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PARTISAN REVIEW
Finally, the American reader will learn from this book of the more
recent uses to which the Holocaust has been put. Some of these uses can
be traced to the political hyperbole and moral indignation associated with
the 1960s. In this type of rhetoric, any grievance of any group, however
trivial, became "a genocide" or "genocidal," and the transgressions of a
Western police force or academic dean might have brought about com–
parisons with the SS or Gestapo; it also used to be an irresistible
temptation in some circles to denounce any political adversary as "fascist"
or "Nazi."
Less well known have been the attempts to use the Holocaust as a stick
with which to beat Western civilization as a whole, and especially capital–
ist modernity-an orientation captured in the phrase "the political
economy of the final solution" (part of Burleigh's title for Chapter 8). In
this perspective, "mass annihilation emerges as a possible... extreme practice
of bourgeois capitalist society." In another version, Nazism becomes "a last–
ditch revolt by those anti-modern dysfunctional groups...who felt...
threatened by modernization." As the author points out, "To argue that the
Holocaust is inherent in 'modernity'.. .is to fail to explain why genocide
occurs in...non-western societies" such as Cambodia or Rwanda.
It is in the darker side of human nature, and especially the familiar
capacity to dehumanize groups by identifYing them with some evil, in a pecu–
liar combination with a vision of an ideal society purified of such miscreants,
where the fundamental requisites of genocidal massacres are to be found.
This well-written and sometimes justifiably polemical volume pro–
vides much historical detail, new information, and clarifying theoretical
argument regarding the nature and conditions of the Holocaust-all also
applicable to other, lesser-known mass murders of this century.
PAUL HOLLANDER
Knowing Matisse
T HE
U NKNOWN M ATISSE:
A
L IFE OF
HENRY
MATISSE:
T HE
EARLY
Y EARS,
1869-1908.
By Hilary Spurling .
Alfred A. Knopf. $40.00.
Hilary Spurling has made a notable contribution to the scholarship of one
of the twentieth century's finest painters, Henri Matisse, in her rigorous
and delightful book. Moreover, her account, albeit biography, restores
credibility to the traditional methodology of twentieth-century art history.
