Essay, Please Read And Critique (But Not Too Harshly)

MommyZ

Wed, Jan 26 2011, 10:17 am

Ladies, here is the response that my instructor gave me to my essay.

"Excellent! Since you clearly put effort into your essay, I thought I would share my opinion with you. The Holocaust was perpetrated not by a few psychopaths but by a whole nation known for its science and culture. The Himmlers and the Eichmanns were not aberrations among the good citizens of Germany. (The exceptions were those very few who opposed the Nazis) And the Germans were not alone in happily murdering innocent men, women and children. They were enthusiastically and actively assisted by almost all the nations of Europe, the Poles, the Ukrainians, the Yugoslavs, the Hungarians and too many others to mention, not to speak of the collaborationist French, the Belgians and Norwegians. The rest of the world did not help either. When the Nazi grip was tightening over the Jews of Europe the British refused to let them into Palestine and the American refused them visas to enter the US. When the British and American governments were shown maps of the camps and railroads leading to them and begged to bomb these so as to slow down these infernal death factories the noble allies and defenders of democracy and civilization could not spare a few bombs to save a few wretched Jews. Therefore it wasn't only the nation of Goethe and Schiller who sank to the depths of depravity and abandoned any notion of human rationality and decency; the rest of the world was also guilty. The ordinary Germans who carried out the most gruesome atrocities while leading normal lives free of remorse and guilt is testimony to what Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil." It forever marked the Enlightenment belief in human goodness and in the progress of civilization as hopelessly naive. The Enlightenment belief in individual liberties and natural rights turned out to be no more than empty claptrap when confronted with the depravity of human nature. The core beliefs of Western civilization were tested, and found to be wanting."