On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century Mar 2, 2017
by Timothy Snyder
( 16,967 )
AUD 8.59
**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER**
‘A sort of survival book, a sort of symptom-diagnosis manual in terms of losing your democracy and what tyranny and authoritarianism look like up close’ Rachel Maddow
'These 128 pages are a brief primer in every important thing we might have learned from the history of the last century, and all that we appear to have forgotten' Observer
History does not repeat, but it does instruct.
In the twentieth century, European democracies collapsed into fascism, Nazism and communism. These were movements in which a leader or a party claimed to give voice to the people, promised to protect them from global existential threats, and rejected reason in favour of myth. European history shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary people can find themselves in unimaginable circumstances.
History can familiarise, and it can warn. Today, we are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to totalitarianism in the twentieth century. But when the political order seems imperilled, our advantage is that we can learn from their experience to resist the advance of tyranny.
Now is a good time to do so.
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On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
by Timothy Snyder (Goodreads Author)
4.18 · Rating details · 50,691 ratings · 6,475 reviews
A historian of fascism offers a guide for surviving and resisting America’s turn towards authoritarianism.
On November 9th, millions of Americans woke up to the impossible: the election of Donald Trump as president. Against all predictions, one of the most-disliked presidential candidates in history had swept the electoral college, elevating a man with open contempt for democratic norms and institutions to the height of power.
Timothy Snyder is one of the most celebrated historians of the Holocaust. In his books Bloodlands and Black Earth, he has carefully dissected the events and values that enabled the rise of Hitler and Stalin and the execution of their catastrophic policies. With Twenty Lessons, Snyder draws from the darkest hours of the twentieth century to provide hope for the twenty-first. As he writes, “Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism and communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.”
Twenty Lessons is a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come. (less)
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Paperback, 126 pages
Published March 28th 2017 by Tim Duggan Books (first published February 28th 2017)
Original TitleOn Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
ISBN0804190119 (ISBN13: 9780804190114)
Edition LanguageEnglish
Literary AwardsGoodreads Choice Award Nominee for History & Biography (2017)
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On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
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暴政：掌控關鍵年代的獨裁風潮，洞悉時代之惡的20堂課
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Trying to come to grip on what's going on in world, and past politics in history. Would this be a good book to read for that purpose?
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Amy Thompson Yes. I think everyone should read this. We are being pushed one step at a time towards tyranny and everyone needs to realize that it is really happeni…more
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Sarah Jessica Parker
Jun 29, 2018Sarah Jessica Parker added it
Some people say this book should be on your person at all times. It's so worth reading and provokes great conversation. ...more
flag569 likes · Like · 54 comments · see review
Lisa
Mar 12, 2017Lisa rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: nonfiction
“If young people do not begin to make history, politicians of eternity and inevitability will destroy it. And to make history, they need to know some. This is not the end, but a beginning.”
The closing lines of this extended essay, divided into twenty lessons on history in its relation to current happenings, speak to me on a personal level. That is what I have been thinking about, and working for, as long as I can remember. Learning from the past is not only a widely neglected subject in school, it is a necessity for democratic society to survive.
Update in 2020: I wrote this review in a frenzy at the beginning of 2017, just after the book was published, and now, at the point when my inner humanist thought it could take a sigh of relief and put the threat to democracy on a history book shelf for a period of time, it looks like we have to start a new lesson on HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE from within. The most terrifying dictators in history could never have acted alone, they needed truth acrobats to hypnotise the masses of confused and scared people they had set up for their ruthless game. I realise now that I had one shred of naiveté left in me over the past agonising four year. I thought most people in the United States of America (including selfish Republican leaders) loved their democracy more than they love their own power and money. That was a mistake. The show we see each day at the moment couldn't be uglier. Humanity is at a point where nobody can be excused and stay complacent. Don't ask for whom the bell tolls!!
Step by step, Snyder approaches the various undermining factors of fascist propaganda that have proven successful over and over again in the world. He keeps it short, and simple, and refers to standard books by famous authors, both fiction writers and philosophers, for deeper understanding of the birth and maintenance of tyranny.
He also suggests different ways of resisting the political brainwashing tendencies, and of keeping an independent mind in the midst of mob behaviour. One root of fascist success is the general human need to belong, and to conform, and go with the crowd. In a chilling example, he describes the terror that Nazi functionaries were able to create with the help of countless regular people:
“Some killed of murderous conviction. But many others who killed were just afraid to stand out. Other forces were at work besides conformism. But without the conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible.”
Hannah Arendt is cited, describing the moment after the Reichstagsbrand, when she realised that you could no longer be a bystander, watching terror and misinformation hypnotise a whole nation.
Another important topic, often raised with my students in class, is the dehumanising effect of internet traffic. Inhibitions are cast off, people forget that what they say is extreme, and extremely hurtful. They are feeling strong in a selected collective, and need “an opposition” to fuel their discussions. A simple suggestion is to get out in the real world, make eye contact with real people, and dare engaging in small talk with people outside your comfort zone. This is a vital point, especially in our Swedish environment, where people naturally shy away even from basic forms of polite greetings. The danger of disappearing in an unreal internet community feeding conspiracy fears and distorting reality is omnipresent. My parents, living on the continent for almost 30 years, are shocked whenever they visit their home country and realise the complete isolation from other human beings in Sweden.
The tyrannies of the 20th century used the mass media available to them at the time - radio, and later television - to transmit their messages, and now the internet fills that function. We have one enormous advantage (which of course has its negative aspects as well), and that is our active participation in it. Even though the flow of (mis)information is part of the root of the new fascist success in the world, it can also be used by people to gently bring more nuance and knowledge into the debate:
“Since in the age of the internet we are all publishers, each of us bears some private responsibility for the public’s sense of truth.”
I think that is of massive importance. Think before you write, reflect on consequences, for yourself and others, and be careful not to add to the populist agenda by using the reductionist vocabulary and simplified, nationalist fear tactics to convince people.
Snyder’s essay is short, and only scratches the surface of a huge topic, which deserves more reflection than the author can possibly deliver given the format. I nonetheless think it has a valuable place in the current debate for its clear introduction and reference to further literature, as well as for the remarkable historical parallels which make the fault lines of history visible. I can imagine reading it with teenage students as a point of departure for overarching discussions, but also to read it privately as a simple reminder of what a powerless individual can do to intellectually survive in an increasingly poisoned political atmosphere.
A good, solid recommendation! Thank you, Matt for encouraging me to read it - I am passing it on to my own teenage son! (less)
flag415 likes · Like · 48 comments · see review
Bill Kerwin
Aug 27, 2017Bill Kerwin rated it really liked it
Shelves: politics, history
As Duncan Black ("Atrios" at Eschaton) phrased it a few days ago, “I veer from ‘haha Trump's a big dumdum’ to ‘oh shit we're all going to die.’” Is Trump a clown or an autocrat? A buffoon, or a despot-in-training?
I can’t give you a definitive answer, but I am sure of one thing: for those worried about totalitarianism in the good ole USA, historian Timothy Snyder’s little book On Tyrrany is an excellent guide to what to do and what to watch out for.
Snyder is an excellent source for such advice, for his major works are Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin and Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. Thus he spent a good portion of his academic career cataloging the increments that lead to tyranny and the harbingers that can alert us to its coming.
This pocket-sized 125 page book consists of twenty “lessons” Timothy Snyder believes are helpful both for observing and for preserving our republic, and also keeping democracy alive within it. Five I found most helpful were “1. Do not obey in advance” (Don’t be like Austria, anticipating Hitler’s wishes, just to get along), “2. Defend institutions” (Don’t just assume newspapers, courts, and NGO’s are strong enough to survive), “5.Remember professional ethics (if lawyers behave with honor, it will be harder for totalitarianism to take hold), “9. “Be kind to our language” (avoid cant, speak in your own voice, read books), and “14. Establish a private life” (keep off the internet, avoid “hooks” they may use to hang you.”
There are two others worth quoting at some length. First, “6. Be wary of paramilitaries”
When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the leader, the paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.
Second, “13. Practice corporeal politics”:
Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them.
On Tyranny is a useful little book, both disturbing and strangely comforting. I’m laughing at Trump less since I read it, and I’m less scared of him too. (less)
flag214 likes · Like · 17 comments · see review
Julie
May 09, 2017Julie rated it really liked it
Shelves: e-book, 2017, history, overdrive, politics, non-fiction
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder is a 2017 Tim Duggan Books publication.
As a Professor of History at Yale University, Professor Snyder uses his expertise to lay out the importance of learning from the mistakes made throughout history, and to warn against a cavalier attitude towards the strength of our own democracy.
The author lists habits we need to develop, and continually practice, in order to protect ourselves and our country, from falling prey to tyrannical regimes. He teaches us how to pick up on subtle changes, and how to recognize the signs and symptoms of tyranny and authoritarianism. He also advises us on what to do or not to do if the worst does happen.
Naturally, the release of this book begs many people in the United States to make comparisons to our current political climate. But, the trouble isn’t simply one for America. The current trend towards nationalism will remind many of another time when “America First” was a slogan and how the isolationism the world was gripped in was the perfect set up for powerful dictators and of course, we all know how that turned out. Still, we have often believed those days are long over with, and our democracy would never again regress or weaken.
Many have used this book to make comparisons between Trump and Hitler, which the author doesn’t discourage out of hand, but, the book was not written solely for that purpose. The book teaches that democracies can fail, and how they fail, and the lessons we should learn from those failures.
The lessons outlined here include many habits we should form and stick to, no matter how progressive or peaceful things are in our country or with our relationships with other countries.
I personally believe our complacency in taking for granted our democracy is safe, is a dangerous attitude to adopt.
I didn’t always agree with everything the author suggested. I’m an extreme introvert, so I doubt I will ever force myself to 'get out there' and 'engage in small talk'. I also enjoy social media, like Goodreads, for example, and I love technologies and the internet, so again, I doubt I will ever deliberately dial back my time spent online.
However, many of the other suggestions the author urges the reader to try, are things I already do. I don’t have cable, so mainstream media aren’t constantly infiltrating my head, which keeps those trendy catchphrases out of my vocabulary as well. I read print papers, and read lots of books, which is advice I can get behind.
The author does offer up a few suggested fiction and nonfiction titles that tie into his philosophies, and I do intend to read a few of them.
I believe the author offers sound advice, no matter which side of the political debate you are on. If you learn the mistakes made by failed democracies, learn your history, make yourself aware, learn to think for yourself, I believe you will have equipped yourself with enough intellect and armor to make informed choices and be prepared for the worst case scenario.
“If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny”
I hope people will not view this book simply as a comparison between Trump and Hitler, because while it may be difficult not to make those parallels right now, this book is one that reminds us that ‘History doesn’t repeat, but it does instruct’. It is a book that will be important, and relevant, not just for the here and now, but for all future eras of time, as well.
4 stars (less)
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Cecily
Aug 30, 2020Cecily rated it really liked it
Shelves: history, dystopian, politics, usa-and-canada, psychology, war
This is a very short, well written, clearly structured, powerful warning and call to action, written shortly after Trump was elected. There are punchy and quotable epithets on every page.
Image: The twenty lessons (chapters)
Snyder is a Yale professor, specialising in 20th century history, including the Holocaust. He looks at the rise of Nazism and, to a lesser extent, Communism, to show parallels with 21st century USA, especially Trump: the tactics of leaders and the response of ordinary people.
“History does not repeat, but it does instruct.”
This was prescient when written. It felt timely as I read it (immediately after the DNC, during the RNC, and less than three months before the 2020 presidential election). But when I finished, it seemed too late, and I didn’t feel I’d learned much.
How to stop a coup, 2020
This article is the natural postscript to Snyder’s book: 10 things you need to know to stop a coup by Daniel Hunter. It is practical and positive, and I hope none of my friends ever need it, but on 2 November 2020, a few US friends are sharing it. The points he elaborates on are:
1. Don’t expect results election night
2. Do call it a coup
3. Know that coups have been stopped by regular folks
4. Be ready to act quickly — and not alone
5. Focus on widely shared democratic values, not on individuals
6. Convince people not to freeze or just go along
7. Commit to actions that represent rule of law, stability and nonviolence
8. Yes, a coup can happen in the United States
9. Center in calm, not fear
10. Prepare to deter a coup before the election
Why read Snyder's book?
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” George Orwell, 1984
There’s not much new here if you’ve read Orwell and followed people/sites like Amy Siskind since before she started her weekly list of “not normal” steps towards authoritarianism in November 2016. But if you’re struggling to understand the current triumph of populist strongmen, and want historical parallels, this is a quick and insightful primer - regardless of what country you live in.
Image: 12 Early Warning Signs of Fascism, often credited to United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Source.)
Consider
• “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.”
• “Any election can be the last.”
• Symbols matter: “What might seem like a gesture of pride can be a source of exclusion.”
• Think of Portland (and others). See BBC re Trump's crackdown on Portland and Wiki on Portland protests:
“When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.”
• “The emotions of rallies and the ideology of exclusion” can challenge, penetrate, and then transform the police and military.
• Nationalism is not the same as patriotism.
“A nationalist will say that ‘it can’t happen here’... A patriot says that it could happen here, but that we will stop it.”
• “Defend institutions” is the second point/chapter. Back in 2017, who envisaged the USPS being at risk? Less than three months before an election during a pandemic, when postal voting will be vital, the new Postmaster General has been removing and breaking up sorting machines and banning overtime. But there has been a lot of push-back, from individuals, as well as other institutions. Enough? Who knows.
• Listen for dangerous words - extremism, terrorism, emergency, exception - used to justify breaking norms and quashing oversight and opposition.
“Citizens trade real freedom for fake safety.”
• “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.” Hence, “Post-truth is pre-fascism.”
• Klemperer explained that “truth dies in four modes” (modes, not a sequence):
1. Open hostility to verifiable reality (inauguration crowd size)
2. Shamanistic incantation (“Lock her up”, “Build the wall”, "Witch hunt", "Fake News")
3. Magical thinking ("One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear" - Coronavirus) and open embrace of contradiction
4. Misplaced faith (saying "Only I can fix it")
Oddities
Anonymity
It’s a warning to the USA, but Snyder only ever refers to “the candidate” and “the president”, even though the examples are clearly specific to Trump. I suppose he wanted to make it more generic, but some of the examples are unique to Trump (describing avoiding HIV in 1980s NYC as his “personal Vietnam” - a war he avoided) and he does name Putin, as well as historical figures.
Terminology
This doesn’t get bogged down with definitions of and distinctions between terms like fascism, authoritarianism, Nazism, and totalitarianism. In a book this short, I think that’s good.
Wrong
Synder claims a deceit of the Brexit campaign was a desire for a British nation-state (true, though “sovereignty” was the term used). But he goes on:
“Such a thing never existed. There was a British Empire, and then there was Britain as a member of the European Union.”
Rubbish. We didn’t join the EEC (as it then was) until 1973, and whatever definition of the British Empire you pick, it was long gone by then. Furthermore, having an empire or not, is not directly related to being a nation state, which can arguably be dated to Acts of Union in 1800, when we did still have an empire.
Personality cults
“Dear Leader” cults of personality are not mentioned. It was visible in 2016, later, at the televised start of cabinet meetings, and even more so now. The GOP didn’t even bother with a detailed agenda for the 2020 election: just a 49-point bullet list that was widely paraphrased as “whatever Trump wants”. It’s lacking in any detail, and includes shamanistic incantation (a whole section titled “Drain the swamp”, with more items than for Education), magical thinking (“Create 10 Million New Jobs in 10 Months”), contradictory (“Pass Congressional Term Limits” from a president who repeatedly “jokes” about having a third term), and the alarming (“Teach American Exceptionalism” is one of only two education policies).
Propaganda techniques
The power of propaganda runs through this book, but it needs something about the techniques, updated to include social media bots and conspiracy sites.
No index
It’s just about short enough (more of an extended essay) for me to forgive, but in general, all non-fiction books should have one. Nor is there a bibliography, though he exhorts readers to step back from the internet and read books (less likely to be distracted by spectacle), mentioning several (fiction and non-fiction).
How it starts?
Image: Audience at Last Night of the Proms, year unspecified, but not 2020 (Source.)
As public life in the UK has become more partisan in the last few years, that is reflected in and amplified by our media. My mother has read The Telegraph all her adult life. It's an intelligent newspaper in many ways, but with a strong conservative and Conservative bias. Some of the stories she reads are deceitfully partisan and stoking culture wars against non-enemies, but they successfully distract from the mishandling of Covid and what will happen with Brexit after 31 December 2020.
There were two such stories in a single day this week. First, was her outrage at the impracticality of making 5-year olds wear masks all day in schools - which absolutely no one is suggesting (though the government has now advised that secondary pupils should wear them where they can’t socially distance). The other was the higher profile story about “cancel culture” and “political correctness gone mad” at the BBC, because at this year’s Last Night of the Proms, Land of Hope and Glory and Rule Britannia would be played by the orchestra, but not sung by the crowd. Some of the words are controversial, but the reason they won’t be sung by the crowd this year is that there will be no crowd in the auditorium!
UPDATE 1: In response to the whipped-up outrage, which drew bombastic criticism from our oft-absent PM, the BBC retreated. There will be a small choir to sing the words.
I can't fully deprogram someone who's 82, especially when it's been a gradual path: it's more that the paper has changed than that she has. But I do challenge individual stories, showing how they undermine her own values and beliefs, or why they’re utter nonsense. Her default is still to believe unquestioningly, but she does at least listen to alternative views, and sometimes accept them.
UPDATE 2: A clear case of Klemperer's "open hostility to verifiable reality" and "magical thinking" from our PM, immediately defended by flunkies (bold is mine):
"Boris Johnson has claimed that 'huge numbers' of people are returning to the office amid a government drive to stop people from working from home, despite a lack of evidence. Pressed on the prime minister's claim on Tuesday afternoon Downing Street said the PM's comments were not based on any hard figures, and that he was in fact expressing more of a wish." (Source)
Do something
Support the work of real journalists, including paying to access their work. The mainstream media is no longer mainstream.
“It is derision that is mainstream and easy, and actual journalism that is edgy and difficult.”
From Churchill not capitulating in 1940 as Hitler expected to Rosa Parks:
“The moment you set an example, the status quo is broken, and others will follow.”
“The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds.”
“The leader who dislikes investigators is a potential tyrant.”
You can organise online (and the current pandemic complicates matters)
“But nothing is real that does not end on the streets.”
Image: Ieshia Evans peacefully protests in Baton Rouge, July 2016 (Source.) (less)
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Peter Bradley
Mar 14, 2017Peter Bradley rated it it was ok · review of another edition
Shelves: history, philosophy
Please give my review a helpful vote on Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/review/R3PWF91...
Post-script: January 20, 2020 - The transition from the Trump Administration to the Biden Administration occurred - as I predicted - without the imposition of a dictatorship - as I predicted.
Snyder's book now stands proven by history as an exercise in hysteria.
