July 5, 2006

Dear Colleague,

    From time to time I pick up a book on the Holocaust to remind me of the horrors that even the most civilized of peoples can perpetrate. One such book is Holocaust: Religion and Philosophical Implications, eds. John K. Roth and Michael Berenbaum (Paragon, 1989). Two things that stick most in my mind are: "excremental assault," the systematic effort to reduce human beings to excrement so that they are disgusting to themselves and to one another, and the lack of consequence--lasting consequence--in doing evil. Le me stay with the second. My bafflement--and complaint--goes like this: If by just biting into an apple can produce a permanent blight on human nature (called sin) that passes on from generation to generation without end, how is it that the atrocities of Nazi Germany have no such lasting effect? Let me quote at some length from Richard L. Rubenstein:

    "Hitler has demonstrated how superfluous people can be dispatched with an extraordinary economy of means. He has also demonstrated that such project need have few, if any, lasting undesirable effects on the perpetrating group. The Germans are today a healthy, prosperous community... Germany today is closer to being Volksgemeinschaft, the homogeneous Volk community, the Nazis sought than at any time since the emancipation. If we dismiss all moral consierations, as did the Germans themselves, Hitler's project can be seen as a superlative success. It also invites repetition, if not against the Jews, then against other minorities which disturb the harmonious existence of a dominant majority."

    Rubenstein's own personal response is to reject the established Jewsih theological position of universalism, individualism, and a historically rootless exploring, querying existence in favor of what he calls paganism. And paganism, to him, is being rooted on earth; it means a devotion to the true divinities, which are the gods of earth, not the high gods of the sky, the gods of home and hearth, not the gods of wandering. Whatever the theologians claim, Rubenstein says that the people are with him; the people have come to Palestine and made it their home.

     I wonder what Hitler thinks of all this as he entertains himself with the ipod in hell? Pleased with the homogeneous Germany of today? Surprised that the Jews too embrace the earth gods of hearth and home (Volk und Heimat)? Dismayed that the people he dismissed as weak are today the superpower of the Middle East? I write this as I watch on TV tanks rumbling into Gaza, and, with the help of air power, destroying bridges, roads, and generating stations. The destruction of the generating stations left 1.4 million Palestinians in the dark, without any means of cooling in 110 F heat, and without water. This is massive collective punishment taken straight out of Nazi Germany's book of total domination. Additionally, Israel captured four cabinet ministers and a third of the elected members of the Palestinian parliament and held them hostage, all in the effort to free one Israeli soldier, and this when Israel iteslf holds 113 Palestinian women and 313 Palestinian children in their prisons. In the civilized world, only Switzerland has the moral courage to say to Israel, "This is wrong."

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu