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The Black Earth exchange, part 3: ‘The best form of genocide intervention is prevention’

[additional-authors]
October 28, 2015

Timothy Snyder is the Housum Professor of History at Yale University and a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He is the author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which received the literature award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding. Snyder is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement and a former contributing editor at The New Republic. He is a permanent fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences, serves as the faculty advisor for the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, and sits on the advisory council of the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

This exchange focuses on Professor Snyder’s critically acclaimed new book Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (Tim Duggan Books, 2015). You can find parts one and two here and here.

***

Dear Professor Snyder,

In the previous round you stated that one of the main lessons we can learn from the mode in which the Nazis operated in Eastern Europe is “that political predictability is desirable, and changes of borders, state failure, regime change, and anarchy are risky.”

In the final chapter of your book you link your conclusions about the destruction of States and political institutions in WW2 with several current day foreign policy initiatives, such as Putin’s campaign in the Ukraine and the War in Iraq. You stress that these are cases in which a callous disregard for existing states and political institutions could potentially result in devastating consequences. At some point you write the following:

When states are absent, rights – by any definition – are impossible to sustain. States are not structures to be taken for granted, exploited or discarded, but are fruits of long and quiet effort. It is tempting but dangerous to gleefully fragment the state from the right or knowingly gaze at the shards from the left. 

One could raise an objection that while that may normally be the case, there have been situations (Rwanda; Cambodia) in which there was a need to infringe on the authority and the borders of a state in which atrocities were being committed. Is aiming for “political predictability” and avoiding active regime change always the wise thing to do? Should these things not be judged on a case by case basis?

Yours

Shmuel.

***

Dear Shmuel,

Let me begin by clarifying one of the basic arguments of the book. When we evaluate the survival rates of Jews from place to place, we see only one truly strong correlation: with the degree of sovereignty of the state in which they lived. In order for the Final Solution to become a Holocaust, German power had to destroy states beyond Germany. No Holocaust took place in the borders of Germany before the war, and no Holocaust could have taken place in Germany before the war. Any attempt along those lines would have been too disruptive, as Hitler understood. What had to happen was the direction of German racial institutions, a kind of anti-political energy, against other states. As other states were destroyed — Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland — fields of possibility for experimentation opened, and techniques for a Final Solution were developed. The Holocaust begin when German power was turned against the Soviet state in 1941, and as German institutions destroyed Soviet institutions that had just, months before, destroyed the Baltic states and eastern Poland. In this historically unprecedented zone of double state destruction new forms of politics were possible that allowed Germans and local populations to kill so many Jews that a Holocaust was seen to be possible. When this conclusion was reached, Germany policy from 1942 forward was to kill Jews wherever they lived. Although each country has its own story, the basic pattern is that institutions of state sovereignty created some possibility for Jewish survival. As a result, death rates beyond the zone of statelessness were much lower. In Germany’s allies, the Jews who died tended to be those who lost citizenship with regime changes or border alterations. In a sovereign state like France it was foreign Jews — stateless people, in effect — who wore the brunt. More Polish Jews died in the French Holocaust then French Jews.

Now, one can place this argument into two scholarly contexts, and address some of your doubts.  There are essentially two lines of research about mass killing and ethnic cleansing.  The social scientists, who have taken up the subject in earnest since the wars in Yugoslavia, tend to argue that it is state failure, state collapse, civil war, regime change, and border changes that enable episodes of genocide and ethnic cleansing.  At the same time, historians draw attention to the fact that the very biggest cases of states killing their own people, such as China, the Soviet Union, and Cambodia, were of a different nature. Here we see not a normal state but a party state, so a situation in which the relationship between the individual and the state was much less important than the relationship between at the individual and the party — and particularly its elites, who drew their confidence from a theory of history and sought to advance progress in their own countries. What we see in Nazi Germany is very special. It was a party state that artificially induced state failure in its neighbours. This helps us to see why Nazi Germany was murderous in a certain special way; but it also helps us to see that Nazi Germany stands in the very little of scholarly research and its findings.

Might it be justified to intervene to stop a state from killing its open people or those of others?  Yes, I agree; in some cases it would be. But I believe this discussion should take place after we have made two basic observations about history. The first is that the state itself is not in fact the problem. We should beware of confusing the state itself with repression, and its absence with freedom.  Thinking along those lines makes intervention, as in Iraq, seem much easier than it will be. Second, we should recognize that there are few if any cases of democratic countries reacting quickly enough to stop a genocide. This includes the Holocaust, of course; despite all the American mythmaking, western armies did not reach the places where the Holocaust was perpetrated. In Cambodia the successful intervention was carried out by communist Vietnam. So though I agree that there could be cases where military intervention to stop genocide is justified, I think we need some kind of protocol that goes beyond the politics and emotions of the moment. There have been recent attempts to predict areas where genocide is more likely in the near future, such as the Early Warning Project at the Committee on Conscience of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. This sort of exercise can be very helpful, since early action might have some preventive capacity, whereas boots on the ground almost always arrives after the damage has already been done. On a global scale,  the best form of intervention is prevention. It is much less glamorous to build and protect structures than it is to invade countries, but it is also much more likely to work.

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