>But this sends you down the road that Franz Neumann went down in his >_Behemoth_ interpetation of Nazism: that the Nazis would never >exterminate >the Jews because they needed to keep them around as an object of >collective hate lest the masses turn against their rulers and bosses. I don't remember Neumann putting exactly in these terms, since I read _Behemoth_ many moons ago, except the intro part that I reread in a grad seminar here. Neumann does not specifically go into the psychological details of why the Nazis particularly chose Jews to exterminate (although I don't agree, you need people like Adorno to figure out that, especially his piece on Anti-Semitism where Adorno sees fascism as an extention of Christianity and enlightenment thought). Assuming that Neumann makes a counterfactual that Nazis would never exterminate Jews because they wanted to keep somebody around as an object of collective hate to detract attention, he is wrong since it did not happen that way.. The matter of the fact is that the folks were exterminated, and we need to understand more seriously the ideology of racism behind those killings and the circumstances, social forces in other words, that made this ideology more convenient to become a hegemonic form of rule. Plus, my general point is that fascism was becoming trendy in every country at that time, not only in Germany. Let's not praise US democracy here. Of course, only in a couple of countries, it was established so to speak. Other countries in the Anglo Saxon world came closer to fascism by orienting their economies towards corporate capitalism and industrial nationalism using protective legislation and other methods of intervention, and introducing Fordism as a class comprimise between big business and organized labor (thanks to bourgeois unions!), as we see in the practice of New Deal liberalism. If you folks here had strong landed clases with organic ties to the army, you would have the same destiny. at the cultural level, I won't go into details of reminding how eugenics, socio-biology, positive anthropology (brain size studies), criminology etc became so popular in the US. I remember once when I was so much into anthropology that I was amazed to see how Turkish History Thesis about the racial superiority of Turks was written and funded under the supervision of American anthropologists and German orientalists (and their respective governments), such as Rolan Dixon, for example, from Harvard University who wrote a sexy book called The racial History of Mankind.... Same story still goes except that people like Pearson have cocktail parties with washington policy analysts to run their think thanks.. >Neumann thought that with strikes forbidden, unions broken, wages frozen, >and prices rising, that some *distraction* was needed--but that the party >bosses knew it was a distraction, and new that it needed to be kept >within >bounds. As I said, Neumann relates the rise of fascism to political economy. He may be too Marxist for your taste Brad, but actually Neumann is not a Marxist, if you wanna hint that. He is a leftish of a liberal democratic variety.. >He was wrong... I am too tried to have a dabate over Neumann at the moment, but I generally like the man's work, although I am not a liberal leftish democrat.. >Moreover, we often underestimate the *scope* of Nazi hatred: not just >Jews, but Gypsies; not just Jews and Gypsies, but Poles and Russians. and african americans, and Kurds, and Palestians... racism is not dead!. it exists both within nations and inter-nationally! >And given Hitler's reaction to Jesse Owens, what would have happened had >the Nazis won World War II and moved south into Africa? US counter hegemony has replaced it anyway.. Viva washington! Mine Doyran SUNY/Albany >Brad DeLong