On the other hand, given the statements by those with power and influence over the new administration about purging, re-education camps and truth commissions and the economic assaults on free speech platforms and Trump supporters, Snyder's hysteria certainly fit in with or channeled the authoritarian tendencies of the left circa 2016-2021.
The book seems timely today, unlike 2016.
_________________________
A sad example of how ideology distorts scholarship.
I purchased this expecting a thoughtful discussion about the lessons that an academic can draw from 20th-century totalitarianism. I was hopeful about something insight and depth from the author of Bloodlands, which did a really good job of bracketing Nazism and Communism into a coherent narrative.
This is not that book. To save those who might not know, author Timothy Snyder's central thesis is that the current Republican President is Literally Hitler. Of course, this should probably not come as a surprise. Every Republican president is Literally Hitler during their tenure, and then they are rehabilitated as the Model of Bipartisanship to be used against the next Republican President who is Literally Hitler. George Bush is now in the middle of rehabilitation as the Model of Bipartisanship, but there are those of us who remember that not so long he was Bushitler.
I expected better.
I wanted to give Snyder some credit for some his observations. Some of his points about tyranny are classic and memorable.
Unfortunately, I have to wonder where he was for the last eight years. During the last eight years, many people of faith have felt that they were under the heels of a tyranny that threatened to divide us from the rest of America and make us give up our freedom of conscience in order to avoid governmental oppression. The 2016 presidential campaign began, let us remember, with the perennial Democrat shill George Stephanopolous asking an off-the-wall question about contraception. Pretty soon, we saw a presidential campaign largely framed around the idea that Catholics were UnAmerican dissenters who irrationally refused to pay for contraception. The Little Sisters of Poor were required to toss a pinch of incense to appease abortion lest they face draconian penalties that would end their historic mission of caring for the poor. Likewise, we saw the government centralize and make a grab for a substantial part of the economy with that mis-named Affordable Health Care Act, which carried with the unprecedented intrusion into personal life and personal decision-making by requiring that Americans divert upwards of 20% of their income into the purchase of health insurance to the enrichment of insurance companies.
Although any of this could be described quite easily as "fascist", we heard nothing from Snyder.
Likewise, the last eight years have seen an unprecedented normalization of hostility to free speech, as colleges have instituted speech codes and rules against triggering and have assaulted and intimidated people who didn't adhere to the progressive line.
But, again, nothing from Snyder.
During the last presidential campaign, we saw videos of the loser's side attacking, hitting, punching throwing things at, and assaulting those on the president's side. We've seen riots in the aftermath of an election and attempt to get Electors to violate their oaths.
One might have seen in this the image of Brownshirts and the destruction of democracy by ignoring the spirit of the law, but, again, nothing from Snyder.
Similarly, we remember that under the former president, the IRS was used in an unprecedented way to harass and target conservatives. One might view this as an unhealthy fascist tendency.
But, again, crickets from Snyder.
It is an interesting feature of Snyder's slim book - which is easily read in a single sitting - that it is so conservative. For example, Snyder gives the very good advice that "institutions should be defended." Quite right, but notice this from his book:
"It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about—a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union—and take its side."
That is good advice, but I was amused at what his advice omitted. My amusement stemmed from my lengthy reading into the Kirchenkampfe. Snyder omits "churches." Obviously, churches were a major institution in the resistance against totalitarianism, although Snyder seems to omit this point. In a later section, he manages to explain how Polish workers allied with atheist scholars to bring down Polish Communism without mentioning John Paul II or the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church gets one reference here when Snyder observes:
"The one example of successful resistance to communism was the Solidarity labor movement in Poland in 1980–81: a coalition of workers and professionals, elements of the Roman Catholic Church, and secular groups."
"Elements." As if the Primate of Poland, the Bishops of Poland, and the Pope were just "elements." And this is from a history professor.
I have to wonder about this. Is it just the case that a Yale professor lives in such a secular bubble that he edits the data to form his arguments? Or is it the case, that he wanted to stay away from the tyranny of the prior eight years? Or is he simply an urban elite entirely out of touch with the country that voted for the president? I found this to be a not very edifying example of scholarship.
So, Snyder is strangely quiet about one kind of institution, but he is very conservative in his demand that everyone pay proper deference to the press and support it with money and loyalty.
And here again one wonders where Snyder has been for the last sixteen years. It has come to the point where everyone knows that the mainstream press is an arm of one political party, which isn't that of the current president. Even Communist China has pointed out that the media was biased in favor the loser. The press has an approval rating lower than that of a cold sore because people have seen the press blatantly misrepresent facts. The time is long gone when the press can't be fact-checked in real-time and stories that were run during the prior administration can't be found by a simple internet search and set against current stories to show the slanting and bias of press coverage.
On the other hand, the most independent and professional reporting is often found among amateur bloggers who have real experience, and, while they may have a bias, are not pretending that they don't.
Snyder would properly have compared the modern mainstream press to the Gleischaltung version of the press that existed in 1933 Germany if he wanted to make a fair comparison.(Given the revelation through Wiki leaks that there were media members who running their stories past the Clinton campaign, Gleischaltung is not too strong a word.)
Here is another example:
"17 Listen for dangerous words. Be alert to the use of the words extremism and terrorism. Be alive to the fatal notions of emergency and exception. Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary."
How about "racist"? Or homophobe? Or Islamaphobe?
Such things do exist, but it seems to me that Snyder is entirely unaware of how "dangerous words" are used by his tribe to stifle speech and mark people as "outcasts."
Here is an example where Snyder goes unhinged:
"14 Establish a private life. Nastier rulers will use what they know about you to push you around. Scrub your computer of malware on a regular basis. Remember that email is skywriting. Consider using alternative forms of the internet, or simply using it less. Have personal exchanges in person. For the same reason, resolve any legal trouble. Tyrants seek the hook on which to hang you. Try not to have hooks."
This may be good advice, but Snyder is injecting poison into the body politic by teaching people that they are presently at risk.
Of course, those who are not on the left have known this for a while. Brandon Eich was fired by Mozilla because of a progressive campaign that was manufactured on the outrage that Eich had dared to participate in politics by donating to one side of a California Initiative that was passed.
Sadly, we are at a point where private citizens are targeted for things they say on Facebook, and the people who target - on both sides - justify their mean-spirited actions by saying that their target was a bad person because the person voted this way or that or violated some piety or other.
I was disappointed in some rules that Snyder didn't offer. Here are a few:
1. Beware of those occasions when someone you like begins to cut away at the spirit of restraint that previously existed. Hitler might not have been able to get his Enabling Act if Kurt von Schleicher had not led the way with his own efforts to circumvent the Reichstag. Likewise, although Democrats cheered, and the media was silent, when Harry Reid exercised the nuclear option, it did set a precedent now that the Fascists control Congress. Similarly, there was loud cheering for the former president's use of executive decrees, but what precedent did unilaterally changing immigration law set for the new president?
At various times during the former president's administration, I was put in mind of the dangerous precedents he was setting, not unlike that of Schleicher. See
2. Beware of the Coordinated Press. The press has to be truly independent. If it becomes a lapdog for one party, it cannot fulfill its job of being a watchdog. A population that has seen it be a lapdog for eight years will probably not pay it much attention when it continues to serve the interest of the party that is out of power.
3.Beware of Charismatic Leaders who are called the Lightworker and make vapid claims about "Hope and Change" and being able to stop the rise of the oceans.
4. Beware of opponents of federalism and advocates of centralizations. Hitler eliminated the federal states and centralized power, such as coordinating political and economic power, such as creating a centralized health insurance system.
Snyder is histrionic. The former president may not have seemed like an authoritarian, but to those who were put to the choice of religious convictions or penalties, the former president was very authoritarian. Nonetheless, only those on the fever-swamp did not believe that the former president was not going to surrender power to his successor. The current president seems to have an authoritarian personality - some might say New Yor personality - but his policies tend away from authoritarianism. Eliminating the ACA is a pro-federalist position. Reducing the size of government is anti-authoritarian.
Certainly, the media will be there to expose him.
And does any sane person really think that the president will not surrender power to his successor exactly the same way that the former president gave up power?
Snyder is doing no one any good with this paranoid fantasy.
We survived the former president as a democracy. We will survive the current president as a democracy. (less)
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Matt
Feb 14, 2017Matt rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: might-tell-you-the-truth, history-books-tell-it
History teaches us the tricks of authoritarians. We can’t allow ourselves to fall for them.
(from a recent interview with the author; worth reading!)
Reading this book is imperative. You may not get another chance.
In twenty small lessons Timothy Snyder, history professor at Yale university and specialized in East European history and the holocaust, illustrates how oppressive regimes and authoritarian governments worked in the past and what might be done to avoid and crush them in the present. The book is clearly addressed at the American people, but anyone anywhere with any sense of freedom and security for themselves and for their loved ones now or in the future must read it too. The book has a sense of urgency which can hardly be ignored and which I actually didn’t expect from a historian.
This is not a scientific work. It is noticeable that the author has sought a language which is understandable to laymen and I think he found it. Whoever, after reading the book, does not yet understand what hour the clock of the world has struck, can not be helped. The chapter headings correspond to instructions and the text contains reasons why it is important to act on them. And acting now is crucial; before it gets too late. That’s the author’s opinion and that’s the opinion of the reviewer as well.
#readingagainsttrump
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. (less)
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Kevin Kelsey
Dec 20, 2017Kevin Kelsey rated it it was amazing
Shelves: favorites, highly-recommended, read-it-again, read-2017
Probably the most important book you could read this year. Please read it, then give your copy to someone else to read.
