Why We Keep Studying the Holocaust

“How you feel about things as seemingly remote as Iranian deals and Putin’s aggressions is shaped by—or shapes—your judgment of the historical micro-details.”

“More broadly, if you believe, with Snyder, that the Second World War was really about subject peoples robbed of their states and their identity at a moment of environmental crisis and pitted against one another by a brutal colonialism, you are likely to see in Rwanda a similar kind of tragedy, as Snyder does—and you are likely to be sympathetic, as Snyder is, to protecting small-state identities and encouraging their nationalisms. If, with the Israeli historian Alon Confino, whose recent “A World Without Jews” is written in quiet opposition to Snyder’s views, you see in the Shoah the vengeance of atavistic tribalism on liberal modernity, you are likely to worry about all incantations of authenticity. Far from being sympathetic to revived nationalisms as bulwarks of the oppressed, you are likely to be suspicious of them (possibly even extending to the renascent Jewish kind).”

“Snyder begins the new book with an unorthodox and provocative account of Hitler’s thinking. He stresses two arresting elements: Hitler’s skepticism about using agricultural science for increased food production and (usefully discomfiting for an American readership) his dependence on an American model of development. Hitler, Snyder tells us, was obsessed with the question of growing enough grain to feed the German population and, for various crackpot reasons, didn’t believe that modern agronomy could make it happen on native soil. He saw himself doing in Eastern Europe, and in Ukraine especially, what Americans had done in the Great Plains: extinguish or exile the natives while taking over the land to feed the metropolis. Lebensraum meant “living space,” but in a different sense from the way we normally understand it: a place to grow grain rather than a place to put Germans.”

“Snyder’s Hitler was not exactly convinced that the Germans were a superior race. He was convinced that they might become a superior race, given their bloodlines and their numbers, but they would have to prove it in competition with other races on the world stage. Startling as it is, this view explains many aspects of Hitler’s character: his physical distance from the ideal he espoused (they aren’t like me, but I will midwife a superior race that I do not belong to); his unappeasable appetite for war; his rage at his compatriots for losing his war; his readiness, at the end, to see German land destroyed, German cities burned, German women raped—his manifest desire for a bonfire of the Germans. He had given them every chance to show themselves a superior race, and, since they had failed the test of history, they must suffer the consequences.”

“Yet if the concept of “politics” is to be explanatory it should show how power gets dispersed and rebalanced among contending groups. Politics is how people adjust to one another’s needs and potential for violence. In the circumstance where one party has all the power, though, the invocation of politics seems unhelpful. The politics of a slaughterhouse is not really politics, at least not to the pigs; it is just a division of the labor”

“Africa, in Snyder’s view, may become the world’s new bloodlands, where ecological crisis is capped by mass slaughter and where ethnic explanations of killings (those Hutus always hated the Tutsis) conceal the political manipulation of power.”

“Surely Snyder is right when he implies that the well-meant “Godwin’s law,” which, beginning as an observation about Internet arguments, has come to be shorthand for the rule that the Nazis should never be introduced into ordinary political arguments, is miscast. In fact, we should keep the image of the Germans and the Nazis in front of us—not to show how close the people on the other side of an argument are to unutterable evil but to remind ourselves that we, too, can become that close in a shorter time than we like to think. In a period of fear and panic, it is the easiest thing in the world to talk ourselves into the idea that bad things we do are necessities of human nature. The Germans listened to Mozart and Beethoven and then murdered children, and this was not a cognitive dislocation from which we couldn’t suffer but the eternal rationale offered by the terrified: we can’t protect what really matters if we don’t do things that we wish we didn’t have to.”

“Hell on earth is possible to make but is hard to go on making. The human appetite for social peace, if not for social justice, eventually asserts itself”