Remembering Stalin in Ukraine, and Other Atrocities to Keep in Mind while Doing Very Careful Business with the Latest Russian Empire (and the Iranians)

"Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

                  — Attributed plausibly to Adolph Hitler,

                      preparing to annihilate, most immediately, Poles         

  

I'm listening again to Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler And Stalin (1st published 2012), and I've gotten to Stalin's program of collectivization and against the peasants and nationalisms (sic: plural) inside that "prison-house of nations" the Russian Empire was under the czars and remained under Stalin.

            The United States will have to cooperate with the Russians (and the Iranians) for immediate needs like a reduction of slaughter in Syria and vicinity, and for continuing necessities like nuclear-arms reduction so the number of warheads gets to and stays below any number likely to destroy human civilization. The history of Russian rule in Ukraine and in the Balkans, the history of Russia in the various attempts to destroy Poland — another big topic for Snyder — is crucial to know and keep in mind during any rapprochement with the Russian Federation: It must be done in ways that won't really upset people with grievances against the Russian Empire in its Stalinist forms and decent memories. In American time, the 1930s were a long time ago; not so for people with better memories, especially when the memories include Ukrainians in huge numbers intentionally starved to death by Stalin and his willing executioners.

            I just finished listening again to Destiny Disrupted: A History Of The World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary (2010), which makes the point that Islam, like aspects of Judaism and in the history of Christendom, is in part a political project. (Year 1 in the Muslim calendar is not the birth of Mohammed nor the year of the first revelation, but the year of the move to Medina and the birth of the Muslim community.) This is a point insisted on by Donald Trump’s national security adviser, retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. It is also a point that must be kept in mind *and* handled with great delicacy.

            Here are two areas where the Trump people have legitimate points to make and could suggest some useful policies, but may end up with greater or lesser disasters because they don't "do nuance" and seem to consider delicacy (and what George Orwell called decency) unmanly.

            We need to cooperate with the Russians without undermining NATO and putting large parts of Europe in doubt of our willingness to prevent Russia from again doing horrible things on their territory. We need to cooperate with Russia and Iran against very much political aspects of "Jihad" in senses that definitely included military struggle. And we need to do all this very carefully.

            Another US administration that's into swagger over substance and some subtlety could make the US Iraq misadventures look relatively minor.

Righteous Gentiles, Anti-Semites, and Overrating Attitudes

Where there are no men, be thou a man. — Rabbi Hillel

            Toward the end of Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, Timothy Snyder notes a small but important and surprising fact: some of the heroic people who saved Jews during the Hitlerian Holocaust, were anti-Semites.

            Snyder notes that the Jews saved by "righteous gentiles" speak very little of the motivation of their saviors, and that the righteous gentiles speak of their motives just as little or less. They usually dismiss what they did as just behaving "normally," just doing what people do, or what any human being should do. These good people, of course, were not behaving normally, not in the statistical sense of "normal"; and in terms of cold-blooded economic theory of rational actors pursuing self-interest; they were not even behaving rationally.

            In the midst of horrors, these righteous few maintained what George Orwell called by the modest term "decency"; they maintained Menschlichkeit (Yiddish, Mentshlekhkeyt): where indecently few people were acting like humane human beings, they remained human.

            But not necessarily because they liked Jews, and in these our sentimental days, when we want people to like us, when attitude really counts — this is important.

            Some of these quiet heroes saved Jews on patriotic grounds: If the Germans wanted the Poles to deliver up their Jews, to give the Germans the Jews in Poland for killing, a loyal Pole resisted, even if he or she would just as soon have Jews out of Poland, and in the 1930s had voted for political parties endorsing doing just that.

            Some thought that murder is murder and that it was their Christian duty to resist murder, even the murder of Jews. For traditional Christian haters of Jews, Jews were people cursed as Christ-killers; but Jews were still people, not subhuman as Nazis saw Slavs (and Blacks), or, most relevantly, nonhumans, as orthodox Nazis saw Jews.

            A fair number took very seriously Jesus' Parable of the Good Samaritan, and saw it as their Christian duty to help strangers in trouble. And some helped people they knew or a good-looking Jewish girl they had a crush on or adopted babies or children because they had lost their own or could use child labor on the farm.

            And most Jews were not killed by professional murderers at Auschwitz or the other death camps, but were shot by more or less ordinary people, some of them very ordinary police officers, and a fair number more or less indifferent to "the Jewish Question." Anti-Semitism obviously had a role in the destruction of the Jews of Europe — including anti-Semitism in England and the United States — but one could not predict from the virulence of anti-Semitism in any given country just what percentage of its Jews would survive the war, how many would be murdered.

            As hinted at in the Stanley Milgram obedience experiments and other work in social psychology, character and attitudes count, but not always in straightforward ways or for a whole lot: context is important, and "character" can be complex. One "moral" of Snyder's study in Black Earth is that people who are indifferent to people like you, or who even like your kind of folk might turn you in for extermination; people who dislike "your kind" might know and like you personally and might save you. Or people who don't particularly like you or your kind at all might save you for all sorts of reasons, including a cold sense of duty or decency.

            When the world moves into barbarism, your friendly neighbor might betray you for a little extra food and your apartment; Sister Attila the Nun, that cold-hearted horror, might give her life to keep you alive.

            People are strange, and in times and places "Where there are no men" — where normal human behavior is inhuman(e) — it is very difficult "be a man" in the sense of acting humanely. And those who do the right thing will do so for a mixture of reasons and some odd ones.

            Those reasons may not include much of their personal likes and dislikes, and they may even overpower a generic but deep-seated hatred.