Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 8, No.

1, 1991 3

Speaking about the Unspeakable:

genocide and philosophy

MICHAEL FREEMAN

ABSTRACT Genocide is a political catastrophe. Yet it has not received much academic
attention. A few social scientists have studied it. Philosophers have largely ignored it.
There is a large literature on the Holocaust, but there is little agreement as to how this
should be related to other genocides. Some have argued that the Holocaust represented a
crisis of Western culture, but that Western culture has not responded adequatelyfor the
lack of the appropriate self-understanding. This crisis has been attributed to the
predominance of scientistic models of rationality in our culture. Social-scientific
approaches to genocide have been criticised because of their commitment to logical
empiricism, which is held to be epistemologically and ethically inadequate. Ethical
approaches based on liberal humanism have been criticised by post-Nietzschean philoso-
phers for their attachment to allegedly outworn metaphysical assumptions. However, the
deconstruction of social science and liberal ethics leads in the direction of relativism and
nihilism, which are either useless or dangerous in the face of evils such as genocide. The
arguments against conventional social science and ethics are examined, and a counter-
critique made of post-modern philosophy in order to clear the ground for constructive
thinking about genocide.

‘Genocide’ names an unqualified evil. No-one speaks of a justifiable genocide. It

appears to be ethically unproblematic. The appearance is, however, deceptive. Genocide
has proved to be problematic on two grounds. The first is the lack of consensus as to
what genocide is. The second is the lack of consensus in ethical theory. While common
humanitarian sentiment finds it easy to condemn genocide, philosophy falters before
this challenge. Precisely because genocide is an unqualified evil in common discourse
and a puzzle in philosophy, an examination of genocide will illuminate some problems
of contemporary philosophy.
‘Genocide’ is, in the first place, a word. It was coined fairly recently, and its history
can be comprehensively narrated. The history of words is not, of course, the same as
the history of ideas. It may be that ‘genocide’ represents different ideas embedded in
different theories. But we cannot know whether or not this is so until we have
examined the language games people play with ‘genocide’. Words can be powerful, and
powerful words can be confusing. We should resist the temptation to object that
linguistic analysis trivialises such a terrible subject, for it is precisely when the political
stakes are high that words are used to confuse. We have to seek control over our
language if we are to grasp the terrible realities to which they somehow refer.
When a political word has a strong emotive force, its meaning is commonly
stretched to cover whatever the user wants to commend or to condemn. The scope of
the term ‘genocide’ has been extended to a wide variety of deplorable events or states
4 M. Freeman

of affairs. The alleged failure of the US government to respond adequately to the

challenge of AIDS and the drug problem in the USA have both been called ‘genocide’.
There is obviously a need to clarify the meanings of this word.
The word was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a specialist in international
criminal law. His project was to document violations of international law by the
German forces in those territories they had occupied. However, international law
assumed that war was fought between states. The German state was waging war
against peoples. In so doing, it had committed crimes which so far exceeded in
barbarity what had been envisaged by the makers of international law that they
required a new name. He called them ‘genocide’. As ‘homicide’ was the killing of an
individual, so ‘genocide’was the killing of a people. But a people could be killed in two
ways, either by killing the individuals of which it was composed or by destroying its
way of life so that the individuals no longer constituted a ‘people’. Genocide was a
crime against nationhood. Although Lemkin held that genocide violated the rights of
individuals, he believed that it was also a crime against the world, in that world culture
was composed of separate national cultures, and genocide, by destroying national
cultures, thereby impoverished the world. For Lemkin, then, genocide was a crime in
international law, which should be condemned on five distinct grounds: (1) it violated,
even though it also went beyond, the norms of the existing international law of war;
(2) it violated the principles of just-war theory, in that it involved illegitimate attacks
on civilian populations by military forces; (3) it violated basic human rights of
individuals; (4) it violated the right of peoples to exist and flourish as such; (5) it
impoverished world culture by destroying some of the component national cultures of
which it was composed. It is worth noting that, although Lemkin included the Nazi
programme to extermiate the Jews as an example of genocide, he did not accord it
special importance. This may have been because he had not yet comprehended the
character of this programme, but the relations between ‘genocide’ and ‘the Holocaust’
would later become problematic. Finally, Lemkin regarded ‘genocide’ as a generic
concept: genocides had occurred throughout history [ 11.
After the Second World War Lemkin lobbied the United Nations to have genocide
made a crime in international law. This campaign led to the adoption of the UN
Convention on Genocide in 1948. The UN defined ‘genocide’ in terms of various
destructive acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
ethnical, racial or religious group, as such” [2]. There are four noteworthy elements in
this definition. First, the UN excluded Lemkin’s conception of the destruction of
cultures. Secondly, it excluded political groups from the protection of the Convention
against the protests of several delegates. The other two problematic elements of the
UN definition were the phrases ‘in whole or in part’ and ‘as such’, the meanings of
which remain uncertain to this day. The UN, like Lemkin, assumed that genocide had
occurred throughout history and gave no special place to the Holocaust.
The UN Convention has never come to life. The word ‘genocide’ has, however,
lived on. Its first use after the Second World War was by exiles from the Baltic states
occupied by the USSR to denote the treatment of the indigenous populations by the
Soviet occupying forces [3]. It was also used in the early 1950s by Lemkin himself
with reference to Stalin’s allegedly deliberate policy of starving the Ukrainians in
1932-33 [4]. Fanon used the word in his critique of French policy in Algeria, and it was
used during the trial of Adolf Eichmann, although it was not one of the formal charges.
However, the word lived a rather quiet life until it was revived and widely used by
critics of the US intervention in Vietnam, and especially by Jean-Paul Sartre [5]. Most
 Genocide and Philosophy 5

