"Black Earth" is Timothy Snyder's fascinating new book about WWII on the Eastern front, a follow-up on his earlier work, "Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin." For anyone with an interest in WWII or political economy, agricultural and food policies or racial politics, I heartily recommend these works. Bloodlands, in addition to the valuable and pioneering work on the policies of Hitler and the Nazi regime, is especially powerful in exploring and documenting the brutality of the Stalinist regime during and in the years after WWII, when it acted in ways that were almost a mirror of Hitler's policies, with almost as brutal results.
Below is an excerpt from a recent interview with Snyder which is a taste of his work and the theoretical perspectives he develops. Because of their depth and wide-ranging relevance, I encourage reading the two reviews:
"What would you say were the basic
principles of Hitler’s worldview, and what did that mean for how he
viewed the idea of nation-states, or ethics, and other universalist
principles we assume as given?
Timothy Snyder:
So what Hitler does is he inverts; he reverses the whole way we think
about ethics, and for that matter the whole way we think about science.
What Hitler says is that abstract thought—whether it’s normative or
whether it’s scientific—is inherently Jewish. There is in fact no way of
thinking about the world, says Hitler, which allows us to see human
beings as human beings. Any idea which allows us to see each other as
human beings—whether it’s a social contract; whether it’s a legal
contract; whether it’s working-class solidarity; whether it’s
Christianity—all these ideas come from Jews. And so for people to be
people, for people to return to their essence, for them to represent
their race, as Hitler sees things, you have to strip away all those
ideas. And the only way to strip away all those ideas is to eradicate
the Jews. And if you eradicate the Jews, then the world snaps back into
what Hitler sees as its primeval, correct state: Races struggles against
each other, kill each other, starve each other to death, and try and
take land.
Delman: And that’s a good world to Hitler?
Snyder: Yeah, that’s the only good. It’s a very
dark, empty universe. I mean, that’s how Hitler describes it to himself.
There are really no values in the world except for the stark reality
that we are born in order to take things from other people. And so
Hitler sees the only good thing as removing the Jews who pervert, as he
says it, human nature and physical nature.
Delman:
And so that’s what you mean when you say that Hitler saw the Jews as an
ecological or planetary threat—that they were truly existentially
damaging the planet with their ideas and their attempts to invert the
natural order. You said that they were “un-nature.”
Snyder: Yeah, so unnatur is actually a term
that Hitler uses, and I think it’s a really telling term. I think it
gets to the heart of the matter. When we think of anti-Semitism, we
start from the ground up, right? We think about everyday prejudice. We
think about discrimination. We think about the separation of Jews from
other people.
What
I’m trying to do is start from the top down, and say that the
fundamental issue is not that Hitler was more of an anti-Semite than
other people. It’s not a matter of just turning up the notches and
getting up to a higher level of anti-Semitism. It’s a whole worldview,
in the literal sense of the world. He sees the Jews as being the thing
which destroys the world, which infects the world. He uses the term
“pestilence” in this sense—the Jews have infected the world. They’ve
made the world not just impure in some kind of metaphorical sense—he
really means it. And so the only way to purify the world—to make things
go back to the way they’re supposed to be, to have a natural ecology, to
go back to this struggle between races, which Hitler thinks is
natural—the only way to do that is to physically eliminate the Jews."
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/hitler-holocaust-antisemitism-timothy-snyder/404260/
Here is another review which encapsulates Snyder's position; "He does not see the Holocaust as a “war against the Jews”—as the
historian Lucy Dawidowicz called it—for which Hitler was prepared to
sacrifice ordinary military strategy, but as an extreme example of
Hitler’s wide-ranging racial obsessions":
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-frying-pan-and-the-fire-1441402937
