Reading Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder this old quotation from Stalin struck me; Hitler's invisible forces lost the War as soon as they crossed into Soviet territory.
Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Soviet regimes as two aspects of a single history. Stalin was a vicious murderer on a scale with his sometime partner Hitler.
Bloodlands is very hard to read -- not because it's badly written, quite the contrary -- and I have been slowly reading Bloodlands since Christmas.
The brutality shown by the Soviets and the Nazis is almost more than can be absorbed. I must have put the text down twenty times in appalled horror at what I read.
There is no reasonable doubt that the Holodomor (Голодомор) was caused by the deliberate actions and policies of the Soviet regime. How many died? Estimates vary but probably about five to six million innocent people in Ukraine (where the focus was), Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova and Russia were killed. The Holocaust (השואה) is better known in the West and killed roughly the same number following careful planning by the Nazi regime. Jews who lived in Ukraine occasionally faced both genocides. Oddly there are many who deny (or minimize) the Holodomor or the Holocaust -- although seldom the same person denies both.
What Bloodlands doesn't answer -- and I still haven't seen a plausible answer to this anywhere -- is why did Stalin want to wipe out the population of Ukraine and why did Hitler see eliminating Jews as a worthy and valuable war goal? Both acts (and the many other causal war crimes Hitler and Stalin committed) seem pointless -- irrational and inexplicable and cruel and wasteful.
4 comments:
When mentally derranged people see a group of people as somewhat less than them - and need to scapegoat their own group's weaknesses or failings - sickness like this can result. Fearmongering, hate, and paranoia - backed by no logical factual basis - can cause people to do evil things. It's "rabble-rousing" and mob-rule taken to the next level.
Scary stuff.
More frightening still is the way that acidic language and hate/fear still find their way into modern political discourse... We see examples of "ethnic cleansing" and racism gone wild all over... If people can deny being racists (the old, "I'm not racist but..."), it's not long down the path before greater and greater evil can be done.
It's a sad commentary on humanity. One thing we may have learned is that multi-ethnic multicultural democracies have a better shot at surviving such episodes. Large monocultures allow for more marginalization of "non-melting-potted" minorities... Scapegoating and fearmongering starts soon after ("they're taking our jobs", "their food smells funny", "they speak their language and it ticks me off...", "they're causing all the crime", etc., etc.).
And yet the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a multicultural place? But perhaps with an ethnic ranking that made your point stronger?
I speak more of the modern Canada, USA, UK, Singapore... These are much more diverse than anything in history.
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