At first glance the title of this blog and the question it raises might seem out of the scope of librarian studies or the librarian profession in general. Librarians might concern themselves with the burning of books or the totalitarian aspects of German literary history during the Third Reich, but as far as studying the European Holocaust goes a librarian's job seems well out of context. Possibly, and possibly not. I hope to come to some more definite answers regarding this issue in this and subsequent blogs.
Before approaching the issue of the librarian's role, the role of new media, and the role of "electracy" in the study of the European Holocaust, however, I want to look more closely at why this question is still important for us today.
There has been a lot of finger pointing in the American public recently and an awful lot of name calling going on. One of the chief and most angering aspects for all sides has been the use of the term "Nazi" and its corollaries to deride and undermine the programs of either the left or the right. One example of this name calling was made public recently when an ex-marine, in a video-taped town hall meeting, chided Senator Brian Baird (D -WA) for his stand on Obama's health care package, even going so far as to call Nancy Pelosi a Nazi and to remind the audience that the term "Nazi" is short for "National Socialist". For this citizen, the term "socialist" was a sure sign that any government-run health program, ie, "socialized medicine", is the work of Nazis. You can view the clip here:
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/08/22/video-marine-goes-nuclear-on-democrat-over-obamacare/
While it is true that the beginnings of the German welfare state are to be found in the years of the Third Reich, it is a real stretch to call American liberals Nazis. The overarching views of the Democratic party are extremely contrary to National Socialist doctrine. Gay rights is one issue that proves this point. Abortion is another. A pacifistic rather than militaristic foreign policy is the most obvious difference, and the fact that an African-American is the leader of the party as well as the President of the United States demonstrates that not only the Democratic party but Americans in general do not adhere to Nazi doctrine.
Nevertheless, we find current in the public forum the accusations and attempts to form connections between Germany's National Socialist history and American current events.
The problem that I have with this trend is pretty straight forward. Beyond the hazy fog that such aspersions cast over the American political system (who are the good guys, who are the bad guys?), these kind of accusations threaten to create an equally hazy fog over the Nazi past of Germany and Europe. This, I argue, is far from a good situation.
In the late 1980's a lively and public discussion occurred among mostly German-language historians over how best to approach the National Socialist past. This discussion has since become known as the Historkerstreit, or "historical conflict". There were broadly two main camps represented in this conflict. On the one side where the historians who attempted to explain Germany's past by finding the root causes of the Holocaust in 19th and 20th Century sources. Germany's "long 20th Century" is to be understood, in their view, as a progression that led to a massive outpouring of negative and murderous policies. For some historians, the normal German as well as the Nazi official all became caught up in a historical wave of hatred which swept them away and allowed for the terrible events of 1933-1945. One famous historian with this view is Martin Broszat.
(Wikipedia has a good article about Broszat: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Broszat)
On the other side of the debate was a more conservative outlook. This one approached the history of the Third Reich as a murderous anomaly, unique not only in the history of Germany but in the history of Western Civilization. Historians from this second camp argued that to view the Holocaust as anything other than the acts of monsters who assumed control of Germany's power structure was to run the risk of losing sight of the very barbarity of the Holocaust. One of the major proponents of this approach was historian Saul Friedlander.
(Wikipedia also has a good article on Friedlander: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Friedl%C3%A4nder)
I see value to both sides of the argument. On the one hand, I agree that the Nazi high officials were monsters. I agree that they had murderous intentions from the beginning. My studies have confirmed in me that the Nazi party was founded not on any positive basis, but on the basis of hatred and warfare and above all anti-Semitism--these were not later developments but were intrinsic to the Nazi party from its inception.
At the same time, I realize that these same Nazi officials were human...all too human. And it is exactly that which can turn a human being into a murderous machine of hatred that concerns me.
Compared to the European Holocaust, the holocausts that were unleashed on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945 were tiny. But the deaths of these two cities and their inhabitants is forever etched in my imagination and forms a sort of a bookend to the WWII experience. In Europe we had the death camps, in the Pacific we had the A-bomb.
The two events are more similar than a cursory analysis might indicate. Both events were calculated to end conflict. In Germany the belief was that by killing the Jews a new and united Europe would emerge. In Japan the bombs were dropped in order to bring a defeated Japan to surrender.
