When institutions fail, we are all we've got.

One particular horror that the new administration has loudly proclaimed their intent to create is the capture, imprisonment, and deportation of millions of immigrants. The new regime has boldly telegraphed their plans and if we don’t take those plans seriously, that’s on us. We still have time to do something, but I do believe we are living through the most dangerous period of the last half century. That is, the most critical period in a generation.

There are so many immigrants in the United States that it’s impossible that you won’t know someone affected by this which means that you almost definitely have a chance to make a positive impact if you want to. I’m seeing a lot of doomerism on my feeds (understandable) so I’m gonna spin some hope today.

Lessons from Black Earth

At this moment (of horror, of shame, of violence and more violence to come) I am thinking about a book by Timothy Snyder called Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning.

I got a copy of Black Earth and read it as part of my processing of what happened after the 2016 election. In the book, Snyder presents an eloquent and chilling history of the Holocaust, its causes and what enabled mass murder on such a staggering scale, drawing on sources from eastern Europe and testimonies from Jewish survivors. Black Earth has stayed with me because after all the WWII and Holocaust history books, films, and testimonies I have consumed, it was one of the few to shake me from the complacency of viewing the Holocaust as a distant historical event and recognizing how close we are to allowing it to happen again, in our own country.

Snyder’s primary contention is that “statelessness” was a precondition for the mass murder of European Jews, and other groups targeted by the Nazis. Hitlet recognized that people without a state, without a country, were vulnerable, so to eliminate “undesirable” populations, he must first eliminate the states to which they belonged. In zones of statelessness, nearly all Jews were murdered.

This bears examining at a time when a new administration is taking control and embark on a violent quest to revoke the physical and philosophical protections of citizenship from millions of people, while already having taken quite a few steps to deny the status of personhood from half the country (by which I mean, women).

Snyder shows Hitler as a "racial anarchist" who viewed states, nations, laws, and ethics all as meaningless, things to be manipulated. Hitler's worldview, according to Snyder, was completely based around the idea of brutal, racial competition for supremacy, and left no room for concepts of compassionate equality. Everything he did, then, was toward the end of restoring a state of "natural racial competition."

In an interview for the Atlantic, Snyder explains Hitler's perverse hatred for Jews thus:

"Any idea which allows us to see each other as human beings—whether it’s a social contract; whether it’s a legal contract; whether it’s working-class solidarity; whether it’s Christianity—all these ideas come from Jews. And so for people to be people, for people to return to their essence, for them to represent their race, as Hitler sees things, you have to strip away all those ideas. And the only way to strip away all those ideas is to eradicate the Jews. And if you eradicate the Jews, then the world snaps back into what Hitler sees as its primeval, correct state."

(Empathy, equity, and compassion, foundations of a functional liberal state, as the collective Nazi enemy. Sounds familiar.)

In Snyder's reading of Hitler, what is especially striking is that Hitler is not necessarily more of an anti-Semite than anyone else during his time period or environment. Rather, his warped worldview led him to see Jews as an ecological, planetary threat, a threat to what is best and "natural" in the world, bringers of corrupt, incorrect, and dangerous ideas. (For instance: "Jews falsely separated science and politics.")

If we accept that Hitler looked at eliminating the Jews, not chiefly out of "anti-Semitism" i.e. racial hatred, but out of a planetary need for both physical and intellectual dominance, then it's easier to understand Snyder's next important point, which owes a debt to the work of political theorist Hannah Arendt: that the survival or sacrifice of Europe's Jews depended mainly on the existence, or destruction, of nation states and other legal and social institutions.

Snyder gives many examples. Compare the occupation of Denmark, where 99% of Jews survived, or Italy, where 80% of Jews survived, with Poland, where more than 90% of Jews perished.

In places that endured a dual Nazi and Soviet occupation, political propaganda by the Nazis portrayed Jews as Soviet collaborators, effectively making them scapegoats and allowing the rest of the population to attack them. In areas where the Nazis used this political strategy, where the state and institutions were destroyed first by the Soviets, then by the Nazis, nearly all Jews were murdered. In places that did not undergo this type of dual occupation, Jews were exponentially more likely to survive.

Now, with hindsight, we can clearly see how the Nazis were able to separate Jews from their countryfolk in what Snyder calls "the production of statelessness."

Where states and institutions were more successfully degraded or destroyed, where the production of statelessness was more completely carried out, and where the citizens therein did nothing to stop the unjust persecution of their neighbors, Jews died. In pockets of Europe where those few citizens did so vociferously, and unequivocally, and immediately, Jews survived. Without support from strong, just institutions, there were only a few citizens who stood up for their Jewish neighbors.

Those few brave individuals did make a difference; sometimes, they made all the difference.

If we don’t have many strong institutions left, that means it’s up to us.

Creative juice

Thanks for reading. Don’t give up. This post is public so feel free to share it.