Auschwitz stands like a mountain unexpectedly encountered, blocking the path to the future. In his haunting book, Modernity and the Holocaust , Zygmunt Bauman examines the popular premise that the Nazis overcame civilization, that a unique phenomenon happened in Germany that resulted in the suspension of civilization. The premise presupposes that civilization imposes morality upon us, that without it we are wild beasts, and that the Nazis, principally through antisemitic propaganda, overcame the civilization of the German people. Bauman's thesis is the exact opposite. Civilization is a process that overcomes morality, rather than instilling it.
Civilization makes rules merely.
Some of the rules may be coextensive with moral ones, when convenient, but they derive from much different sources. The antisemitism of the Germans may have been profound, but Bauman observes that, being human, it did not translate into spontaneous violence, or even into a tolerance of physical violence by others. Eventually, when the Final Solution was implemented, it was considered necessary to hide it from the German people. Note, however, that in a bizarre way, Bauman, and I who stand with him, are optimists. If you sit in the cheap seats overlooking Congress and listen to the work, every day our leaders are deciding who will live and who will die.