Superb and Somber
A few months ago I posted excerpts from Anne Applebaum’s appreciative review of a new book by Timothy Snyder, Professor of History at Yale: Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. I quoted then Applebaum’s stark conclusion which is worth repeating:
If nothing else, a reassessment of what we know about Europe in the years between 1933 and 1953 could finally cure us of that “lack of imagination” that so appalled Czesław Miłosz almost sixty years ago. When considered in isolation, Auschwitz can be easily compartmentalized, characterized as belonging to a specific place and time, or explained away as the result of Germany’s unique history or particular culture. But if Auschwitz was not the only mass atrocity, if mass murder was simultaneously taking place across a multinational landscape and with the support of many different kinds of people, then it is not so easy to compartmentalize or explain away. The more we learn about the twentieth century, the harder it will be to draw easy lessons or make simple judgments about the people who lived through it—and the easier it will be to empathize with and understand them.
Having now read the book itself, and especially its stunning Conclusion: “Humanity,” I find Applebaum well captures Snyder’s purpose. He himself writes of his labor:
The Nazi and the Stalinist systems must be compared, not so much to understand the one or the other, but to understand our times and ourselves.
He suggests some of what we need to understand when he writes:
Ideologies also tempt those who reject them. Ideology, when stripped by time or partisanship of its political and economic connections becomes a moralizing form of explanation for mass killing, one that comfortably separates the people who explain from the people who kill. It is convenient to see the perpetrator just as someone who holds the wrong idea and is therefore different for that reason. It is reassuring to ignore the importance of economics and the complications of politics, factors that might in fact be common to historical perpetrators and those who later contemplate their actions. It is far more inviting, at least today in the West, to identify with the victims than to understand the historical situation they shared with perpetrators and bystanders in the bloodlands. The identification with the victim affirms a radical separation from the perpetrator. The Treblinka guard who starts the engine or the NKVD officer who pulls the trigger is not me, he is the person who kills someone like myself. Yet it is unclear whether this identification with victims brings much knowledge or whether this kind of alientation from the murderer is an ethical stance. It is not at all obvious that reducing history to morality plays makes anyone moral.
He explains further:
The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim, but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander. It is tempting to say that a Nazi murderer is beyond the pale of understanding … Yet to deny a human being his human character is to render ethics impossible.
To yield to this temptation, to find other people to be inhuman, is to take a step toward, not away from, the Nazi position. To find people incomprehensible is to abandon the search for understanding, and thus to abandon history.
In my opinion Snyder’s book is a must read for the New Year: harrowing and imperative. I would love to see him discuss further his “Conclusion” in an article for, say, Commonweal or First Things, or in a Symposium at Boston College or Fordham. Without coming to grips with his historical and ethical discernment, invocations of “the common good” can appear merely facile and rhetorical.
Sounds like a great book. So let me open this can o’ worms:
“To yield to this temptation, to find other people to be inhuman, is to take a step toward, not away from, the Nazi position. To find people incomprehensible is to abandon the search for understanding, and thus to abandon history.”
Substitute “pro-choice” for “Nazi” here and it strikes me that there’s a possible message for Catholics struggling with the abortion issue here.
I know many women who have had abortions or have assisted others in procuring one. To ignore the social, economic, cultural inducements that went into those decisions, to ignore the lack of religious or ethical formation that contributed to those decisions–doesn’t all of that simply render those who have abortions and abortionists “incomprehensible,” in Snyder’s words?
To what extent have Catholic anti-abortion movements begun to abandon the “how can you kill your own helpless baby?” tack for one that addresses the humanity of and tackles the ethical landscape of those who have or perform abortions?
I find it incredible that my comment with recommendation to read an article arguing that it is bad of most of us to do nothing while tens of thousands people die each day of poverty related causes (which is more per year than figure given by Snyder re 1932-33 famine in Ukraine, which could also be prevented) has been deleted. I hope it was by mistake.
I have the book and am in the process of reading it (the scale of the depravity makes it rough going, especially if one is inclined towards melancholia to begin with).
Anyhow, I am again reminded of Flannery O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person and “The Artificial Nigger” — Especially this quote from the latter, a part of which I’ve cited before.
Have read the book and appreciate the effort that went into this work. There have been a number of historical works over the last five years that have drilled down into the period 1930-1945 in Eastern Europe including an on-going study led by a catholic priest who has interviewed and written about the killings in the Ukraine and Poland which sheds a light on the facts that various ethnic groups were eliminated by catholics, communists, nazis, etc. for a multitude of reasons.
The typical history book used in our schools, colleges focus almost exclusively on Nazism and WWII and Jewish victims (i.e. concentration camps). Soviet repressions is mentioned but with little to no details – the aim is to highlight Nazi atrocities.
What this historian has done is illuminate the long hidden or suppressed facts – Stalin killed more than Hitler; it starts to tell the story of the immense loss of POW lives; it shows that the killings began years before the actual events of WWII. (in fact, if another book could be done about the Japanese expansion starting in the 1930s – Korea, Manchuria, China), the total number of mass killings would increase exponentially. What it does do is broaden the historical interpretation and thus our understanding of our history – that man’s inhumanity to man was a significant part of the 20th century which new technology only supported.
It also broadens the “old” and accepted idea that all inhumanity was by Nazis or in concentration camps. Add in local and ethnic passions; slave labor, POWs, etc. and the mass killings have a whole other viewpoint. (this book has interesting impact on some of the Zionistic writings (Fr. Imbelli’s point about over-identifying with the victims and missing the fact that any of us could be the perps) that have filled our historical space for 60 years)
Jean – interesting insight. You manage to get beyond the book’s obvious historical facts – what went on; who and where folks died; who instigated these killings to a deeper thesis of the author – this brutal story shows us that the threat to be a perpetrator is always with us in different ways and aspects of our life. That is the true meaning of the book.
I gave this book to my father for Christmas — the massacre of the Innocents is, after all, part of the Christmas season. After reading it in two days he gave it to me to read (I’ll take a lot longer.) My father served in WW2 and said the book completely changed his perspective on the war, and is going to have his book club read it.
The point about identifying with victims and not with perpetrators is important. “Never again” cuts two ways.
Jean Raber is right to point out the dangers to ourselves when we all too easily claim the “moral high ground.”
The imperative to forgive, even of the most heinous atrocities, is one that we all have to try to honor. It shows up closer to home in the clergy sex abuse issues, in the terrible things said by some people ab out illegal immigrants, and those who drive us crazy by their political positions.
James, please tell us more about how your father’s views were changed by the book. Sounds like an interesting story.
Bernard, I wasn’t talking about forgiveness as much as understanding. I think there IS a moral high ground, but it doesn’t do a lot of good if only a few people are up there; they’ll most likely go to heaven as martyrs. The trick is to move everyone in the direction of the moral high ground. I don’t think you can do that unless you understand how people think and why.
“but it doesn’t do a lot of good if only a few people are up there; they’ll most likely go to heaven as martyrs.”
Ugh. That came out badly. Sometimes it takes a martyr to show people the way. But wouldn’t it be BETTER if martyrs weren’t necessary? It makes it easy to dismiss those killing the martyrs as monsters.
Jean, he made a few points. One was the idea that it was Russia that won the war, not the US – sure to be debated in his book club, I’d say. It’s increasingly conventional to say that, but perhaps not among his generation.
The really interesting thing he said was how easy to have been one of the perpetrators had one been in the bloodlands; he hoped he wouldn’t have, but how can one ever know? And he compared his fatigue in reading about yet another atrocity to the moral fatigue the perpetrators must have felt in performing yet another atrocity. I said that the critical thing would be the first time that one was ordered to shoot an innocent. We both said that we hoped we would have resisted then.
I think he “got it.”
From a Sheldon Hackney interview with Paul Fussell (http://web.viu.ca/davies/H482.WWI/fussell.conversation.1996.htm)
This reminds me of an old movie about a priest (played by Gregory Peck) who helped a Nazi officer’s family escape Italy to Switerland, and then later helped the Nazi guy come back to God. During the war, the same officer was guilty of many war crimes and was always threatening to kill the priest.
