Cunning

I was riding the PATH train yesterday and having a philosophical conversation with Mr. London about genocide and the ills of 'modern' civilization and the current (50 years long) crisis in the Fertile Crescent. I was mentioning a book I had read in college, The Cunning of History, a book by Professor Richard Rubenstein. This tiny book packs a profound argument about how the holocaust, in its sheer organization, economy of effort, and application of technology towards the death of millions was a supreme expression of the 'modern' - of enlightenment reason and industrial know how. It is a chilling thought.

Those of us who have studied history and yet continue to entertain a grain of optimism in the future, and the future of our children - must ask ourselves whether we are hopelessly naive to the present? In this world around me, I see less understanding and much hatred, less civility and much barbarism. People and civilizations have lost the ability to speak to one another, to converse with another, to learn from one another. It is as if a certain species of fish dissassociated with all the other fish in their ecosystem - without ever considering the symbiotic relationship that nurtures their existence. The majority of the world lives on some meagre crumb, while our heroes and gladiators consume mountains of wealth and live in palaces made of glass. Is anyone out there that horrified by the level of consumption that our culture is celebrating? I find it truly vulgar to see this self-infatuation and materialism, in a world largely lacking in even the basic necessities for most of its inhabitants.

Today our global leaders speak at each other. In effect, our leaders communicate with and answer to their tiny microconstituencies (esp. those with deep pockets). Once in power, they lobby and pass through their own agendas. The age of leader's fighting to preserve the common or national good are long behind us. Which brings us to an interesting question - will the nation state survive the 21st century?

Already, you see a growing tide of people who through the wizardry of modern communication and technology, have no fealty to the nation state. These are individuals that have been born in the shantytowns, educated in one place, and now earn their living in another. It's not that they are in opposition to the state, rather and perhaps more frightening, they are indifferent. To which nation do they owe primary allegiance? Moreover, if we live in a world where nations can be toppled and occupied to slake the desire of more powerful nations, then have we really learned much from the great wars that plagued much of the previous century? Does might still equal right? Do the citizenry even care about such conflicts? Apparently not.

I find it both alarming and profoundly interesting to consider that much of the internationalization that occurred with respect to international relations, the concern for 'human rights', and the birth of the United Nations, were a direct result of the brutality and genocide of World War II. Have we moved so far away in time and feeling from those dark nights and the sacrifices of the countless to enter a new century with such disregard?

Comments

[Barney Popkin]

Per pervasive corruption in Afghanistan etc., I wonder the influence of its much respected cunning on its common and institutionalized corruption, its ancient and biblical cultural origins. The substitution of second-born sons to inherit from dying dads in Genesis. Ulysses’ cunningness. Chaucer’s Pardoner. Of course, we have similar challenges in the west – just think of President Clinton lying under oath and parsing his comments to dissuade Congressional candidates, Vice President Spiro Agnos, President Richard Nixon and Watergate cover up, President Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara Vietnam war lies, Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich selling of Obama’s Senatorial seat, UK PM scandals, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert real estate scandal, the governor of New York Eliot Spitzer and US Secretary of State for Development (USAID Administrator) Randy Tobias scandals, President Ronald Reagan making up stories to prove a morale point, Bernard Madoff scandal, Martha Steward insider trading, sinking of The Main to liberate the Philippines from Spain, etc. We don’t see much of Honest Abe Lincoln anymore. So what happened?
Might be useful research area with modern practical applications.

[New Jordans]

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[mark haymont]

where does Rubenstein tell of how history will most likely repeat itself?

[Thivai]

True Blueguy, and it continues today as the US Supreme Court weighs in on the legality of the Guatanomo detainees and US citizens held as foreign combatants (guilty until proven innocent?)

[Blueguy]

All of this could also be said of Rwanda. When we remember the Holocaust, we must also wonder how could we allow this to occur again - fifty years later. I guess we're not as civilized as we think.

[Thivai]

{Thivai—pages 12-21 examine the judicial process that led to the development of the death camps and mass extermination. Important in this legalistic development was the designation of “apatrides or stateless persons” (12) at the end of WW1. These were people who had been denied any official standing in the nation and thus could be prosecuted or jailed at any time for no reason at all. Also the process of denaturalization or denationalization was increasingly used during and after the 1920s to deal with unwanted minority groups within the European states. This was an effective stripping of any rights whatsoever. Concentration camps first appeared across Europe to deal with apatrides (or refugees).}

The concentration camps for the apatrides served much the same purpose as did the original Nazi camps in 1933 and 1934. In the popular mind, the first Nazi camps conjure up images of wild sadism by brutal brown-shirted storm troopers. The images are, of course, well deserved, but they tend to hinder precise understanding of the development of the camps as a legal and political institution. (Rubenstein, 15)

Initially, the concentration camps were established to accommodate detainees who had been placed under “protective custody” (Schützhaft) by the Nazi regime. Those arrested were whom the regime wished to detain although there were no clear legal justification for so doing. Almost all of the original detainees were German communists, not Jews. Had the Nazis’ political prisoners been brought before a German court in the first year or two of Hitler’ regime, the judiciary would have been compelled to dismiss the case. This was not because the German judiciary was anti-Nazi, but because it was bureaucratic in structure. In the early stages of the Nazi regime, there was no formula in law to cover all the political prisoners the Nazis wanted to arrest. This problem was solved by holding them under “protective custody” and setting up camps outside of the regular prison system to receive them. Incidentally, the American government did something very similar when it interned Japanese-American citizens during World War II. They had committed no crime. No court would have convicted them. Prison was not the place to detain them. Happily, as bad as were the American concentration camps, they were infinitely better than the German counterparts. (15-16)

One of the least helpful ways of understanding the Holocaust is to regard the destruction process as the work of a small group of irresponsible criminals who were atypical of normal statesmen and who somehow gained control of the German people, forcing them by terror and the deliberate stimulation of religious and ethnic hatred to pursue a barbaric and retrograde policy that was thoroughly at odds with the great traditions of Western civilization.
On the contrary, we are more likely to understand the Holocaust if we regard it as the expression of some of the most profound tendencies of Western civilization in the twentieth century. (Rubenstein, 21)

In order to understand more fully the connection between bureaucracy and mass death, it will be necessary to return to the apatrides. They were the first modern Europeans who had become politically and legally superfluous and for whom the most “rational” way of dealing with them was ultimately murder. A majority of the apatrides had lost their political status by a process of bureaucratic definition, denationalization. (Rubenstein, 31)

Men without political acts are superfluous men. They have lost all right to life and human dignity. Political rights are neither God-given, autonomous nor self-validating. The Germans understood that no person has any rights unless they are guaranteed by an organized community with the power to defend such rights. They were perfectly consistent in demanding that the deportees be made stateless before being transported to the camps. They also understood that by exterminating stateless men and women, they violated no law because such people were covered by no law. Even those who were committed by religious faith to belief in natural law, such as the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic church, did not see fit to challenge the Nazi actions publicly at the time. (Rubenstein, 33)

[Thivai]

A truly monumental work that has relevance to the current revival of prison camps for non-entities (such as Guatanamo Bay, etc...)