There are a number of nations, variously labeled as
Central or Eastern European, whose territorial boundaries were ill-defined and
whose ethnic makeup was complex in the interwar period. These were lands whose position put them
between Germany and Russia both geographically and politically. World War I destroyed the entities that
maintained order in this region as empires disappeared and left control to
local populations, often leading to ethnic confrontations. It was in this region that most of the
violence associated with World War II and the Holocaust occurred.
Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale
University, has made the understanding of the history and culture of this
region one of his main research topics.
He has produced the book Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. In it, Snyder attempts
to place the Holocaust, the persecution and murder of Jews, into historical and
political perspective. After almost two
millennia of anti-Jewish preaching by the Christian Churches it was inevitable
that violence against Jews would erupt during chaotic war years. What is less-well known and less-well
understood is the degree of violence that also ensued between other ethnic
groups. The Ukraine was an area of
especially high chaos as it was invaded and reinvaded during the war
years. Ukrainian nationalists attempted to eliminate the ethnic Poles
that lived in the area with a level of brutality that may have exceeded
anything faced by Jews.
Snyder wishes to make sure that we realize that the
Holocaust was only one of the black marks on humanity that were apparent after
the events that occurred in this region.
Violent anti-Semitism has been with us for a very long time—and we have
a sense of how that arose. There are,
perhaps, deeper and more frightening things to learn about humanity from a more
general consideration of the other massacres that occurred. Does the chaos of war force people to do
violent things, or does it provide them with the opportunity to do violent
things? Is violence the innate
response—or is it the exception? What
exactly does it take to drive formerly peaceful people to become mass murderers?
The focus here will be on the more limited topic of food
security and what the lack of it can cause.
Snyder has recently published two short articles
discussing points that he wants to make sure are read by a broader audience
than is likely to delve into his book. The
first appeared in The New York Review of
Books: Hitler’s World. Here, Snyder makes clear Hitler’s motives and
philosophy, and explains how they led to war and genocide. The second appeared in the New York Times with the title The Next Genocide. A Hitler is not likely to be seen again, but
the conditions that led him to pursue war and mass murder could recur.
Let us begin by learning about Hitler and his world. Hitler believed races lived according to a
law of the survival of the fittest. The
strong contend against the weak in order to maintain their dominance and
acquire the resources they need to survive and thrive.
“Nothing can be known about the
future, thought Hitler, except the limits of our planet: ‘the surface area of a
precisely measured space.’ Ecology was scarcity, and existence meant a struggle
for land. The immutable structure of life was the division of animals into
species, condemned to ‘inner seclusion’ and an endless fight to the death.
Human races, Hitler was convinced, were like species. The highest races were
still evolving from the lower, which meant that interbreeding was possible but
sinful. Races should behave like species, like mating with like and seeking to
kill unlike. This for Hitler was a law, the law of racial struggle, as certain
as the law of gravity.”
There would be no end to this struggle, and the
cognizance of its necessity should motivate racial policies. Racial policies and political policies were
identical. As Snyder puts it:
“The ceaseless strife of races
was not an element of life, but its essence.”
“Hitler entitled his book Mein Kampf—My Struggle. From those two
words through two long volumes and two decades of political life, he was
endlessly narcissistic, pitilessly consistent, and exuberantly nihilistic where
others were not.”
To Hitler, the Jews were not so much an inferior race to
be disposed of, as not a race at all by his definition. Having no turf to defend or to extend they
intermingled with many of the races and introduced words and ideas about the
universality of mankind, suggesting that all men could learn to live together
in peace. This is the exact opposite of
Hitler’s philosophy, and thus the Jews set themselves up as a threat to Hitler. To the degree that Germans accepted the
Jewish view, it weakened Hitler’s hold over them and threatened his goals of
conquest.
“Hitler saw the species as
divided into races, but denied that the Jews were one. Jews were not a lower or
a higher race, but a nonrace, or a counterrace. Races followed nature and
fought for land and food, whereas Jews followed the alien logic of ‘un-nature.’
They resisted nature’s basic imperative by refusing to be satisfied by the
conquest of a certain habitat, and they persuaded others to behave similarly.
They insisted on dominating the entire planet and its peoples, and for this
purpose invented general ideas that draw the races away from the natural
struggle. The planet had nothing to offer except blood and soil, and yet Jews
uncannily generated concepts that allowed the world to be seen less as an
ecological trap and more as a human order.”
