Warrior Politics by Robert D. Kaplan

Author:Robert D. Kaplan [Kaplan, Robert D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58836-080-9
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-11-16T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER VIII

THE HOLOCAUST, REALISM, AND KANT

In recent decades, unprecedented affluence has led to unprecedented altruism and idealism, complicating our reaction to the difficult truths revealed by philosophers like Hobbes and Malthus. Behind this altruism and idealism is the specter of the Holocaust. Because foreign policy is, ultimately, the extension of a country’s domestic inclinations and conditions, it is necessary to say something about it.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the Holocaust has become more than a Jewish memory. It is taught by law in the public schools. Annual commemorative ceremonies are held in the Capitol Rotunda. The federal government pays for most of the upkeep of the U.S. Holocaust Museum near the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. Peter Novick, in his path-breaking book The Holocaust in American Life, calls it “the emblematic atrocity,” the most likely “criterion by which we decide what horrors command our attention” and what do not.

The Holocaust grew to vast significance not only because of its intrinsic horror but also because of specific conditions in post–World War II American life. In the 1950s, as Jews assimilated rapidly into American society, American Jewish organizations rarely mentioned the Holocaust; they chose to appear part of the patriotic mainstream at a time when Jews like Ethel and Julius Rosenberg figured prominently in Cold War espionage investigations, and anti-Semitism was still rife.1 Growing up in the 1950s, the movie director Steven Spielberg learned little about the Holocaust from a popular culture that prized consensus and assimilation. Spielberg said that making Schindler’s List was “an outgrowth of his increasing Jewish awareness” that occurred only in the 1970s.2

It was actually in the 1960s that the Holocaust began to be transformed from an assemblage of searing family memories to a totemic event. William L. Shirer’s 1960 bestseller, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 may have played less of a role in this process than the sixties themselves—a time of social upheaval that led, by the 1970s, to “an era devoted to diversity … the elaboration of ethnicity and the exploration of one’s heritage,” in the words of the Holocaust scholar Hilene Flanzbaum.3 The Holocaust soon became the defining narrative of a generation of Jews who had become part of America’s secular mainstream, and thus required a new badge of identification with their ethnic forebears, now that both Orthodox and Yiddish culture had largely been lost.

The Holocaust influenced—and was influenced by—the cult of victimhood that flourished in the aftermath of the sixties, in which women, blacks, Native Americans, Armenians, and others fortified their identities through public references to past oppression. That process was tied to Vietnam, a war in which the photographs of civilian victims—the little girl fleeing napalm, for example—“displaced traditional images of heroism.”4

The Holocaust took on further meaning following the West’s victory in the Cold War, when the failure of communism focused increased attention on the mass murders committed by Stalin and Mao. Then came the atrocities in Bosnia and Rwanda, with their eerie similarities to the Holocaust, especially the bureaucratic death apparatus.

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