Abstract
The problem of comparative victimization and the issues associated with the hierarchizing of genocide into greater and “lesser evils” are thoroughly charged, overdetermined, and, for some, even a tasteless enterprise. How does one presume to grade evils? Perhaps a further source of disquiet arises from a powerful claim made by Martin Malia: “Nazism’s unique status as ‘absolute evil,’” he writes, “is now so entrenched that any comparison with it easily appears suspect.”1 One may (or may not) find such entrenchment normatively problematic or unwarranted, but few, I think, would question the empirical accuracy of Malia’s assertion that Nazism has indeed come to occupy a unique demonic status within our moral economy, a symbol of the deepest incarnation of barbarism and inhumanity. Perhaps Malia should have added an important rider to this statement: the model of Nazism as radical evil applies peculiarly and particularly to Anglo-American spheres of influence and to Western and Central Europe societies (and to some variable and increasing degree, to certain Eastern European countries).
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Notes
See Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999) and Michael Bernstein, “Homage to the Extreme: The Shoah and the Rhetoric of Catastrophe,” Times Literary Supplement (March 6, 1998), pp. 6–8 and his earlier Forgeone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
Evelyn Wrench, I Loved Germany (London: Michael Joseph Ltd., 1940).
Quoted in Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (London: Macmillan, 2000), p. 282.
See the preface to George Steiner’s Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman (New York: Atheneum, 1977), pp. viii, ix.
Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, lerror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), p. 3. Perhaps even more stunning is the almost total ignorance—including widespread neglect by historians—of the great famines that took between 30 to 50 million lives throughout the “Third World” between 1876 and 1899, the time in which European imperialism reached its height and global market forces were unleashed as never before. These mass starvations and deaths (and often murders), so goes the claim, were not the inevitable outcome of “natural disasters,” but a result of deliberate political and economic policy. On this “political ecology of famine” (“the missing pages—the absent defining moments … in virtually every overview of the Victorian era”)
see the controversial work by Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño and the Making of the Third World (London and New York: Verso, 2001).
See, for instance, Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998) and,
quite controversially, Dagmar Barnouw, Ansichten von Deutschland (1945). Krieg und Gewalt in der zeitgenössischen Photographie (Basel: Stroemfeld Verlag, 1997).
Rudyard Kipling, “Mandalay” in Barrack Room Ballads (London: Methuen, 1892). Quoted in Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, p. 138.
See Harry Mulisch, Case 40/61: A Report on the Eichmann Trial (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), p. 63.
As evidenced by a rash of recent publications. See Charles Kimball, When Religion Becomes Evil (San Franciso: Harper, 2002);
James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002);
Richard J. Bernstein, Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation (New York: Polity Press, 2002).
The work that is attracting the most attention is by Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). On this see Edward Rothstein, “Defining Evil in the Wake of 9/11,” The New York Times (Arts and Ideas section), October 5, 2002, pp. A17, A19; and Judith Shulevitz, “There’s Something Wrong with Evil,” The New York Times Book Review, October 6, 2002, p. 39.
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© 2012 Steven E. Aschheim
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Aschheim, S.E. (2012). Imaging the Absolute: Mapping Western Conceptions of Evil. In: At the Edges of Liberalism. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137002297_10
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