A reader has pointed out a spirited and astute review by David Rieff of Daniel Goldhagen's Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (PublicAffairs, 2009).
Rieff comments that -
It is hard to believe that the erstwhile–Harvard political scientist turned full-time moralist, pro-Israel polemicist and amateur historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen could have a more devoted admirer than, well, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. In his first book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, he stated baldly that explaining why the Holocaust occurred required a radical revision of “what has until now been written” and that his book was that revision. His next effort, A Moral Reckoning, claimed to expose the malign role of the Catholic Church not only during the Holocaust but pretty much from its inception, since, according to Goldhagen, the Church had been the central locus of Western anti-Semitism almost from its founding.Rieff notes that -
Having, by his own lights, first single-handedly rebutted what he called the "false paradigm" about the Holocaust, replaced its mendacities with his true rendering, before finally unmasking the Catholic Church and its clergy’s enormous “crimes and transgressions,” the historical contours of which, he has said, "no one can rightly deny", Goldhagen has now written Worse Than War, a book whose modest goal is to "reconceptualize, understand anew, interpret differently, explain adequately, and to propose workable responses to [the] catastrophic and systematic problem of eliminationism".
And on the seventh day, He rested.
Worse Than War is, depending on your point of view, either the logical conclusion of the path Goldhagen has been taking for the past fifteen years or its reductio ad absurdum. Despite Goldhagen’s extraordinary claims, he himself concedes in his unwittingly revealing afterword that he is not presenting much in the way of original research. That, however, is just fine with him since, as he puts it, the book "is not meant to be an exhaustive documentation of any individual mass murderer, let alone a history of our time’s sweep of mass murders, let alone eliminations".
Why his decision to write books that, to use a self-description he employed at the time of the publication of A Moral Reckoning in 2003, are "primarily about morality, not history", while simultaneously claiming for himself the authority to denounce or condescend to (condescension being a Goldhagen trope) the work of many of the finest historians working today should be just fine with us is another subject matter.
This pattern began with Hitler's Willing Executioners, where, when he wasn’t busy laying down the moral law, Goldhagen was largely arguing against the historiographical consensus about the Holocaust (the great Holocaust scholar, Raul Hilberg, drew his particular scorn). If he had an essentialist view of German history from the early nineteenth century to the fall of Berlin in 1945 (that essence, broadly speaking, being what he calls eliminationist anti-Semitism), Goldhagen felt equally confident in his ability to discern and lavishly praise the moral regeneration of the post-Nazi German state and society.Further -
The problem, whether when he was doling out praise or blame, as the historian of Nazism Christopher Browning (Goldhagen's bête noire in Hitler’s Willing Executioners) pointed out more than a decade ago, is that Goldhagen has shown a tendency in his work to claim to be blazing new trails in understanding when, in reality, his own views are not so far as he imagines from the conventional wisdom he so excoriates and about which he claims to be writing to correct and reform.
Worse Than War has some of this same reinvent-the-wheel quality to it. In fact, while Worse Than War is both long and turgid, it is rather less of an accomplishment than either its length or Goldhagen's claims for the work might lead the reader to assume.And on it goes.
As with his analysis of what he called German eliminationist anti-Semitism in Hitler's Willing Executioners and the Catholic Church's systemic culpability in A Moral Reckoning, in Worse Than War, Goldhagen again makes the sweeping claim that pretty much every government, institution and even most individuals have been unwilling to face the problem of genocide forthrightly and, more crucially, to understand its real nature. Enter Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, explanatory key and, in this case, institutional responses and policy solutions in hand. The man really does give self-love a bad name.
If Goldhagen was grandiose in his earlier books, the terms of reference he lays down in "The Choice", the stentorian title of his preface to Worse Than War, make his previous claims seem paltry by comparison ....
Unsurprisingly, in his own eyes he has succeeded brilliantly. In an afterword entitled "Thoughts and Thanks" — which is part self-promotion, part the conventional contemporary writer's boilerplate (thanks to nearest, dearest publishers, agents and institutions), and part childish score settling with critics and academic specialists with whom he has crossed swords in the past — Goldhagen claims to have "substantially recast our understanding of the phenomenon".
