american-holocaust

184 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTficial, contextless explanations. But the reverse is also true: examining onlylong-term and deeply imbedded cultural themes, as we have largely donethus far, places the burden of historical explanation solely on evolved collectiveconsciousness, and collective consciousness by itself cannot explainwhy individual events occurred when and where they did. Moreover, certainof the institutions of Christian culture and society that we have canvassedhere-slave-holding, for instance-were not unique to the Europeanor the Christian world. For such individual social practices or culturalhabits to become implicated in the emergence of specific historical events,the essential substance of the phenomena-in the case of slavery, the objectificationand dehumanization of people-must fuse with other complementarysocial and cultural traits, and be activated and directed byevents.For an example of this we can turn to the matter with which the firstpart of this chapter concluded, the problem of explaining the Jewish Holocaust.Here we noted that Elie Wiesel has said that a key to that explanationis the fact that "all the killers were Christian," and that the Holocaust"did not arise in a void but had its roots deep in a tradition thatprophesied it, prepared for it, and brought it to maturity." This no doubtis correct. Indeed, the characteristics of Christian tradition delineated inthe immediately preceding pages that, we shall see, prophesied, preparedfor, and brought to maturity a frame of mind that would allow to takeplace the genocide that was carried out against the native peoples of theAmericas were in many cases the same religio-cultural traits that buttressedjustifications for the Holocaust.However, as Arno J. Mayer recently has shown, it was certain specificconditions and certain specific events-in addition to the larger historicalcontext of Christian anti-Semitism-that triggered the actual mobilizationof the "Final Solution" in twentieth-century Germany. By itself, Mayerpoints out, Christianity's age-old and collectively conscious "Judeophobia"was not sufficient to bring on the Nazi "Judeocide." Rather, he demonstrates,during the first few decades of the twentieth century "there was aconstant interplay of ideology and contingency in which both played theirrespective but also partially indeterminate roles. Above all, this raging fusionof ideas and circumstances which produced the Judeocide was part ofa single, larger historical confluence." The major elements in that confluence,Mayer believes, derived from the several decades of "cataclysmic upheaval"in Europe that preceded and enveloped the outbreak of the SecondWorld War, combined with specific crises that erupted within Germanywhen war in the east-a "crusade," Mayer calls it, that was waged with"pseudoreligious furor" -began going badly. 111The historical backdrop of intense and ancient European anti-Semitismis, of course, an essential (if by itself insufficient) element in explaining theNazi Judeocide, and of particular importance in that regard is the dis-