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Holocaust as a Global Disastrous Event

The unimaginable horror that has a myriad of atrocities has been an unprecedented event in the history of civilization. The world, though, allowed genocide behavior to occur prior to the Holocaust, such as the Turkish atrocities against the Armenians in 1915 and the way America treated the Native American population, but never before had an entire population being marked for death just because of their origin (Fischel, 1998, xxix). Such a feature of the Jewish history refers to the ideology of the Nazi movement, which will be proven in this paper as not limited to the German politics and led to such disasters as war and genocide, but also being a response from a social and political practice. It was a response from the nature, encrypted in the domination between ideology and human intervention.

There is no doubt that the Holocaust fulfils the criteria of being a phenomenon that has disrupted social, economic, and political practices of the human nature anthropology. It is also subjected and is capable of referring to the change in disaster approach presented by Hewitt, according to which disaster is the collapse of the productive units that captures the social order (Oliver-Smith, 2001, 43). Vulnerability is the key feature of disaster that defines the multidimensional nature of the Holocaust. Holocaust to the popular culture has framed peoples’ perception of historical subject as a matter of jeopardy (Schweber, 2006). Therefore, the acceptability of this disaster on a broad spectrum in the larger culture has permeated the contemporary culture to pose the challenge of orienting society to take it seriously. To many of us, the disaster has reached the threshold of limiting the power to know the historical events that must be faced. That is, according to Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, we are bound to place this global disaster in the contrasting category where it seems more like a cultural incident rather than a natural one. Contemporary thoughts on this event place it in the subjective realms of explaining historical events and assigning causal meaning to previous ones. Instead of placing it in the context of human-nature relationships, historians have tried to highlight the dilemma as a negative incident that has disrupted the image of the Jews in German and European culture (Rosenberg & Myers, 1988, 6). This way it has more often witnessed as the destroying of culture and has gained and assigned causal significance in the evolution of historical significance. Even to numerous communication scholars, the disaster served as a metaphor that encouraged looking into the problematic aspect of cultural constraints (Hasian, 2002). Therefore, scholars who evaluate the veracity of competing the Holocaust memories termed the disaster as a “rhetorical culture” (Condit & Lucaites, 1993, xiv). However, it is important to recognize that nature has been prevalent in the connection between culture and the Holocaust, as it allows human beings to enter, change, control, and utilize the perceptions of cultural self utilization (Oliver-Smith, 2001). That clearly indicates that culture is manufactured and, since nature allows human beings authority to some extent, this refers to the notion that human nature dominates and even interacts between social and natural features.

An example of this stance is that Judaism gives birth to Christianity and their connection has been the single most significant fact in defining the relationship between the Jews and the Christians. This relationship is the answer to the social construction of human environments that evoke the positive and negative practices of social relations systems. In fact, it would be better to claim that such effects that are raised by human environments are the consequences that emerge as dominant constructions of vulnerability. The above-mentioned aspect of the Holocaust fulfilled environmental perspective of disasters. If we talk about the Holocaust as a historical event, it can be concluded that the Holocaust reflected the social domination that never occurred out of context, but was already embedded in the political structure, economic system, and social order, basing upon a religious theology, a religious domination (Bankoff, 2003).

Jewish culture was always there; therefore, it is hard to blame this culture as it affected the beliefs and behavior patterns of individuals caught in the Holocaust. When diffused within the various forms of host cultures where Jews lived, the effects of Jewish culture took varied forms. But throughout thousands of years of Jewish culture could not stop the permeation of religious convictions and traditions that later allowed to blame the passions of secular Jews. Thus, it is better to blame human redemption in interrupting physical, national, and international settings than to blame any religious theology.

The Holocaust memories and expressions of humanitarian sympathy are the result of predication built on the presupposition that the disasters of the Holocaust could be blamed on human beings, rather the secular Jews or the Christian forces (Kwiet & Matthaus, 2004). Globally, the Nazi glorification of the state, the excessive nationalism and racism of large segments of the German population, and the sinister impact of global anti-Semitism are all evidences of the apostasy of nature. Alternatively, we can say that they are the permissions that nature allowed to the modern man. These permissions that man used against humanity defamed nature and attempted to become a culture. Such a cultural discrepancy remembered as a disaster, as Finkelstein (2000) suggests, is not an arbitrary but rather an internally coherent construct, the central dogmas of which sustain significant political and class interests (Finkelstein, 2000). Thus, the Holocaust has proven to be a critical ideology of destruction, based on war, human rights negligence and total absence of humanity.