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Dave Schaafsma
Jul 05, 2018Dave Schaafsma rated it really liked it
Shelves: politics
“History does not repeat, but it does instruct”--Snyder
“I love the poorly educated”--Trump
I carried this little book in my back pocket at the recent Chicago march against the incarceration of children and separation of families policy of the current U. S. administration. It’s a pamphlet written by a Holocaust historian to help us look for and mobilize against fascist tendencies. It contains twenty lessons he has gleaned from his historical study about how a well-educated and highly “developed” society such as Germany might have succumbed to fascism.
Here’s the twenty lessons, briefly elaborated on in a little booklet that will take you an hour to read:
1. Do not obey in advance.
2. Defend institutions.
3. Beware the one-party state.
4. Take responsibility for the face of the world.
5. Remember professional ethics.
6. Be wary of paramilitaries.
7. Be reflective if you must be armed.
8. Stand out.
9. Be kind to our language.
10. Believe in truth.
11. Investigate.
12. Make eye contact and small talk.
13. Practice corporeal politics.
14. Establish a private life.
15. Contribute to good causes.
16. Learn from peers in other countries.
17. Listen for dangerous words.
18. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.
19. Be a patriot.
20. Be as courageous as you can.
Here’s some takeaways I found interesting:
“In founding a democratic republic upon law and establishing a system of checks and balances, the Founding Fathers sought to avoid the evil that they, like the ancient philosophers, called tyranny. They had in mind the usurpation of power by a single individual or group, or the circumvention of law by rulers for their own benefit.”
“Post-truth is pre-fascism: “Re: #10: Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.”
“Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on a screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people.”
“Protest can be organized through social media, but nothing is real that does not end on the streets.”
Things we can do to be proactive:
“We must, among other things, support a multiparty system and election rules. In the European context, several democracies that emerged after the World Wars I and II soon collapsed when a single party assumed power—usually by means of some combination of an election, emergency powers, and a coup d’état.”
READ and educate yourself. Historian Snyder endorses the reading of novels, imaginative constructions of possible scenarios so we can also imagine resistance and reconstruction of democracy. Read 1984, It Can’t Happen Here, The Handmaid’s Tale. Snyder even says: Parents, read with your children the Harry Potter series.
“Re #18. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of political parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. DO NOT FALL FOR IT.”
You are entitled to think this is liberal paranoia. I get that, but in every fascist state, a majority of thinking people have not believed the government was doing what it was doing. They were “apolitical.” Or they believed that this drastic disruption of democratic ideals was necessary for radical change. Keep reading the news and read this little book and think for yourself.
At the very least, admit this, that we are not necessarily smarter than those that have been hoodwinked by fascist movements conducted “for our own good”:
“We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the last century. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. . .”
On Tyranny is a 128 quarter page-sized book pages, available on Kindle for $3.99. They would make cheap and useful presents for friends. (less)
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Elyse Walters
Sep 20, 2017Elyse Walters rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
I had read Timothy Snyder before. I still remember that even though much of it was challenging to read - much of it gave me chills to. The book I'm speaking about is
"Black Earth":The Holocaust as History and a Warning...published in 2015.
And..... here again, Snyder is giving us a warning...and what's even more scary is some of the things he said in "Black Earth" give me more concern for those chills -- because I never thought those warnings would manifest in our country just two years later.
This is an incredible worth reading quick read -it's fricken sad it had to be written....
Given out current political situation- what stands out for me after reading this is....
If we survive as a democracy it will be going against history!
A small tidbit of interest that caught my eye in this book - was the section about politicians and television-- It was a reality wake up remember of how we have taken the collective trance to be normal.
"More then half a century ago, the classic novels of totalitarianism warned of the domination of screens, the suppression of books, the narrowing of vocabularies, and the associated difficulties of thought."
Snyder goes on to mention several worthy books to read....Rat Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, George Orwell's 1984, Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, .....
a few others...
And one I have not read -- that my goodness -- I actually now see reason to read it:
Snyder says....."One novel known by millions of young Americans that offers an account of tyranny and resistance is J.K. Rowling' Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallow.
If you and your friends or your children did not read it that way the first time, then it bears reading again".
Twenty - very common sense lessons are in this small book - it's only $3.99 on Kindle!
Highly worth readers time to read it!!! (less)
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Andy
May 15, 2017Andy rated it did not like it
Shelves: on-deck
If this is the response to creeping fascism in America, we are in trouble.
(Note: for suggested alternatives see comment stream below.)
Obviously, Hitler is bad. And some of the advice is unassailable (Contribute to good causes, etc.) But beyond that, the little essays that make up this book seem pretty messy.
-Before Hitler comes to power, it makes sense to stand up, speak out, etc. But after, it's more about getting out or going underground. If the author really believes that Trump is Hitler and that Americans have had our last free election, then much of his advice is dangerously counterproductive.
-He says to read books, but Mein Kampf was a book, and Trump supporters love to read lots of books. So this is not a differentiating factor between Trump/Hitler and the alternatives.
-In the first chapter he talks about the Milgram experiments. The finding there was that about 65% of people will obey evil orders for no good reason. So using this as a rationale for the lesson "Do not obey" is confusing. A more logical lesson would be "Be careful about what you order people to do."
-There seems to be a general confusion about what applies to ordinary citizens vs. what is possible for a world leader like Churchill (Ch. 8).
-He recommends a bunch of books, but it is hard to see these becoming popular manuals for promoting democracy. The Rebel by Camus, for example, is a lengthy philosophical discussion of why it is so hard to get people to rebel against tyranny. This brings up a question that struck me many times while reading "On Tyranny": what is the audience for this pamphlet?
-Ch. 10/11 "Believe in truth, and Investigate" bugged me. You don't need to believe in truth. The truth is true whether you believe in it or not. Reality exists. You can know the truth. This is very difficult and nobody can do this for every issue, but you can do it for something. And if you're not willing or able to do it for anything then you can just shut up and admit ignorance and not be all fanatical about it. Because blindly trusting NPR or FOX or Clinton or Trump is still blindly trusting. (less)
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Richard Derus
Mar 24, 2018Richard Derus rated it it was amazing
Shelves: borrowed, returned
Rating: 5* of five
Not for its perfection of style but for its perfection of wisdom and its amazing timeliness. As I write this today, 24 March 2018, I saw the face of our future president in Emma Gonzalez as she stood silent, focused, determined, at a march made by young people to demand their lives be protected from ammosexual assholes. She spoke for six minutes and twenty seconds in total, the same amount of time that it took one piece of shit human being to slaughter seventeen of her classmates.
I believe that her speech...the few words, the long silence...will be the spark of the youth revolution our country so very badly needs. I am hopeful that Emma Gonzalez will be, by her very adamantine sense of self and her charismatic gravitas, the voice that alerts her compatriots to Author Snyder's clarion call to clarity:
The politics of inevitability is a self-induced intellectual coma.
The most unbelievably high stakes are at risk in the November 2018 elections. Buy this book not for yourself but for your hopes of a reasonably happy future for the United States of America, buy it in quantity and give it to everyone you know and/or can find who is under 25, and talk to them about why you're giving them this short, clear, concise, and urgently necessary book.
Your life, my life, the life of a truly great nation, depends on them showing up at the ballot box on 6 November 2018. This is neither hyperbole nor alarmism. It is simply the truth. Looking away from the horrors of the current kakistocracy's rise to any position of power higher than hall monitor at the local middle school will only ensure the brutal and vicious agenda of these lowlife scumbags and their horrifying cadres of disgustingly venal and/or stupid supporters will succeed. (less)
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====
Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin Aug 31, 2011
by Timothy Snyder
( 1,286 )
AUD 21.93
In the middle of Europe, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered fourteen million people in the bloodlands between Berlin and Moscow. In a twelve-year-period, in these killing fields - today's Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Western Russia and the eastern Baltic coast - an average of more than one million citizens were slaughtered every year, as a result of deliberate policies unrelated to combat.
In his revelatory book Timothy Snyder offers a ground-breaking investigation into the motives and methods of Stalin and Hitler and, using scholarly literature and primary sources, pays special attention to the testimony of the victims, including the letters home, the notes flung from trains, the diaries on corpses. The result is a brilliantly researched, profoundly humane, authoritative and original book that forces us to re-examine the greatest tragedy in European history and re-think our past.
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Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
by Timothy Snyder (Goodreads Author)
4.31 · Rating details · 11,584 ratings · 1,084 reviews
Americans call the Second World War “The Good War.” But before it even began, America’s wartime ally Josef Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens—and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was finally defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war’s end, both the German and the Soviet killing sites fell behind the iron curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness.
Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single history, in the time and place where they occurred: between Germany and Russia, when Hitler and Stalin both held power. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands will be required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history.
From Booklist
If there is an explanation for the political killing perpetrated in eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, historian Snyder roots it in agriculture. Stalin wanted to collectivize farmers; Hitler wanted to eliminate them so Germans could colonize the land. The dictators wielded frightening power to advance such fantasies toward reality, and the despots toted up about 14 million corpses between them, so stupefying a figure that Snyder sets himself three goals here: to break down the number into the various actions of murder that comprise it, from liquidation of the kulaks to the final solution; to restore humanity to the victims via surviving testimony to their fates; and to deny Hitler and Stalin any historical justification for their policies, which at the time had legions of supporters and have some even today. Such scope may render Snyder’s project too imposing to casual readers, but it would engage those exposed to the period’s chronology and major interpretive issues, such as the extent to which the Nazi and Soviet systems may be compared. Solid and judicious scholarship for large WWII collections. (less)
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Hardcover, 524 pages
Published October 12th 2010 by Basic Books (first published August 11th 2010)
Original TitleBloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
ISBN0465002390 (ISBN13: 9780465002399)
Edition LanguageEnglish
Literary AwardsWayne S. Vucinich Book Prize Nominee (2011), Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding (2012), Prix Jan Michalski Nominee for Shortlist (2012), Cundill History Prize Nominee for Recognition of Excellence (2011)
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Does this book's factual material mean that Soviet socialism bears blame (at least partial blame) for German socialism's death toll, due to the conspiracy between Stalin and Hitler?
