9. Responses to: Understanding Hitler’s obsession - a new website posting, and blog news
19th March 2006
Posting 9. to General (no specific category), a new posting announced, and replies, posted by George Salzman.
Here is the e-mail, followed by responses.
Subject: Understanding Hitler’s obsession - a new website posting, and blog news
From: George Salzman <>
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 20:09:24 -0600
To: undisclosed-recipients
Oaxaca, Sunday, March 19, 2006
Friends,
1. In a new posting today, “Changing History,1″, at http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/2006-03-18.htm, I begin to try to understand why normal human beings can (and do) become capable of terrible actions. Some excerpts follow:
Does this new creature enter the world from its mother’s womb with any preconceptions as to its identity? Nature stamps it only with an instinctual drive to begin breathing and to fasten its tiny toothless gums to a breast, a breast it initially does not know is its mother’s, and to suckle, as do all newborn
mammals. Totally ignorant, a finger touched to its lips elicits an effort to suck the finger. So the miracle of a new human life begins with the first breaths and the initial nursing and the warmth and closeness to its mother’s body. It knows not of religion, nationality, ethnicity, race, pride, patriotism, shame, sex, greed, love, hatred, killing, and so on. Totally innocent. That’s how each of us began our rocky journey through life.
In discussing lying and killing, it’s clear that I am unable, in strictly logical terms, to provide a “proof” [that we are not a genetically flawed species], that is, a “proof” in the rigorous sense in which a mathematician would judge a theorem to be proved. Nevertheless, it seems to me indisputably clear that the argument is also obviously correct.
Now consider the act of killing. Specifically, think of a newborn boy who first saw the light of day eighteen years ago in Israel, a son of Jewish parents. It would be ridiculous to imagine that he knew anything at birth about his “identity”, his forthcoming ritual circumcision which would mark him indelibly as Jewish (or Muslim), or that he would be called upon to serve in the Israeli military to enforce imposed curfews in the occupied territories, in some cases killing Arab schoolchildren for crossing the street to get to their school, children acting in resistance by violating the curfew. Nor, of course, did he know he would come to despise Arabs, to regard them as less than human, and to feel no compassion for them, no remorse as he lined up the cross-hairs of his sniper-scope and squeezed the trigger. One might try to argue that although as a newborn he was totally innocent of all such ideas, he was actually programmed by his “Jewish genes” to develop into a killer of Palestinians. But this “development stage” argument is as ludicrous for killing as it is for lying. And in fact it ought to be particularly repugnant to those of us who identify (or are identified) as Jews, because it was promoted as a core justification of the Nazis’ attempt to exterminate all the Jews, i.e. the idea that Jews were despicable and dangerous because we are Jews, a genetic group that deserved to be got rid of.
2. The weblog at georgesalzman.org is now quite functional. You can add comments directly following a post, with no need to register first. If you want to write your own post, i.e. not just a comment on an item already posted, you need to first register. Some comments have already been posted.
My hope is that the blog will contribute to open direct discussion among us without the need for me to post your letters (as was the case with my website). I encourage you to provide your name and e-mail address with all your comments and postings so that others can, if they wish, write you privately, as well as publicly on the blog.
3. From now on I do not expect to announce blog postings on the page
Please let me know if you have ideas how to improve this setup.
4. Openness and secrecy. I’ve encountered a couple of people, just within the very recent past, who are fearful of having their e-mail addresses known, not because of the nuisance of commercial spamming but because of clandestine government spying. This is new to me. My personal preference is to refuse to be intimidated, to be absolutely open about what I’m doing, and to take my chances. I would encourage those of you who want to use the blog or to communicate with me to also do so openly.
e-mail distribution list, please let me know
From: Kwaku Duren <>
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 18:33:04 -0800
George, I would strongly encourage those who are studying this issue to purchase and read “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness” [1973] by Eric Fromm [also author of volumes including “The Art of Loving,” [1956] “Escape from Freedom,” [1941], “Man for Himself” [1947] and “The Sane Society” [1955].]
Fromm basically believed that our character [or personality] is a socio-economic and cultural construct; and “Man” “may be defined as the animal that can say I.” Kwaku
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 22:07:10 -0600
Thank you Kwaku, I did read, a long time ago, Escape from Freedom, but not the particular volume you recommend. I will see if I can borrow a copy of The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness locally. I posted your recommendation on my blog.
Sincerely,
George
From: Michael Milburn <>
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 22:18:28 -0500
George,
You should read the chapter on Hitler (and in fact the entire book) of Alice Miller’s For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelties in Childhood and The Roots of Violence. Also see my book, The Politics of Denial.
Best,
Mike Milburn
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 22:53:51 -0600
Thanks Mike,
I read Miller’s For Your Own Good, but a long time ago, and don’t recall anything specific about Hitler, though I’m confident she “did a job” on his father, which he might well have deserved. But I don’t recall ever having read Roots of Violence. Nor your The Politics of Denial. Right now I’m reading Mein Kampf, as well as several other books sporadically (each one gets interrupted, it seems, can’t keep up). I’ll post your note on my blog, so others can see it too.
All best wishes,
George
From: Robert Mann <>
Date:Mon, 20 Mar 2006 20:55:24 +1300
To: Science for the People list <>
The most depressing work on this that I’ve discovered so far - I couldn’t read its entirety - is Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Among its many dismal assertions is evidence that the few SS men who refused orders were not even penalised.
R
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 10:27:35 -0600
Hi Robert,
First, on a light note. When I read your second sentence I thought of replying, for fun, as though I had misread it, “Yes, they weren’t even punished. They got away without murder. How un-German! Not to obey orders. And then not to punish the violators. It’s enough to kill the usual stereotype of Germans.”
But seriously, I would be interested to read Hitler’s Willing Executioners, and will see if it’s in the local English language lending library. Or I may order a copy from the States. Because that is, for me, a major focus of interest, i.e. that the so-called “leaders” cannot effect the actions they want — in Hitler’s case eliminating all European Jewry — without the cooperation of the mass of people who actually carry them out. What seems to be factually true is the enormous malleability of human beings. I was struck, in reading Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil and Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews, in the great variation, among different countries that were occupied by the Nazis, in the degree of cooperation or resistance to the Nazi’s program of Judeocide. And these include relatively small geographical areas in which the cultural factors influencing popular attitudes varied greatly from one to another. Even among the German military, the impact of popular attitudes among the occupied people was not always negligible. Arendt writes, regarding events in Denmark, “Politically and psychologically, the most interesting aspect of this incident is perhaps the role played by the German authorities in Denmark, their obvious sabotage of orders from Berlin. It is the only case we know of in which the Nazis met with open native resistance, and the result seems to have been that those exposed to it changed their minds. They themselves apparently no longer looked upon the extermination of a whole people as a matter of course. They had met resistance based on principle, and their “toughness” had melted like butter in the sun, they had even been able to show a few timid beginnings of genuine courage. That the ideal of “toughness,” . . . was nothing but a myth of self-deception, concealing a ruthless desire for conformity at any price, was clearly revealed at the Nuremberg Trials …”
Thanks for writing and calling Hitler’s Willing Executioners to my attention.
George