The cultural mechanisms behind violence
This article focuses on cultural violence in today' s world and a growing interest in the Holocaust history. Cultural violence, torture, shame, silence and racial discourses, are no objects or fatal strategies. They are no pure signs of evil, but dimensions of social life and power. Leaning on some important remarks made by Zygmunt Bauman, it seems important to add the dimension of ethics to our cultural analysis.
The arguments in this article are about modernization; the conditions behind racism must be found in a changing socioeconomic structure. From that point of view it might be interesting to find so many connections between Ford in Detroit and the Nazi development in Germany during the 208; not only because Henry Ford believed in a Jewish world conspiracy but also because Taylorism and mass production were truly anticulture movements. This explains the impact of deculturalization in early mass-production and so called "final solutions", the elimination of cultures and individuals who were different.
The new Holocaust interest in the 90s is a representation of crisis. In a visual culture, like the postmodern, Auschwitz is transformed into a sign, an ethnographic experience. The neweconomism in the 90s has created an imagined fairness, a discoursive use of truth which is impossible on the market, but also a need for" original sin", where the historical interpretation of "survival", "being alive" in Germany during the war is quite different from a chaotic, ongoing genocide in present Kosovo.
In a game, the structure is obvious first when it is over. In a postmodern Europe, where stock markets and the monetary fundamentalism have replaced industrial production and work with pure capitalism, culture has gradually changed into post facto explanations.
