The Obedience Alibi

1998 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
David R. Mandel
Keyword(s):  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Sense Of Obligation ◽  
Obedience To Authority

AbstractStanley Milgram’s work on obedience to authority is social psychology’s most influential contribution to theorizing about Holocaust perpetration. The gist of Milgram’s claims is that Holocaust perpetrators were just following orders out of a sense of obligation to their superiors. Milgram, however, never undertook a scholarly analysis of how his obedience experiments related to the Holocaust. The author first discusses the major theoretical limitations of Milgram’s position and then examines the implications of Milgram’s (oft-ignored) experimental manipulations for Holocaust theorizing, contrasting a specific case of Holocaust perpetration by Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police. It is concluded that Milgram’s empirical findings, in fact, do not support his position-one that essentially constitutes an obedience alibi. The article ends with a discussion of some of the social dangers of the obedience alibi.

The Roots of Stanley Milgram’s Obedience Experiments and Their Relevance to the Holocaust

1998 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Blass
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Psychologist ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Stanley Milgram ◽  
Detailed Presentation ◽  
Obedience To Authority

AbstractDrawing on archival materials, interviews, as well as published sources, this article traces the roots of one of the most important and controversial studies in the social sciences, the experiments on obedience to authority conducted by the social psychologist, Stanley Milgram. Milgram’s research had two determinants: First, his attempt to account for the Holocaust and, second, his intention to apply Solomon Asch’s technique for studying conformity to behavior of greater human consequence than judging lengths of lines-the task which was the original focus in Asch’s studies. After a detailed presentation of these antecedents of Milgram’s work, the article concludes with a brief discussion of the applicability of the obedience experiments to the behavior of the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

zy prawda nas wyzwoli? Przełamywanie oporu psychologicznego w przyjmowaniu wiedzy o Zagładzie

2014 ◽  
pp. 803-822
Author(s):  
Marta Witkowska ◽  
Piotr Forecki
Keyword(s):  
Psychological Research ◽  
Public Knowledge ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Holocaust Education ◽  
Positive Group ◽  
Nazi Occupation ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Survey Results ◽  
Social Psychological Research

The introduction of the programs on Holocaust education in Poland and a broader debate on the transgressions of Poles against the Jews have not led to desired improvement in public knowledge on these historical events. A comparison of survey results from the last two decades (Bilewicz, Winiewski, Radzik, 2012) illustrates mounting ignorance: the number of Poles who acknowledge that the highest number of victims of the Nazi occupation period was Jewish systematically decreases, while the number of those who think that the highest number of victims of the wartime period was ethnically Polish, increases. Insights from the social psychological research allow to explain the psychological foundations of this resistance to acknowledge the facts about the Holocaust, and indicate the need for positive group identity as a crucial factor preventing people from recognizing such a threatening historical information. In this paper we will provide knowledge about the ways to overcome this resistance-through-denial. Implementation of such measures could allow people to accept responsibility for the misdeeds committed by their ancestors.

The Real Culture Wars

2019 ◽  
pp. 258-279
Author(s):  
Riane Eisler
Keyword(s):  
Culture Wars ◽  
Religious Ideology ◽  
The Real ◽  
Social Scale ◽  
Family Politics ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Male Supremacy

We humans live, and all too often die, by stories, as one of the authors almost died as a child in the Holocaust. This chapter shows that the real culture wars are not between religion and secularism, East and West, or capitalism and socialism, but are within all societies, between orientation to either the partnership or domination side of the social scale. Starting with the two different biblical stories about the creation of humanity—the famous tale where Eve is an afterthought responsible for all our ills, and the earlier story where both men and women are created equal—is a contrast in normative narratives that support domination or partnership. Covering a wide swath of prehistory and history, this contrast offers fascinating new insights: for example, how Western science came out of a hierarchical, conformist, misogynist, all-male medieval clerical culture (a world without women and children) and how it took more than 700 years for women’s, men’s, and gender studies to emerge in universities; how Freud’s secular theories replicated the earlier religious ideology of original sin and male supremacy; and how in all spheres (from the family, politics, and the academy to mainstream and popular culture worldwide), the underlying tension between movement toward partnership and the resistance/regressions to domination is playing out.

Historicity, Peoplehood, and Politics: Holocaust Talk in Twenty-First-Century France

2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 968-997 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly A. Arkin
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
North African ◽  
Religious Minorities ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
Anthropological Literature ◽  
French National Identity ◽  
Holocaust Narratives ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractDrawing on ethnographic data from the mid-2000s as well as accounts from French Jewish newspapers and magazines from the 1980s onward, this paper traces the emergence of new French Jewish institutional narratives linking North African Jews to the “European” Holocaust. I argue that these new narratives emerged as a response to the social and political impasses produced by intra-Jewish disagreements over whether and how North African Jews could talk about the Holocaust, which divided French Jews and threatened the relationship between Jewishness and French national identity. These new pedagogical narratives relied on a very different historicity, or way of reckoning time and causality, than those used in more divisive everyday French Jewish Holocaust narratives. By reworking the ways that French Jews reckoned time and causality, they offered an expansive and homogenously “European” Jewishness. This argument works against a growing postcolonial sociological and anthropological literature on religious minorities in France and Europe by emphasizing the contingency, difficulty, and even ambivalence around constructing “Jewishness” as transparently either “European” or “French.” It also highlights the role played by historicity—not just history—in producing what counts as group “identity.”

