Interpretando o Holocausto

Abstract

In the hands of Hannah Arendt the Holocust became an academic subject. In "The Origins of Totalitarianism" she defined Nazism and Communism as forms of dominations unkown by tradition and classical political thought. Hitler and Stalin were empirical evidence of a new time, where the past, or the historical as the master of life in the sense given by Machiavelli, was unable to illuminate the present. She studied the tragedy of Israel with the eyes of Alexis de Tocqueville; the destruction of the Jews presents the same mechanism present in the suppression of the aristocracy of France. The novility and the Jews, as well as the Soviet victims, were powerless politically. Totalitarian terror suppressed the old distinction between friend and foe, its ideologies defined who should die. But the great majority of scholars of the Final Solution (the Nazi jardgon for the extermination of the Semites) is unaware of Tocqueville's relationship to the German ´philosopher's interpretation of the insane Bolshevik and National Socialist procedures. This text seeks to fill this gap using anthropological studies and historical analysis showing that the murder of the weak and powerless is a natural resorce when cultural boundaries disappear and the war of all against all becomes a reality.