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Mieczyslaw Kasprzyk
Aug 27, 2011Mieczyslaw Kasprzyk rated it it was amazing
Shelves: non-fiction, russian, history, my-must-reads, polish, central-european-setting, world-war-2, jewish, german, 20th-century
I was raised amongst survivors of the great horror that was the War in Eastern Europe. My mother endured forced labour under the Soviets in 1940 and slave labour under the Nazis after 1941. She saw some of her family being deported by the Soviets to almost certain death in Kazakhstan and discovered the rest in a mass grave, shot by the Nazis. Her best friend survived Auschwitz. My Godfather was a partizan in the forests around Lwow, fighting both Nazis and Soviets. My Godmother lived through the Stalinist regime, survived the battles for Kharkov and slave labour in Germany. I was taught chess by a White Russian whose memories of that time were horrific. Even I visited Auschwitz in 1963 - when I returned to England I was shocked to realise non of the English people I knew knew anything about the place. Until recently who, apart from the Poles, knew the truth about Katyn?
So, when I started reading Timothy Snyder’s “Bloodlands” my first impression was “There is nothing new here”. I’d heard it all in one place or another. But what Snyder does do is take all those evils and puts them together in his Pandora’s Box - only one thing is missing, Hope. Because there was no hope, only fear and death. The depressing bleakness hollows out the soul. One has to pause to take stock, to look away, to absorb the evil and hear the dead cry out for justice, and an understanding that what happened there, on the “Eastern Front”, in the “Bloodlands”, actually exceeded anything the West could understand: “...The American and British soldiers who liberated the dying inmates from camps in Germany believed that they had discovered the horrors of Nazism. The images their photographers and cameramen captured of the corpses and the living skeletons at Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald seemed to convey the worst crimes of Hitler...this was far from the truth. The worst was in the ruins of Warsaw, or the fields of Treblinka, or the marshes of Belarus, or the pits of Babi Yar.” Timothy Snyder is the conscience of us all.
Snyder fills his Pandora’s Box and then he reveals its contents to us. He deals with the real terrors of Stalinism; the tragedy of the Great Famine of the Ukraine, the nightmare of the Great Terror, and the cold-blooded elimination of the educated classes and all forms of potential resistance in Poland. He goes on to deal with Nazism; once more, the elimination of educated Poles, the attempts to depopulate Belarus, and the Final Solution. He looks at Post-War Cold War anti-Semitism in a very knowledgeable manner that makes the era clearly understandable. He does a wonderful job of sorting the truth out from the “false history” we have in the West by reminding us (for example) that “by the time the gas chamber and crematoria complexes came on line in spring 1943, more than three-quarters of the Jews who would be killed in the Holocaust were already dead.” The name of Belzec is less well known than that of Auschwitz because it was a death camp - those who survived it were highly lucky and could be counted on the fingers of one hand. “The vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust never saw a concentration camp.”
Snyder debunks the modern attempts to “balance” out history: the Nazis and the Soviets were not inhuman beasts - they were ordinary men and women like you and me. These men and women had ideals which they tried to live up to. They saw themselves as victims of other groups and their actions were a form of self-defense. They forced others to collude in their plans by giving them a choice between that or death. He reminds us of the real atrocities carried out in the war, for example, “About as many Poles were killed in the bombing of Warsaw in 1939 as Germans were killed in the bombing of Dresden in 1945. For Poles, that bombing was just the beginning of one of the bloodiest occupations of the war... “ and that “German journalists and (some) historians ... have exaggerated the number of Germans killed during wartime and postwar evacuation, flight, or deportation...”
Snyder’s “Bloodlands” are, for me, the lands of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth partitioned between 1772 and 1794. The horrors that took place here are just a continuation of the policies of the Germans and Russians to control those lands. Perhaps I fall into that category of historians who try to understand the horrors in nationalistic terms - he debunks the Russian myth of the “Great Patriotic war” and points out that most of the “Russian” dead were “Soviet” and came from Belarus, the Ukraine and Eastern Poland - themselves victims of Stalinism in 1939 (and earlier).
I said there was nothing new here - that isn’t completely true. Snyder’s research is so broad as he brings the strands together that there will always be a fact that will surprise you, no matter how much you think you know the history. I never knew that the invading Germans, in 1939, tended not to treat captured Polish soldiers as prisoners-of-war but simply shot many of them as they surrendered. Snyder filled his history with facts and figures throughout. One simple fact stands in for so many in the book: “On any given day in the second half of 1941, the Germans shot more Jews than had been killed by pogroms in the entire history of the Russian Empire.”
There’s nothing new in this book. The story and the facts have always been available. In this post-Cold war era the truth about what went on in the East has been slowly revealed to the West: all the “false” history is been revealed as another version of the West’s anti-Communist propaganda, a Big brother version of history in which Polish troops, for example, were not allowed to partake in VE celebrations because the country was Communist (albeit sold out by the allies at Yalta). Snyder brings the true history of this era to the attention of the West. Everyone should read it - but then I would say that, wouldn’t I, I was raised amongst survivors of the great horror that was the War in Eastern Europe. (less)
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Brad Wheeler
Apr 22, 2012Brad Wheeler rated it it was amazing
Shelves: history, audiobooks, non-fiction, changed-my-worldview
Man. Oh, man.
This book is without a doubt the most depressing thing I've ever read. If there was ever a time and place that demonstrated man's inhumanity to man, it would be the "Bloodlands," the areas of Eastern Europe squashed flat two or three times by Hitler and Stalin. The author's accounts of casual starvation, brutal repression, and mass murder were horrifying not just because they happened, but because both victims and perpetrators were everyday, normal people.
This is why you read the epilogue in any history text: it's where the author makes their point. In this case, the author wanted to make clear exactly what happened to the 14 million people who died as a direct result of Soviet and Nazi policies before and during the Second World War. Specifically, he wanted to make it clear that it was actual people who died, and actual people who did the killing. He dips down into the masses and chooses one or two telling examples from each murder, each siege, each starvation.
It's people who died, the author says, and it's people who killed them. It's easy to dismiss the Nazis and the Stalinist as monsters, and in a sense they were. But that's a cop-out. The fact is, given the right time and circumstances, any of us might decide that it was in our best interest to cooperate in a program of mass killing. That's what the thousands of SS and NKVD men did. They're not so different from us. In acknowledging this, and in making plain what happened, Snyder make it ever so slightly less likely that it will ever happen again.
There are few history texts--few books of any kind--that have affected me as strongly as this book did. There were times I could barely keep listening, but I'm glad I did. Everyone should read this book. Not just historians or World War II enthusiasts (although the latter definitely should, if they only follow American history). Everyone should read this book, because everyone needs to hear its lesson. I don't mean to sound melodramatic, because I'm being entirely sincere. Read it.
Edit: corrected some embarrassingly bad grammar (less)
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Tony
Nov 09, 2010Tony rated it it was amazing
Shelves: top-10-2011, wwii
First, there are numbers:
13,788 at Polesie
23,600 at Kamiamets-Podilskyi
3,739 prisoners at Starobilsk
358, one night at Palmiry Forest
2,500 at Leningrad by October, 1941
5,500 by November
50,500 by December
1,000,000 by the end of the Leningrad siege
80,000 at Stalag 307
60,000 at Stalag 319
55,000 at Stalag 325
23,000 at Stalag 316
500,000 Soviet prisoners in the General Government
450, one night at Krzesawice
12,000 at Dnipropetrovsk
386,798 kulaks
33,761 at Babi Yar
14 million in all.
Not soldiers in battle. Just people in the wrong place. Jews, Poles, Lithuanians, Belarusians.
Think of the 1 at the end of 33,761, Timothy Snyder tells us, insists.
Each of the living bore a name.
Emmanuel Ringelblum, who created archives in the Warsaw ghetto making its history possible, and died betrayed.
Adam Czerniakow, told to present 5,000 Jews at a transfer point and certain mass death, and killed himself instead.
Sofia Karpai, a doctor who refused to yield under Stalin's torture.
And Dina Pronicheva, always Dina Pronicheva, one person, yet more than a number, who lived to tell of Babi Yar.
Along the way:
Violence is not confidence, and terror is not mastery.
And:
Those German soldiers who saw the Treblinka transports knew, if they wanted to know, just what they were fighting for.
There are people, some even in the reviews on this site, who argue which people suffered more. In a powerful closing chapter, Snyder asks, "Can the dead really belong to anyone?" And he warns us, "What begins as competitive martyrology can end with martyrological imperialism." We reflexively seem to need to see Hitler and Stalin as different from us, that we could never do what they did, that they are inhuman. Careful, Snyder says. That Jews and non-Aryans were sub-human was Hitler's justification for murder. "To find other people to be inhuman," Snyder writes, "is to take a step toward, not away from, the Nazi position."
The scholarship in this book is superb, much taken from untranslated Polish sources. And while the numbers sometimes read as lists, and points are often repetitively and numbingly made, Bloodlands is thought-provoking and personal.