Still, the priest helped the Nazi and his family.
A difficult, and very important lesson.
I forgot to mention – I think that movie was based on a true story.
“The really interesting thing he said was how easy to have been one of the perpetrators had one been in the bloodlands.”
James, when I was growing up, our next-door neighbors for a time were a lovely young German couple for whose four children I used to babysit. It was interesting to see hear how their fathers, who lived through WWII as adults, responded to the bloodlands.
His father was a college professor at a school where Jewish professors were taken away. Some inquiries and mild protests were made, but intellectuals were being watched fairly closely, so most profs kept their heads down. He was allowed to come to the U.S. to teach immediately after the War, but was watched by the American authorities for a time, which he found unnerving, even though he “hadn’t done anything.” (Which was his tragedy, I suppose.)
She came from a farming area, and the family was pretty apolitical from all accounts. They hated the Allies because the bombing disrupted life and destroyed farming operations, and life was very hard-scrabble. Toward the end of the war, her father was drafted into the German army, which left the family even worse off. He was captured by the Russians and presumed dead. He was released some years later and found his way home, but died of shock and malnutrition not long after. As the extent of German war atrocities was uncovered, she said her family and most “average Germans” felt that they were absolved of any collective guilt because they had suffered so much themselves.
“I said that the critical thing would be the first time that one was ordered to shoot an innocent. We both said that we hoped we would have resisted then.”
My guess is that in the bloodlands “an innocent” might be quite hard to distinguish, especially if fear for your own safety or that of your family allowed you to justify shooting whomever your superiors identified as an enemy.
Years ago, I did some newspaper stories about a local Vietnam vet’s group. A couple of the fellows were having terrible psychological problems because they had shot children. They were told that the Viet Cong regularly strapped mines to their children underneath their clothes and they needed to protect their buddies. They said at the time it all made perfect sense (maybe), and it wasn’t until they got home that other feelings about it kicked in.
Now, of course, the shooting of innocents can be done from high in the air or with long-range artillery, and, in those cases, you can say you were only aiming for the bad guys and the innocents were unluckily in the line of fire.
Another tragedy on top of tragedy was the guilt the American public, including friends and relatives laid on the returning troops from Vietnam. “How could you kill another person?” As if the ones remaining at home were so innocent. Jesus said it best: Even Jane Fonda finally got the message when she apologized to the troops. “Only God is good.” Generally people blind themselves to the injunctions of Matthew 25 which they still deny when the Lord finally reminds them.Our cruelties of every day life are denied while others are blamed.
“The typical history book used in our schools, colleges focus almost exclusively on Nazism and WWII and Jewish victims (i.e. concentration camps). Soviet repressions is mentioned but with little to no details – the aim is to highlight Nazi atrocities.”
That’s true, for several reasons probably. One probably is that the Germans were, like us, educated westerners living in a highly advanced state, while the Russians, in the popular imagination, were half-Asians. Westerners and as we all know, treat each other in a civilized manner, and that makes Nazidom all the more shocking, while Asians, as wel all know, do unspeakable things to each other, so what would you expect? Another is that Stalin’s Russia was our great and good friend from 1941-1945, and we might not want to look too closely at that alliance and its meaning. And finally, I suspect there’s still a lingering though by now largely unconscious Popular Front mentality (for want of a better term) that recoils at the idea of any sort of moral equivalence between Hitler and Stalin (and the movements they led).
Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, published over 50 years ago, was dismissed by some who should have known better, precisely for this reason (I ran across this feeling many, many years ago when I was a very junior instructor in the history department of a great university located in a pleasantly green and leafy town not twenty miles north of Trenton, NJ).
As for the Russians winning the war — I think one can certainly make a case for that as long as “the war” is understood only as meaning the fighting in Europe. But then one must also come to terms with the Soviet role in bringing on the war — particularly in late August, 1939, and lasting up until June 21, 1941.
I haven’t read Snyder, but I am going to do so, perhaps when winter’s darkness lifts a little bit. Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern (a cantata for Epiphany — this Thursday — ) but though the spiritual Morningstar is with us, the natural one’s still a bit dim in the northern latitudes).
