The Holocaust’s moral categories grew more contested after consensus about the facts settled

Evidence

By comparison with its posthumous life, the reality of the Holocaust seems in retrospect simple and straightforward: certain people methodically and systematically murdered certain other people whom some other people yet had earmarked for extermination, while still other people watched – whether in despair, with indifference or with barely concealed joy – but did too little or nothing at all to stop the murder. There were evil murderers, innocent victims, and bystanders of varying degrees of evil and innocence. Except for the lunatic fringe of ‘revisionist historians’ and Nazi mourners, a broad consensus has been reached about who was who and who did what in Auschwitz. Today, however, things look much more confused. The most confused of them all is the question as to what is to be learned from the Holocaust, who is to learn it and to what effect. Today, the lines dividing evil from innocence, guilt from good reason, a clear conscience from a dirty one are anything but straight and uncontested. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 657

Categorization

• QUESTION: What exactly dissolved the evil/innocence bipolarity — historiographical revisionism, or structural understanding of complicity?
• XREF: connects to: The Holocaust question must keep its full weight and horror — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 4; After 1945 the question shifted from whether to which western nation could commit genocide — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 570; Comparing the Holocaust to postwar German expulsions broke all possibility of dialogue — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 606

Related

• The Holocaust question must keep its full weight and horror (similarity 0.87)
• All Holocaust scholarship is ultimately a debate over modernity’s self-image. (similarity 0.83)
• The Holocaust is a possibility modernity contains, not its paradigm (similarity 0.82)
• The Holocaust required neutralizing popular attitudes, not mobilizing them (similarity 0.81)
• The Holocaust’s perpetrators were ordinary educated men of their era, not deviants. (similarity 0.81)
• Both dominant readings of the Holocaust leave sociology’s theory of modernity unchallenged (similarity 0.81)
• The Holocaust must be read as integral to modernity, not as its aberration. (similarity 0.81)
• The Holocaust reveals sociology’s inadequacy more than sociology explains the Holocaust (similarity 0.80)
• Analogizing all oppression to the Holocaust is analytically counterproductive. (similarity 0.80)
• The Holocaust was a product of modern civilization, not merely its failure (similarity 0.80)
• The Holocaust rendered Western civilization itself incomprehensible, not just the event. (similarity 0.79)
• Modern civilization was a necessary but not sufficient condition of the Holocaust. (similarity 0.79)
• The commonsense antisemitism-explains-Holocaust causal link collapses under scrutiny. (similarity 0.79)
• No scientific method can adjudicate moral responsibility for the Holocaust. (similarity 0.79)
• Normalizing the Holocaust as one genocide among many also defuses its challenge to sociology (similarity 0.79)