Black Earth Quotes

“The history of the Holocaust is not over. Its precedent is eternal, and its lessons have not yet been learned.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“A common American error is to believe that freedom is the absence of state authority.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“The ideal capitalism envisioned by advocates of the free market depends upon social virtues and wise policies that it does not itself generate.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“Hitler the thinker was wrong that politics and science are the same thing. Hitler the politician was right that conflating them creates a rapturous sense of catastrophic time and thus the potential for radical action. When an apocalypse is on the horizon, waiting for scientific solutions seems senseless, struggle seems natural, an demagogues of blood and soil come to the fore. A sound policy for our world, then, would be one that keeps the fear of planetary catastrophe as far away as possible. This means accepting the autonomy of science from politics, and making the political choice to support the pertinent kinds of science that will allow conventional politics to proceed.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“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.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“Separated from National Socialism by time and luck, we find it easy to dismiss Nazi ideas without contemplating how they functioned. Our forgetfulness convinces us that we are different from Nazis by shrouding the ways that we are the same. —”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“Nevertheless, disorderly violence within the Reich itself was revealed to be a dead end. Most of German public opinion was opposed to the chaos. Visible despair led to expressions of sympathy with Jews, rather than the spiritual distancing that Nazis expected. Of course, it was possible for Germans not to wish to see violence inflicted upon Jews while at the same time not wishing to see Jews at all. Göring, Himmler, and Heydrich immediately drew the conclusion that inspiring pogroms inside Germany had been a mistake. Not long after they would organize pogroms in much the same way as Goebbels had, but beyond the borders of Germany, in time of war, in places where German force had destroyed the state.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“In a new Russian colonialism that began in 2013, Russian leaders and propagandists imagined neighboring Ukrainians out of existence or presented them as sub-Russians. In characterizations that recall what Hitler said about Ukrainians (and Russians), Russian leaders described Ukraine as an artificial entity with no history, culture, and language, backed by some global agglomeration of Jews, gays, Europeans, and Americans. In”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“Between July 1942 and June 1943, only 4,705 Jews were admitted to the United States—fewer than the number of Warsaw Jews who were killed on a given day at Treblinka in summer 1942.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“It turned out that the Germans were not, in fact, a master race. Hitler had accepted this possibility when he invaded the Soviet Union: “If the German people is not strong enough and devoted enough to give its blood for its existence, let it go and be destroyed by another, stronger man. I shall not shed tears for the German people.” Over the course of the war, Hitler changed his attitude towards the Soviet Union and the Russians: Stalin was not a tool of the Jews but their enemy, the USSR was not or was no longer Jewish, and its population turned out, upon investigation, not to be subhuman. In the end, Hitler decided, “the future belongs entirely to the stronger people of the east.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“Yet if states were destroyed, local institutions corrupted, and economic incentives directed towards murder, few of us would behave well.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“When the mass murder of Jews is limited to an exceptional place and treated as the result of impersonal procedures, then we need not confront the fact that people not very different from us murdered other people not very different from us at close quarters.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“The lesson that Hitler had drawn from the Balkans, Schmitt presented as a purely German idea: There is no such thing as domestic politics as such, since everything begins with the confrontation with a chosen foreign enemy. The definition of the domestic was that which had to be manipulated to destroy what is foreign. Germany itself had no content. The idea of the people, the Volk, was there to persuade Germans to throw themselves into their murderous destiny as a race. The people were only what they proved themselves to be, which without struggle was nothing.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“Who,” asked Hitler, “remembers the Red Indians?” For Hitler, Africa was the source of the imperial references but not the actual site of empire; eastern Europe was that actual site, and it was to be remade just as North America had been remade.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“Since homo sapiens can survive only by unrestrained racial killing, a Jewish triumph of reason over impulse would mean the end of the species. What a race needed, thought Hitler, was a “worldview” that permitted it to triumph, which meant, in the final analysis, “faith” in its own mindless mission.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“If we believe that the Holocaust was a result of the inherent characteristics of Jews, Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, or anyone else, then we are moving in Hitler’s world. —”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“Most of us would like to think that we possess a “moral instinct.” Perhaps we imagine that we would be rescuers in some future catastrophe. Yet if states were destroyed, local institutions corrupted, and economic incentives directed towards murder, few of us would behave well. There is little reason to think that we are ethically superior to the Europeans of the 1930s and 1940s, or for that matter less vulnerable to the kind of ideas that Hitler so successfully promulgated and realized. A”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“Auschwitz has also become the standard shorthand of the Holocaust because, when treated in a certain mythical and reductive way, it seems to separate the mass murder of Jews from human choices and actions. Insofar”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“Our intuitions fail us. We rightly associate the Holocaust with Nazi ideology, but forget that many of the killers were not Nazis or even Germans. We think first of German Jews, although almost all of the Jews killed in the Holocaust lived beyond Germany. We”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“Vienna School merges with the thought of Ayn Rand. She believed that competition was the meaning of life itself; Hitler said much the same thing. Such reductionism, although temptingly elegant, is fatal. If nothing matters but competition, then it is natural to eliminate people who resist it and institutions that prevent it.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“all major German crimes took place in areas where state institutions had been destroyed, dismantled, or seriously compromised.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“One of the errors of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the belief that regime change must be creative. The theory was that the destruction of a state and its ruling elite would bring freedom and justice.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“These forms of counterglobal thinking increase the possibility that particular groups can be blamed for planetary phenomena.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“Might did make right, not just in practice, but as a matter of principle; and, of course, this conclusion came very close to abolishing the very idea of principle.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“As she observed, “the first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the juridical person in man.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, who endured Stalin’s Gulag while his brother was sheltering Jews, wrote that “a man can be human only under human conditions.” The purpose of the state is to preserve these conditions, so that its citizens need not see personal survival as their only goal. The state is for the recognition, endorsement, and protection of rights, which means creating the conditions under which rights can be recognized, endorsed, and protected. The state endures to create a sense of durability.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“If past and future contained nothing but struggle and scarcity, all attention fell upon the present. A psychic resolve for relief from a sense of crisis overwhelmed the practical resolve to think about the future. Rather”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“Auschwitz was unusual, however, in one important respect. Unlike the death pits in the doubly occupied zone and the occupied Soviet Union, unlike the death facilities at Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, and Chełmno, it was the planned murder site for very large numbers of Jews who were still citizens of states that Germany recognized as sovereign.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“Hitler foresaw a “resolution of the Polish problem” by the murder of those who might be regarded as fully human.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

“As their land was taken, Ukrainians could be given, said Hitler, “scarves, glass beads, and everything that colonial peoples like.” A single loudspeaker in each village would “give them plenty of opportunities to dance, and the villagers will be grateful to us.” Nazi propaganda would simply remove Ukrainians from view. A Nazi song for female colonists described Ukraine thus: “There are neither farms nor hearths, there the earth cries out for the plough.” Erich Koch, chosen by Hitler to rule Ukraine, made the point about the inferiority of Ukrainians with a certain simplicity: “If I find a Ukrainian who is worthy to sit with me at table, I must have him shot.” Even in”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning