the first place didn't spell them out.
> 
> > I do wonder if it's time to stop dwelling on these Todorov reviews.  
> 
> *My* intention was to draw attention to the book (as evidenced in the
> subject header I used), rather than the review. That the discussion got
> bogged down momentarily by a spurious attack on the Australian
> reviewer's tone is not down to me. 

Well, I'm really not blaming rj for anything, but speaking for myself, it
was frustrating and
disorienting to have the SMH review--which is apparently filled with
provocative
remarks--unveiled bit by bit.  As an "unprivileged" bystander in the
discussion, I was
continually surprised by what was "behind the curtain" when rj unveiled
more excerpts--I found it hard to figure out exactly what the gist and even
the length of the
*whole article* was.  That's why I spent time looking for an URL where all
of us could see it at once, and why I was happy to see that there were
substantial assessments of Todorov's book available to all at the
NYTimes website.  That's why I was also anxious to see rj simply cut loose
of the SMH review and apply himself more to GR--I didn't see that there was
a
need to dwell on any review of a book about structual morality in order to
have a go at issues of structural morality as they applied to GR.
  > 
> > If the
> > thinking summarized or expressed in the reviews can shed light on GR,
then
> > I'd like to see more focus on its application to GR.  
> 
> Would you now? (!)

Yes.  (?)

[Examples of rj focusing on its application to GR followed.] 
> 
> Do you understand how I might perceive your aloof and seemingly
> innocuous request for "more focus" as disingenuous, an intentional
> slight even?
> 
Yes--if, for example, rj mistakenly thought my request for "more focus"
(which was not "aloof" but was "innocuous") meant that I was suggesting
that there hadn't been any focus in the first place.  I liked it when rj
let go of the SMH review and focused on GR, and wanted to see more of that.
 
> 
> > No need to get lost
> > in Todorov review-land....
> 
> Like we were in 'Eyes Wide Shut'-land? But, of course, you're quite
> choosy with your targets, and careful with your barbs, aren't you?

If this is supposed to suggest that I'm not indiscriminate and careless in
what I post, I appreciate the compliment--I'm not happy with all of my
posts on this thread, but I'm working on it.  But instead it strikes me as
vaguely accusatory, as if rj were afraid to come out and say...something. 
Anyway, I meant what I wrote.  I was concerned that the discussion would go
off in a direction where it seemed that we were pretty ignorant.  (I'd seen
something similar happen in Chang land--where Matthew made a whopping
negative 
judgment about Iris Chang based on a couple of isolated sentences from her
book, which very few (perhaps one) of us managed to read in time for the
end of the "discussion.")  

Anyway, I've been trying to encourage folks to do two things: find
something Todorov-related that *everyone* could read in its entirety and,
second, focus *more* on GR itself.  As I've tried to make clear, I find
Todorov's approach to be interesting and provocative (albeit problematic),
but I found the way
his thinking was introduced into the discussion to be more
problematic--more than
rj probably anticipated when he introduced it.  When possible, it helps for
everyone to be able
to see the same synopses (in this case, reviews) in their entirety before
discussing
them.  Furthermore, I get the feeling that ideas of structural morality
could be applied to GR by someone such as rj without as much emphasis on
one particular (not readily available) review of one particular Todorov
book.  

d.