of these uses were closer to Lemkin’s than to the UN definition, emphasising military
invasions destructive of indigenous ways of life.
At about the same time as ‘genocide’became more widely used the term ‘Holocaust’
came into use to denote the Nazi project to exterminate the Jews. Since then the
relation between the two terms has become confused. Most scholars consider the
Holocaust to have been a case of genocide. Many consider it to have been a very
special case. Some, however, have thought it so important to emphasise the uniqueness
of the Holocaust that they have resisted comparisons between it and (other) genocides.
Thus some have held the Holocaust to have been a case of genocide; others that it was
the only case of genocide; and still others that it was not a case of genocide at all [ 6 ] .
In the past decade the meaning of ‘genocide’ has been extended to include many
forms of mass killing, so that the distinction between genocide and other forms of
political violence has become blurred. The definition of the victims has been widened
to include any social group. The scope of the concept can also be broadened by use of
the UN phrase ‘in part’: if any part of any group can be the victim of genocide, then
Lemkin’s term is widened and weakened to the point at which it loses its distinctive
analytical value. Another issue which has divided scholars is whether genocide is to be
defined by its intent (which is sometimes confused with its motive) or its outcome.
Finally, although the distinction between physical and cultural genocide has generally
been maintained in principle, it is often lost in practice.
During this period the concept of ‘genocide’ has attracted the attention of social
scientists, who have proposed different solutions to the problem of definition. Leo
Kuper, for example, has criticised on moral and scientific grounds the UN definition
for its exclusion of political groups, but has decided to use it because of its status in
the international community. Harff & Gurr distinguish between ‘genocide’ and ‘politi-
cide’. Chalk & Jonassohn have developed their own definition for the purpose of a
long-term, comparative-historical analysis. These differences are rooted in different
theoretical perspectives. Kuper, for example, has chosen his definition for practical
efficacy, Chalk & Jonassohn for historical use, while Harff & Gurr are committed to
the methodology of empiricist political science [71.
However, ‘genocide’ still occupies a very small corner of the academic field. Is this
the fault of the word or of the academy? Has ‘genocide’ been badly conceptualised?
Perhaps the word leads us up a theoretical blind alley, and is useful only for expressive
purposes. It may refer to diverse realities. It may also be that the realities to which the
word refers can be more adequately studied with the aid of other concepts, such as
‘war’, ‘internal war’, ‘civil war’, ‘war crimes’, ‘massacre’, ‘ethnic conflict’, ‘state
repression’, ‘gross human-rights violations’, etc.
These concerns do not require social scientists to remove the concept from their
agenda. Many terms in political science are used for expressive purposes (e.g.
‘democracy’, ‘fascism’). Lemkin introduced the new term for a clear reason: to denote
the destruction of nations by states. Precisely because the word carries great expressive
power, it has been extended to other types of event. This suggests the strategy that the
study of genocide should begin with the concept of nation-destruction and proceed
rather cautiously into those areas that have been identified as similar. We may
provisionally conclude that the diversity of uses demands conceptual rigour rather than
the abandonment of Lemkin’s problematic.
The concept of ‘genocide’ raises a further problem for logical empiricists who
require us to separate ‘facts’ from ‘values’ and to establish only ‘facts’ as objects of
explanation. ‘Genocide’ began its life as a normative legal term naming a crime, and it
6 M. Freeman

has always retained a strong connotation of criminality. Thus ‘genocide’ can never be
identified purely by ‘value-free’, empirical observation but always requires a normative
judgment. The project of preventing genocide has led to a search for its causes.
Empiricist epistemology has led some scholars to look for law-like generalisations. It
may, however, be doubted whether there can be law-like generalisations about a set of
phenomena which can be identified only by the use of essentially contestable judg-
ments. This problem is yet to be addressed in the social-scientific literature on
genocide. The unreflexive mixture of scientific and normative discourses in the study
of genocide raises problems not only for the logical empiricist, however.
Stuart Hampshire has sought clarification of the ethical problems raised by genocide
by going back over the heads of the eighteenth century moralists to the starting-point
of modern secular thought about statecraft and morality in Machiavelli. His experience
as an intelligence officer during and immediately after the Second World War led him
to the conclusion that there was no significant correlation between high culture and
elementary moral decency. In Machiavelli he found the disturbing idea, not only that
our civilisation is historically indebted to political violence that violates humane moral
standards, but also that the vocation of politics requires the renunciation of such
standards. If Machiavelli was right, ethics is largely excluded from politics [B].
But how cogent is the Machiavellian case? Is it not precisely a task for moral
philosophy to subject it to critical scrutiny? If evil is necessary to culture, we can still
ask whether elementary moral decency can and should be opposed to both.
Elementary moral decency has to struggle not only with Machiavelli but also with
Nietzsche. If Machiavelli gives priority to politics over ethics, Nietzsche leads us to
ask what can give elementary moral decency authority to pass judgment on culture.
Did not morality die with the death of God, leaving us only with the will to power?
Did Nietzsche push Machiavelli’s case to its logical extreme? Does the idea of
elementary moral decency break up on the rock of metaphysical and ethical historicism
and relativism? Once again, we should not concede to such amoralist arguments too
readily, for, if morality can be interrogated by philosophy, philosophy can also be
interrogated by morality. Genocide produces a moral response which can properly be
examined by philosophy, but a philosophy untroubled by genocide must itself be put in
question. Post-Nietzschean philosophy casts doubt on all ethics [9], but extreme evil
calls upon us to reconsider the Nietzschean challenge.
The post-Nietzscheans have, however, attacked not only the ethical but also the
epistemological and ontological grounds of the liberal critique of evil. Ernest0 Laclau
and Chantal Mouffe, for example, have declared that ‘the era of normative epistemo-
logy has come to an end’ [lo]. But it is hard to understand how this claim can be true,
for if it were true, how could we know that it was true? Richard Rorty has rejected the
notion of a reality ‘out there’ to which our moral and political theories should aspire to
be adequate, but he nonetheless advocates a liberal-democratic politics without
philosophical foundations which requires much the same out-there reality which has
concerned traditional moralists. Laclau and Mouffe are less radical about ‘reality’.
They do not deny that there is a world external to thought, but they hold that the
specificity of every object is constituted as an object of discourse [ 111.
The ‘saving’ of reality from post-modernist language-games is important, if the
reality of Auschwitz is not to be relativised out of existence. And, while the emphasis
of Laclau & Mouffe on the ‘meaning’ of experience is valid, we should insist on the
independence of the experience from its meaning. Writers on genocide often emphasise
the intensity of the experience and the difficulty of attributing ‘meaning’ to it. The
 Genocide and Philosophy 7

reality-discourse gap itself is of the first significance, as Arthur Cohen has explained in
writing of the Nazi genocide.
The death camps are a reality which, by their very nature, obliterate thought
and the humane programme of thinking. We are dealing, at the very outset,
therefore, with something unmanageable and obdurate-a reality which
exists, which is historically documented, which has specific beginnings and
ends, located in time, the juncture of confluent influences which run from
the beginnings of historical memory to a moment of consummating orgy,
never to be forgotten, but painful to remember, a continuous scourge to
memory and the future of memory and yet something which, whenever
addressed, collapses into tears, passion, rage. The death camps are unthink-
able, but not unfelt. They constitute a traumatic event and, like all decisive
trauma, they are suppressed but omnipresent, unrecognised but tyrannic,
silted over by forgetfulness but never obliterated [ 121.
Where does this leave elementary moral decency? The question of the relation
between decency and post-Nietzschean philosophy has recently been raised with
reference to Martin Heidegger. Heidegger is regarded by post-Nietzscheans as a great
philosopher, He was also a Nazi. He never condemned the genocide of the Jews. In an
analysis of Heidegger and Nazism Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has declared that Nazism
was “an absolutely vile phenomenon”. Yet he refuses to base this value-judgment on
‘juridical humanism’ without reservations. In an essay entitled ‘Doing Wrong’, Lacoue-
Labarthe reflects on ethics as follows.
To speak of doing wrong presupposes that there exists an ethics, or at least
that an ethics is possible. Now it is probably the case today that neither of
these conditions is fulfilled. . . because ethics. . . suffers from the general
exhaustion of philosophical possibilities, and manifestly cannot claim to stand
outside that exhaustion except at the cost of a certain blindness towards it
and its origin: how and from where could one philosophically get back
beyond Heidegger’s delimitation of ethics and humanism?. . . We are, of
course, forced to live and act according to the norms and prescriptions
derived from the old ethical systems, but no one can any longer be in any
doubt, unless they wish simply to indulge in re-legitimising the obsolete, that
we are in this regard entirely without resources. . . This lack of ethical
resources is what must, by an extremely obscure and quite undecipherable
imperative keep us exclusively within the interrogative mode. I do not then
hazard the words ‘doing wrong’ with regard to Heidegger from within any
form of ethical certainty [13].
Lacoue-Labarthe is unable to sustain his thesis that the exhaustion of ethics must keep
us “exclusively within the interrogative mode”. His remarks on Heidegger and Nazism
are not interrogative and seem to draw on ethical resources. If we are ‘forced’ to live
according to the old ethical systems, then they provide our resources and cannot be
obsolete. If Heidegger could not generate a condemnation of the Nazi genocide from
his philosophy, then it is his delimitation of ethics and humanism that is put in
question [ 141.
Richard Rorty has sought to rescue liberal-democratic politics from this post-
Heideggerian moral exhaustion. He refuses, however, to defend such politics by an
appeal to ultimate foundations, for “anything can be made to look good or bad by
being redescribed”. Those who insist on their particular foundations are merely
8 M.Freeman

dogmatic. Rorty believes, not only that liberal democracy does not require a founda-
tionalist metaphysics, but that it is better off without it, since it is illusory to think that
the required foundation is available [151.
But, if political philosophy can have no foundations, why liberal democracy? The
non-metaphysical liberal, according to Rorty, wishes not to be cruel, without needing a
reason for so wishing. The recognition of ‘a common susceptibility to humiliation’ is
the only social bond that is needed. The liberal’s sense of human solidarity is based on
a sense of common danger. This is not human solidarity as identification with
‘humanity as such’, for this identification is impossible. Yet the postulated sense of
common susceptibility to danger seems to re-introduce a minimal realism and a
minimal account of the human condition to support liberalism. Rorty denies that there
are moral facts, while holding that we should become more sensitive to cases of
cruelty. This is to be thought of, not as revealing reality, but as a redescription of what
is happening. Nevertheless, ‘what is happening’ is an unreduced reality-concept [ 161.
Hampshire agrees that protection from harm should be accorded priority in moral
and political thought. Like Rorty, he emphasises common susceptibility to suffering as
the human bond, yet, while refusing, like Rorty, to found political philosophy on a
thorough-going essentialist view of human nature, he does not believe that anything
can be made good or bad by being redescribed: suffering is bad independently of its
description [17].
The liberal, on Rorty’s account, values freedom, not on the basis of some supposed
universal standard such as ‘human rights’, but on the historical facts which suggest that
without liberal institutions people will be less able to live according to their own
beliefs. The non-metaphysical liberal will call ‘good’ whatever is the outcome of free
discussion. This could obviously lead to a paradox if the outcome of free discussion
was a decrease of freedom. This is a familiar paradox of liberalism, but Rorty’s
treatment of it is unsatisfactory because it is unclear on his account whether freedom is
ungrounded (so that its loss need not be regretted) or valuable precisely because no
particular view of the good life is grounded (in which case the loss of freedom would
be regrettable). Thus, liberalism can be grounded in anti-foundationalism itself or be
the merest historical contingency. The former is clearly the stronger version, although
it appears to use anti-foundationalism as a quasi-foundation for liberalism. The
paradox deepens if one regards anti-foundationalism as just as metaphysical as
foundationalism: the cogency of liberalism would then depend on the strength of the
proof that there are no foundations. Since Rorty himself believes that there can be no
such proof, his liberalism rests on very thin ice indeed [18].
Rorty is content to defend liberalism without foundations on the ground that the
struggle against cruelty requires courage rather than theory. Yet he leaves the
opposition to cruelty so contingent that the appropriate courage appears at the same
time admirable and arbitrary. He claims that to attribute rights to people is ‘merely’ to
say that we should treat them in certain ways: it is not to give a reason for treating
them in those ways. However, the human susceptibility to pain and humiliation is
surely a reason for treating people in certain ways, and is precisely the reason
commonly given for attributing to people certain basic human rights. Rorty’s rejection
of metaphysics leads him to present his liberalism as less reasoned than it could be
~91.
There is no consensus among post-Nietzschean philosophers about liberal politics,
nor is there always dissensus among ‘modern’ and ‘post-modern’ philosophers in
practice. For example, an open letter to The New York Review Of Books, Published on
 Genocide and Philosophy 9

