180612 Readings, Viewings, and Comments

Stephen Greenleaf

The distinction between the two types of politics is one that I haven't heard made before, but this dichotomy has great value. In the end, politics is always about change and choice. Politics can't ever really be about "eternity " (timelessness) or inevitability--that 'economic laws or "History" will determine our future and resolve our problems. But my, such beliefs are popular.

YOUTUBE.COM

Timothy Snyder Speaks, ep. 14: Politics of Eternity, Politics of Inevitability

History is not just what happens in time, it is how we think about time. The present moment seems…

Stephen Greenleaf

12 mins · 

My last two posts about Romania meld in this article and the accompanying video. About 20K Romanians gathered here in Bucharest to honor Halep.

However, the mayor of Bucharest showed up, and as you can hear, roundly booed. (I think this embarrassed Halep, but fans do have concerns beyond sports.) Afterward, the mayor "blamed 'Soros’s propaganda machine' for compromising the event by infiltrating teams of 'venomous citizens', well organized and strategically placed among decent people." This statement reinforces my sense that the ruling Social Democrat Party is beginning to track the line of other authoritarian movements in Eastern Europe. In fact, the reference to Soros is right out of the playbook of Hungarian prime minister Victor Orban. Soros is a wealthy Hungarian financier and philanthropist and a strong proponent of democracy and classical liberalism (think Karl Popper). And, oh yes, it just happens that he's Jewish. Hmm, what a coincidence. #sarcasm.

Halep's victory was a great moment to share, but the victory of the rule of law, democracy, and constitutional government over corruption, authoritarianism, and anti-Semitism is an even greater contest and one that, if one & preserved, is a win for the entire nation. So, yes, hurray for Halep, and boo to anti-Semitism.

ROMANIA-INSIDER.COM

Some 20,000 Romanians come to cheer champion Simona Halep

Some 20,000 Romanians went to Bucharest’s National Arena on Monday evening to cheer tennis star Simona Halep, who won her first Roland Garros title on Saturday.

Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder

History & Prophecy

Tim Snyder, a professor of history at Yale who specializes in modern East European history, has emerged as a leader in the resistance to the threat to democracy posed by the election of Trump. This book reveals why Snyder might have such committed and informed opinions about our current situation. The story of East Europe in the 1930s and 1940s is one of radical anti-Semitism (and the persecution and elimination of other groups) followed by state destruction by both Stalin’s and Hitler’s regimes. The chaos that followed state destruction allowed the Holocaust to evolve into the mass murder that it became. The Holocaust is a familiar story, but it’s one that Snyder brings further insight to.

At the beginning of the book, Snyder addresses Hitler’s ideology. Hitler was an extreme and rabid anti-Semite, and he wanted “Lebensraum” (living room) for the German people. Snyder argues that Hitler’s concern with Lebensraum is not merely a matter of grabbing more land for Germany (although it certainly entailed that), but it also referenced a standard of living that looked to the U.S. for its inspiration. Hitler was infatuated with the problem of a Malthusian trap and the hunger and deprivation that Germany suffered in the First World War. To offset these fears, Hitler saw the Slavic and Jewish lands to the east as the equivalent of the American West, which was taken by force by white settlers, who considered the natives (American Indians)  ignorant and expendable. What Hitler intended and what his beliefs about Jews and Slavs would entail were never hidden; his beliefs and intentions were in plain sight.

Snyder also reports on how the Polish government tried to address the “Jewish problem” by helping to arm and train fighters to allow Jewish emigration to Palestine. But the Polish state was caught between the Stalinist Soviet Union and Hitler’s Nazi Germany, and as a functioning state, it disappeared in the joint onslaught that immediately followed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that secretly divided Poland and the Baltic states between the USSR and Germany. The destruction of the Polish state also ended the most effective state advocacy for a Jewish homeland in the Middle East.

One of Snyder’s most arresting insights comes from his description of how the destruction of states by one side and then the other (after Hitler invaded the USSR) facilitated and encouraged the Holocaust. Snyder notes that Jews in these twice-invaded lands perished at extremely high rates, while those who lived where states (which entail bureaucracies) remained intact survived at much higher rates, even in Germany. The double destruction created moral and practical anarchy that stripped individuals of legal rights and their basic humanity and allowed the criminality of the Nazi regime to act unchecked by any rival authority. Snyder shares some stories of survival and those heroic few who saved others, but the offset against the truly staggering death tolls doesn’t create a balance, just a crack of light shining through a crushing avalanche of human depravity.