That suggests such weapons have put the contemporary society at-risk state where many of the domestic sources of the Holocaust industry interpret the disaster as emergence of identity politics and the culture of victimization. In between the two lies the ethnic identity of the Holocaust that cannot be seen as a detached event. However, the processes inherent in this global disastrous event of modernization serve as the application of rational principles to all fields of human endeavour. From
secularization of religious influences on society and culture to the sense of betrayal to nature, this event has remained vulnerable to define policies that called for their segregation, expulsion, or extermination (Markusen & Kopf, 1995). Risks, war and genocide made the basis of the Holocaust ideology, which revealed the Holocaust rotten essence. There were even risks involved in the probability of offending many people by staining the memory of the courageous aircrews and by insulting the feelings of the Holocaust survivors and scholars. It was risk that created the term genocide to broaden its scope to include additional cases of deliberate mass killing.

Historians believe that the solution to the destruction of European Jewry was not mass extermination and there was thus skepticism about the scope of the disaster. Thus, the final solution emerged as a process that dealt with the economic phase of the finale that followed upon other solutions by forcing emigration and concentration that was already close to physical extermination (Feldman, 2007). The disaster was escorted by the struggle headed by the Nazi-appointed Jewish Councils in the ghettos to maintain appearance of normal life, which praised the vitality of the incarcerated Jews who carried on social, cultural and religious activities regardless of their suffering. But upon the final slaughter, they yield with a quit metaphor of resignation which typified the Jewish reaction to persecution from medieval times (Cesarani, 1996). Western social thought believes that Jews were simply betrayed by the Nazis and were naturally unable to comprehend something unprecedented and so evil. Moreover, the universalistic basis of liberalism made it difficult to see or treat Jews as a special case in which the ideology was determined by adopting the approach of winning the war.

Few historians will today deny the broad popular consensus behind the National-Socialist regime and its policies that became a significant part of the Holocaust. Although coercion and terror always loomed in but the majority very soon identified the new trends of global migration with the new regime. In this process, the government’s early economic and political achievements were on priority and ousted ideological factors. On the way to recovery, Jewish enterprises were progressively isolated as more and more Jews worked with and for other Jews. Jewish workers and employees were not only deprived of any benefits but were soon dismissed from larger, even Jewish-owned enterprises (Cesarani, 1996). The Jews’ social isolation was the ultimate answer to the disaster that escorted the world to plunge into visualizing the catastrophe.

References

Bankoff, G., 2003. Cultures of disaster: society and natural hazards in the Philippines. New York, NY: Taylor & Francis.

Cesarani, D., 1996. The final solution: origins and implementation. New York, NY: Routledge.

Condit, C. M., & Lucaites, J. L. 1993. Crafting equality: America’s Anglo-African word. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Feldman, D. G., 2007. The economics of the final solution. The Australian Journal of Politics and History, 5 (1), p. 57.

Finkelstein, G. N., 2000. The Holocaust industry: reflections on the exploitation of Jewish suffering. London, UK: Verso.

Fischel, R. J., 1998. The Holocaust. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Hasian, M. Jr., 2002. Holocaust denial debates: the symbolic significance of Irving V. Penguin & Lipstadt. Communication Studies, 53 (2), p. 129.

Kwiet, K. & Matthaus, J., 2004. Contemporary responses to the Holocaust. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Markusen, E. & Kopf, D., 1995. The Holocaust and strategic bombing: genocide and total war in the twentieth century. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Oliver-Smith, A. & Hoffman, S., 2002. Theorizing disasters: nature, power and culture. Catastrophe and culture: the anthropology of disaster. Santa Fe, NM: The School of American Research, pp. 23-47.

Rosenberg, A, & Myers, E. G., 1988. Echoes from the Holocaust: philosophical reflections on a dark time. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Schweber, S., 2006. Holocaust fatigue in teaching today. Social Education, 70 (1), p. 44.