Reviews for Edmund Burke and the discourse of virtue

The average rating for Edmund Burke and the discourse of virtue based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-08-23 00:00:00 Willliam Graam After a slow start this becomes an engrossing book. Haas, a Jewish Studies professor at Case-Western, came up with it in the course of teaching courses on the German persecution of Jews to a predominantly non-Jewish student body unfamiliar with the war and German race policies. Consequently, the historical background and implementation of such policies are covered adequately and clearly for nonspecialists. The point of the work, however, is to demonstrate how Nazism represented a coherent ethic in keeping with European traditions and norms. This claim is made in opposition of those who would consign Nazi ideology to the realm of psychopathology or to the broad, but fundamentally obscure, rubrics of wickedness. On the contrary, very few Germans--indeed, very few passively complicit Europeans or North Americans--felt they were doing wrong in respecting, if not directly implementing, State policy. By their lights, the elimination of communists, internationalist socialists, gypsies, sexual perverts, mental defectives, Jehovah's Witnesses and, most particularly, Jews was a good thing, compatible with civilized practice and harmonious communal life at home and in the broader society. Even after the war, the victorious allies, all of whom had known fully of the genocide, elements of whom had supported it, lacked a clear sense of how the Germans and their allies may have misbehaved in any legal or universal ethical sense. The war crime trials conducted by the United Nations and the negotiations leading up to them are portrayed as an illustration of this. The point of Haas' somewhat overstated argument is to bring German behavior from 1933-45 into a context which includes the American reader into the equation. That such cruelty was almost entirely ignored, if not abetted, by virtually all states and organizations during that period represented a recognition of at least some of the principles by which the German Nazi state operated, a recognition based, in part, on the reality that they were and continue to be shared. The exceptions deserve to be noted. Other than some, but not all, Zionist organizations, the American Friends Service Committee stands out as actively opposed to the genocide as do the states of Sweden (neutral), Denmark (allied with Germany) and Norway (opposed to Germany). There were also, of course, rare individuals and even communities which stood up to the violence, all of whom, the author claims, were already eccentric so far as broad Western cultural norms were concerned. My major objection to this otherwise excellent book is that Haas underplays the courage of the opponents. They may, for the most part, have been eccentrics to begin with, but all of them had the opportunity not to remain so when eccentricity became mortally dangerous. Some few were truly courageous and their example is worthy of both approbation and study.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-06-27 00:00:00 Gino Coelho A very impressive piece of scholarship, linking the murder of mentally and physically disabled people in Nazi Germany with the later mass murder of Jews and other victims in camps and gas chambers. The process of transporting the victims to centralized killing facilities, using ruses and lies to ensure a smooth process, selecting the victims before ushering them into the gas chamber, gassing them, plundering the corpses, and disposing the corpses is the same with "euthanasia" and the gassing of victims in death camps. As a result, Friedlander concludes correctly that the murder of the disabled needs to be classified as a part of the Holocaust.