Beyond these obvious points, however, these experiences share strikingly similar cultural significances. In both events there were no dead bodies to bury or to morn. The survivors lived with great physical and emotional traumas for the rest of their lives. Many of the survivors ended their lives prematurely through acts of suicide (famously Primo Levi and Paul Celan in Europe, Tamiki Hara in Japan. There are some very interesting similarities, even, between the poems of Tamiki Hara and Paul Celan. For example, these two famous ones:
Engraved in stone long ago,
Lost in the shifting sand,
In the midst of a crumbling world,
The vision of one flower.
-Tamiki, 1951 (?)
Deported into
the land
with the unmistakable trace:
Grass,
written assunder
-Celan, 1958)
Both events also (obviously) have countless numbers of interpretations from every conceivable angle filling up rows of book shelves at any given library.
Finally, and significantly, both experiences were the results of the deadly use of technology.
All of that is not to say that there is anything similar about the two events from an ethical perspective. We as humans do not and cannot condone the European Holocaust. However, many of us--particularly Americans (and I am one of these) feel that the use of the A-bomb in that particular historical moment was a justified action. Many people do not agree with this analysis, but whether we justify the use of atomic weapons or not most people would agree that the United States incurred upon itself a great and terrible responsibility when it ushered in the nuclear age.
The popular mind does not think "holocaust" without associating these two events with one another. In fact, the European Holocaust provides us lessons from which we learn how to avoid creating a nuclear holocaust.
It is on this last point that the study of the European Holocaust is so fundamental and continues to be essential for us today. If the European Holocaust is allowed to be fogged over by political rhetoric, if the facts and realities of the European Holocaust are sacrificed to political maneuvering, we as humans have not only lost sight of the victims of Nazi Germany, but we have lost sight of the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and with it the reality of our own precariousness in relation to our nuclear capabilities today. This would be the most dangerous position of all, for it would mean we are one step closer to being the cause of the complete dissolution of life on earth for millions if not billions of years.
The study of the European Holocaust remains fundamental to us today because without it we lose the memory and the language of genocide, of mass murder, and of the constant possibility of technological devastation. I would like to look more closely in the next blog at the specifics of the technological devastation and the philosophic discussions and understandings of this issue. To conclude this post, however, I want to offer a few words of warning and encouragement.
We as Americans cannot allow our political agendas to cloud our memory of the European Holocaust. Our fathers, grandfathers, and for some of us great-grandfather fought a terrible struggle against a great evil. We are not Nazis. We might be a bit militaristic at times. We might push the limits of democracy, and we might come closer to socialising many of the industries that have traditionally been in the private sector. But so long as we continue to be a culturally dynamic people, so long as we continue to fight for the equal rights of all of our citizens, so long as we continue to celebrate the successes, achievements, and contributions of all of our citizens no matter what race, gender, sexual orientation, religion or any other qualification, we can be sure that we are NOT Nazis. It is only when we confuse ourselves about what a Nazi really is that we begin a march toward a more cruel and inhumane society than that generation who fought to end the tyranny of the Third Reich could have ever have envisioned for us.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Saturday, August 29, 2009
1st LIS blog: what is LIS and why is it important for me to write a blog about it?
My name is Nathan Finley and I am just beginning an MA course in Library and Information Sciences (LIS), in which I hope to develop a number of Web 2.0 skills (and Library 2.0 skills) as well as advance my understanding of a number of philosophical/theoretical issues dealing with the technological age. This can be pretty heavy duty stuff, and I decided to use the blogger platform as a method of organizing/trying out some thoughts and discoveries both as a practice in public discourse and as a private meditational tool.
Of course I've read a number of other blogs, mostly political in nature, over the course of the last several years, but I never really thought about starting my own. Until now. I just began Nancy Courtney's Library 2.0 and Beyond and my brain is buzzing with what to me are good ideas. Since I'm just beginning my MA program I thought this would be a perfect time to start a blog and keep a record of my thoughts as I progress through the next year and a half. I'm hoping that this will clear away some of my cobwebs and refine my thinking/writing for class. In order to help facilitate this endeavor I have written the following introductory blog as a sort of manifesto for myself and any potential readers. Comments of all and any sort are welcome--don't think you have to follow my creed if you talk to me!
My guiding thoughts are probably along the lines of this: what does the technological revolution really mean to us as citizens, as participants in government and community networks, as artists and lovers and thinkers and dreamers? In order to contextualize this question I'll review something that I learned while studying at the University of Florida.