27 September 1990, protests against anti-Armenian pogroms in the Soviet Union. It

describes them as ‘flagrant violations of human rights’ and recalls the genocide of the
Armenians in 1915. The letter is signed by, among others, Isaiah Berlin, Jacques
Derrida, Luc Ferry, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jiirgen Habermas, Agnes Heller, Leszek
Kolakowski, Emmanuel Levinas, Hilary Putnam, Paul Ricoeur, Richard Rorty and
Charles Taylor. Confronted with a serious,practical problem of politics, philosophers
of different schools can sign a text which not only brings them together with a common
political goal but also employs the discourse of human rights doubted or rejected by
many of the post-Heideggerians. This may be Rortyan politics without metaphysics,
but it shows that there can be liberal humanism after deconstruction, even if such a
text, itself political not philosophical, cannot show why this can be [20].
Even though it is clear that Rorty can in practice join with philosophers of different
persuasions in political action, is his unfounded liberalism vulnerable to the charge of
relativism? Rorty defends himself against this charge by arguing that anti-relativism
holds that the relativist believes all cultures to be of equal value, but that view would
require precisely the metaphysical foundation which he rejects. We can evaluate, he
says, but only from the cultural perspective we contingently have, and there is no
foundational way of justifying that. Liberals cannot rise above historical contingencies
to see freedom as ‘just one more value’. Nor is it ‘rational’ to compare, for example,
liberal with Nazi values and then use ‘reason’ to discover which are ‘morally
privileged’. There is no position from which such operations can be performed. There
is no position from which one can evaluate one’s values.
This would mean giving up the idea that liberalism could be justified, and
Nazi or Marxist enemies of liberalism refuted, by driving the latter up
against an argumentative wall-forcing them to admit that liberal freedom
has a ‘moral privilege’ which their own values lacked. From the point of view
I have been commending, any attempt to drive one’s opponent up against a
wall in this way fails when the wall against which he is driven comes to be
seen as one more vocabulary, one more way of describing things.
Rorty’s argument here is weak, and dangerous. In the Nazi vocabulary Jews were
‘vermin’. Psychologically, it may be impossible to persuade a Nazi to abandon this
vocabulary. But Rorty fails to show that reason is impotent in the face of such a
genocidal discourse. It is Rorty’s denial, not of metaphysical foundations, but of
reasoned critique that is the basis of the charge of relativism [21].
However, Rorty rejects the form of relativism which says that every belief is as good
as every other, not only on the ground that it requires the foundationalism which he
rejects, but also because it is self-refuting. He distinguishes this view from what he
calls ‘ethnocentrism’, which is also sometimes called ‘relativism’,and which holds that
there is nothing to be said about truth or rationality apart from the procedures of
justification used in a given society. It is not clear that the latter view escapes the
problem of self-refuting relativism, since ‘ethnocentrism’, on this account, is ‘true’ if
and only if it is justified by the procedures of a given society. The imprecision of this
test produces the imprecision of the status of ethnocentrism [22].
There is a truth in Rortyan relativism but it will seem banal to those who have never
succumbed to the temptation of metaphysical foundationalism. The truth is that, when
‘we’ condemn Nazism (for example), we must do so from our perspective, not God’s.
This does not, however, leave us without resources. Rorty himself suggests some basic
resources in the obligation not to inflict pain and in the value of freedom. It is, of
10 M. Freeman

course, possible, psychologically and logically, for an authoritarian sadist to reject these
values and there is room for debate about their political implications [23]. Liberalism,
therefore, can be provided with foundations: we can, with Rorty, drop the claims that
they are ultimate or metaphysical as unhelpful encumbrances.
Rorty denies that the ‘we’ of ethnocentric judgment can ever mean ‘we human beings’
because ‘we’ (some-humans) must be contrasted with ‘they’ (other-humans). Neverthe-
less, there can, of course, be no metaphysical limit to the scope of ‘we’. The liberal is
dedicated to enlarging that scope. The liberal is an ethnocentric who has been brought
up to distrust ethnocentrism. Indeed, Rorty’s use of the term ‘ethnocentrism’ is
misleading, since he makes it clear that a liberal ‘ethnos’ may be constituted in many
ways, not only, for example, by ‘we Americans’ but also by ‘we cosmopolitan liberal
intellectuals’. The vocabulary of we/they and ethnocentrism is, however, not wholly
suited to the liberal solidarity Rorty wishes to endorse. The liberal project of opposing
cruelty may be aided by extending the ‘we’ or by extending, anti-ethnocentrically,
solidarity to ‘them’ (e.g. to Armenians) by an appeal to a common humanity, which
Rorty both recognises (as the common susceptibility to pain) and denies (in the welthey
doctrine). Indeed, the denial that ‘we’ can mean ‘we human beings’ is hard to defend
without covert appeal to a human (ethnocentric) essence which Rorty cannot allow [24].
Yet Rorty’s ethnocentrism is not infinitely extendable. This is shown by an
imaginary tale he tells. A child is found wandering in the woods. She is the sole
survivor of a slaughtered nation. Such a child, Rorty acknowledges, on his view, has no
share in human dignity. It does not follow, however, that she may be treated like an
animal.
For it is part of the tradition of our community that the human stranger from
whom all dignity has been stripped is to be taken in, to be re-clothed with
dignity. This Jewish and Christian element in our tradition is gratefully
invoked by free-loading atheists like myself, who would like to let differences
like that between the Kantian and the Hegelian remain ‘merely philosophical’.
~ 5 1
Once again, Rorty’s argument is weaker than it needs to be. It is not clear what
constitutes ‘our’ community and Rorty cannot say that ‘our’ community is fixed. It
could be the community of liberal humanists. Such a community can, on Rorty’s own
account, hold that the survivor of a genocide has a share in human dignity. There is no
need for Rorty to ‘free-load’ on beliefs he holds to be false.
Post-modern philosophy, therefore, deconstructs modern ethics but lacks conviction
in the face of real ethical challenges. It cannot be said, however, that modernist
philosophers have done much better. The conceptualisation of genocide rests upon the
natural-law tradition and its chief modern manifestation in the doctrine of human
rights. There is no consensus on these doctrines in Western academic philosophy, and
their roots in non-Western cultures are still more shallow 1261. Faced with the realities
of genocide, some philosophers have responded with a moral realism [27]. This argues
for the existence of moral facts and against our being bullied out of recognising them
as such. This realism is typically illustrated rather than argued: narration is privileged
over rational argument [28]. The explanation of this method itself requires illustration.
The following passage, quoted by Martin Gilbert from a death-camp witness, provides
a good example.
Soon after my arrival at Belzec, one very young boy was selected from each
transport. (I don’t know where he was from as we didn’t know the origin of
 Genocide and Philosophy 11

the transports.) He was a fine example of health, strength and youth. We

were surprised by his cheerful manner. He looked around and said quite
happily, ‘Has anyone ever escaped from here?’
It was enough. One of the guards overheard him and the boy was tortured
to death. He was stripped naked and hung upside down from the gallows-he
hung there for three hours. He was strong and still very much alive. They
took him down and lay him on the ground and pushed sand down his throat
with stkks until he died. [29]