The Nazi and Soviet regimes turned people into numbers, some of which we can only estimate, some of which we can reconstruct with fair precision. It is for us as scholars to seek these numbers and to put them into perspective. It is for us as humanists to turn the numbers back into people. If we cannot do that, then Hitler and Stalin have shaped not only our world, but our humanity. (less)
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BlackOxford
Mar 14, 2017BlackOxford rated it it was amazing
Shelves: history
History As Intention and Response
History can be told in several ways: as a textbook-like sequence of events and dates; as a moral tale; as a story of the strong or of the weak; from the point of view of the victors or the vanquished; as an account of divine providence or satanic interference. Snyder has a particularly engaging method of narrating history: as intention and response to circumstances. According to his title one could conceive his subject as the history of a specific geographical region, namely Eastern Poland, Ukraine and Belarus. But this is merely the location of the action.
The real history in Bloodlands is stated in the subtitle, namely the personal intentions of Hitler and Stalin and how these intentions were formed and interacted. Events in Bloodlands are relevant only as they relate to these intentions. Dates are relevant primarily to distinguish action and response. The story is not one of conflict and victory or loss but of joint persecution by Hitler and Stalin of a victim-population of Poles, Slavs, Jews and other ethnic groups. It is this genre of purposeful historiography in which the centre of attention is the intended victims that makes the book highly readable and intellectually compelling.
According to Snyder, the fundamental aims of both National Socialism and Soviet Communism were the same: to control their own food supply. The Germans, by expanding eastward, to acquire the most productive agricultural acreage in Europe. The Russians, by expanding westward into Poland and collectivising Soviet agriculture, primarily to finance industrialisation through exports. It is these intentions, their mutual responses to the other, and the interpretations by their subordinates that determine the trajectory of events from the end of WWI through the conclusion of WWII.
The central 'show' according to this view was never in Western Europe or Southeast Asia but in precisely that area for which both powers contended for agricultural land, Snyder's Bloodlands. It is here as well, and only here, that the full horror of both fascist and communist regimes can be appreciated. The details of the military campaign, as well as the 'formal' atrocities of Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet Gulag are important but, in a sense, obscure the wider and ultimate intentions to murder or displace the entire existing population of the region. The millions who died and the millions more who suffered were not 'collateral damage' incidental to war, they were the point of the war on both sides.
Stalin's clear purpose in his agricultural policy of the early 1930's, for example, was not just to crush Ukrainian nationalism and to eliminate any residual Polish influence in the Western Soviet Union, but also to replace its indigenous population by Russians. German strategy was commensurate, that is, to liquidate or otherwise enslave the Slavic population of the same region, and encourage the emigration of German farmers. Stalin used starvation as his weapon of choice; Hitler his Einsatzgruppen. Both were strategic necessities not incidental aberrations. Both used substantial resources that appear wasted only if their strategic intent is ignored.
Moreover, both leaders seriously risked their own positions to pursue these aims, an indication of their centrality. Ukrainian collectivisation was an obvious economic failure. It was nevertheless pursued by Stalin until de-population was largely achieved. The Einsatzgruppen which carried out the bulk of the Nazi liquidations in occupied countries were opposed by the regular army as a militarily useless collection of thugs and psychopaths. Yet they were given free rein in military areas by Hitler and received logistical priority, even in retreat.
These sorts of actions can only be perceived as errors in judgement if their real intent is ignored. Neither man was as concerned so much about the outcome of any particular battle as about his ability to carry out his ultimate purpose. And this purpose remained constant. Every significant political and military act, even the most bizarre, can be traced to the need to eliminate opposition to the requirements of the overall purpose, no matter how politically inept or militarily inefficient.
Failure to appreciate these aims was also the root of misunderstanding by contemporaries who should have known better. Among journalists only the Welsh Gareth Jones could see beyond the fascist and communist propaganda to the ultimate aims. Walter Duranty, the Pulitzer Prize-winning bureau chief of the New York Times, simply refused to believe the overwhelming evidence of mass starvation. Even intellectuals like Arthur Koestler temporised about the most horrible events - including widespread cannibalism - by insisting on the ultimate beneficence of socialism. American foreign policy simply ignored the reality of German and Russian intentions for two decades.
Continuing failure to appreciate the impact of these tragedies is the 'take-away' from Snyder's analysis. For example, Stalin starved to death approximately 3 million Ukrainians in 1932-33, and killed approximately another 3 million whom he had already deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan. These people were murdered not because they refused to conform to his policies but because they were who they were. Can there be any doubt about the conviction of present-day Ukrainians to resist further assimilation by Russia?
The unreliability of the press in reporting the factual detail of events was matched by the ineptitude of the intelligence and ambassadorial services in analysing their own sources of information. In part, at least, this seems due to an inability to accept the degree of depravity that human beings can reach. By any standards Stalin and Hitler were mad. But were then also the millions of previously normal citizens who necessarily carried out and even supplemented their malicious commands also mad? One small unit of NKVD officers shot more than 20,000 people during the Great Terror in the Soviet Union. If these men were not mad, how could they not have become so, and their families, their acquaintances, their country with them?
An interview with a communist activist who was charged with enforcing Stalin's orders to take the seed grain from collective farms, thus condemning the peasants to death, could be the most important theme of the entire book. "As before", he says, "I believed because I wanted to believe." This certainly would have been the response of every Soviet commissar, Nazi SS officer, Treblinka or Gulag camp guard and general army officer. This realisation is even more depressing than the seemingly endless atrocities recounted by Snyder. Commitment, loyalty, passion to and for ideals, no matter what they are, or leaders who represent these ideals, no matter who they are, are not virtues but vices.
It was these vices - the real evils of commitment, loyalty, and passion - that allowed Stalin and Hitler and their henchmen to carry out their work. These men were inspired by the conquest of the American West and the liquidation of its native population. These men created myths of foreign plots to undermine national sovereignty and used them to justify the closing of borders, the isolation of minority groups, and the necessity for murderous action against unarmed people. These men were consistent in their pronouncements about what they intended to do and why. And still each was able to manipulate the unique politics of his own system to maintain popular support through an appeal to purported 'virtue'. It is this virtue, not nationalism, or ideology per se which was the driving force of the evil committed.
Am I alone, therefore, in feeling apprehension watching American political rallies or evangelical religious meetings, or even corporate 'team-building' exercises? Am I alone in suspecting that men like Trump and Putin are capable of the most horrific crimes regardless of the institutional constraints imposed on them? Am I alone in considering that the cause for strength, whoever puts it forth, is a fundamental evil which has no inherent limits? Why are commitment, loyalty and passion valued most by the people who do most harm in the world? Is it I who am mad?
An addendum on Purpose and History
In the 1980's I attended a lecture by an economist whose name now escapes me (it could have been Paul Johnson). His topic was the history of agricultural policy in the United States. He pointed out that the two main components of this policy from the 1930's onwards had been 1) Rather substantial subsidies to farmers for not growing certain crops, and 2) Also rather large subsidies to industry and academia for research directed toward the increase in yields for the same crops that farmers were already paid not to grow.
Every year when these subsidies were brought before Congress, someone would point of the apparent contradiction. A debate would ensue. And a vote would endorse both sets of subsidy, usually with and increase. The presumption of irrationality in the political process was put forward as the only possible explanation.
Until it was pointed out, I believe to the Reagan administration, that this outcome only appeared irrational because no one was looking for the fundamental rational, the real purpose. According to the lecturer, this purpose wasn't obvious because it was never made explicit, but it nevertheless was there and it was politically compelling. The purpose of the apparently contradictory subsidies was quite straightforward: to maximise the value of U.S. farm land. In this light both subsidies made sense.
The importance of this insight was not merely intellectual. Having articulated the implicit purpose of historical agricultural policy, it was then possible to ask the question: Is the increased value of farm land a national priority? The answer was 'no'. Consequently, for the first time in several generations, both subsidies were reduced.
The implications for historical method are to me profound. The presumption of purpose is crucial in historical analysis. Without it, one is confronted with apparently random often irrational events. With it, one is forced to confront intentions that are only implicit and perhaps only shared by a very few with leadership positions. It is a presumption that is a self-fulfilling prophecy. But so is its negation. The example of U.S. agricultural policy is one proof of its superiority as a general method. (less)
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Matt
Jan 11, 2012Matt rated it really liked it
Shelves: world-war-ii
Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands is about the worst place that ever existed in the world: that unfortunate slice of Europe ruled by the two evilest people who ever inhabited our earth: Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.
Imagine a Venn diagram of evil. The left (west) loop is Hitler; the right (east) loop in Stalin. And in the middle, where the two circles overlap, is the bloodlands, extending “from central Poland to western Russia, through Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States.” From 1933 to 1945, 14 million people died in this ill-fated swatch of ground. Bloodlands is their story.
Snyder begins with the famines in Soviet Ukraine, brought about by the collectivization required by Stalin’s five-year plan. This initial chapter is a bit on the frustrating side. Like many who came of age watching Saving Private Ryan, I’m a World War II junkie. There are more books on my shelf emblazoned with swastikas than I care to admit.
That doesn’t make me knowledgeable on the subject, however. Indeed, my reading has always tended to be a bit myopic. I’ve read ten books on the D-Day landings at Normandy to every one book on the decade leading up to war. That’s even more true with regards to the U.S.S.R., about which I frankly know next to nothing. Accordingly, I could have used a little more table-setting, a little more explanation of why things were they way they were. Snyder, though, simply jumps right in.