Dr. Greg Ulmer, who I had the chance to take a graduate course with at UF, coined the term "electracy" to indicate how radical of a transformation he thinks we as humans are undergoing at this time. The new media communication tools that are revolutionizing our lives are as tangibly transformational, according to Dr. Ulmer, as the advent of literacy was 3000 years ago. Thus he is calling the new skill sets associated with the new media "electracy" (wikipedia has a good article on electracy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electracy). Mark that he's not saying the the new media platforms are akin to the advent of the printing press. No, he's thesis is far more radical. What Dr. Ulmer argues is that we are living in a time of transformation as radical as the dawn of human writing itself.
Wew. That's pretty radical. I mean, if I sit down and think about it a number of realizations come to mind. I think about how the ancient Druids of the Celtic world were notorious for distrusting the new medium of writing--and they're pretty much extinct for all practical political purposes. I think about how the pre-historic peoples of so many societies--from ancient Greece to the Scandanavian countries to Africa and the Middle East--all finally broke down and made written records of their oral traditions, thus creating the first historical documents of their peoples.
Also, however, I think about how much oral traditions still persist even today. The spoken word is still very much a vital part of our culture: poetry jams and hip-hop communities, stand-up comedy and presidential addresses are all part of our oral traditions in the West. So the new medium doesn't do away with the older medium, the one just displaces the other as a primary signification tool in our lives. That's a relief as a book lover!
But how does such a radical transformation effect the way we think about ourselves? How does it make radical and far-sweeping changes in the way we narrate our own stories--as individuals, as cultures, as political bodies--on a fundamental level? How do we gauge that foundation and anticipate or even observe its swings and transformations? Finally, and very important: how does it effect the way we perceive--the actual physical activity of sensing--the world around us.
While these might seem like somewhat common sense questions where the answers are right before our eyes I am starting this blog with the hypothesis that we have not even begun to understand how radically transformed an "electrate" culture is relative to a "literate" culture. As much as we today have difficulty imagining what a purely oral culture would have looked like, how it would have operated, and that it could have constructed such elaborate and well thought out cosmologies as the Vedas or Homer's Iliad (yes, some argue that this was an oral poem before Homer wrote it down), so it is nearly inconceivable to think about what kinds of changes the new technologies will entail. My firm belief is that all things are cyclical in nature--some argue spiralic. What goes around comes around. Are we beginning a new loop, are we witnessing the end of one, is there any way to rationally see where we are heading without getting into some really wild new age mumbo-jumbo?
One of the chief reasons I am starting this blog is to make a record of my thoughts and reactions to the material that I will be learning, with a particularly close attention being placed on the "evolutionary" changes wrought on society by technology. In order to stay away from the really wild and out-there theories like I see on New Age blogs (end of the Mayan calender type of stuff), I'll try to stay as grounded as I can in the texts and philosophies that I have used or am using in the course of my studies. I do warn any readers from the outset that I am not going to hold back on looking into what might be some really weird spaces. I want to get ABSTRACT with this. But I also want to have a solid center to come back to.
There is one note that I should make and that is that I am heavily informed by Christian texts and will come back to the Judeo-Christian traditions time and again in my discussions. I do have an interest in working through some theoretical notions that I have in regards to technology and the Biblical texts but I warn you up front that the Bible rubs me the wrong way. I am so heavily informed by it because I have a strong familial background in the Bible. But what rubs me in an even worse way is the political agenda of Bible students and so-called Christians. So if your stomach is turned by religio-political agendas, be aware that I am aware of my own agenda and one thing that I want to do in this blog is to look more closely at my own agenda (and those of others) in this time of upheaval which many find themselves going through.
Now I'm tired of talking about what I want to do with this site, and I want to get down to doing it. Since the introductions are over, I'll close this first blog and get prepared to write my first real entry. thanks to anyone out there who finds this and wants to keep reading!
Of course I've read a number of other blogs, mostly political in nature, over the course of the last several years, but I never really thought about starting my own. Until now. I just began Nancy Courtney's Library 2.0 and Beyond and my brain is buzzing with what to me are good ideas. Since I'm just beginning my MA program I thought this would be a perfect time to start a blog and keep a record of my thoughts as I progress through the next year and a half. I'm hoping that this will clear away some of my cobwebs and refine my thinking/writing for class. In order to help facilitate this endeavor I have written the following introductory blog as a sort of manifesto for myself and any potential readers. Comments of all and any sort are welcome--don't think you have to follow my creed if you talk to me!
