Posted on 02/15/2002 6:44:35 AM PST by Romulus
In 1997 Daniel Goldhagen, a young Harvard academic and son of the German refugee historian Eric Goldhagen, also at Harvard, caused an international sensation with his book Hitler's Willing Executioners. The book attributes the Nazi Holocaust to the 'eliminationist anti-Semitism' that allegedly prevailed among the pre-Hitlerian German people. Germans killed Jews not because some Germans were Nazis, but because there was popular enthusiasm in Germany for killing Jews, which the Nazis parlayed into political success. Although Goldhagen's 'facts' fell prey to the Holocaust scholar Raoul Hilberg and to a book-length refutation by Ruth Bettina Birn and Norman Finkelstein, both of whom lost family members to the Nazis, Goldhagen gained worldwide renown for his fearless exposure of what he believes to be congenital anti-Semitism. German newspapers, most conspicuously the Frankfurter Rundschau, snarled at Birn and Finkelstein as self-hating Jews; Goldhagen would have been able to retire on the royalties and speaking honorariums he obtained from the Germans alone.
Now Goldhagen has done it again, with A Moral Reckoning: The Catholic Church and the Holocaust in History and Today. This time Goldhagen identifies Christianity as the single greatest source of anti-Semitism in the world. A bitter controversy arose in the United States last month when the New Republic devoted much of one issue to Goldhagen's brief. It is hard to see why the magazine was so generous with its space. The New Republic fervently supports the Israeli Right and has become an outspoken backer of George Bush's extended war on terrorism. Since those fighting in this extended war are, and will continue to be, overwhelmingly Christian, it might seem sensible for the New Republic and its publisher, Marty Peretz, to emphasise Jewish-Christian solidarity in the face of a shared non-Christian foe. This has been the approach of most Jewish conservatives since the late 1980s when Commentary, the Jewish monthly, concluded what may be described as a friendship pact with the pro-Israeli Christian Right. For example, after Abe Foxman, of Bnai Brith's Anti-Defamation League, attacked the religious Right in a widely distributed polemic in 1994, two leading Jewish writers, Midge Decter and Irving Kristol, rebuked the anti-Christian Foxman for going after the 'friends of Israel'. Although writers such as Decter and Kristol couldn't give a rap about the narrow theology of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, they did notice that fundamentalists considered the Jewish presence in the Middle East to be God's will. They also observed that conservative Catholics and Orthodox Jews in the United States had become constant political allies against the secularist Left.
It does no honour to New Republic, a magazine that has some claim to intellectual respectability, that it should be peddling Goldhagen's new schlock, especially since he draws uncritically on Hitler's Pope, John Cornwell's book about Pius XII, published in 1999. There is nothing conclusive shown by Cornwell that would discredit the postwar Jewish consensus about Pius as someone who worked heroically, albeit selectively, to save Jews during the second world war. The argument that the Pope might have done even more does not invalidate the fact that he did a great deal on behalf of Italian and Hungarian Jews - indeed far more than he did for the approximately 2.6 million Polish Catholics, including many clergymen, whom the Nazis also slaughtered.
Goldhagen discerns anti-Semitism even in the papal encyclical 'Mit brennender Sorge' that was promulgated in 1937 by Pius XI but written by the papal nuncio in Germany, the future Pius XII. Although the document lashes out against Nazi racism and proclaims the universal scope of 'God's moral law', the author is charged with anti-Semitism for not singling out the specific persecution of the Jews (though Pius XI did declare elsewhere that 'we are all Semites spiritually'). Goldhagen, moreover, depicts the entire history of Christianity as a monomaniacal persecution of Jews by a monolithic Christian enemy. In fact, Jews in the early Middle Ages made common cause with Persians and Muslims against Byzantine Christians, and in one bloody episode helped the Persian Zoroastrian emperor to exterminate the Christian population of Jerusalem. While the Catholic Church generally treated Jews wretchedly in the modern period, it treated Eastern Orthodox Christians, particularly in the Fourth Crusade and during the Nazi puppet regime in second-world-war-Croatia, even worse. Protestant heretics before and during the Reformation received less generous treatment than the Jews in Catholic Europe; and one would have to be mad to believe that Jews, after their return to England in the 17th century, lived any worse in that country than did the (non-aristocratic) Catholics or the Irish Catholics under English rule.