Historian & prophet

Snyder’s account summarized above makes for fascinating reading. The history of ideology, diplomacy, and criminality by states (Nazi and Soviet) and individuals is deeply engaging and troubling enough. But it is in his concluding chapter that Snyder goes beyond the role of historian to that of a political and practical thinker. In his concluding chapter, Snyder contemplates how our times share characteristics with those of this truly awful period in human history. Snyder writes:

There is little reason to think that we are ethically superior to the Europeans of the 1930s and 1940s, or for that matter less vulnerable to the kind of ideas that Hitler so successfully promulgated and realized. If we are serious about emulating rescuers, we should build in advance the structures that make it more likely that we would do so. Rescue, in the broad sense, thus requires a firm grasp of the ideas that challenged conventional politics and open the way to an unprecedented crime. (320-321).

Snyder explains:

By presenting Jews as an ecological flaw responsible for the disharmony of the planet, Hitler channeled and personalized the inevitable tensions of globalization. The only sound ecology was to eliminate a political enemy; the only sound politics was to purify the earth.” (321).

 [This refers to Snyder’s initial consideration of Hitler’s ideology; the use of “ecology” is an anachronism but a quite appropriate one.]

Snyder goes on to note that 

[T]he course of the war on the eastern front created two fundamental political opportunities. At first, the zoological portrayal of Slavs justified the elimination of their polities, creating the zones where the Holocaust could become possible. (323).

 . . . . 

Just as Hitler’s world view conflated science and politics, his program confused biology with desire. The concept of Lebensraum unified need with want, murder with convenience. It implied a plan to restore the planet by mass murder and a promise of a better life for German families. Since 1945, one of the two senses of Lebensraum have spread across most of the world; a living room, the dream of household comfort in a consumer society. The other sense of Lebensraum is habitat, the realm that must be controlled for physical survival, inhabited perhaps temporarily by people characterized as not quite fully human. In uniting these two passions in one word, Hitler conflated lifestyle with life. For the vision of a well-stocked cupboard people should endorse the bloody struggle for other peoples’ land.  Once standard of living is confused with living, a rich society can make war on those who are poorer in the name of survival. Tens of millions of people died in Hitler’s war not so that Germans could live, but so that Germans could pursue the American dream in a globalized world. (324).

Reflect on this as you consider world population growth, the rise of demand for food and other goods by China and India and other developing nations, and our (American) attachment to material prosperity. Consider also this:

Hitler the thinker was wrong that politics and science are the same thing. Hitler the politician was right that conflating them creates a rapturous sense of the catastrophic time and thus the potential for radical action. (325). 

Does this sound like any contemporary politicians? I think that it reminds Snyder (and me) of some. 

The similarities between now and then (the 1930s and 1940s) arise foremost from globalization. Snyder writes: “Hitler was a child of the first globalization, which arose under the imperial auspices at the end of the nineteenth century. We are the children of the second, that of the late twentieth century. Globalization is neither a problem nor a solution; it is a condition with a history.” (326). It promotes thinking—for good or ill—on a planetary scale. And when a “global order collapses, as was the experience of many Europeans in the second, third, and fourth decades of the twentieth century, a simplistic diagnosis such as Hitler’s can seem to clarify the global by referring to the ecological, the supernatural, or the conspiratorial.” (327).

In the past 25 years or so, we’ve experienced new collapses of order, in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, for instance, where virulent, fearful ideologies team with economic and ecological precariousness to unleash new genocides. As pressures continue, especially in light of continued climate change and world population growth, we’ll continue to see these problems pop up as they do in daily headlines. Hitler used bad science to foresee a bleak future, not appreciating the Green Revolution ahead, but we don’t’ know if we have further Green Revolutions available. And we have grave reasons to doubt that the fortuitous climate that civilizations have come to depend upon will continue in light of continued human activities that alter the climate.