Such descriptions seek to break through linguistic, ontological, epistemological and

ethical inhibitions created by modern philosophical discourse. The language is plain.
The story is true. We know it is true because it is adequately documented. The
appropriate ethical response is beyond doubt. Granted that the documentation must be
adequate and that other descriptions are possible, the ontological, epistemological and
ethical truth of this story stands up. The only alternative is a radical scepticism or
relativism which can only capitulate (and/or collaborate) in the face of the realities of
genocide.
Moral realism can paradoxically be supported by Rortyan ethnocentrism. If all
‘facts’ are constructed by discourse, then the fact-value distinction, so dear to logical
empiricists, becomes, as Hilary Putnam puts it, less an epistemological truth than a
cultural institution. The passage from Martin Gilbert describes an evil event as surely
as it does a physical one. We can describe it as evil precisely because we have the
ethical resources to do so. Of course, someone who rejects the discourse will reject the
description, but that is as true of factual as moral descriptions. Rorty would restrict
moral facts to ethnocentric communities, but it may be that some moral facts are
nearly universal (say: ‘it is wrong to kill children solely because of their supposed
ancestry’). Putnam, who vigorously defends the notion of moral facts, insists that they
can be identified only within a discursive tradition. It is, however, important to
recognise that traditions are amorphous and open-textured, so that opportunities for
reasoned argument across traditions are not underestimated. Liberalism and Nazism
may, for example, appear to be mutually exclusive discourses, yet the reasoned defence
of Nazism would require the rejection of far more of the Western tradition than its
liberal strains. There may come a point at which the liberal and the Nazi reach stand-
off, but the Rortyan discourse of final vocabularies should not be allowed to dim the
recognition that Nazism is intellectual rubbish by epistemological standards that are
deep, wide and hard to surrender without the risk of nihilism [30].
Stuart Hampshire has proposed a moral universal which yet recognises the moral
pluralism required by Rorty. Precisely because there is no one true view of the good
life, he argues, every society must have rules of procedural justice to settle conflicting
claims. This necessity is derived from the Hobbesian notion that the only real
alternative is unregulated violence, which no society can allow. The peculiar evil of
Nazism was its determination to destroy procedural justice. This is a universal good
because it is a necessary defence against what almost all humans would regard as evil.
Thus we can criticise the post-Nietzscheans for over-historicising morality and defend
a minimal, almost-universal morality. Procedural justice is foundational if we are to
avoid a constant war of fanatical gods. This will not convince those who desire
fanatical wars, but it does hold for everyone else. It is not certain, however, that
Hampshire has best caught the peculiar evil of Nazism. An alternative view is that this
consisted precisely in its genocidal ideology: its redescription of the human to exclude
12 M. Freeman

Jews and others and its prescription of extermination for those so excluded. This is not
to question Hampshire’s argument for procedural justice nor his claim that the Nazis
violated it; it is to draw attention to the evil consequences of restricting the definition
of the human and to the moral dangers of the post-Nietzschean critique of humanism,
to which even Rorty’s benevolent liberalism succumbs [31].
In the light of the Nazi experience, and of Heidegger’s role in it, there is a strong
case for subjecting the post-Heideggerian critique of humanism to the Rawlsian test of
reflective equilibrium. Intuitionism as a meta-ethical theory no longer commands
support, but ethical intuitions deserve to be taken seriously, for they may be
unreflective manifestations of the best moral ideas we have, or can have, and we
should not be too deferential to philosophical theories which do them violence. The
lesson of Heidegger is that philosophy should be morally interrogated. Rorty acknow-
ledges that philosophy can be dangerous, but seeks to counter the danger by rendering
philosophy useless and advocating a liberal politics without philosophical support [32].
It is doubtful, however, whether politics and philosophy can be so sharply separated
without a return to the essentialism which Rorty rejects. The struggle against evil
requires not only courage but theory too. Rorty gives Charter 77 as an example of
admirable politics. Courage played a major role in bringing down the Communist
tyranny in Czechoslovakia. But reason is needed to construct a sturdy democracy
there. Rorty gives reasons why liberals need no reasons; he also gives reasons why it is
reasonable to be liberal. One cannot read off the solutions faced by the peoples of the
new democracies in central and eastern Europe from the Western tradition of political
philosophy, but the value of that tradition (in, for example, offering diverse theories of
democracy) has not been exhausted by the Nietzschean and Heideggerian interventions
in Western philosophy.
The interrogation of philosophy can be extended to academic discourse in general.
The questions we can ask are epistemological (what kind of knowledge can academic
discourse produce?), sociological (why does academic discourse choose these knowl-
edge practices rather than those?), and ethical (how should we evaluate academic
discourses from an ethical point of view?). These questions are urgent because the
academy has no immunity from evil and because the Nazi evil was facilitated by
intellectuals working in academies which were greatly admired by our culture. Further,
even the central values of the liberal academy (the conception of the ivory tower itself,
for example) must be regarded as problematic: detachment and engagement both can
be morally perilous. The interrogation of the academy is therefore a central feature of
the self-interrogation of our culture.
Elie Wiesel has attacked all academic treatments of the Holocaust from the
perspective of the survivor. He claims that the Holocaust experience is unintelligible
and that attempts to subject it to academic discourse both misrepresent and degrade it.
Wiesel’s critique of academic discourse comprises several arguments. The first is that
the experience of the victims is beyond language. The second is that academics have
judged the dead on the basis of arrogant claims to knowledge of their predicaments.
The third is that understanding the Holocaust would require empathy with victims and
executioners, which is impossible [33].
The first of these arguments is incontestable. No language can exactly represent the
subjective experiences of the victims. But this is a general problem of language as well
as a particular problem of the Holocaust. The particular problem arises from the
extreme character of the Holocaust experience, which removes it to an enormous
distance from those who lead normal lives. Language is useful in everyday life and for
 Genocide and Philosophy 13

communication among experts, but it is stretched to breaking point when required to