This is a terribly important book — and discussion. I have not yet read the book but followed the author’s articles in The New York Review of Books carefully. They reminded me of the work of Omer Bartov, whose essays and reviews, some in The New Republic, confounded many conveniently distant notions about easily dividing good guys and bad guys.
But this overdue recognition of historical and moral complexity carries a complexity of its own. It would be a great disservice to Snyder’s unflinching scholarship and moral intent to find in it somehow reasons to relax our search for moral understanding and wisdom into some kind of everyone-was-guilty muddle, to allow our increased perception of Stalin’s horrendous crimes, for example, or of the endless cycles of ethnic enmities, to reduce our anguish at the Holocaust. Because Snyder rebuts the sweeping generalizations that writers like Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, for instance, have made about the perpetrators of genocide and massacre, to say nothing of Pius XII and the church, should not ease our own concerns about what makes people perpetrators, or bystanders, now understood in greater complexity.
This might be the point to repeat a story about a young German nun I knew in grad school. One evening she played her guitar and sang some very beautiful German songs for us. I complimented her on her German musical heritage, and she replied, “Ah yes. We Germans are very clever. We write lovely sentimental songs and march armies into France”.
Peter,
I agree with the thrust of your comment above. And I think you capture well Snyder’s intent as I understand him.
It is precisely because he is raising significant moral questions in a context of “greater complexity” that I think the discussion needs to be probed further. And I think Catholic periodicals/universities would be a most appropriate forum for promoting that discussion in an effort to gain “moral understanding and wisdom.”
Fr. Imbelli –
When your university sponsors such a conference, be sure to include some psychologists. They’ve studied our capacity for evil in great depth — see for instance the notorious Milgram experiments that would no longer be tolerated for ethical reasons (the psychologists lied to the subjects). Still the data remains in all its starkness, and there have been many other studies since then.
With regard to the Milgram experiments and related moral and ethical issues, there’s an excellent paper by Professor Robert A. Burt entitled “Wrong Tomorrow, Wrong Yesterday,
but not Today: On Sliding into Evil with Zeal but without Understanding.” The paper was given as part of a seminar on collaboration with systems of evil.
Professor Burt states the issue as follows:
With regard to the Milgram experiments, Professor Burt points out that Milgram, himself, seemed oblivious to the moral implications of the anguish he inflicted on the teacher-subjects who were induced to administer what they were told were lethal electrical shocks.
Incidentally, Kazuo Ishiguro has written several novels that confront this issue directly. The most chilling is “Never Let Me Go”, which tells of a future dystopia in which human clones are created whose sole purpose is to serve as future organ donors.
Visiting the sites of the Spanish Inquisition in Toledo, Cordoba, Seville last week I found that the Spanish have a keen sense of the connections between that Catholic totalitarianism and the evil totalitarianisms of the 20th century. I do believe that as Catholics we cannot talk convincingly about this issue if we do not at the same time reflect on the crimes of the Church, which in childhood we may have been taught to think were not crimes at all…
Antonio, Walter M. Miller’s short stories often deal with many of the same issues in a futuristic setting (I hesitate to say ‘science fiction’). I discovered Miller thanks to the very well read commentators here at commonweal.
I am a little surprised that Snyder’s book is generating so much shock when it has been preceded by so many other books that made similar claims such as Richard Lukas’ “Forgotten Holocaust: the Poles Under German Occupation” http://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Holocaust-German-Occupation-1939-1944/dp/0781809010
A great novel by a Polish prisoner of war is “Without Vodka” by Aleksander Topoloski which details many eastern european attitudes to the German invasion (as a prisoner of war in Ukraine after being captured by the Soviets, Topolski (and many Poles/Ukrainians) waited with restless anticipation for their ‘liberation’ by Nazi Germany (the honeymoon was short-lived). My own family history (I lost family in the Hlodomyr, at Katyn and an uncle fought with Gen. Anders in North Africa then at Monte Casino) has given me a particular impetus to study this timeframe.