The New Republic graces Goldhagen's splenetics with pictures of Croatian nuns following German soldiers, and of unidentified Catholic prelates giving clumsy Nazi salutes (while painfully grimacing). While it is hard to figure out why the nuns are traipsing behind the soldiers (perhaps because they believe that the Germans are liberating them from an unwanted Serb domination), there is no evidence that they are doing so to support the Holocaust. As for the prelates who are in bad company, what Goldhagen fails to mention is that bishops and other Catholic officials - in Munich, Berlin, Cologne, Fulda and Munster - spoke out explicitly against Nazi ideology. Polish and other Catholic clergymen did the same and paid with their lives.
Goldhagen is not alone in his antipathy to Christianity. In the United States there are self-identified Jewish publicists and celebrities who have made a career out of flagellating American Christians for their supposedly anti-Semitic history and intentions. Allan Dershowitz, Leonard Dinnerstein, Abe Foxman, Ruth Wisse and Cynthia Ozick, to name just a few, can always be counted on to tell American gentiles how they stand in a terrifying, unbroken tradition of Jew-baiting going back to the New Testament.
That being said, the fact remains that Jews have also been active in ripping apart Goldhagen and his questionable scholarship. Because Jews, except for those on the Israeli Left, are immune to the anti-Western politics of guilt found among liberal Christians, they have no moral scruples about ridiculing its practitioners. My hand does not tremble with anxiety when I go after a fellow-German Jew for the arrant nonsense that Goldhagen and the New Republic dare to present as a 'moral reckoning'. If only Christians would act in the same manner!
Paul Gottfried is a professor of humanities at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania and the author of After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State (Princeton).
LOL.....I don't necessarily share Goldhagen's views. I've never read his works and have no desire to do so. Consequently, I have had to rely on articles like this for what his views are. But I love how those who are opposed to his views (and who also have probably never actually read what he's written) try to morally equate him and others with various types of evils.
Whatever. I appreciate what you've written. It provides me with more information about your morals than the morals of Goldhagen's supporters.
I suppose what Goldhagen thinks he's doing is exposing the truth in the hopes that people will appreciate it. If so, he's wrong. True, there are a few people who will appreciate it. Most will not and will harbor resentment. And, of course, there are those who will refute his positions which only adds to the animosity. Some of the vitriolic language in this article, for instance, impresses me less than if the author took a more logical approach and left out adjectives such as "schlock". I suppose that's impossible given the emotional arguments involved.
That's not quite true. I suspect you WON'T see any. There's a big difference, but I will try and explain anyway.
Have you read the Protocols? Admittedly, I have not - I have only read commentaries on them. From what I understand, they are a collection of amazing lies designed with one purpose - to foster hatred of the Jews. And they have been used by some to generate violence and murder. Something more than just "smearing".
Whatever Goldhagen's work is...whether parts are accurate or not...I seriously doubt that it's purpose is to create hatred towards Christians or the Church, or to inspire violence. Now, I haven't read his work so I can't say for sure. Moreover, since Christianity is the predominent faith in this country and throughout most of Europe, I seriousl doubt that violence will result from any reading of Goldhagen's books.
I guess my position is that you could have denounced his work (even though you haven't read it?) without the comparison to the Protocols (which you also haven't read?). It would have made more sense.
Lol back at you. This garbage is a staple of the liberal menagerie. From homosexual activists to the Progressive Caucus in the House of Representatives to Unitarian, Reform and other liberal congregations, books such as this reinforce everything they believe already.
Probably no one. On the other hand, Menachem Begin (OBM) said that Poles received their anti-Semitism with their mother's milk. Whatever. Frequently, the apple does not fall far from the tree. If there is hatred in the home, children learn to hate.
Perhaps you're right. I still don't think that excuses your comparison.
This is almost equivalent to blaming the Russian Orthodox Church for the persecution of Catholics in the Soviet Union. Pope Innocent III encouraged a crusade, and the Fourth Crusade was the result, but he was not in control of it, and disapproved both of their sack of Zadar (a Catholic city) and of the diversion to Constantinople, and it was Frankish soldiers, who happened to be Catholics, and their leaders, rather than the Catholic Church, who were to blame for the outrages that took place.
Similarly, in WWII Croatia, it was Ante Pavelic and his Ustasha followers, who included some members of the Catholic clergy, but not the Catholic Church as an institution, who committed the massacres of Serbs, Jews, and others (including anti-fascist Croats); the head of the Catholic Church in Croatia, Archbishop Stepinac, spoke out publicly against the racist policies of the regime.
I haven't read his work nor do I have any interest in doing so. I would hope his motive is to uncover the unpleasant truth. However, that is just a hope, based on no facts whatsoever.
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