transmit very extraordinary experiences. So those who were not there, who are, in
Wiesel’s apt phrase, “on the other side of the wall” [34], have to consider very carefully
what can be said and how it should be said. In particular, there is a danger that abstract
theoretical discourse will flatten the moral landscape with desensitising effects.
Wiesel’s second argument is weaker. If some academics have judged the dead
unjustly, such judgments are not intrinsic to academic discourse. On this point Wiesel
has shifted his position, since he has acknowledged the moral importance of Holocaust
history, although he still maintains that it is not a great help in recovering the
Holocaust experience and that ‘any survivor has more to say than all the historians
combined about what happened’. It is not clear what ‘more’ means here: it might be
better to acknowledge that survivors and historians tell us different things, and both
are important. The merit of Wiesel’s point is its insistence on the epistemological
limits of even the very best history. “History is something that never happened; it is
written by someone who was not there” [35].
Wiesel also argues that understanding is impossible, because it requires empathy,
which is impossible. Alan Berger has attacked positivist, ‘value-free’, social-scientific
discourse on the Holocaust because it cannot produce empathy with the victims. This
discourse, Berger claims, is genocidal since it celebrates technical efficiency and
devalues ethical values. In similar vein Zygmunt Bauman has argued that the Holo-
caust was an expression of, not a deviation from modern scientific rationality [36].
Berger’s complaint seems inconsistent with Wiesel’s, for Berger requires empathy,
which Wiesel holds to be impossible. This inconsistency may be only apparent,
however. Wiesel is concerned with the limits of understanding: understanding cannot
but fall short of complete empathy. Berger is concerned with moral pedagogy: for this
purpose extra-scientific works (e.g. poetry) may produce the requisite empathy. Once
again, there is a general philosophical problem here, not peculiar to the Holocaust or
genocide. If ‘empathy’ means putting oneself into the same subjective condition as
another, it is impossible. Perhaps Berger requires that Holocaust writing evoke
sympathy (fellow-suffering). If this is the problem, Berger is correct to imply that the
social scientist stands differently from the physical scientist. There is no ethical call to
sympathise with physical objects. But the social scientist can choose whether or not to
evoke sympathy with human objects of inquiry. When those objects are victims of
genocide, the ethical issue is imperious, and ‘value-free’ discourse is not ethically
innocuous. Both Rorty and Hampshire also, in different ways, find our culture
excessively rationalistic and would give a more important role to non-rational judg-
ment and imagination in ethics and politics. However, although it may be conceded
that rationality has its limits and its dangers, and scientific rationality has no privileged
immunity from ethical or political criticism, we should recognise the danger of under-
valuing reason and underestimating the dangers of irrationalism [37].
Berger’s critique of social science is mistaken in three ways. First, positivism as such
is not genocidal. The Nazis recognised, correctly, the incompatibility of Nazism and
positivism in denouncing both Weberian, ‘value-free’ social science and the philosophy
of logical positivism. Secondly, genocidal ideologies, such as Nazism, are never ‘value-
free’. Thirdly, it is quite clear that social-scientific analyses of genocide in the
positivist mode are motivated by sympathy with the victims.
Yet, although Berger’s critique of scientific discourse is maladroit, he touches on a
fundamental point. This concerns the role of the technical frame of mind in the
psychology of the Holocaust. As a discursive practice, the Holocaust was not primarily
14 M. Freeman

an explosion of fanatical anti-Semitism, except at the level of the Hitlerite leadership,

but a mode of Fordist production. Steven Katz cites the following clinical report of the
laboratory results of experiments into ‘supercooling’ in low temperatures: “generally
speaking (in 6 cases) death supervenes when the temperature is lowered to between
24.2 deg. and 25.7 deg.” Katz observes that this scientific discourse is a redescription
of the murder of six human beings. The rhetoric of the statistical, scientific report
excludes all description which would be required by elementary moral decency to
express horror, outrage, remorse. It objectifies human beings as abstract ‘cases’, subject
to statistically recordable changes, on which death can ‘supervene’. This vocabulary is
not ‘value-free’ because it legitimates what would be illegitimate without the cover of
such a discourse. It protects the Nazi scientist from recognising the moral implications
of the experiment by excluding the suffering of the victim. Such writing self-describes
its author as a scientist not a murderer. The universal, mathematical, dispassionate
norms of science can generate valid descriptions which can simultaneously be judged
to be evil by the norms of moral decency [38].
But it is not only that the Nazi elite employed modern scientific rationality in the
implementation of their genocidal programme. The programme itself was scientific,
based on what were at that time and in that place (as well as in other places at that
time) reputable scientific ideas about nation, race and biology. Scientists were not
merely agents of, but also contributors to the genocidal ideology. If fact was separated
from value at the level of bureaucratic implementation, fact was fused with value at
the level of Nazi ideology: that Jews were vermin was a scientific and political fact-
value within the discourse of Nazism [39].
The ideology of ‘value-free’science provides no reason not to collaborate with genocidal
power. The discourses of contemporary social science often claim to be able to support
liberal conclusions, but they inhibit themselves from doing so convincingly, either by
privileging ‘knowledge’ over ‘value’ (e.g. logical empiricism) or by relativising both
‘knowledge’ and ‘value’ (e.g. post-modernism). Consequently, none is capable of
producing a discourse adequate to the reality of genocide. The demand for a perfectly
adequate discourse is, however, utopian. It is nonetheless important to note the limits and
dangers of scientific discourses in view of their high status in our culture.
The most radical challenge which genocide presents to academic discourse is the
claim that it lies beyond all meaning. This is often made by those who experienced the
Holocaust or who have studied it most carefully. Several arguments support this
position. The Holocaust was unique and the unique is unintelligible. The event
overwhelms, not only our linguistic resources, but our cognitive and moral capacities.
Hitler’s fanatical anti-Semitism defies all rational explanation, and, in the absence of
an explanation of that, there can be no explanation of the Final Solution.
The response to the claim that genocide is meaningless should be similar to that to
the claim that it is beyond language: the claims are correct only if they demand
perfection. That perfect understanding is impossible does not mean that none is; that
the full meaning of the Holocaust will always elude us does not entail that it has no
meaning. Nor should we expect the Holocaust to have a single meaning for everyone.
The event had some meaning, however elusive, for the victims, and some meaning for
the perpetrators; it will necessarily have a different meaning for those who have been
neither. Social-scientific approaches to genocide have been criticised for diminishing
the meaning of each genocide by generalisation and thereby producing a banal
discursive response. The social scientist should recognise that specific meanings are
necessarily lost in the process of generalisation, but different meanings can be added in
 Genocide and Philosophy 15