Adam – that was part of what I was trying to say above and it captures some of the feeling expressed by Fr. O’Leary.
Given ethnic, regional, and even local animosities, WWII and back and forth invasions gave impetus and cover for many localized and regional massacres – committed by more than just a label called Nazism or Communism. Yes, it does get confusing and complex.
Trying to drill down into just Poland and the Ukraine and the repeated deaths over a 20 year period indicates that Polish, Catholics, Socialists, Nazis, Communists, etc. all committed massacres – thus, the point that any group can find themselves as perpetrators and not just victims.
Add the on-going conflicts in the Balkans staring in the 1030s – during WWII, you had the Franciscans and catholic bishops supporting Nazism to eliminate and suppress ethnic and religious groups they did not agree with. The church’s role in this region during WWII is not usually part of textbooks or even discussed in graduate school. It is part of history that has been lost to a degree but completes a total picture that is all too often neglected.
It challenges the simplistic notion that Nazism was evil and anyone who opposed Nazism was good. In the “name of good” hundreds of thousands died, were tortured; had their homes/farms taken from them.
Yes, this type of historical research may also widen the analysis of Pius XII and his actions.
I am a little surprised that Snyder’s book is generating so much shock…
There were other books but none to my knowledge that disclosed the scope and sweep of such calculated slaughter as this book does.
I wonder whether the apparently human propensity to follow the orders of authorities is the same propensity that Piaget described as one of the ordinary levels of human development. Piaget held that there is a level of human moral development which typically occurs in adolescence and *prior* to the development of higher level logical thinking. In this level the authority of one’s family, one’s tribe, one’s clan determines one’s moral judgments. Unfortunately, according to Piaget, many people never get past this level of group-thought.
According to Piaget (and his disciple Kohlberg), until a person sees the contradictions that such clannish authoritarianism leads to, the person will not reject his group’s authority. Being a “good German”, according to this theory, is a matter of not growing up intellectually, of not understanding the inconsistencies which the thinking of one’s own clan leads to.
Kohlberg developed Piaget’s theory, but I don’t know if he ever applied it to the Nazis.
Antonio,
thank you for the various quotes you give and the observations you make above.
I believe I have recommended before the article by Stanley Hauerwas: “Self-Deception and Autobiography: Reflections on Speer’s ‘Inside the Third Reich’.” I think it a masterful analysis of the “not wrong today” self-deception that afflicts us all and insinuates into the most mundane nooks of our lives.
The article can be found in Hauerwas’ book of essays, “Truthfulness and Tragedy” and also in the “Hauerwas Reader.”
“According to Piaget (and his disciple Kohlberg), until a person sees the contradictions that such clannish authoritarianism leads to, the person will not reject his group’s authority. Being a ‘good German,’ according to this theory, is a matter of not growing up intellectually, of not understanding the inconsistencies which the thinking of one’s own clan leads to.”
That’s a fair observation, though I’d argue that a certain amount of “clannishness” holds ALL cultures together. To what extent is being “a good German” unlike being “a good American”? To what extent do cultures reward stunted psychological development?
FWIW, “Never Let Me Go” is also about a failed attempt of one group to try to establish the full humanity of the clones without entirely pushing for full human rights for them. The novel is especially good for its shadings of morality. And why Walter Miller’s “A Canticle for Leibowitz” has been out of print for so many years stymies me.
A check of Amazon shows “A Canticle for Leibowitz” to be still in print.
FYI: Apparently, Walter Miller was a pilot on the raid that destroyed the Monte Cassino monastery.
Antonio, thanks! That book has been sitting in my Wish List on Amazon for years (literally) as out of print, but when I hit the “see all buying options,” I found the 2006 Eos edition is still available.
About obeying orders. Isn’t it necessary at times to give over our decision-making to authority? I’m thinking of the necessity for obedience on the battlefield.
Interesting, isn’t it, that once again we look to literary artists for understanding of human nature and understanding of moral problems. I also find it interesting that science fiction writers are now taking such moral problems quite seriously. Science fiction used to be mainly about technological wonders and weird physics.
“Yes, it does get confusing and complex.”
