The_Holokaust_-_origins,_implementation,_aftermath

REMEMBERING IN VAIN
countries are governed by force and not by law. Furthermore, how was it possible
to persist in converting suffering into reason, to forget the men who die in favor
of the Man who marches forward, when it was this forward march that had made
possible this industrialized death There is nothing more regimented, more
methodical, more modern than the Final Solution. This “criminal enterprise against
the human condition” 7 did not burst forth from the depths of time to convulsively
undo the patient work of civilization. In this unleashing of a cruelty without
limits, progress was implicated in its technological form (the sophistication of
the death machine) as well as in its moral form (domestication of urges,
submission of will to the law).
In the aftermath of the First World War, Valéry wrote:
We have seen, seen with our own eyes conscientious work, the most
solid teaching, the most serious discipline and assiduity adapted to
unspeakable projects. . . . So many horrors would not have been
possible without so many virtues. A lot of science was needed, no
doubt, in order to kill so many people, to waste so many assets, to
obliterate so many cities in such a short time—but moral qualities
were no less needed. Knowledge and Duty, are you then suspect 8
In 1945, this suspicion became a certainty. Life had surely resumed its busy
course, but its victims could no longer be chalked up to progress, and history
ceased to be that cartoon in which the hero—battered, mutilated, robbed of
speech, crushed—always rises up again intact (if not strengthened) to continue
his throbbing adventure. It was clear that this time the blow was mortal. From
whatever angle one looked at it, the crime was murder. The human race had
been forever impoverished by the destruction of the world of European Jews. A
catastrophe had taken place that no logic could possibly efface; no amount of
reason could attenuate its irrevocable nature. That is why, instead of letting
mankind continue on its way without dwelling on the wounds inflicted on
individuals, men themselves decided to dwell at length on the wound that Nazism
had inflicted on humanity. 9
And the dogma of humanity’s self-fulfilling destiny through history was
refuted not only by the scope and meticulousness of the crime; it was also
compromised by the statements of the torturers. As Jankélévitch has rightly
noted, the extermination of the Jews “was doctrinally founded, philosophically
explained, methodically prepared by the most pedantic doctrinarians ever to have
existed.” 10 The Nazis were not, in effect, brutes, but theorists. It was not because
of blood-thirsty instincts, economic or political interests, or even because of
prejudice that they sacrificed all scruples. On the contrary, it could be said that
the objections and scruples of interest, of instinctive pity, and of prejudice were
sacrificed on the altar of their philosophy of history. “It is thus an erroneous
and stupid conception,” Theodore Fritsch commented as early as 1910 in his
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