Despite this, this first chapter is among the most memorable, and sets the tone for the rest of the book. Most histories take a top-down approach. They start with the big picture, the big events, and the big people. Occasionally they will zoom in for a detailed glimpse, showing us what it was like for the common man, but this is only done for color. Snyder inverts this usual approach. He takes a microscopic, bottom-up approach, that begins and ends with the human dimension as its main focus.
I don’t mean to say that Snyder ignores Hitler or Stalin or any of their henchmen. He doesn’t. In fact, he spends as much time with them as any other World War II book. But Snyder does such a good job of integrating eloquent, searing first-hand accounts into his narrative that it leaves a lasting impression. He never forgets that history is not a relic to be studied; it is the story of human beings.
This is never more apparent than in Snyder’s dealing with the famines. The death toll of the World War II-era defy comprehension. At the very least, though, through archival footage, photographs, and film, we can start to imagine what the Holocaust was like. Starvation, though, is another matter. In comparison to marching someone to the gas chamber, it seems more like a crime of omission. Snyder forces you to reconsider, to envision what it actually means to starve to death, on a large scale, and on a personal level.
The Ukrainian musician Yosyp Panasenko was dispatched by central authorities with his troupe of bandura players to provide culture to the starving peasants. Even as the state took the peasants’ last bit of food, it had the grotesque inclination to elevate the minds and rouse the spirits of the dying. The musicians found village after village completely abandoned. Then they finally came across some people: two girls dead in a bed, two legs of a man protruding from a stove, and an old lady raving and running her fingernails through the dirt…
From the Ukrainian famines, Bloodlands moves into more familiar territory: Stalin’s “Great Terror”; the Nazi dispossession of the Jews; the einsatzgruppen aktions in the east, following Operation Barbarossa and Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union; and, of course, the Nazi concentration camps, some of which killed directly, and others of which worked through attrition. There are also sections devoted to Stalin’s treatment of the Jews, as well as resistance movements, especially the two uprisings in Warsaw.
Snyder covers this territory with empathy that is rare in history books. He has a plain, unadorned writing style that is appropriate to the subject matter. His keen eye for detail and acknowledgement of the power of certain, simple facts, makes for poignant reading. He should also be commended for his refusal to engage in simplistic comparisons pitting Hitler’s fascism verses Stalin’s communism. Any discussion about who was worse is, at its core, idiotic. They both sucked more than anything else on this planet has ever sucked.
Undoubtedly, the subject matter of Bloodlands is grim. And really, you should expect that, since the name of the book is Bloodlands. Yet the book itself is livened by Snyder’s injection of humanity. A contemporary of the late writer and intellectual Tony Judt (with whom Snyder collaborated), Snyder is more than an able historian, devoted to uncovering all the primary sources in all their many languages. He is also a thinker. All good histories tell you what happened. Snyder tries to work on two levels simultaneously, by also attempting an explanation at what it means today.
Here, perhaps, is a purpose for history, somewhere between the record of death and its constant reinterpretation. Only a history of mass killing can unite the numbers and the memories. Without history, the memories become private, which today means national; and the numbers become public, which is to say an instrument in the international competition for martyrdom. Memory is mine and I have the right to do with it as I please; numbers are objective and you must accept my counts whether you like them or not. Such reasoning allows a nationalist to hug himself with one arm and strike his neighbor with the other.
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Clif Hostetler
Jan 22, 2011Clif Hostetler rated it liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: history
This is history that deserves to be read, if for no other reason, to acknowledge the individual lives of so many innocent people deliberately murdered. We’re not talking war casualties or so-called collateral wartime deaths. We’re talking civilians sentenced to death by deliberate national policy. Sometimes they were targeted because of national, political, or ethnic reasons. Sometimes they were targeted for no particular discernible reason.
The author does a good job of balancing the numbingly huge numbers with the firsthand accounts from letters and diaries of victims, recorded memories of survivors, and written records of the perpetrators. One example I found especially horrific were the words from a letter written by an Austrian soldier to his wife telling of how he is repeatedly shooting, on a daily basis, large numbers of Jews including women and children. He even includes details such as throwing babies into the air and shooting them before they fall into the pit or water. Can you image admitting such behavior in writing to a spouse? Presumably, his wife approved. One wonders if these stories were shared with this couple’s children. (He specifically mentions in his letter that he thinks of his own children.)
After reading about millions of Ukrainian peasants starved because of an artificial famine created by Soviet collectivization, my heart was rent by the following simple story:
"... Garth Jones met a peasant who had acquired some bread, only to have it confiscated by the police. "They took my bread away from me," he repeated over and over again, knowing that he would disappoint his starving family."
Soviet police assumed that whenever they saw a peasant with some food it must have been stolen, so they would take it away. The logic of Stalin's thinking was that the peasants deserved to die because they were being anti-revolutionary by starving instead of being happy in a Communist paradise. Anybody on Stalin's staff who couldn't understand this logic was eliminated (i.e. killed).
There were times I felt the stories in this book were too awful to read. But I felt it my duty to keep on, if for no other reason, to honor the memories of those who perished. These are stories that are not widely known in western circles. A detailed tally of the numbers involved could not be studied by western historians until the Soviet Union fell and the records of the Communist era opened. This book brings the Nazi and Soviet regimes together, and Jewish and European history together, and the national histories together. It describes the victims, and the perpetrators. It discusses the ideologies and the plans, and the systems and the societies.
The "bloodlands" referenced in the title of the book consists of those territories subject to both German and Soviet police power and associated mass killing polices at some point between 1933 and 1945. It consists generally of the areas within the following counties: Ukraine, Belarussia, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
The book contains discussions of the motivations of nations that led to these deaths. Germany was quite clear that they considered the bloodlands to be a frontier for German civilization to expand into. The German settlers moved into the area would deal with native populations in a manner similar to the way American settlers pushed (and killed) the Indians out of the way. (Himler, head of the German SS, actually referenced the American example.) The Soviet actions were somewhat disguised by Marxist rhetoric, but the author shows a clearly nationalistic and racist aspect to the mass killings by the Soviet Union. He shows that the Poles, Ukrainians, and Belarussians were statistically much more likely to be killed than the ethnic Russians and Georgians (Stalin was Georgian).
"Whereas Hitler turned the Republic into revolutionary colonial empire, Stalin translated the poetics of revolutionary Marxism into durable work-a-day politics."
When the narrative finally reached the end of WWII, I thought the killing had finally stopped. But no, Stalin was still alive and many thousands of people were dislocated. Germans were moved out of Poland and Czechoslovakia, and Polish boundaries were moved toward the east with subsequent moving of the population.
The book also discusses the deliberate changing of the numbers of people killed by post-war nations to fit their political agendas. It seems that after the war every nation had a motive to adjust, inflate or ignore the numbers in different ways. The recent Yugoslavian experience is a reminder that mass killings can still happen. Need I mention Cambodia or Uganda?
The wars for Yugoslavia in the 1990's began, in part, because Serbs believed that far larger numbers of their fellows had been killed in the Second World War than was the case. (pg 406)
The author suggests that people today who identify with the victims and find the behaviors of the killers incomprehensible, could probably learn more by trying to understand the motivations of the killers. The book hints that most readers would behave in the same manner if placed in the same circumstances.
I found it particularly interesting to learn why the author used the term "mass killings" instead of "genocide" in this book. When the word "genocide" was written into international law the Soviet Union made sure that it excluded mass killings of "political" groups, and it also does not include destruction of a social group through the forcible removal of a population. In doing so the Soviets made sure that the mass killings under Stalin could not be defined as genocide. I suppose these are some of the technicalities that Turkey uses to insist that the killing of the Armenians after WWI was not genocide.
Thus far in this review I have refrained from mentioning the numbers of people killed. Once you start mentioning numbers they take over. This book contains lots of numbers, big numbers that are hard to fathom. If you want numbers you can read the following excerpts that I have taken from the book. I have made the text bold that compares those killed to the total of American battlefield losses in all foreign wars because I'm assuming most people reading this are from the United States.
______________
" Fourteen million is the approximate number of people killed by purposeful policies of mass murder implemented by Nazi Germany and the soviet Union in the bloodlands. (pg.409)
The count of fourteen million is not a complete reckoning of all the death that German and Soviet power brought to the region. It is an estimate of the number of people killed in deliberate policies of mass murder. (pg.410)
Fourteen million, after all, is a very large number. It exceeds by more than ten million the number of people who died in all of the Soviet and German concentration camps (as opposed to the death facilities) taken together over the entire history of both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. If current standard estimates of military losses are correct, it exceeds by more than two million the number of German and Soviet soldiers, taken together, killed on the battlefield in the Second World War (counting starved and executed prisoners of war as victims of a policy of mass murder rather than as military casualties). It exceeds by more than thirteen million the number of American and British casualties, taken together, of the Second World War. It also exceeds by more than thirteen million all of the American battlefield losses in all of the foreign wars that the Unites States has ever fought. (pg.411)
(The following tabulation of numbers has been abbreviated and edited from how it's shown in book, so it's not an exact quotation:)
3,300,000 Soviet citizens (mostly Ukrainians) deliberately starved, 1932-1933. (by USSR)
300,000 Soviet citizens (mostly Poles and Ukrainians) shot 1937-1938. (by USSR) (*)
200,000 Polish citizens (mostly Poles) shot by German and Soviet forces in occupied Poland (1939-1941). (by USSR and Ger.)
4,200,000 Soviet citizens (largely Russians, Belarussians, and Ukrainians) starved by German occupiers (1941-1944). (by Ger.)
5,500,000 Jews (most of Polish or Soviet citizens) gassed or shot by the Germans in 1941-1944. (by Ger.)
