How Could It Happen?

 

How Could It Happen?

July 10, 2024

I am reading the book Bloodlands, Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, by the great Yale historian Timothy Snyder. I’m not halfway through it, but I already have some thoughts I want to share. In that book Snyder goes into excruciating detail about the killing fields on the land between Germany and the USSR, and in the USSR itself, from around 1930 up to the end of World War II in 1945. Early in the book he focuses on the Holodomor, the famine Stalin imposed on Ukraine in 1933 and 1934. Millions of people starved to death. Snyder’s descriptions of the Ukrainian countryside during that famine are bone chilling. He tells stories of Communist Party members stealing whatever food a Ukrainian peasant family had managed to hold onto, doing it just to make sure the family starved to death. Stalin and his Communists knew what they were doing. They were punishing the Ukrainians for resisting the forced collectivization of agriculture. Stalin knew what was happening in Ukraine, and he just didn’t care.

Snyder then turns to Stalin’s Great Terror later in the 1930s. I have a PhD in Russian history, but Snyder presents the Great Terror in a way I’d never seen before. Western people like me usually think of Stalin’s Great Terror as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) turning on itself. We think of it as Stalin purging real and supposed opponents from the Party and solidifying his personal, dictatorial control of the Party and thus of the entire USSR. Stalin certainly did that, but there was much more to the Terror than that. Snyder focuses particularly on what he calls “the Polish campaign.”

People of Polish nationality or descent made up only a tiny percentage of the Soviet Union’s population. Yet Stalin set out to eliminate them nearly altogether. His Communists dreamed up something called “the Polish Military Organization” that was supposedly an active foe of the Soviet Union working to undermine it from within. There was no such organization, and Stalin had entered into a mutual nonaggression pact with Poland. Nonetheless, the Soviet Communists charged over 100,000 Soviet people with being that nonexistent organization’s operatives in the country. Something like three-quarters of them were shot. The others were sent to the Gulag, many of them never to be heard from again. Stalin conducted other what Synder calls “national operations” too. He targeted Lithuanians and Latvians along with other nationalities present in the country along with the Poles. Snyder says that there was never a national operation against the Jews, but they died in the “national operations” in disproportionate numbers nonetheless.

Essentially none of the people Stalin had killed in the Great Terror received any kind of due process of law. Instead, Stalin created a mechanism of terror that consisted of two or three local Communists putting together lists of people to be eliminated and deciding which of them would be shot and which would be sent to the Gulag. In the later months of the operations, Snyder says, the percentage of executions increased because there was no more room in the Gulag.

Snyder’s description of the Great Terror reminds me of a story I read in the book Leningrad, Siege and Symphony, by Brian Moynahan. This story took place later than the Great Terror. It happened during the German siege of Leningrad in the early 1940s, but it is nonetheless telling. Moynahan tells a story of a man who worked daily eight hour shifts for the NKVD, a predecessor of the KGB, that was Stalin’s primary element of terror. This man’s job for eight hours a day was to shoot people in the back of the head. There’s no telling how many innocent people this man murdered on orders from his superiors. There were no doubt people in the USSR doing the same routine work during the Great Terror. We Americans are fortunate in a way. Our history in no way prepares us to comprehend what Stalin and the Soviet Communists did to the people of their country. What the Soviets did to their own people is horrific beyond understanding.

Snyder then turns to the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. When Hitler began that invasion, he had his Luftwaffe bomb a huge number of Polish villages, towns, and cities that had no military significance. Hitler’s bombing of Warsaw was the first time there ever was a massive bombing of a major European capital city. Snyder tells stories from the German invasion of Poland that establish that German soldiers simply did not see Polish people as human beings. They murdered people they had taken prisoner whether those people were military people entitled to certain rights under the articles of war or not. They forced people into barns, then set the barns on fire. The Luftwaffe strafed civilians as they fled Warsaw. German tanks crushed Polish buildings and people without regard for any military significance those buildings and people had or did not have. The Germans simply inflicted mass terror on the Polish population, and the Nazi genocide against the Jews hadn’t even really started yet. We, however, know that it is coming, and we know how horrific it was.

How was it possible? The dehumanization of human beings in World War I is part of the answer. European people became inured to human life meaning little or nothing. Every country in Europe, with the exception of a few places like Albania, had a history as a Christian nation. Yet whatever Christian faith people had did nothing to stop that dehumanization of God’s people (and all people are God’s people). In World War I, Christians dehumanized other Christians.

Into that context of dehumanization came the ideologies of both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. I’ll start my discussion of those ideologies with the Soviet Union’s Marxism/Leninism. In the mid-nineteenth century, Karl Marx (1818-1883), a German economic philosopher who worked mostly in England, developed a theory of history called dialectical materialism. Marx posited that the nature of everything in human culture is determined by ownership of the means of economic production. The dialectical part of dialectical materialism consists of Marx’s assertion that history progresses through stages as different economic classes come to own those means. History, Marx said, is always characterized by class conflict. In industrialized Europe in the 19^th century, the conflict was between the capitalists who owned the means of production and the workers, who Marx called the proletariat, who worked them and thus were the ones who actually produced value. Marx was simply wrong about most of that, but his dialectical historical philosophy is not what mostly interests us here.

