Observed from the outside, victim and persecutor look as though they were both insane and the interior life of the camps reminds the onlooker of nothing so much as an insane asylum. Our common sense, trained in utilitarian thinking, is offended by nothing so much as by the complete senselessness of a world where punishment persecutes the innocent more than the criminal, where labor does not result and is not intended to result in products, where crimes do not benefit and are not even calculated to benefit their authors.

The death camps resembled an insane asylum. However, what historian writes about the death camps in this way--as a manifestation of insanity? Not even Omer Bartov or Stephen Fritz, among the best of them.

Who writes about the Holocaust as a psychotic episode. The tendency of history is to "normalize the fantastic:" pretend that psychotic behavior is normative. If a young man in the United States shoots fifteen people--becomes a "mass-murderer"--we assume that he is mentally disturbed.

However, when a nation-state murders millions of people, we don't think of this as a manifestation of mental disturbance or disorder. We've assimilated insane behavior into the historical process.

THE IS THE GREAT LIE OF "HISTORY"