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The Cunning of History
by Richard L. Rubenstein (Introduction: William Styron)
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Harper Perennial (1987-09-15)
ISBN: 0061320684
EAN: 9780061320682
Dewy Decimal #: 940
Paperback: 128 pages
Release Date: 1987-08-03
SKU: 08020147
Condition: Very Good As issued
Comments: Trade Paperback. Very Good condition with some underlines in text. No creases to spine or cover. Minor wear to cover. Tight binding and clean crisp text. Very Nice copy.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Richard Rubenstein writes of the holocaust, why it happened, why it happened when it did, and why it may happen again and again.
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Customer Reviews
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Poles, Like Jews, Recognized as Victims of Genocide
Rating  (5)
Date: 2006-09-02
13 out of 13 customers found this reveiw helpful
In 1944, Polish Jew Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide, applying it to Jews and Poles alike. In this small but thought-provoking book, Richard L. Rubenstein approaches the German Nazi exterminationist policies in much the same vein, while stressing the role of the modern state bureaucracy to make it possible.
Probably the first step in genocide is the denial of the humanity of the intended victims: "Once the victim is categorized as belonging to a different species, the task of transforming him into a thing is immensely simplified...Before the Nazis assaulted the Jews, the Poles, the Russians, and the Gypsies, they were categorized as members of sub-human races."(p. 54). Terms such as Tiermenschen ("animal people") and Untermenschen ("subhumans") were commonly used. Rubenstein (p. 83) points out that Jews were often referred to as "a surplus population", but not the fact that the Germans also used this term for Poles.
The denationalization of those intended for genocide was also significant: "Unfortunately, the Nazis clearly understood the importance of the question of statelessness. When they began to deport Jews from such occupied nations as France, Bulgaria, and Hungary, they insisted that the deportees be stripped of their citizenship by their respective governments no later than the day of deportation. There was no need to denationalize Polish and Russian Jews because the Nazis had destroyed the state apparatus as soon as they occupied the territory. The absence of a state apparatus in Poland and occupied Russia was an indication of the ultimate fate of the Poles and the Russians had the Germans won."(pp. 32-33).
While the mass shootings and gassings of Jews were already well underway, the Germans set their sights higher. Rubenstein cites an October 13, 1942 letter by Otto Thierack, the German minister of justice: "With a view of freeing the German people of Poles, Russians, Jews, and Gypsies, and with a view to making the eastern territories which have been incorporated into the Reich available for settlement by German nationals, I intend to turn over criminal jurisdiction over Poles, Russians, Jews and Gypsies to the Reichsfuhrer-SS (Himmler). In doing so, I stand on the principle that the administration of justice can make only a small contribution to the extermination of these peoples." (p. 34). Richard L. Rubenstein comments: "Soviet domination of Eastern Europe was closer to that of a classical tyranny than was the German occupation. The German aims were far more radical. They sought to create a society of total domination involving initially the enslavement and extermination of the Jews and eventually similar treatment to other subject peoples. They were determined to clear a Lebensraum, a living space, for German settlement."(p. 76).
Of course, owing at least in part to the much greater numbers of Poles than Jews, and despite the fact that 2-3 million Polish gentiles (including half of all educated Poles) were murdered before the Germans before the latter were finally driven out of Poland, the overall extermination of the Poles was more of a long-term German project. In this regard, practical methods of mass sterilization were actively being developed (p. 49), with the 3 million Russian POWs to be the first large-scale victims (p. 50). The Nazi goal was clear: "As we have noted, had the Germans won the war, mass sterilization would have been an important aspect of their program for the subject peoples. It must be remembered that with both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks, victory inevitably led to an intensification rather than a diminution of terror. Mass sterilizations of Poles, Russians and, in the more distance future, the French and the Italians, would have permitted the Germans to exploit the vanquished at their own convenience in the certain knowledge that the subject peoples' national existence was at an end. Whether extermination or killing was the means of securing absolute dominance or whether a certain number of the vanquished might be permitted to reproduce in exactly calculable quantities would have depended solely on the requirements of the German masters. The victims would have had as little control over their own destiny as cattle in a stockyard. In a society of total domination, helots could be killed, bred, or sterilized at will."(p. 52).