the same process: uniqueness and comparison both carry meanings and it is a
regrettable dogmatism to insist that only one does so [40].
Genocide challenges the positivist assumption that the description of reality is
unproblematic, for the choice of our descriptive language is highly problematic. In this
regard linguistic philosophies can sensitise us to issues of language and meaning. But
the discourse-theoretical claim that objects are constructed by discourse is more
problematic, for it fails to emphasise that discourse can conceal as well as disclose the
real. Understanding genocide requires at least a minimal realism, for without that the
problem of genocidal fantasy cannot even be stated. Doing without realism seems to be
difficult without running into self-contradiction or nihilism. Rorty cannot make sense
without assuming the reality of pain. Pace Rorty, Rorty is too relativistic, for we must
privilege some forms of discourse even to assent to Rorty’s case. If ‘reality’ is
discursively constituted, that constitution must be rule-governed, even if the rules can
never be immunised from rational challenge. There may be important realities beyond
discourse. Silence may sometimes be appropriate, at other times unavoidable. But
silence too is not unproblematic. There is the culpable silence of Heidegger. There is
also the reverential silence, which may command respect, but which denies all attempts
at understanding and therefore at building inhibitors to future genocides: such silence
is, then, not innocent either. We are therefore condemned to speak about the
unspeakable with our inadequate language and our inadequate understandings.
We must also recognise that the Western university is a social institution which
should be ethically interrogated. It has so far largely failed to address the problem of
genocide, and it may not be well equipped to do so. I have tried to show how the
dominant contemporary discourses in both normative philosophy and social science
have faltered in the face of this task. This is a serious failure of the academy if Bauman
is correct to maintain that understanding the Holocaust is essential to understanding
the catastrophic potentialities of modernity [41]. We have not yet grasped the meaning
of genocide, cognitively or morally.
The word ‘genocide’ has been allowed to wander around under too little constraint.
Yet discourse theory discourages us from attempting to fix its meaning. The risks of
premature and semi-arbitrary fixing seem slight by comparison with those of permit-
ting the existing confusion to continue. The moral imperative of genocide is for
understanding, explanation and prevention. At present we have too many definitions,
too little understanding, few explanations and no prevention.
Finally, we come back to the ethical problematic. A core theme of the Holocaust
literature, and a glaring absence from most modern philosophy and social science, is
that the Holocaust was not just another massacre, albeit on an exceptionally large scale
and exceptionally systematic, nor merely by far the worst outbreak of traditional
European anti-Semitism, but a crisis of Western civilisation. Anti-Semitism, national-
ism, racism, state power, modernisation, industrialisation, rationalisation, bureaucrati-
sation, ‘legitimate’ violence, all these were elements of the Holocaust, and none was
unique to Germany [42]. The ethically problematic standing of Nietzsche and Heideg-
ger, and the epistemologically and ontologically problematic status of humanism,
should lead us, in the face of genocidal realities, to interrogate philosophy and, more
broadly, academia as discursive practices. If ethics has been badly shaken by its
interrogation by philosophy, then philosophy can be interrogated by ethics.
The Holocaust is, of course, only problematic within the framework of a particular
discourse. Within a Hitlerite problematic, the extermination of the Jewish people was a
technical, bureaucratic problem. We cannot accept such discourses as beyond criticism
16 M. Freeman

merely because those who engage in them reject our criticism. There is a danger,
revived by post-modernism, of over-relativising our ethical discourse. The evil of the
Holocaust is more than a prejudice of twentieth century liberal intellectuals. Ruben-
stein and Bauman have argued that the Holocaust was consistent with Western
civilised discourse [43]. This view is provocative but oversimplified. For, if it can
explain how the Holocaust could happen, and could happen again in some different
form, it cannot explain its special place as a negative reference point in our moral
discourse. Genocide is, then, not just another topic for empirical or normative theory:
it is a challenge to the adequacy of our understanding of ourselves and of the modern
world we have made. So far, with a few notable exceptions, social science and
philosophy have displayed a fastidious or timorous distaste in the face of such evil.
Those in the ivory tower go about their worthy routines. And evil continues largely
unhindered by its babel of discourses.

Michael Freeman, Department of Government, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park,

Colchester C 0 4 3 S Q United Kingdom.

NOTES
[ l ] RAPHAELLEMKIN(1944) Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Washington, DC, Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace), especially chapter 9.
[2] LEOKUPER(1981) Genocide: its political use in the nuentieth century (Harmondsworth, Penguin), pp.
2 10-2 14.
[3] K. PELEKIS(1 949) Genocide: Lithuania's threefold tragedy (Venta, Germany); ALEKSANDERKAELAS
(1950) Human Rights and Genocide in the Baltic States (Stockholm, Estonian Information Centre).
[4] New York Times, 21 September 1953, p. 10.
[5] JEAN-PAUL SARTRE(1968) On Genocide (Boston, Beacon Press).
[6] ALANROSENBERG (1987) Was the Holocaust unique?: a peculiar question?, in: ISIDORWALLIMAN &
MICHAELN. DOBKOWSKI (Eds) Genocide and the Modern Age (New York, Greenwood Press), pp.
145-161.
[7] KUPER,op. cit.; BARBARA HARFF& TEDROBERTGURR(1988) Research note: toward empirical theory
of genocides: identification and measurement of cases since 1945, International Studies Quarterly, 32,
pp. 359-371; FRANK CHALK& KURTJONASSOHN (1990) The History and Sociology of Genocide:
analyses and case studies (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press).
[8] STUARTHAMPSHIRE (1989) Innocence and Experience (London, Allen Lane, Penguin Press), pp. 7-8,
161, 162, 164-165, 166-167, 177.
[9] See ROBERTBERNASCONI (1987) Deconstruction and the possibility of ethics, in: JOHNSALLIS(Ed.)
Deconstruction and Philosophy: the texts of Jacques Dem'da (Chicago, University of Chicago Press), pp.
122- 139.
[lo] ERNESTOLACLAU& CHANTALMOUFFE(1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: towards a radical
democratic politics (London, Verso), p. 3.
[ l l ] RICHARD RORTY(1989) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press),
pp. 75, 76; RICHARDRORTY(1989) Philosophy as science, as metaphor, and as politics, in: AVNER
COHEN& MARCELLO DASCAL(Eds) The Institution of Philosophy: a discipline in crisis? (La Salle, IL,
Open Court); LACLAU & MOUFFE,op. cit., p. 108.
[12] ARTHURA. COHEN(1981) The Tremendum: a theological intetpretation of the Holocaust (New York,
Crossroad), pp. 1-2.
[13] PHILIPPELACOUE-LABARTHE (1990) Heidegger, Art and Politics (Oxford, Blackwell), pp. 31-32,34-35,
127 (emphasis in the original).
[14] EMILL. FACKENHEIM (1989) To Mend the World: foundations of post-Holocaust thought (New York,
Schocken Books), pp. 181,268-269.
[15] RORTY,Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, op.cit., pp. 73-74, 86, 93, 94, 103, 198; RICHARD RORTY
(1988) The priority of democracy to philosophy, in: MERRILLD. PETERSON & ROBERTC. VAUGHAN
(Eds) The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom: its evolution and consequences in American History
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), p. 269.
[16] RORTY,Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, op. cit., pp. 87, 91, 92, 173, 177.
 Genocide and Philosophy 17

[17] HAMPSHIRE, op. cit., pp. 106, 107.

