The fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War should be less an occasion for patriotic commemorations than for serious reflection on the moral and historical meaning of certain events of this war, which seriously call into question the very nature of modern civilization. The opposition between civilization and barbarism is very old. It found a new claim to legitimacy in the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and will be the lasting heritage of the socialist left. Even a revolutionary like Rosa Luxemburg, at the moment when she coined her slogan “socialism or barbarism,” considered the “relapse into barbarism” to be the “decline and fall of civilization,” a decadence like unto that of ancient Rome.(1)
Walter Benjamin was one of the few Marxist thinkers who was able to see that technical and industrial progress could be the bearers of unprecedented catastrophe. Whence his pessimism—not fatalist, but active and revolutionary. In a 1929 article he defined revolutionary politics as “the organization of pessimism,”(2) a thoroughgoing pessimism: scepticism regarding the future of liberty, doubt as to the destiny of the European people. And, he would add ironically, “only limited confidence in I.G. Farben and the peaceful development of the Luftwaffe.” But even Benjamin, pessimistic as he was, could not foresee the limits to which these two institutions would go a few years later, the malevolent and destructive capacity of modernity. (Bear in mind that the huge chemical trust I.G. Farben not only used massive numbers of slave laborers at Auschwitz but also produced the Zyklon B gas that was used to exterminate them.
Auschwitz was representative of modernity not only in the structure of its death factory, scientifically organized and armed with techniques at the forefront of efficacy. The genocide of the Jews and the Gypsies was also, as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman observed, a typical product of the rational bureaucratic culture, which eliminates all moral interference from the process of administration. It was, from this point of view, one of the possible results of the civilizing process, in part the rationalization and centralization of violence, in part the social production of moral indifference.(3)
Hiroshima was evidently different from Auschwitz. The objective of the atomic bomb was not the extermination of the Japanese population as an end in itself. It was rather a question of hastening the end of the war and of demonstrating U.S. military supremacy over the Soviet Union. To achieve this policy objective, the most advanced science and technology was employed and several hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians—men, women, and children—were massacred, not to mention that future generations were contaminated by nuclear radiation. But the Americans who directed the project were themselves conscious of the parallel with the crimes of the Nazis. In a conversation with Truman on June 6, 1945, Secretary of State Stimson made plain his sentiments: “I told him I was anxious about this feature of the war ... because the United States gained the reputation of surpassing Hitler in atrocity.”(4)
The contradictory nature of “progress” and “civilization” lie at the heart of the reflections of the Frankfurt School. In The Dialectic of Reason, Adorno and Horkheimer established the tendency of instrumental rationality to transform itself into murderous folly: the “frozen light” of calculating reason “arouses these men of barbarism.” Adorno uses the expression “regressive progress” to try to comprehend the paradoxical nature of modern civilization.(5)
Nonetheless, these expressions are tributaries in spite of themselves to the philosophy of progress. In truth, Auschwitz and Hiroshima do not in any sense comprise a “regression to barbarism,” or even a regression of any sort: there is nothing in the past that is comparable to the industrially produced, scientific, anonymous, and rationally administered murder of our epoch. It is sufficient to compare Auschwitz and Hiroshima to the military practices of the fourth century A.D. to understand that they have nothing in common: the difference is one not simply of scale, but of nature. Mass atrocities technologically perfected and bureaucratically organized belong uniquely to our advanced industrial civilization. Auschwitz and Hiroshima are not “a return to barbalism,” they are irremediably and exclusively modern.
NOTES
(1.) The Crisis of German Social Democracy, The Junius Pamphlet: Part I, 1915.
(2.) Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism. The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia”.
(3.) See Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, (London: Polity Press, 1989), pp. 15, 28.
(4.) Cited by Barton Bernstein in Foreign Affairs, February 1995, after the historical archives were opened to the public.
(5.) T.W. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklarung original edition. (New York: 1944) and T.W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life translated by E.F. Jephcott (Germany: Routledge Chapman Hall, 1985)