700,000 civilians (mostly Belarussians and Poles) shot by the Germans in “reprisals” chiefly in Belarus and Warsaw in 1941-1944. (by Ger.) (pg.411)
TOTALS: 3,700,000 by USSR, 10,500,000 by Ger.
(*) Total of 700,000 victims of the great terror in all of Soviet Union.
"In general, these numbers are sums of counts made by the Germans or the Soviets themselves, complemented by other sources, rather than statistical estimates of losses based upon censuses. Accordingly, my counts are often lower (even if stupefyingly high) than others in the literature. The major case where I do rely upon estimates is the famine in Soviet Ukraine, where data are simply insufficient for a count, and where I present a total figure on the basis of a number of demographic calculations and contemporary estimates. Again, my reckoning is on the conservative side. (pg.412) "
The following link is to another excerpt from the book, "Bloodlands" by Timothy Snyder (pages: 32-35)
http://www.delanceyplace.com/view-arc...
The following is a link to the Wikipedia article about the Holodomor, the name given for the man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 that killed an estimated 2.5–7.5 million Ukrainians:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
The following is a link to the movie, "Bitter Harvest," a movie about the Holodomor:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3182620/
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David
May 31, 2018David rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Lengthy but loaded with good information and details of various groups of people starved to death and murdered initially by Stalin and his purges while changing USSR to collectivism with millions dying and then by Hitler with his focus on killing Jews and undesirable people. Finally when Russians took back territory from Germany the continued to purge by killing or sending to gulags suspected partisans or alleged spy’s for The US or Israel. Much information had been locked behind the iron curtain including details about the death camps and actual numbers of deaths. Much was distorted for propaganda purposes by the Soviet Union including murders by them that were blamed on the Nazis. Fascinating read that was very well researched. Great for any WWII or Holocaust buffs. (less)
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Tim
Jul 20, 2021Tim rated it it was amazing
This is possibly the most gruesome book I’ve ever read. It tells the story of 14 million victims of Hitler and Stalin in the “Bloodlands” – the area in central Europe from Poland to western Russia where the devastation brought by both dictators overlapped. These 14 million people didn’t die directly from the war, or even indirectly from malnutrition or disease, but instead died from “mass killing” programs. If you are considering reading this book, be prepared for blunt and detailed descriptions of the atrocities. I can’t emphasize this enough.
I would also consider skipping this review. I do not get anywhere near as graphic as the book does, but I can’t avoid sharing some of the disturbing findings.
I think this book is best geared for people with some level of understanding of World War II, Nazi Germany, and Soviet history, as it doesn’t really do a lot of “table setting”. Personally, I knew something of the first two (I’m no expert, I’ve just read a few books and know the basics) but I was largely ignorant of Soviet history, and that made the book more challenging. Trying to absorb the details of the Ukrainian starving program, or the Great Terror, while also getting a crash course in Soviet history was a lot to absorb, and I often had to re-read sections or take a break and do a bit of background learning on some of the people or incidents mentioned.
Of the 14 million deaths, 5.4 million are Jewish victims of the Holocaust. These parts are well worth reading, but I was more unfamiliar with other incidents. The two largest sources of other deaths are Ukrainian victims of Soviet famines (3.3 million) and the victims of the German hunger plan in the Soviet Union (over 4 million, 3.1 million of which were Soviet Prisoners-of-War).
The Ukrainian famine was a result of Stalin’s collectivization program. There was a sequence of tragic and avoidable events. The program was enacted the year after a strong harvest. When the results were not replicated, the Soviet enforcers still ruthlessly demanded farmers surrender their allocated quotas and severely penalized those that didn’t. This was further exacerbated because the collectivization program itself had a negative impact on farm yields.
The Soviet enforcers would often take the farmer’s “seed grain” as punishment, which would doom the farmers futures. The enforcers also terrorized the farmers.
You can read the book for graphic details of the terror that the Soviet enforcers wrought, and for details of what it was like for individuals and communities as nobody had any food to eat. As bad as the above sounds, frankly it only scratches the surface of the horror. Some of the things that were described I just don’t have the stomach to write about here.
And when the Ukrainians starved, Stalin interpreted this as a resistance movement, and he doubled down on demanding the farmers turn in their yields. Then, in another perverse twist of logic, Stalin interpreted this “resistance movement” (i.e. the starving) as evidence of the success of his programs, reasoning that the success of Communism is just stirring greater fears from its opponents.
The German hunger plan was equally horrifying. Hitler’s strategic plan was to use the captured lands for food and living space for Germans, and to kill or enslave the native populations. He was not successful; otherwise tens of millions more would have died. But one segment where the Germans did enact this program was on the Soviet Prisoners-of-War.
Traditionally, countries have been reluctant to mistreat Prisoners-of-War, as they don’t want their own prisoners to be treated similarly. But Hitler turned this logic on its head. Hitler wanted his own soldiers to be afraid that if they got captured, they would be treated with no mercy. So, the Soviet Prisoners-of-War were literally starved to death.
Other incidents are described in the book, and while the death numbers do not rise to that of the Ukrainian famines or the German starving program, the inhumanity is just as horrifying. This includes:
• Over 1M civilians in Leningrad died during the Siege from hunger
• 700K civilians shot by Germans in Belarus and Poland in 1944
• 700K executions during the “Great Purge” by Stalin in 1937-38
• 200K Poles killed by both regimes in occupied Poland in 1939-41
One thing that struck me about the book is that there were a lot of numbers. Snyder spends a lot of time discussing what the actual death count is for various incidents, what we know about how that breaks down (for instance into different ethnicities) and how confident we are in these numbers. It was difficult to keep track of what exactly each number meant. Your eyes may glaze over at times. But this isn’t a criticism. It’s important to document what we know, and that includes getting the numbers correct. If you hear “1 million people died as a result of famines in Ukraine in 1932-33” you might process that mentally the same way as if you heard “3.3 million people died as a result of the famines in Ukraine in 1932-33”. But it matters that the actual number is 3.3 million, not 1 million. Just as two people dying is twice the tragedy as one person dying, each of those 3.3 million people had a name, a family, and people that cared about them. So, I appreciate Snyder’s work in getting the numbers right, even though it makes the reading more tedious.
So how to make sense out of all this? Snyder does not offer any easy answers, but he does have a concluding chapter titled “Humanity” that has some interesting thoughts. I’ll highlight a couple memorable quotes:
It is unlikely that reducing history to morality plays makes anyone moral
It is easy to identify with the victims, and just think of the perpetrators as monsters that we could never have anything in common with. But the perpetrators were not driven by an ideology, which would make it easier to write them off as being almost a different species than us. Rather, they were typically driven by personal economic and survival incentives. Because of this, the “moral risk” is that we might be the perpetrators, and we should try the difficult task of understanding their actions, so we can guard against this risk.
When meaning is drawn from killing, the risk is that more killing will result in more meaning
This quote is referring to the very human tendency to draw a greater meaning from the killings. That they served some greater purpose – like winning the war, teaching us to value freedom, or evolving us to a more pacifist nature. Snyder talks about how this impulse has been taken to such an extreme that it is common to exaggerate the deaths a country has endured, to reinforce an identity or to establish a standing as innocent victims. Snyder makes the case that this isn’t harmless. He points to the example of the wars for Yugoslavia, where it began, in part, because Serbs believed in an exaggerated number of deaths during the second World War.
I hope this gives a flavor for how the book ends. No easy answers, and in fact instead of answers there are just more questions to think about. It’s probably not fair to expect anything more. (less)
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Manray9
Mar 14, 2014Manray9 rated it really liked it
Shelves: russia, germany-austria, wwii-europe
The history told in Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin is not a revelation. Readers familiar with the works of Robert Conquest, Daniel Goldhagen, Anne Applebaum, or Halik Kochanski have read it all before. Snyder presents it with a new perspective, concentrating on the plight of the minority peoples caught between the two ideological empires of the mid-twentieth century – Ukrainians, Belorussians, Balts, Roma, Russians, Germans, Poles, Jews – all pawns of Hitler and Stalin. Both tyrants were committed to ethnic and cultural homogeneity in the lands they ruled, but as Snyder so aptly pointed out, it was Stalin who won Hitler's war, so his vision triumphed.
The old adage about man's inhumanity to man was never reinforced better than in Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. While well-written, often captivating, and thoroughly footnoted (extensive references in English, Polish, German and Russian), it is undeniably a depressing book. Stalinism, with its forced collectivization of agriculture, the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class,” and recurring politically-driven suppressions, when married in time and geography with Nazism's bloodlust and pseudo-scientific racism, resulted in a clash of unrivaled barbarity. The beleaguered peoples of Eastern Europe bore the brunt. A volatile mix of nationalism, racism, and political ideology led to the devastation of wide swaths of the European borderlands where mixed religions, ethnicities, and cultures had survived, and even thrived, during the ages of the Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns and Romanovs. The advent of Hitler and Stalin ended that situation, perhaps forever. The numbers are mind-boggling. Many millions were slaughtered and no group escaped untouched. In Warsaw on 5 and 6 August 1944 alone, SS Special Commando Dirlewanger shot 40,000 Polish civilians. While much of western historiography has been focused on the Holocaust, the Jews comprised 5.40 million of the 14 million victims of totalitarianism in the bloodlands. Snyder rounds out the ugly tale of murder.
Timothy Snyder deserves great credit for presenting a new look at this sanguinary chapter of European history. So much of today's news on the region has been shaped by the events described and explained in Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Snyder's book earned a rating of Four Stars in my library. Another plus: The text is accompanied by excellent maps. A brief study of the maps reflecting the changing borders in the region from 1918 through the post-war era is, in itself, enlightening. (less)
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