MODERN BARBARISM

On the 60th Anniversary of Auschwitz and Hiroshima

By Michael Loewy

[This article published in: SoZ-Sozialistische Zeitung, 5/24/2005 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web,  http://www.linksnet.de/artikel.php?id=1703.]


The 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War should be an occasion for serious reflection on the moral and historical significance of certain events in this war that put the core of modern civilization in question. It should be more than an opportunity for patriotic remembrance.

The opposition between civilization and barbarism is ancient. In the philosophy of the enlightenment, it finds a new justification that is inherited by the socialist left. In her call “Socialism or Barbarism,” a revolutionary like Rosa Luxemburg understood the “relapse into barbarism” as “destruction of civilization” – a downfall analogous to ancient Rome.

Walter Benjamin was one of the few Marxist thinkers who had a premonition that technical and industrial progress could be an unparalleled catastrophe. His pessimism was active and revolutionary, not fatalistic. In an article from 1929, he defined revolutionary politics as “organizing pessimism,” a pessimism right down the line: distrust in the fate of freedom, mistrust in the destiny of European humanity and “absolute trust in German industry and the peaceful perfection of the air force”, he added ironically. However not even Benjamin the most pessimistic of all could suspect how much these two institutions could show the sinister and destructive potential of the modern age a few years later.

Auschwitz represents the modern age, not only on account of its structure as a scientifically organized death factory using the most efficient technologies. As the sociologist Zygmunt Baumann observed, the genocide of Jews and gypsies is also a typical product of the rationality of bureaucracy that eliminates every intrusion of morality in administrative actions. From this standpoint, it is one of the possible results of the civilization process: rationalization and centralization of authority and social production of moral indifference.

Hiroshima reveals blatant differences to Auschwitz. The goal of the atomic bomb was not the extinction of the Japanese population. Rather it involved accelerating the end of the war and demonstrating the military superiority of the US over the Soviet Union. The most advanced science and technology were applied to each these political goals. Several hundred thousand innocent civilians, men, women and children were massacred, not to mention the contamination of future generations through the nuclear radiation.
The American leader Secretary of State Stinson was conscious of the parallels with Nazi crimes. In a talk with President Truman on June 6, 1945, he admitted his uneasiness: “I told him that I was alarmed about this aspect of the war… I did not want the US to win the reputation of surpassing Hitler in the atrocity of crimes” (Foreign Affairs, February 1995).

The contradictory character of “progress” and “civilization” in the modern age was at the heart of reflections of the Frankfurt school. In the Dialectic of the Enlightenment (1944), Adorno and Horkheimer diagnosed that instrumental reason has the tendency to become a murderous delusion under the frosty sun.

Rays of calculating reason ripen “the seed of new barbarism.” In one of his notes on Minima Moralia from 1945, Adorno used the term “regressive progress” to express the paradoxical nature of modern civilization.

Despite everything, these formulations breathe the spirit of the philosophy of progress. In reality, Auschwitz and Hiroshima were not “regressions in barbarism” or “regressions.” Nothing in the past is comparable with the industrial, scientifically anonymous and rationally administered production of death of our time. Comparing Auschwitz and Hiroshima with the practices of barbaric tribal warriors in the 4th century shows they have nothing to do with each other. The difference is fundamental, not only of degree.

The technologically perfect, bureaucratically organized mass slaughters are part of our progressive civilization. Auschwitz and Hiroshima are not expressions of “modern barbarism.” They are past recovery and exclusively modern crimes. This alarming conclusion must stimulate reflection and action before it is too late.