Richard L. Rubenstein also picks up where scholars such as Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Trunk left off in discussing the role of the Judenrate (the Jewish community councils) and its central role in the Nazi extermination of Jews (p. 3). Although the degree of Judenrate-German collaboration differed from place to place, the reader may be stunned by the degree to which the collaborationist actions of some Judenrate eliminated the need for large numbers of Germans and non-Jewish collaborators in the roundup of Jews for extermination: "In almost all of the killing operations, the German personnel were short-handed. It is estimated that only fifty SS personnel and 200 Lett and Ukrainian auxiliaries were assigned to the Warsaw Ghetto which hade a population of five hundred thousand at its peak, almost all of whom perished."(pp. 74-75).
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Everyone should read this short but important book/essay
Rating (5)
Date: 2006-03-04
2 out of 8 customers found this reveiw helpful
If you doubt his premise, think about World War I. The leaders of the nations of Europe and the US put their male citizens into soldier's uniforms, lined them up in close proximity to one another to dig trenches, ordered them into the trenches, and then gassed them. It was an extermination experiment. It's time we all woke up to the global death machine and its propaganda. Also read How the World Really Works.
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History as Learning
Rating  (4)
Date: 2006-02-25
4 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
Few incidents have exposed man's inhumanity to man like the Holocaust. Richard Rubenstein in his pamphlet "The Cunning of History," attempts to demystify the Holocaust to show it as not only an event that happened, but also as one capable of happening, again.
Rubenstein establishes a linkage between the Reformation and the concentration camps. He asserts that the contemporary culture of death was the apex of ideas forged way back to Martin Luther's schism from the Catholic church. He establishes that without the active collusion of business interests, a docile citizenry and the military, the extermination of Jews might not have occurred. The complicity of Britain and America is barely treated, but the little touched on is informative.
A Century of Progress, the last chapter in the book, exposes the excesses of power as not inherent in the executive, but rather in the structure of government. To Rubenstein, an American president "can resort, if not to overt terror, at least to extralegal bureaucratic harassment to secure the compliance of the governed."
While a very good book, The Cunning tends to skip over events that could interrupt the narrative, like his definition of bureaucracy. Far from being a mindset unique to Nazi Germany, the rationalization and disenchantment of the natural existed since the Enlightenment. The Nazis set up concentration camps not because of bureaucracy, but because there was economic incentive. Rubenstein also posits that men have no natural rights - A dreadful propostion considering that if rights are granted by the state, those rights can be taken away. (A point he had repeatedly emphasized.)
Notwithstanding these kinks, The Cunning of History is a stimulating book with much to tell us about our past, as well as our future.
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Professor Rubenstein was my most fascinating and challenging
Rating (5)
Date: 2005-03-09
5 out of 7 customers found this reveiw helpful
Professor Rubenstein was my most fascinating and challenging professor at FSU during the 1970s. His range of intellectual inquiry makes him a "Renaissance" man. He has written numerous provocative and important books.
And I am re-reading the books thirty plus years later.
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Well argued and intelligent
Rating (4)
Date: 2004-06-24
14 out of 16 customers found this reveiw helpful
In this essay Richard Rubenstein contends that the Holocaust should be viewed within the context of a tradition of slavery that is deep rooted in western culture. Drawing on Max Weber, Rubenstein argues that the combination of unrestricted capitalism and protestantism helped to create the conditions necessary for the ultimate form of slavery as expressed in the Nazi death camps. Additional factors include a European trend toward viewing certain segments of a given population as expendable. The analysis is thought provoking and intelligently written. My reservation is that while I agree that viewing the holocaust in this way leads one to the conclusion that under the right circumstances genocide on this scale could happen again , I also believe that there was something uniquely evil in the Nazi leadership that contributed to the Holocaust. Rubenstein's analysis focused on historical/economic/social forces at the expense of the personal responsibilty of Hitler and his inner circle. Despite that this is an important book that should be mandatory reading in any study of the Holocaust.
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