A closing thought from Snyder:

States should invest in science so that the future can be calmly contemplated. The study of the past suggests why this would be a wise course. Time supports thought; thought supports time; structure supports plurality, and plurality, structure. This line of reasoning is less glamorous than waiting for general disaster and dreaming of personal redemption. Effective prevention of mass killings is incremental and its heroes are invisible. No conception of a durable state can complete with visions of totality. No green politics will ever be as exciting as red blood on black earth. But opposing evil requires inspiration by what is sound rather than by what is resonant. The pluralities of nature and polities, order and freedom, past and future, are not as intoxicating as the totalitarian utopias of the last century. Every unity is beautiful as an image but circular as logic and tyrannical as politics. The answer to those who seek totality is not anarchy, which is not totality’s enemy but it handmaiden. The answer is thoughtful, plural institutions: an unending labor of differentiated creation. This is a matter of imagination, maturity, and survival. (342).

To which I say, “Amen,” let it be so.

Thinking the Twentieth Century by Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder

Listening in to a great conversation

A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind. 

John Maynard Keynes (opening epigraph)

Reading Thinking the Twentieth Century by Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder (2012) was like eavesdropping on a fascinating conversation between two very erudite gentlemen who happen to be discussing a topic in which you hold a keen interest. But this unusual book—as an extended conversation—arose from an unusual and sad course of events. Tony Judt was a historian who had risen to prominence based on his longer works and on widely admired (and sometimes criticized) pieces in prestigious publications such as The New York Review of Books. In 2005, he published his acclaimed Postwar:  A History of Europe Since 1945. But then in 2008, Judt was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease. The diagnosis is a slow motion death warrant. Yet Judt worked until his death in August 2010. After learning of his diagnosis, instead of writing a large, intended study, he decided to use recorded conversations with Snyder, a fellow historian, as the vehicle for sharing his insights. In fact, the unusual format of an extended conversation works quite well, serving to add a feel of intimacy to the work that it would not have enjoyed if it Judt had written it in the usual manner. Of course, this wouldn’t have worked were it not for Judt’s erudition and facility with words, nor would it have worked without the matching knowledge and insight of Snyder. Both men are professional historians, and both shared an interest in 20th-century European history, history as a discipline, and the application of historical knowledge and insight to current affairs. And perhaps of greatest significance, they both exhibit a profound ethical commitment.

The Berlinian [Isaiah Berlin] lesson most pertinent to daily political analysis and debate is the reminder that all political choices entail real and unavoidable costs. The issue is not whether or not there is a right or wrong decision to be taken, nor even whether you face a choice such as the "right" decision consists in avoiding the worst mistakes. Any decision–including any right decision–entails forgoing certain options: depriving yourself of the power to do certain things, some of which might well have been worth doing. In short, there are choices that we are right to make but which implicitly invoke rejecting other choices whose virtues it would be a mistake to deny. In the real world of politics, as in most other arenas of life, all worthwhile decisions entail genuine gains and losses. (196)

The conversation contained in each chapter begins with a consideration of Judt’s personal and professional history. Following E.H. Carr’s dicta, “Before you study the history, study the historian” and “and before you study the historian, study his background and environment”—dicta that John Lukacs considers a “half-truth”, but which must suffice at present—Snyder has Judt recount his background as the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants to London growing up in the 1950s (Judt was born in 1948). From there, the story continues to Cambridge, Israel, Paris, Berkeley, and eventually to New York City. Each portion of Judt’s biography serves as a springboard for a discussion of topics in 20th-century history (centered on Europe and the U.S.). For instance, early on, especially relevant in light of Judt’s Eastern European Jewish heritage, the discussion turns to the role of Judaism and anti-Semitism in European culture. The discussion is enlightening, for one can’t understand 20th-century history and political thought without grasping the importance of “the Jewish question." (I learned this as an undergraduate in modern history and contemporary political science. I hailed from a small town in Iowa where there was only one Jew—that I knew of—in the town, and his living there was no big deal.  The better side of growing up in such a sheltered environment was that most ethnic and racial prejudices, while existent, were of little importance because, except for seasonal migrant workers (“Mexicans”), there were no racial or ethnic minorities (unless you count the single Jewish merchant in town). And I have my parents to thank for discouraging such nonsense if it did come up. But when it came to understanding the place of Jews and anti-Semitism in the modern world, I was at a bit of a not unwelcome disadvantage.)

