History, Hitler, and Global Warming

History, Hitler, and Global Warming

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/16/hitlers-world-may-not-be-so-far-awa...

Very insightful and thought-provoking, though the title had me thinking of Godwin's law at first.

Timothy Snyder writes here that Hitler's ideology was a response to an inflated sense of impending catastrophe (food shortage) brought on by globalizing forces. We are facing another such turning point (climate change) and may not be much better prepared than our ancestors in the 1930s and '40s.

We also fail to learn an important lesson of Nazi history when we blame the Holocaust on overweening state power rather than on the destruction of state authority.

Since the Holocaust is an axial event of modern history, its misunderstanding turns our minds in the wrong direction. When the Holocaust is blamed on the modern state, the weakening of state authority appears salutary. On the political right, the erosion of state power by international capitalism seems natural; on the political left, rudderless revolutions portray themselves as virtuous. In the 21st century, anarchical protest movements join in a friendly tussle with global oligarchy, in which neither side can be hurt since both see the real enemy as the state. Both the left and the right tend to fear order rather than its destruction or absence.

Long but worth it.

This is taken from Snyder's new book, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning.

The Graun's review of Snyder's book is very interesting. The reviewer Richard Evans is of the opinion that Snyder's thesis doesn't work. All a bit too intellectually taxing for me I'm afraid...

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/10/black-earth-holocaust-as-history-ti...

>3 dajashby:

Evans faults Snyder for linking a historical analysis to a speculative forecast of future events. Fair enough. As for Snyder's historical analysis, he sees the concern with food production for Germany as relatively minor. I'm not sure that's correct, as the famine at the end of World War I was severe (soon forgotten in the Allied countries, except by Quakers who founded relief charities to feed the families of vanquished Huns).

If he's right about Snyder seeing the "Final Solution" as a reaction against the failure of the USSR to submit to German might, then I agree that seems preposterous.

What I find most valuable in the Snyder piece is the insight that fascism did not rejoice in "the health of the state" but in a fantasy image of the people or race. Even when Hitler ran the German state, he didn't trust it and established his own parallel institutions to carry out his projects, e.g. Ribbentrop's office in lieu of the Foreign Ministry.

Even loyal Nazis could have unsound humanitarian, insufficiently race-conscious principles. This recent Skeptoid podcast provides a moving example I wasn't aware of: http://skeptoid.com/mobile/4480

It's about John Rabe, a Siemens exec and Nazi party official in Nanjing, China who intervened to protect Chinese lives during the Japanese "rape" of the city.

(Skeptoid is my favorite of the numerous "skeptical" podcasts out there, largely because of its attention to historical topics. Also its sourcing, transcripts, and relatively low self-importance quotient.)

Thanks for the explication. Normally I can read just about anything (obviously not heavily technical scientific material), but for some reason I found the Snyder extract heavy going. He has a rather ponderous style. Don't think I'll bother with the book.

I have long thought that the Nazis' obsession with race was very strange indeed in the way it actually led them to act against the best interests of the state. Everywhere there was a vogue for preventing the "unfit" from breeding, but persecuting, exiling and murdering the intellectual elite on solely racist grounds could hardly be seen as rational even by the standards of the time.

Thanks also for the tip about Skeptoid. Never heard of it, but I will follow up.