"Wehler makes most of the standard criticisms that have been noted repeatedly in most of the other reviews, but there are a couple wrinkles to his argument that merit repeating:
Accounts differ as to whether Goldhagen's doctoral thesis, on which his book is directly based, received a prize for the best dissertation in the School of Government at Harvard or (as his publishers maintain) a similar prize awarded by the American Political Science Association. Either way, it was honored as a dissertation in 'comparative politics.'
And yet it is hard to think of a book that displays fewer of the virtue of the comparative method in history and the social sciences. It shuns comparison like the plague. . . .
Suppose. . . for the sake of argument, that we take Goldhagen's central tenet -- that mass murder can be 'explained' by reference to the 'character' of one section of the human species -- as the basis for generalizing to other cases. We are then led into a hopeless and dangerous explanatory dead end.
Take, for example, the Turkish massacres of millions of Armenians: instead of trying to provide an explanation in terms of a cluster of very varied causes and motives, should we simply give up and hand the job over to a young Armenian historian, so that he can then trace everything back to the centuries-old tradition of 'Ottoman butchery'?
And what is the application to the war in Kurdistan?
Take the even more appalling decades of million-fold murder under the dictatorship of Lenin and Stalin: instead of trying to provide an explanation in terms of a cluster of very varied causes and motives, should we simply give up and hand the job over to a young Ukrainian historian, so that he can then trace everything back to the centuries old tradition of 'Russian barbarism'?
And what is the application to the war in Chechnia?
Take the near extermination of the North American Indians: instead of trying to provide an explanation in terms of a cluster of very varied causes and motives, should we simply give up and hand the job over to a young Navaho historian, so that he can then trace everything back to the tradition of the American 'killer,' inaugurated when the first Puritans branded the native Americans as 'children of Satan'?
And what is the application to My Lai?
All historians are painfully aware that the rational explanation of mass murder has its limits. But a monocausal approach based on the deliberate, essentialist decision to stigmatize one section of humanity as permanently evil on ethnic, racial natural grounds is tantamount to a declaration of intellectual, methodological and political bankruptcy.
By boxing himself into this corner -- a tactic which has been hailed by his wildly cheering fans as a stroke of overwhelming originality -- Goldhagen has successfully contrived to avoid even posing the main questions."
We, of course, would like to take the Goldhagen Hypothesis one step further.
Take the treatment of the soldiers of the Egyptian Army of the Six Day War
in 1967 where thousands of Egyptian soldiers were deliberately allowed to
die of thirst in the desert, and more thousands were killed after they surrendered
to the Israelis.
Instead of trying to provide an explanation in terms of a cluster of very
varied causes and motives, should we simply give up and hand the job over
to a young Egyptian - who will publish a book in the future in the Arab
countries consisting of some 150 million Arabs, claiming that there is no
redeeming factor whatsoever that would exonerate the 7 million Jewish people
living in Israel because of what their army did to the Egyptian soldiers
or the Palestinian people?
Ingrid
Thought for the Day:
"I watched as the man dug a hole for about 15 minutes. Afterwards, the (Israeli military) policeman told him to throw the shovel away, and then one of them leveled an Uzi at him and shot two short burst, each of three or four bullets. Another prisoner was brought to the same hole a few minutes later, forced to enter and also shot."
(Gabi Brun, an Israeli journalist, in Yediot Ahronot, August 17, 1995, as reported in the Toronto Sun, August 18, 1995)