Is social failure the cause of fascism? On Lucy Davidowicz's interpretation of Hitler in "The War against the Jews: 1933-45"

Lucy Davidowicz's book "The War against the Jews: 1933-45," which is one of the most respected studies of the Holocaust, begins with a chapter that is mostly about Hitler as a man. Rhetorically, this seems to me something of both a straw man argument and an almost disingenuous one that presupposes what it proves, which is a point supposedly about the causes of the Holocaust. Of course, we know that Hitler's own thinking and personality both was a 'necessary' cause without which we must suppose that the Holocaust would not have happened at least as it did. The most people will suppose in this regard is that if it had not, something like it eventually would have. That is unknowable but an interesting thought. The dominant view today certainly is that anti-semitism is the principle cause of the 'Shoah' and that that event did in fact realize a fated destiny. It is worth asking not only how true that is but what are the possible gains and losses for those of us who do want to prevent barbarism of this kind from recurring.

The most interesting claim made marginally in the first chapter is that the Nazi ethnic and social cleansing (that also targeted other marginal groups) was carried out in part as a Manichaean holy war based upon what ultimately was part of the structure of Christian political metaphysics (theology) in Europe. It was quite literally a secular variant of the discourse of salvation and damnation.

A principal purpose of the chapter is also to understand Hitler. Much of her argument here is made tacitly, not made explicit as to what the point is. Hitler is a ready made figure in post war thought for demonization; if anyone in history could be or has been a pure figure of evil, Hitler would be a candidate for that role. Usually, the anomaly of this man (who was unique, though none of ideas were in themselves, and those discourses were not anomalous in Europe before Hitler, unfortunately) is explained in one of three ways: 1) he was a figure of evil because of a monstrous immorality and hatred. The evil he caused therefore was caused by the evil he was. Evil is explained by evil. 2) he was capable of evil because he was a failure as a person, 'bad' as much as 'evil' in Nietzsche's sense: poorly educated, but worse: a failure as a person. So it becomes relevant to say that he was a failed artist, a loner, surely a madman, paranoid if nothing else, a social loser (like today's right-wing incels), a man who never rose in the army above enlisted man status (corporal), a writer who doesn't think clearly or want to, a pseudo-intellectual (he did read classical German philosophy from Kant to at least Nietzsche while in prison; we can infer he probably knew and liked Heidegger, as well as Schiller and others), etc. Like Trump for those who hate him, he was evil because he was bad, had the character of a person who just is ill-formed as a person. A failure, a loser, and someone who deserved to be. In other words, a failed exemplar of that very German thing, Bildung, or character formation through formal and informal education and especially the cultivation of ethical wisdom through the arts. 3) The third possibility, which merges with the second and perhaps the first, is that he was 'mentally ill'. This idea may require literal explication, since in the end all that ascriptions of mental illness mean is that a person is bad and can be discarded. Indeed, the Nazis themselves did that. So maybe Hitler’s proper place was at Auschwitz as one of the victims, a place that in this thinking he would have to share with a lot of people, including, in today’s America many people (some ‘of color’ and others ‘white’, if that is important to you) who have lost out in the bid for professional jobs or otherwise are social rejects, doing drugs, with absent fathers and dysfunctional families, or whatever (obviously, this would hit African-Americans hard). Consideration of the role of the notions of mental health and illness in the Third Reich and the Holocaust might well vitiate using such explanations to explain its founder and principal individual causal force, but maybe not if what you want is to construct an argument you can use to win.

Win what? It’s not as if we need to refight World War II, or ascertain what the different models of industrial society then (that of England and America, and France and Western Europe, vs. that of the Soviet Union, vs. that of Germany and Japan) had in common or differed in, in order to understand — what? Understanding a particular set of events in history can be approached in different ways, according to what are the current concerns. Not asking that question will likely lead to historiographies that are perhaps satisfying to read, but less helpful in figuring out how we might move forward. We can celebrate the victory of the good guys (which was either America and England or Soviet Russia, and now is only the former since the latter was finally defeated) so as to maximally legitimate the status quo against whatever might oppose it today. Or we adopt a more properly skeptical or critical (or both: criticism wants to change things, usually from the perspective of some desire or project) stance towards the present, leading us perhaps to ask more revelatory and interesting questions about the past. The other side was a bunch of very bad guys and the bad guys lost, the good guys one, and we are retelling this story so that you won’t forget it. At stake is what the study of history should be about.

