| Saturday, December 19, 2009 8:26AM | | | | Can We Learn from the Nazi Period? | Posted By: Boria Sax
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| Tags: Eugenics, Nazis, Lorenz, Peter Novak | I do not think there is any question of the historical and intellectual links between breeding and eugenics, which culminated in Nazi Germany. The entire concept of pure breeds was originally developed in relation to animal breeding and later extended to people. Prominent Nazis from Alfred Rosenberg to Konrad Lorenz constantly remarked on they found it terribly ironic that people were more concerned with the pedigree of donkeys or dogs than human beings. The entire project of recreating the primal Aryan race can easily be seen as application of the techniques developed in breeding animals to human beings. But I have gone over this subject many times before and, as I will explain shortly, am weary of it. For more detail, I refer people to either my book Animals in the Third Reich or to the essays of Aaron Skabelund.
But what are the implications of these parallels? It is extremely hard to investigate them in a reasoned way, mostly because it has now become almost impossible to cut through all of the rhetoric and confusion surrounding the Nazi period. For a long time, we have promulgated very stereotyped views of Nazis, as rigid and mechanical, as consumed by hate, as humorless, as sadistic, as banal, and so on. The result of this is to obscure any resemblance between them and ourselves, a well as between their society and ours. Lorenz was a member of both the Nazi party and its Office of Race Policy, yet people still think he couldn't have been a Nazi because he didn't "act like one."
Disconcerting as it may be, the Nazis were actually not necessarily so different from us, and Nazi science was not especially far from the mainstream of Western science, which was also permeated with racialist assumptions. This similarity cannot be obscured entirely, and the result is that just about everything in our society sporadically gets compared to the Nazis, from universal health care to the ACLU. A further result is that any comparisons between something in our era and theirs is even more likely to seem very extreme or frivolous and easily deniable.
I would like to be able to explore a reasoned, and limited, comparison between the Nazi eugenic policies and breeding, but we probably just aren't ready for that yet, and it could take a while before we have sufficient perspective. In the meantime, I rather lean to the pessimistic conclusion of Peter Novak in his excellent book The Holocaust in American Life, where he argues that the Nazi era may have no lessons for us at all beyond the sort of moralizing that will prove disappointingly bland. | | |
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| 12-20-09 7:59AM: Private Detective Smiley said...
Dear Mr Boria Sax,
You posted Can We Learn from the Nazi Period? in December 2007 yet. Ha-ha-ha! :) You are posting the same articles since 2007. Why?
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