A recent post featured the evolution of the thought of Zygmunt Bauman. There I mentioned a comparison with his Warsaw contemporary, Leszek Kołakowski, and suggested that Kołakowski's break with Stalinism was earlier and more profound than Bauman's. I am not able to find a full-length biography of Kołakowski, but his history parallels that of Bauman. …
How Bauman became Bauman
Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) was an influential voice in the world of sociological theorizing. In the second part of his career -- following his expulsion as a dissident and a Jew from Poland in 1968 -- he came to be recognized as a non-conventional thinker about "modernity" and the modern world. His idea of "liquid modernity" …
The Holocaust “comparability” debate
The question of how to understand the Holocaust has troubled historians since the first knowledge of the war of extermination against the Jews of Europe became widespread in the 1940s. Is the Holocaust unique in human history? Can the crimes of the Holocaust be compared to other periods of genocide in the twentieth century? Is …
Experiencing war, genocide, and totalitarianism (Tony Judt)
photo: Manès Sperber Tony Judt's historical writings about the twentieth century are brilliant, and highly relevant to the research I'm pursuing on the evils of the twentieth century. His book of essays, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, is a valuable part of this corpus. Most of the chapters take the form of discussions …
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Multinational corporate accountability and control during the Nazi period
In a previous post I considered the question of the culpability of multinational corporations with affiliates in wartime Nazi Germany (link). There I discussed a number of books that address this question, including Billstein, Fings, Kugler, and Levis' very important 2000 contribution, Working for the Enemy: Ford, General Motors, and Forced Labor in Germany during the …
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Forced labor and multinational corporations
What role did American multinational auto companies play in the rearmament of Germany during the early period of Nazi rule? And to what extent did these companies participate in Nazi practices like forced (slave) labor and Aryanization for which they should have been held morally responsible? An early discussion of the responsibility of American corporations …
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Corporations and the Nazi regime
It is apparent, 90 years after the beginnings of the Nazi period, that large corporations played an important and lamentable role in Nazi power and administration, and the implementation of the atrocities of slave labor and mass murder. This is true for domestic German industries, like I.G. Farben and Siemens; and it appears to be …
LaCapra on history, memory, and the Holocaust
Child's drawing from barracks wall in Auschwitz Dominick LaCapra's History and Memory after Auschwitz (1998) is an important contribution to the topic of "history's responsibility in front of the Holocaust". His aim in this book, and elsewhere in many of his other writings, is to express his "conception of the relations among history, memory, ethics, and politics" …
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Organizational evil
image: IG Farben headquarters A number of posts have confronted the historical realities of atrocities, genocide, and cruelty on a massive scale. The general question tying these discussions together has to do with individual human beings: "How could a normal human being with normal social emotions commit these atrocious acts?" And the individual question can …
Mass murder in the borderlands
The facts of mass murder in eastern Europe in the 1930s through the 1950s are simply too horrific to fully absorb. These decades include the mass killings of millions of Jewish men, women, and children by the Nazi state and military and their collaborators in territories they conquered in eastern Europe -- the Holocaust. And …
Understanding Society 