My guiding thoughts are probably along the lines of this: what does the technological revolution really mean to us as citizens, as participants in government and community networks, as artists and lovers and thinkers and dreamers? In order to contextualize this question I'll review something that I learned while studying at the University of Florida.
Dr. Greg Ulmer, who I had the chance to take a graduate course with at UF, coined the term "electracy" to indicate how radical of a transformation he thinks we as humans are undergoing at this time. The new media communication tools that are revolutionizing our lives are as tangibly transformational, according to Dr. Ulmer, as the advent of literacy was 3000 years ago. Thus he is calling the new skill sets associated with the new media "electracy" (wikipedia has a good article on electracy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electracy). Mark that he's not saying the the new media platforms are akin to the advent of the printing press. No, he's thesis is far more radical. What Dr. Ulmer argues is that we are living in a time of transformation as radical as the dawn of human writing itself.
Wew. That's pretty radical. I mean, if I sit down and think about it a number of realizations come to mind. I think about how the ancient Druids of the Celtic world were notorious for distrusting the new medium of writing--and they're pretty much extinct for all practical political purposes. I think about how the pre-historic peoples of so many societies--from ancient Greece to the Scandanavian countries to Africa and the Middle East--all finally broke down and made written records of their oral traditions, thus creating the first historical documents of their peoples.
Also, however, I think about how much oral traditions still persist even today. The spoken word is still very much a vital part of our culture: poetry jams and hip-hop communities, stand-up comedy and presidential addresses are all part of our oral traditions in the West. So the new medium doesn't do away with the older medium, the one just displaces the other as a primary signification tool in our lives. That's a relief as a book lover!
But how does such a radical transformation effect the way we think about ourselves? How does it make radical and far-sweeping changes in the way we narrate our own stories--as individuals, as cultures, as political bodies--on a fundamental level? How do we gauge that foundation and anticipate or even observe its swings and transformations? Finally, and very important: how does it effect the way we perceive--the actual physical activity of sensing--the world around us.
While these might seem like somewhat common sense questions where the answers are right before our eyes I am starting this blog with the hypothesis that we have not even begun to understand how radically transformed an "electrate" culture is relative to a "literate" culture. As much as we today have difficulty imagining what a purely oral culture would have looked like, how it would have operated, and that it could have constructed such elaborate and well thought out cosmologies as the Vedas or Homer's Iliad (yes, some argue that this was an oral poem before Homer wrote it down), so it is nearly inconceivable to think about what kinds of changes the new technologies will entail. My firm belief is that all things are cyclical in nature--some argue spiralic. What goes around comes around. Are we beginning a new loop, are we witnessing the end of one, is there any way to rationally see where we are heading without getting into some really wild new age mumbo-jumbo?
One of the chief reasons I am starting this blog is to make a record of my thoughts and reactions to the material that I will be learning, with a particularly close attention being placed on the "evolutionary" changes wrought on society by technology. In order to stay away from the really wild and out-there theories like I see on New Age blogs (end of the Mayan calender type of stuff), I'll try to stay as grounded as I can in the texts and philosophies that I have used or am using in the course of my studies. I do warn any readers from the outset that I am not going to hold back on looking into what might be some really weird spaces. I want to get ABSTRACT with this. But I also want to have a solid center to come back to.
There is one note that I should make and that is that I am heavily informed by Christian texts and will come back to the Judeo-Christian traditions time and again in my discussions. I do have an interest in working through some theoretical notions that I have in regards to technology and the Biblical texts but I warn you up front that the Bible rubs me the wrong way. I am so heavily informed by it because I have a strong familial background in the Bible. But what rubs me in an even worse way is the political agenda of Bible students and so-called Christians. So if your stomach is turned by religio-political agendas, be aware that I am aware of my own agenda and one thing that I want to do in this blog is to look more closely at my own agenda (and those of others) in this time of upheaval which many find themselves going through.
Now I'm tired of talking about what I want to do with this site, and I want to get down to doing it. Since the introductions are over, I'll close this first blog and get prepared to write my first real entry. thanks to anyone out there who finds this and wants to keep reading!
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