THE HORROR OF FAILED STATES
Timothy Schneider’s “Black Earth:
The Holocaust as History and Warning” follows his prize-winning book
which covered much the same geographic and chronological ground: “Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin.”
Schneider’s thesis is that the
Holocaust, at its worst, i.e., where the highest percentage of Jews were murdered,
coincided with those geographical areas where the “state” had been
demolished. For Hitler, the destruction
was intentional. His purpose in
moving into Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and then the Soviet Union, was to
obliterate these states; to act as if they never existed. The Aryan race would move into these
spaces, creating his new empire.
In annihilating the state, Nazis decapitated the leadership structure
and elite from the top and the middle.
Because Jews, Schneider argues, constituted a large part of that
leadership, they suffered the greatest carnage.
Schneider doesn’t deny the anti-Semitism that permeated the areas which
Germany, coming from the west, and the Soviet Union, coming from the east,
pillaged. I refer to Poland,
Hungary, Austria, Romania and the Soviet Union.
Schneider’s primary point is that it was the dissolution of the “state”
which, despite the anti-Semitism had protected the Jews to a fair degree, that dramatically
accelerated their decimation. In
fact, the percentage of Jews who were murdered was far higher in those
countries where the state collapsed.
Poland is an example…compared, for example, to France and to Italy
where, despite Nazi occupation, the state continued to have a sustaining
framework.
Schneider develops his argument carefully, for example, comparing the
relatively low rate of Jews being murdered in Sweden, where the government was
intact, compared to Lithuania, where it was annihilated.
He further makes the point that the conditions which unleashed the
greatest atrocities on the Jews were in areas which suffered two invasions; the
first, the Soviet Union from the east, followed then by the Nazis from the
west.
I believe this history has searing relevance to what we have seen occur
over the past decade. We are
seeing that the failed state of Libya has unleashed tremendous internal
carnage. The failed state of Iraq,
which our invasion precipitated, has resulted in far more deaths than occurred
under the regime of Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein. And what we’re seeing now in Syria follows the same pattern: a failed state unleashing forces that
have been held together, to some degree, by the rule of force and, yes, a
dictatorial state government.
This perspective makes nonsense out of the advocacy to simply wipe out
Assad and his government without having a transition government in place, as
difficult as that will be to achieve.
It also shows that, with all its imperfections, the strong government
that flowed in the Soviet Union and then Russia from Gorbachev to Yeltsin to
Putin; yes, with all the corruption involved, this represented a far better
direction in terms of the well-being of the people than other alternatives that
could have sent Russia into internecine chaos.
If there is a risk in Timothy Schneider’s presentation, or at least an
unspoken reality, it is the danger that exists in any nation, strong or
failed, on the fueling of “we vs. them” attitudes toward people of different
ethnicities and faiths that, in times of economic hardship and political
uncertainty, when fear starts to brim for whatever reason, people will strike
out against one another, sometimes in deadly fashion. There is a risk in that right now in the U.S. in the
irresponsible comments about Muslims being made by some of our political
candidates, particularly Donald Trump.
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