Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Continuing Struggle Against Civilisation

Black Earth is a remarkable re-interpretation of the Holocaust. Snyder goes beyond the statistical and sociological facts of mass murder in order to understand the underlying evil of the disaster. And he succeeds. His acute insights and narrative skills in the introductory chapter alone are worth the entire price of admission.

According to Snyder, Hitler's attempt to annihilate the Jews was not racially motivated nor was it concerned with religion as such. Hitler's intention was ecological and intellectual - to reverse the growing disequilibrium introduced to the planet by Jews as the carriers not of defective genetic material but of corrupt ideas.

To restore this ecological equilibrium, it was necessary to rid the world of the corrupting influence of Jewish ideas. The most important of these ideas is the distinction made by Jews between nature and morality. Morality is an invention of the Jewish mind which contradicts the laws of nature by limiting the strong through the collective power of the weak. Morality in all its insidious variants must be identified and rooted out.

Authentic politics, for example, must conform with the demands of nature, according to the chief political philosopher of the Reich, Carl Schmitt. Schmitt reasons that political power must be exercised only by the strong in their own interests (see for more on Schmitt: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... also the addendum below). Both Capitalist and Communist politics are divorced from nature because they have been conceived from Jewish distortions of natural law. The only authentic politics is one of persecution.

Nature is also political so that science is the study of how best to conform to the reality of nature. Reality is a world in which competition for survival - among nations not with nature - provides the only test of scientific or any other truth. Any scientific concepts which do not advance this competition are unnatural and, by definition, Jewish.

According to this view, therefore, Hitler was not irrationally or un-pragmatically hateful of Jews. He had a very clear rationality that was based on very reasonable presumptions and clear criteria of success, namely that it was indeed Jewish thinkers who had made the moral break with nature as attested in the Bible and other sacred scriptures.

Further, since it had been the self-confessed mission of the Jews, considered by them to be divinely mandated, to maintain this distinction between nature and morality, that is between the world and its creator, and to pass it down from generation to generation forever, the historical link to these ideas must be eliminated. QED: Jews must be destroyed.

Snyder's somewhat startling message is that Hitler viewed the Jews not as corrupters of civilisation but as the creators of civilisation. Civilisation itself, in its recognition of ideals like mutual respect and peace; in its encouragement of virtues like compassion and intellectual ambition, is the problem that the Third Reich was intended to solve. Jews in other words were not racially inferior; they had no race. Hence the term 'mongrels' which referred to the fundamentally un-natural position of Jews in the world. It was the absence of Jewish racial conscience and racial competitiveness that was their sin.

Whether or not you are persuaded by Snyder's rhetoric (as I am), you will not be able to forget its logic nor the challenge of its conclusions. The reason for continuing anti-Semitism, especially in the United States and in Europe, is precisely because of the continuing war against civilisation, the principles and aims of which are still those articulated by Hitler.

The implications for how one sees recent elections in the US and Europe are staggering. Trump, for example, is clearly pursuing the programme for the destruction of civilised society outlined by Hitler. Trusting in the robustness of American institutions to withstand this assault may be as pointless as it was in Germany in 1933.

Postscript

Another GR reader (see comments) alerted me to the similarity between the Nazi thesis about nature and that of the early 19th century Catholic philosopher, Joseph de Maistre. De Maistre's vision of life is certainly as bloody as that of the leaders of the Third Reich as summarised in this excerpt from his Soirees de Saint Petersbourg:

In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life. You feel it already in the vegetable kingdom: from the great catalpa to the humblest herb, how many plants die and how many are killed! but, from the moment you enter the animal kingdom, this law is suddenly in the most dreadful evidence. A power, a violence, at once hidden and palpable, has in each species appointed a certain number of animals to devour the others: thus there are insects of prey, reptiles of prey, birds of prey, fishes of prey, quadrupeds of prey. There is no instant of time when one creature is not being devoured by another. Over all these numerous races of animals man is placed, and his destructive hand spares nothing that lives. He kills to obtain food and he kills to clothe himself; he kills to adorn himself; he kills in order to attack and he kills to defend himself; he kills to instruct himself and he kills to amuse himself; he kills to kill. Proud and terrible king, he wants everything and nothing resists him…from the lamb he tears its guts to make his harp resound… from the wolf his most deadly tooth to polish his pretty works of art; from the elephant his skin to make a whip for his child—his table is covered with corpses…. And who [in this general carnage] exterminates him who will exterminate all the others? Himself. It is man who is charged with the slaughter of man…. So is accomplished…the great law of the violent destruction of living creatures. The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.

Schmitt was a self-confessed admirer of de Maistre as a 'political realist', by which he meant one who knew how to distinguish between friends and enemies. Schmitt is de Maistre's equal in dismissing the 'sentimentality' of liberal ideas of human nature. Where he differs from de Maistre is his rejection (by silence) of providential action in the world. De Maistre considered the French Revolution a punishment by God for a European sinfulness for example.

Schmitt rejects this sort of theological meddling as unnatural. Schmitt had a new Darwinian foundation that was unavailable to de Maistre, and he made the most of it to justify the separation of politics and ethics. Or rather to create an ethic closer to the divine and, incidentally of course, supportive of genocide. It was God after all, operating through the laws of natural selection, who demanded the natural ascendancy of the strong. God has established the rule of survival of the fittest. It was man who broke that rule. Even God had been subtly naturalised by Schmitt. De Maistre had shown the way.

With Natural Law, you pick your desired outcome, and then work backwards to suitable premisses. Paul of Tarsus did it. Thomas Aquinas did it. De Maistre did it. And Schmitt did it. None of them liked the Jews very much. Seems like a pattern. See, for more on the perils of Natural Law: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show.... And for more on how it affects recent philosophical thinking see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....

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