"The West is a vast testimony to childhood botched to serve its own
purposes, where history, masquerading as myth, authorizes men of action
and men of thought to alter the world to match their regressive moods of
omnipotence and insecurity. The modern West selectively perpetuates
these psychopathic elements. In the captivity and enslavement of plants
and animals and the humanization of the landscape itself is the
diminishment of the Other, against which men must define themselves, a
diminishment of schizoid confusion in self-identity. From the epoch of
Judeo-Christian emergence is an abiding hostility to the natural world,
characteristically fearful and paranoid. The sixteenth-century fixation
on the impurity of the body and the comparative tidiness of the machine
are strongly obsessive-compulsive. These all persist and interact in a
tapestry of chronic madness in the industrial present, countered by
dreams of absolute control and infinite possession."
-Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness, 1998, page 126–27."A combination of a slaughterhouse, a bordello, and an insane asylum- that's what the world really was."
-Isaac Bashevis Singer"The insight that governmental practices reserved for the most oppressed are eventually generalized to the entire population."
-Giorgio Agamben, No to Biopolitical tattooing, Le Monde, January 10, 2004."Ideational
processes that by their own inner logic may lead to genocidal projects,
and the technical resources that permit implementation of such
projects, not only have been proved fully compatible with modern
civilization, but have been conditioned, created and supplied by it...It
was these norms and institutions that made the Holocaust feasible...All
those intricate networks of checks and balances, barriers and hurdles
which the civilizing process has erected and which, as we hope and
trust, would defend us from violence and constrain all over ambitious
and unscrupulous powers, have been proven ineffective.
When it came to mass murder, the victims found themselves alone.
Not only had they been fooled by an apparently peaceful and humane,
legalistic and orderly society- their sense of security became a most
powerful factor in their downfall. To put it bluntly, there are reasons
to be worried because we know now that
we live in a type of society
that made the Holocaust possible, and that contained nothing which could
stop the Holocaust from happening."
-Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 1989, page 87-88.
"There
are no ultimate institutional safegaurds available for insuring that
emergency powers be used for the purpose of preserving the constitution.
Only the people's own determination to see them so used can make sure
of that...All in all the quasi-dictatorial provisions of modern
constitutional systems, be they martial rule, state of seige, or
constitutional emergency powers, fail to conform to any exacting
standard of effective limitations upon temporary concentration of
powers. Consequently, all these systems are liable to be transformed
into totalitarian schemes if conditions become favorable to it."
-Carl J. Friedrich, Constitutional Government and Democracy, 1941, page 584.Seltzer, W., & Anderson, M. (2001).
The dark side of numbers: The role of population data systems in human rights abuses. Social Research, 481-513.
Luebke, D. M., & Milton, S. (1994).
Locating the victim: An overview of census-taking, tabulation technology, and persecution in Nazi Germany. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 16(3), 25-39.
Nazi persecution of racial victim groups presupposed not only precise legal definitions and close cooperation among multiple governmental agencies, but also sophisticated technical procedures for locating those groups according to complex age, occupational, and racial criteria. This article shows how a variety
of administrative tools - including two national censuses, a system of
resident registration, and several special racial databases - were used
to locate groups eventually slated for deportation and death, as well as
the possible role played in this process by Hollerith tabulation
technology. Patterns in the expulsion of Jews from Germany suggest that aggregate census data
may have been used to guide this process as well. The precise role
played by punched-card tabulation technology remains a matter of
speculation. However, it is certain that as early as 1933, Nazi
officials and statisticians envisioned a future in which the racial
characteristics and vital statistics of every resident would be monitored through tabulation technology in a system of comprehensive surveillance.
While the' "final solution" was in no sense caused by the availability
of sophisticated census-taking and tabulation technologies, concrete
evidence suggests that Hollerith machines rationalized the management of concentration camp labor, an important element in the Nazi program of "extermination through work."
Aly, G., & Roth, K. H. (2004).
The Nazi census: Identification and control in the Third Reich. Temple University Press.
It
was simply not the custom to carry identification within the borders of
the Reich. Such a state of affairs between state and citizen-
unimaginable to us today- was taken for granted to such an extent that
the Nazis felt it necessary to implement their program very slowly, step
by step. They were forced to build their system piecemeal over the
course of ten years, eventually cobbling together an increasingly secure
network of registration laws, mandatory identification cards, censuses,
and the like. It was only in the last phase of the war that they
could begin to conceive of a unified system of registration- at which
point they had also reached the limits of their technological know-how.
At that point they could no longer handle the amount of incoming data- but these are "problems" that have been solved in our day. Seltzer, W. (1998).
Population statistics, the Holocaust, and the Nuremberg trials. Population and Development Review, 511-552.
Urekew, R. (2002).
Justice Delayed: IBM's Collaboration with Nazi Germany. HARV. INT'L REV., 23, 84-84.
Black, E., & Wallace, B. (2001). IBM and the Holocaust: The strategic alliance between Nazi Germany and America's most powerful corporation. New York: Crown Publishers.
Lösener, B., & Schleunes, K. A. (2001). Legislating the Holocaust: the Bernhard Loesener memoirs and supporting documents. Westview Press.
"The
Nazis had cunningly applied the assembly-line techniques of the
Industrial Revolution to the Final Solution; everything was engineered
with maximum, but entirely dehumanized efficiency."
-Judy Chicago"Systematic extermination, as opposed to sporadic pogroms, could be carried out only by extremely powerful government, and
probably could have succeeded only under the cover of wartime conditions."
-Sarah Gordon, Hitler, Germans, and the 'Jewish Question', 1984, page 48.
Rummel, R. J. (1994).
Death by government: genocide and mass murder in the twentieth century. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
Harff, B. (2003).
No lessons learned from the Holocaust? Assessing risks of genocide and political mass murder since 1955. American Political Science Review, 97(01), 57-73.
