Above I read a reference to the book Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. I have tried, several times, to slog my way through this book in its entirety. I cannot. The author points out, in his introduction, that the work is an extended version of a doctoral thesis, and I give him credit for admitting this, as it certainly reads like one.
I have been informed by the author, in my several attempts to tackle his work, that pretty much everyone in the world who has ever harbored even one anti-Jewish thought, or told one joke in which a jewish person was the foil, fits somewhere into his neat taxonomic scheme of the various genera and specie of the anti-semite. Kind of ironic, isn't it, given that the last I knew, Palestinian Arabs, and Syrians and Jordanians are semitic peoples too?
Perhaps this is literary criticism, better suited for a reader review on Amazon.com than in this forum topic, but it struck a nerve with me. I'd advise all readers of this post, particularly those who agree with Mr. Goldahgen's position, and can overlook his (imho) strident and sometimes hyperbolic (and clumsy) prose, and also read Victor Klemperer's I Will Bear Witness: A Diary Of The Nazi Years instead. A much more complicated picture, viewed by one on the scene, emerges.
