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let's talk about an ugly story.
consider the holocaust was treated as an administrative problem---an entire bureaucracy constructed to deal with the "problem" of the jews efficiently of which the camps were simply the end results----zygmunt baumann writes about this pretty eloquently in "the holocaust and modernity"---this bureaucracy was full of perfectly ordinary people whose day jobs happened to be either developing an efficient system of extermination of a people or tracking the ways in which it was carried out. they went home afterward the way any other person goes home from a day job. they were likely nice people who liked their kids and their kitties. how was that possible? the ways in which bureaucracies neutralize object(ives) by making them into administrative goals and stripping out ethical problems. the ways bureaucracies divide up and transmit information--what max weber called rationality. the tendency of individuals to compartmentalization &/or a sense of professional duty (rationality in the more subjective sense of the ways the rules of social game are internalized and performed). nationalism as a "common sense" ideology. everyday life pressures of the sort that keep any number of people in jobs. things that are still *very* much around, that are *very* present in the world you live in.
the policy objective--extermination of the jews---was decided on at the highest governmental levels. the bureaucracy i am talking about wasn't in the same position--that was assembled to carry out the policy. and that is what they did. there was no doubt additional pressure to not think real hard about the implications of what these people were doing because the consequences of speaking out could be quite dire. but it often is like that. kids, house, pressures...this quite apart from a militarization of social relations is often more than enough to keep perfectly nice people administering really vile things. and these folks had no contact with the end results of their actions. those were addressed in other areas of the structure. in a horrifying way, it worked really well. and the characteristics that enabled it are the characteristics of capitalist enterprises bent to appalling ends.
this is not to downplay the role of anti-semitism in the policy itself. it's merely to say that the actual administration of the holocaust didn't need it to function.
could you say the nazi regime was arrogant? sure.
what would that tell you about what enabled the holocaust to happen? nothing.
and the value of the answer to that question rests on what you imagine to be at stake in the answer. if you merely want to announce your superiority to these people who were likely just like you but in a different context, then fine. but really, if that's all that's at stake for you, who really cares what you think? if you are genuinely disturbed by something like the holocaust and want, based on that, to at least imagine that your understanding would make such a thing more difficult in real time, then you have to ask different questions and look in different places....well, look at all, really. you don't have to think real hard to declare yourself superior to these people because it results from an accident of history, from the fact that you were born later in another context.
and so far as arrogance in concerned, there are few more arrogant positions to take than declaring yourself superior to others based on nothing but an accident of history.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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