ARGUMENTS
275
gave space to the treatment of a great many matters which had little
relation to Eichmann or his transport problems. For example, Miss Arendt
goes out of her way
to
assert in
Eichmann in Jerusalem
that two of the
principal Nazi exterminators of Jews, Heydrich and Frank, were both
Jewish, Heydrich a half-Jew and Frank "probably even a full Jew."
Now surely the J ewishness of Frank and Heydrich has nothing to do
with Eichmann or his problems. But it does have very much to do with
one of Miss Arendt's main contentions: namely, that Jews played an
important role in the murder of their fellow Jews. The fact is that neither
Heydrich nor Frank was Jewish; and Jacob Robinson, in his scholarly
work,
Eichmann, Arendt and the Holoc,aust,
which I have read in manu–
script, has fully documented the flimsy evidence on the basis of which
Miss Arendt hastily concluded that Heydrich was a half Jew and that
Frank was "probably even a full Jew." This is only one of the "no less
than 600" distortions of fact I said Miss Arendt was guilty of. The
charge is of course Jacob Robinson's, and when he makes it publicly
himself, it will be a much more serious matter than when I made it in
The New Republic.
Mr. Macdonald can of course hope to disprove it,
but it cannot be laughed away.
Another point in Miss McCarthy's piece which perhaps I should
have answered was her argument that I used the word
forces
improperly
when in my article I wrote of a man who with a gun
forces
another man
to kill his friend. I was implying, Miss McCarthy claims, that the man
threatened with the
gun
was not free to die rather than to kill. Now
I do not think there was any such implication in my use of the word
forces,
which I used as it
is
naturally used in our language. As Miss
McCarthy sees it though, it would have been truer (more morally
sensitive?) to say that a man who kills his friend under the threat of
force is
tempted
to the deed. I cannot agree. The
threat
of force is not
the
lure
of temptation. Would Miss McCarthy say that people who were
tortured by the Nazis were
tempted
by their torturers into compliance?
Certainly the word
forced
sounds more right to me. Otherwise we would
speak of "totalitarian temptation" regimes rather than regimes of "totali–
tarian terror."
So much for Miss McCarthy's arguments: I think I have now
answered every one which could be construed as serious. And so much
for Dwight Macdonald, who chose to depend on Miss McCarthy-he
has been unable to advance any argument of his own. His contribution
is
to
abuse me, and Norman Podhoretz, also Crossman and Trevor-Roper,
whom he has not scrupled to attack as "honorary Semites."
It
all comes
down finally to calling people "Jews."