This could be a pretty strong denunciation of Hitler, except for one contextual fact: Few people today, and presumably none possessed of good sense, think of Hitler in such a way that he would need to be delegitimated. The effect is actually the reverse: what (or who) is the cause explaining the effect is also explained by it, so that it is tainted by it. Thus, showing that Hitler was a failure who did not deserve any special or normal life success, would have the utility merely and importantly of delegitimating losers and badly educated people. Here enters on the scene moral and political intellectual blackmail. If you say this, you are associating yourself with that. In this case: If you are a loser, perhaps a mentally ill person, who doesn't have well-thought out ideas (or who does), then you may be a lesser Hitler. This is of course absurd and it insults normal people who are not particularly educated or smart, be they on the right or the left, be they workers or peasants, or bourgeois or something else. The point would be to tell individuals that they should be nervous on what are effectively Kantian grounds, that if they are caught out not obeying some norm or rule, they can be called Nazis. And to suggest to the elites among us, including professionals and also managers, as today's economy employs tens of millions of people in policing others, - that we have to watch out for lonely, crazy, unattached people who might not only be stupid or unhealthy but actually very dangerous. And there must be many and not few such people, and they must be the targets of close surveillance and an almost total suspicion. I think even Bernie Sanders believes this, though it is not a belief that is specific to either the left or right alone. Sanders has said in one of his campaign books that we need more mental health services in order to lock up more crazy people, because they are a cause of horrible crimes.

The hatred of Jews and their marginality in Western societies in particular is quite a topic. Understanding it will help in understanding the Holocaust, and how other incidents of horrifying terror and organized civilization barbarism, even if they are less extreme than 'that', not only warrant our attention, but might be avoided.

For this reason, I find a book like late Polish-Jewish sociologist Zygymunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust, along with the work fo Arendt and others, much more interesting than just ascribing evil effects to evil motives, which by using the thing to explain itself only baroquely deepens our sense of horror or other affective response. If there is great evil and great evil is the cause, and it is real and possible, that could put terror in one's soul; it does mine. But what was the thinking, what made that possible, and what made the Jews different?

Bauman's explanation turns largely on his theory of Jewishness, and how it was constructed by Jews and others. Jews were figures of marginality especially in modern Europe after the emancipation that began in Revolutionary France in 1792. Every nation, every ideology, every discursive formation, every language that is spoken as a form of life, as Wittgenstein said they are (in what amounts to an argument for ethical nationalism): Jews could learn and master any of them, but not 'fully' belong to any. The standard news is that the State of Israel has solved this problem. The nineteenth century's great ideas included nationalism as well as republican liberalism, socialism, and developmental historicism, and these formations existed in various mixtures. Zionism is a development out of 19th century European nationalisms, whatever else it is, and whatever else they are. The Jews suffered from European nationalisms that excluded them; the solution was to create another that includes only them. Thus, being Jewish is no longer anomalous.

Postwar philosophy and philosophical theology, Jewish especially, in the European languages developed some interesting notions in this regard. In Derrida, Levinas, Lyotard, and others, there were notions of difference, existential exile, and other figures of cosmopolitan identity that at a level of metaphysics and ethics as well as politics did quite well go beyond older nationalist and totalitarian conceits, which can now in philosophy be largely associated with French and German thought from Descartes to sometime in the first decades of the 20th century.

Bauman's proximity and debt to Derrida in particular is obvious. In a way, what he did was to historicize French postmodern philosophy after Heidegger in order to construct a social theory of the tendencies that made possible the Third Reich and its horrible crimes. A central category in his argument in this book is ‘viscosity’, a state that is liminal to or in-between metaphorical solidity and liquidity of individual and group identities and the boundaries delimiting them. His more recent work centered around trying to make sense of neoliberal capitalism’s uses of and dependence on liquidity, which remains in his thought a decisive metaphor. Nazism was indeed rooted partly in discourses of health and normality, which is why one of the first acts of the regime was to publicly exhibit modernist art denounced as ‘degenerate’; it is why the Reich obsessed about maintaining healthy bodies; it is why the physically handicapped as well as the ‘mentally ill’ shared the fate of the Jews; and it is why, as I have tried to argue, discourses of mental health that are oriented around concepts of normality and practices of exclusion enjoy some continuity with the Third Reich. Bauman’s work helps to see the conceptual unity that made possible both the particular ideology of health and normality that was Nazism’s closest equivalent of Stalinism’s absuses of the discourse of class conflict, and the desire specifically to destroy the Jews, were very much of a piece.

If he is right, moralistic, normalizing, and Manichaean discourses are certainly unhelpful dead ends. Of course, Hitler was defeated, and by America and England, with some help from the Soviets (who actually played far the larger and more decisive role), and partisan/resistance fighters, while the Soviet form of Manichaean and normalizing totalitarianism was eventually defeated by the forces of capitalism (with some help from dissidents in those countries). So why not articulate the reasons legitimating this victory. Sure, but legitimating what? Moralism's logic is that of war and policing. War's object is the enemy who is different either as a national group or an ideological one. Policing's object is citizens at risk of social dysfunctions, political dissent, and capital losses, obtained by controlling people who are labor power. Every discourse about what is wrong about some party or position is also a legitimation of a positive position that may or may not be presented. Among those who would prevent further Holocausts, we do find it interesting to wonder how and why that happened so that it will not be in any way repeated. Repetitions are usually surprising, because some of the old terms no longer apply, and what is proposed and opposed may seem incongruous by the expectations formed within the framework of a first instance that is not merely followed in the second.

Is the biggest problem crazy people who need more and better policing (or defeat in a way, if they are a whole other nation), or is it that our society is already far too totalitarian? And does acknowledging the latter place on the left or the right? Or neither or both?