“Hitler’s basic critique was not
the usual one that human beings were good but had been corrupted by an overly
Jewish civilization. It was rather that humans were animals and that any
exercise of ethical deliberation was in itself a sign of Jewish corruption. The
very attempt to set a universal ideal and strain toward it was precisely what
was hateful. Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s most important deputy, did not follow
every twist of Hitler’s thinking, but he grasped its conclusion: ethics as such
was the error; the only morality was fidelity to race.”
If the master race was to be spared Jewish corruption the
only solution was to remove Jews and their influence from society. There seems to be some disagreement over
whether extermination was his initial plan.
He talked of gathering Jews and removing them to some remote location
(Siberia?), but extermination was the eventual decision.
Hitler’s plan for protecting the future of the master
race depended on a belief that food and resources were limited. The land could only provide so much and if a
race needed more they must take it from another race. The fundamental driver behind his plans for
aggression was his belief that the German people would not long be able to feed
themselves without capturing new territory.
Hitler’s gaze was always turned to the east where he saw races easy to
defeat and rich agricultural land.
Attacking Poland and Russia was unavoidable.
Hitler’s idea of warfare was not an attempt to just
control land, it was also necessary to defeat another race and eliminate it if
possible. His plans for mass murder far
exceeded the number of dead that so horrifies us to this day.
“A war of simple conquest, no
matter how devastatingly triumphant, could never suffice. In addition to
starving inferior races and taking their land, Germans needed to simultaneously
defeat the Jews, whose global power and insidious universalism would undermine
any such healthy racial campaign.”
Hitler believed that technology would never be able to
increase food production in Germany to the extent needed. Food security thus was the justification he
used for waging war and mass extermination.
While Hitler and his philosophy my never be duplicated, food security
has always been a worry and a source of conflict. Global climate change will affect food
production, likely diminishing it in total and causing major redistributions in
agricultural productivity. This brings
us to Snyder’s warning about “the next genocide.”
“The Holocaust may seem a
distant horror whose lessons have already been learned. But sadly, the
anxieties of our own era could once again give rise to scapegoats and imagined
enemies, while contemporary environmental stresses could encourage new
variations on Hitler’s ideas, especially in countries anxious about feeding
their growing populations or maintaining a rising standard of living.”
Many countries are unable to feed their populations
without importing food. Food scarcity
leads to higher prices. In many of the
poorer nations food is a large fraction of a family’s budget and price
increases lead to political unrest. Some
attribute the “Arab spring” to widespread concerns in the Middle East about
food security at the time.
Snyder points out that Africa is the only location where
there still exists a significant amount of underutilized arable land. The fact that it is underutilized does not
mean it isn’t providing food for the local populations, but it does mean the
land is a tempting target for wealthy countries in need of more food. Many have already closed deals with African
nations to work land currently being used by local Africans to produce food to
be shipped back home—a form of agricultural imperialism.
Snyder suggests China as a country that is incapable of
feeding its population and could eventually succumb to “ecological panic.”
“The Chinese government must
balance a not-so-distant history of starving its own population with today’s
promise of ever-increasing prosperity — all while confronting increasingly
unfavorable environmental conditions. The danger is not that the Chinese might
actually starve to death in the near future, any more than Germans would have
during the 1930s. The risk is that a developed country able to project military
power could, like Hitler’s Germany, fall into ecological panic, and take
drastic steps to protect its existing standard of living.”
“How might such a scenario unfold? China is already leasing a tenth of
Ukraine’s arable soil, and buying up food whenever global supplies tighten.
During the drought of 2010, Chinese panic buying helped bring bread riots and
revolution to the Middle East. The Chinese leadership already regards Africa as
a long-term source of food. Although many Africans themselves still go hungry,
their continent holds about half of the world’s untilled arable land. Like
China, the United Arab Emirates and South Korea are interested in Sudan’s
fertile regions — and they have been joined by Japan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia in
efforts to buy or lease land throughout Africa.”
“Nations in need of land would likely begin with tactfully negotiated
leases or purchases; but under conditions of stress or acute need, such
agrarian export zones could become fortified colonies, requiring or attracting
violence.”
Snyder leaves
us with this warning:
“It is not difficult to imagine
ethnic mass murder in Africa, which has already happened; or the triumph of a
violent totalitarian strain of Islamism in the parched Middle East; or a
Chinese play for resources in Africa or Russia or Eastern Europe that involves
removing the people already living there; or a growing global ecological panic
if America abandons climate science or the European Union falls apart.”
No comments:
Post a Comment