Some samples: 

It is perhaps worth reminding ourselves that this [the Reagan-Thatcher view that the right to make any amount of money unhindered by the state is part of an unbroken continuim with the right of free speech] is not what Adam Smith thought. And it is certainly not the view of most neoclassical economic economists either. It would simply never have occurred to them to suppose a necessary and permanent relationship between the forms of economic life and all other aspects of human existence. They treated economics as benefiting from internal laws as well as the logic of human self interest; but the notion that economics alone could supply the purposes of human existence on earth would have struck them as peculiarly thin gruel. (247)

It's terribly important for an open society to be familiar with its past. It was a common feature of the closed societies of the 20th century, whether of the Left or the Right, that they manipulated history. Reading the past is the oldest form of knowledge control: if you have power over the interpretation of what went before (or simply lie about it), the present and the future are at your disposal. So it is a simple democratic prudence to ensure that the citizenry are historically informed. (265)

By the beginning of Chapter 6, my pencil came out. I’d read the beginning of the book with pleasure and profit, but in Chapter 6, I started marking comments that I found especially revealing or with which I agreed, celebrating the identification of kindred thinkers. (I’ve spread some of these quotes throughout my review and at the end.) Judt and Snyder not only talk about events, beliefs, and actors in the twentieth century, but they also remark upon how those events and beliefs are manifest in our world today. They also provide some insightful comments on the history profession, journalism, the relation of memory to history, and the teaching of history that I found exceptionally well-considered. (And—again—they were making these observations via a conversation, not via a carefully crafted essay.) By the end of the book, I’d marked the book with more red pencil marks than I imagined I had available.

Nature doesn't mind paths [ways of understanding historical events], but nature abhors a vacuum. We have taken remembering events in a vacuum. Accordingly, we invoke them in isolation: "never again," Munich, Hitler, Stalin and so forth. But how can anyone make sense of such invocations and labels? In American and European high schools today, it is not uncommon for students to graduate having just taken one course in World coupled History: typically this will be either the Holocaust, World War II, totalitarianism or some comparably excerpted were from mid-20th- century Europe. However well taught, however sensitively sourced and discussed, such a course emerges from nowhere and, inevitably, leads nowhere. What possible pedagogical purpose can it serve? (273)

For anyone interested in the history of Europe and America, especially from the perspective of incisive commentary on social and political thought, this will prove an exhilarating read. As a lifelong student of history and as a firm believer in the value of history as a way of knowing and understanding the world, one could not ask for a more worthwhile example of the practice and culture of historical thinking and how it applies to our world. At a time when U.S. democracy and values are threatened by demagoguery unparalleled in my memory, taking (silent) part in the conversation of these two extraordinary historians reminds me that there are those out there who are shining their lights into the darkness. I’m with them. (Keep reading below--the best parts of this post!)

The Churchillian dictum that democracy is the worst possible system except for all the others has some – but limited – truth. Democracy has been the best short-term defense against undemocratic alternatives, but it is not a defense against its own genetic shortcomings. The Greeks knew that democracy was not likely to fall to the charms of totalitarianism, or authoritarianism or oligarchy; it's much more likely to fall to a corrupted version of itself.
 . . . . Democracies corrode quite fast; they corrode linguistically, or rhetorically, if you like – that's the Orwellian point about language. They corrode because most people don't care very much about them. . . . Democracy is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for a good, open society. I don't want to come across as excessively skeptical about democracy: as someone having a preference for the aristocratic, liberal societies of the 19th century. But I do want to make a (Isaiah) Berlinian point. We seem to have simply have to acknowledge that some earlier nondemocratic societies were in certain respects better the late democracies. (306;308)

I profoundly believe in the difference between history and memory; to allow memory to put replace history is dangerous. Where as history of necessity takes the form of a record, endlessly rewritten and re-tested against old and new evidence, memory is keyed to public, non-scholarly purposes: a theme park, a memorial, a museum, a building, a television program, an event, a day, flag. Such pneumonic manifestations of the past are of necessity partial, brief, selective; those who arrange them are constrained sooner or later to tell partial truths or even outright lies – sometimes with the best of intentions, sometimes not. In either event, they cannot substitute for history. (278) 

Remember that in Europe above all, those who have been most successful in mobilizing such fears--fears of strangers, of immigrants, of economic uncertainty or violence–are primarily the conventional, old-fashioned demagogic, nationalist, xenophobic politicians. The structure of American public life makes it harder for people like that to get a purchase on the government as a whole, one of the ways in which the US has been uniquely fortunate. But the contemporary Republican Party has begun to mobilize just these fears in recent times and may well ride them to power.(386) 

This last quote, remember, was written before the rise of Trump and Trumpism.