Not when one considers this Moral and Historical complexity in light of atheism, the marketing of evil and the fine art of persuasion through deception and manipulation. Although the anti-christ was already in the world, there have been many anti-christs. If there is no Truth of Love, everything becomes permissible.
“He who does not gather with me scatters.”- Christ
Science fiction used to be mainly about technological wonders and weird physics.
Now, now, Ann! Dystopian novels are not science fiction, though some have elements of sci fi as “worlds of the future.” And science fiction has long been concerned with social issues. I bought the boys the complete “Twilight Zone” for Xmas and would recommend “The Monsters on Maple Street,” “Dust” and “The Obsolete Man” as cases in point (as Rod Serling used to say). Some of those episodes are almost as old as me!
Would also recommend Ursula K. LeGuin and Octavia Butler as sci-fi writers looking at matters of conscience and morality.
Or if you want to go back a lot further, “We” by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1921) or Ayn Rand’s “Anthem” (1935). While I don’t recommend Rand to anyone, really, “Anthem” is short and contains a lot of the seeds of her later ideas.
Nancy, I think it is dangerous to personify the anti-christ in others or some shadowy cadre, since it distracts us from the fact that, without vigilance, courage and discernment, we’re all capable of becoming the anti-christ.
No doubt, without vigilance, courage and discernment, it becomes difficult to read the signs of the period of Time in which one is living, Jean.
JEan –
Would you say that the sci fi genre is more interested in morality than other sorts of novels these days? There are very few novelists I read these days. i’ve started so many bad or plain boring novels over the last 30 years I’ve pretty much given up on them. But I used to look to them for moral insight.
So where is understanding of the human nature to be found? History, in such books as Snyder’s? Or does his work, given its defined subject, thereby distort human nature?
Or maybe even TV can teach us? There was a fine Masterpiece program on last night about Rudyard Kipling and the tragic death of his son in battle. It raised questions about imperialism, hideous battles, and being guided by the authority of one’s father.
While we’re looking at the responsibility of the Catholic Church for such massacres as those of the Cathars we might take a look at the whole question of the legitimacy of authority, including our sometime duty to obey. When is it required? When is it immoral?
Science fiction used to be mainly about technological wonders and weird physics
Science Fiction is a complicated and subtle genre. For example, thinking of the moral distinction between the human and the non-human, which is at the heart of the issues we’ve been discussing, brings the the movies “Blade Runner” and Steven Spielberg’s AI to mind as well as many Ray Bradbury stories. In particular, AI is especially difficult to watch for the way it evokes the Holocaust and the institution of slavery. The robots are merely disposable entities created for our delectation. To me, the implications are deep and troubling.
Incidentally, another parable in the same vein is “Nightmare Number Three” — a poem by Stephen Vincent Benet. in which the machines acquire sentience and turn on the human race. It can be found at http://www.brewerb.com/BREWERBLOB/Nightmare_Number_Three.html
A fine adaptation for radio is available at:
http://castroller.com/podcasts/XMinusOne/1318011-X%20Minus%20One%20Podcast%2011%20Nightmare
There was another recent piece, in the NYRB, I think, though I can’t remember either the author or the book under question. The point was made, however, that right after the war, French historical memory conveniently divided up all French citizens either into those who had joined the Resistance, or those, like the Vichyites and others, who became collaborators. But in fact (said the critic) the vast majority fell into neither of these two camps, but rather into a let’s-wait-and-see category.
What will the historians, one or two centuries hence, make of us, living here in North America today? How will they judge the blind eyes we all turn towards certain unpleasant aspects of our time? And what will they see as those unpleasant aspects?
While Snyder’s thesis that massacres are not exactly rare is no doubt true, I don’t think that it implies that those who order mass killings and those who follow an order to kill one or even several people are evil in the same magnitude. Neither are those who do not protest such killings very loudly as evil as those who actually kill. We are not all guilty of being Stalins or Hitlers or Pol Pots.
There is no such thing as a universal guilt. We are each guilty in our own way to our own degree, though it might be possible to consciously concur in another’s guilt without actually committing the crime, I think.