Bauman on Moral Blindness

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-94
Author(s):  
Anthony Chuwkuebuka Ohaekwusi ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Individual Choice ◽  
Moral Obligations ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Liquid Modernity ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Moral Blindness ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Universe

This article analyzes Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of moral blindness against the backdrop of his designation of modern culture as a dynamic process of liquefaction constantly dissolving every paradigm and subject to the flexible and indeterminate power of individual choice. Bauman argued that the social conditions of this radically individualistic liquid modernity result in a kind of moral insensitivity that he calls adiaphorization. Adiaphorization for him places certain human acts outside the “universe of moral obligations.” It defies the entire orthodox theory of the social origins of morality as it reveals that some dehumanizing monstrous atrocities like the holocaust and genocides are not exclusively reserved for monsters, but can be attributable to “frighteningly normal” moral agents. The present text therefore attempts to discuss the various moral implications of Bauman’s analysis of moral blindness, with a view to highlighting its weaknesses. It moves on to explore Bauman’s recourse to Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics of the “face of the Other” as a viable ethical remedy that trumps the uncanny effects of this whole adiaphorization effect. Finally, the paper further advances his call for a rediscovery of the sense of belonging, by appealing to some major insights originating from African traditions of ethical communalism in order to propose a possible route towards the avoidance and amelioration of this moral challenge.

Raphael Lemkin, Culture, and the Concept of Genocide

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Dirk Moses
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Ontology ◽  
International Humanitarian Law ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Post War

This article describes the genocide concept of Raphael Lemkin. Genocide is a curious anomaly in the post-war regime of international humanitarian law, which is dominated by the discourse of human rights with its emphasis on individuals. It embodies the social ontology of ‘groupism’, because genocide is about the destruction of groups per se, not individuals per se. Lemkin thought that the Nazi policies were radically new, but only in the context of modern civilization. Wars of extermination have marked human society from antiquity until the religious conflagrations of early modern Europe, after which the doctrine that dominated was that war should be conducted against states rather than populations. Given that forty-nine members of his family died in the Holocaust, Lemkin's ecumenical approach to human suffering is at once astonishing and exemplary.

Comments

1975 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 55-56
Author(s):  
Karl R. Stadler
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
World War ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Historical Role ◽  
Made In

In recent years there has been a deplorable lack of interest in Austria in the historical role of the Jews in Central Europe. Given the general trends towards internationalization of the social sciences and the interdisciplinary method of analysis, this neglect is most distressing. Presumably this lack of scholarly interest is related to the fact that since World War II the Central European Jews no longer constitute a distinct ethnic and religious group. Apart from studies made in university institutes for Jewish studies and in occasional publications which have mainly treated various aspects of “the holocaust,” most studies have approached Jewish history only collaterally by focusing on anti-Semitism.

Japanese Americans at Dachau: Intercultural Exchange in the US Tour of The Gate of Heaven

2002 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-212
Author(s):  
Emily Colborn
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
50Th Anniversary ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Holocaust Survivor ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Us ◽  
Globe Theatre

The Gate of Heaven, which toured the United States for two years marking the 50th anniversary of the Dachau concentration camp liberation and commemorating the heroism of Japanese-American soldiers in World War II, imagines the friendship between a Japanese-American veteran and the Holocaust survivor he saves at the gates of Dachau in 1945. While the playwright-performers set out simply to celebrate their family histories – Lane Nishikawa is a third-generation Japanese American and Victor Talmadge lost many relatives in the Holocaust – the commemorative politics they encountered at each stop on the tour transformed the meaning of their play. A reconstruction of the social framework the play encountered at four venues, including the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Old Globe Theatre in southern California, demonstrates the malleable nature of race relations in America and the instability of Holocaust representation.

scholarly journals Gender, Jewish Identity, and Cultural Memory in the Poetry of Rhea Tregebov

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donna Krolik Hollenberg
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
Modern Jewish History ◽  
Parent Child

Rhea Tregebov’s self consciousness as a woman facilitated her developing self consciousness as a Canadian Jew, a process recorded in her five books of poetry. In the course of this work, her reflections on the social meanings of motherhood are particularly important. When insights about the parent-child bond are transferred to reflections about the meanings of modern Jewish history, particularly the Holocaust, the poet’s understanding of her role is extended. The result is an ambitious collection of elegies in which she changes the structure of mourning specific to that genre.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document