[18] RORTY,Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, op. cit., pp. 53, 84-85, 196; The priority of democracy to
philosophy, op. cit., pp. 267, 269.
[19] RORTY,Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, op. cit., pp. 63 note 21, 173, 184-185; RICHARD RORTY
(1985) Solidarity or objectivity?, in: JOHNRAJCHMAN & CORNELL WEST(Eds) Post-analytic Philosophy
(New York, Columbia University Press), p. 14.
[20] DAVIDAARON et al. (1990) An open letter on anti-Armenian pogroms in the Soviet Union, New York
Revieno of Books, 37(14), 27 September, p. 66. See also A Crime of Silence: the Armenian genocide: the
permanent peoples’ m’bunal (1985) (London, Zed Books), pp. 234-236; JACQUES DERRIDA (1985-1986)
Racism’s last word, Critical Inquiry, 12, pp. 291, 293-294, 295, 298. For a critique by Ferry of Derrida
on Heidegger, see Luc FERRY & ALAIN RENAUT(1990) Heidegger and Modernity (Chicago, University
of Chicago Press), pp. 43-54.
[21] RICHARDRORTY(1983) Postmodernist bourgeois liberalism, Journal of Philosophy, 80, p. 589;
Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, op. cit., pp. 50, 53, 54, 57, 76, 80.
[22] RORTY,Solidarity or objectivity?, op. cit., pp. 5-6.
[23] Ibid., pp. 11-12, 13, 18 note 13; The priority of democracy to philosophy, op. cit., pp. 266-267.
[24] RORTY,Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, op. cit., pp. 64 note 24, 189, 190, 191-192, 196, 198.
[25] RORTY,Postmodernist bourgeois liberalism, op. cit., p. 588 (emphasis in the original).
[26] ALWINDIEMERet al. (1986) Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights (Paris, UNESCO).
[27] WARREN K. THOMPSON (1988) Ethics, evil and the Final Solution, in: ALAN ROSENBERG & GERALDE.
MYERS(Eds) Echoesfrom the Holocaust: philosophical rejections on a dark time (Philadelphia, Temple
University Press), p. 181.
[28] PHILIPHALLIE(1984) Scepticism, narrative and Holocaust ethics, Philosophical Forum, 16, pp. 33-49.
[29] MARTIN GILBERT(1986) The Holocaust: the Jewish tragedy (London, Collins), p. 419.
[30] HILARYPUTNAM(1981) Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press);
HAMPSHIRE, op. cit.
[31] HAMPSHIRE, op. cit.
[32] RORTY,Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, op. cit., p. 94; Philosophy as Science, as Metaphor, and as
Politics, op. cit., pp. 28-29.
[33] ELIE WIESEL(1968) A plea for the dead, in Legends of Our Time (New York, Holt, Rinehart &
Winston); (1974) Talking and writing and keeping silent, in: FRANKLIN H. LITTELL & HUBERTG.
LOCKE(Eds) The German Church Struggle and the Holocaust (Detroit, Wayne State University Press);
(1977) The Holocaust as literary inspiration, in: Dimensions of the Holocaust (Evanston, IL, North-
western University Press); (1978) Why I Write, in: ALVINH. ROSENFELD & IRVING GREENBERG (Eds)
Confronting the Holocaust: the impact of Elie Wiesel (Bloomington, Indiana University Press).
[34] WIESEL,A plea for the dead, op. cit., pp. 190, 193-194.
[35] HARRYJ. CARGAS(1986) An interview with Elie Wiesel, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 1, p. 5. See
also RAULHILBERG(1988) I was not there, in: BERELLANG(Ed.) Writing and the Holocaust (New
York, Holmes & Meier), pp. 17-25.
[36] ALANL. BERGER(1984) Holocaust: the pedagogy of paradox, in: ISRAEL W. CHARNY (Ed.) Toward the
Understanding and Prevention of Genocide: Proceedings of the International Confuence on the Holocaust
and Genocide (Boulder, CO, Westview Press), pp. 265-277; ZYGMUNT BAUMAN (1989) Modernity and
Holocaust (Oxford, Polity Press).
[37] HAMPSHIRE,op. cit., pp. 46,47, 136-137; RORTY,Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, op. cit., p. 69.
[38] BAUMAN,op. cit.; RICHARDL. RUBENSTEIN (1985) The Cunning of History: the Holocaust and the
American future (New York, Harper Colophon Books); STEVENT . KATZ (1988) Technology and
genocide: technology as a ‘form of life’, in: ROSENBERG & MYERS,op. cit., p. 278.
[39] ROBERT JAYLIFTON (1986) The Nazi Doctors (London, Macmillan); MAXWEINREICH (1946) Hitlm’s
Professors (New York, Yivo); BAUMAN, op. cit.
[40] COHEN,op. cit., pp. 8,16-17; EMILL. FACKENHEIM (1968) Quest for Past and Future: essays in Jewish
theologv (Bloomington, Indiana University Press), p. 18; (1985) The Holocaust and philosophy,
Journal of Philosophy, 82, pp. 505-515; (1986) Concerning authentic and unauthentic responses to the
Holocaust, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 1, pp. 101-120; ELIEWIESEL(1985) How does one write?,
in: IRVINGABRAHAMSON (Ed.) The Voice and Vision of Elie Wiesel (New York, Holocaust Library);
FRANKLIN H. LITTELL (1975) The Crucifucion of the Jews (New York, Harper & Row), p. 16.
[41] BAUMAN, op. kit.
[42] Ibid.
[43] Ibid.