It is far more important for our purposes that Marxism was radically, aggressively atheistic. The “materialism” of Marx’s dialectical materialism refers to the philosophical assertion that only the material is real. There is no metaphysical dimension to reality. There is no spiritual dimension to reality. Only physical objects are real. There is no God. For Marx, religion was nothing more than a tool the class which owned the means of production used to quiet and suppress everyone else. In Marx’s day, that meant, Marx contended, that religious faith functioned only to keep the capitalists as the dominant class. It acted as the “opiate of the people.”

The Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1870-1924) added several things to Marx’s philosophy. Most importantly for our purposes, he developed a theory of the communist party, which, he said, was the party of the proletariat. For Lenin, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union consisted of the most “class conscious” of the country’s workers. It represented the economy’s working people against the capitalists. Under first Lenin and then under Stalin, the CPSU developed a structure topped by a General Secretary. In theory, discussion of political and economic issues inside the party was permissible until that structure made a decision. Then everyone in the party had to fall in line in support of the decision. In practice, especially under Stalin, the General Secretary was the one who made the decisions, and everyone else just had to follow and support them. In Marxism/Leninism, the communist party represents the interests of the workers by definition. It represents the interests of the workers because it says it does. Soviet Marxism/Leninism created the structure that Stalin used to make himself supreme dictator of the USSR with everyone else just obligated to do what he told them to do. That ideology contained nothing that would inhibit mass murder or genocide.

Then there is the ideology of Nazi Germany. Nazism was never as well thought out or sophisticated as Marxism/Leninism, wrong as Marxism/Leninism was. Nazism consisted mostly of the ravings of Adolf Hitler. Marx’s ideology was based on class. Hitler’s was based on race, with race defined in a very unscientific way by the Nazis themselves. In Nazism, the Germans were a race. They were in fact the dominant race. All other human races either were or ought to be subordinate to them. Indeed, all other races were less human than were the Germans.

Hitler directed his hateful ideology against essentially everyone who wasn’t German, but he had two “races” in particular in view when he dehumanized non-Germans. They were the Jews and all Slavic people, including the Poles and the Russians. Germany in the 1920s and the first years of the 1930s was not a happy country. In the early 1920s it had inflation so extreme that paper money literally wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. The world-wide depression that began in 1929 just made matters worse. Germany was nominally a democratic republic in these years, but the government was never very successful at addressing and solving Germany’s myriad problems.

Hitler blamed all of those problems on the Jews. There were Jews in Germany, but they were less than one half of one percent of the German population. That there were so few Jews in Germany didn’t matter to Hitler at all. They were still responsible for all of Germany’s problems. They had caused Germany to lose World War I. They were responsible for all of Germany’s economic problems. They were supposedly dominant in the communist movement and had it in for the German people. All of that was utter nonsense, but Hitler proclaimed it as salvific truth to the German people. He proclaimed that Jews were essentially subhuman.

The Slavic peoples were also subhuman for Hitler. Slavic people, in particular the Poles, Belarussians, Ukrainians, and Russians, occupied vast tracts of land to the east of Germany. Hitler insisted that the Germans needed more “Lebensraum,” space in which to live. Hitler had grandiose ideas about conquering those peoples, either exterminating them or making them essentially slaves of the Germans, and having Germans occupy those people’s homelands. The Nazis actually never won an election in Germany. In the election of 1932 they received something like one third of the vote. Nonetheless, Hitler came to power lawfully in January, 1933, when German President Hindenburg appointed him Chancellor.

Germany was a Christian nation. It had been one for well over a millennium by 1933. Some Germans were Protestants, some were Catholics, but they were virtually all Christians. Yet Christianity played no role in Hitler’s ideology. He was not as assertively atheistic as Lenin and Stalin were, but Christianity for him was not something to but was something to control. The Nazis convinced, or forced, most German Christian clergy to sign an oath of loyalty not to God or to Jesus Christ but to Hitler, who basically just ignored the moral teachings of the Christian faith. They just weren’t important to him. Neither he nor his followers were about to let Christian morality stop them from doing what they wanted to do.

Thus, in the 1930s, there were in Europe two powerful or at least rising nations governed by ideologies that were anything but Christian. In both of them, certain people became nothing more than pawns in the dominant ideologies’ quest to impose themselves on their respective nations. In the Soviet Union, anyone who opposed the CPSU was an enemy of no human value who could be killed with no pangs of conscience whatsoever. The same was true of anyone Stalin and the Communists made out to be an enemy whether a person actually was an enemy or not. The main group the dominant ideology dehumanized in Germany were the Jews, though Hitler also dehumanized the Roma (commonly but incorrectly called gypsies), people with physical and mental disabilities, and homosexuals. Hitler wanted all of these people simply eliminated.

So how was all the horror of what Snyder calls the Bloodlands possible? It was possible first of all because World War I had inured the people of Europe to the dehumanization of other human beings. That war was a horror in the life of Europe orders of magnitude greater than any horror imposed by human beings ever had been before. The ideologies of Marxism-Leninism and Nazism introduced justifications for continuing the dehumanization of certain sorts of people. If you want some people to kill some other people willingly and without regret, convince them that the other people aren’t human. People fighting wars dehumanize their enemy all the time. For Americans during World War I Germans weren’t people, they were “krauts.” During World War II for Americans the Japanese weren’t people, they were “the Japs.” In both Korea and Vietnam, American soldiers called their Asian opponents “gooks.” War propaganda in all nations typically pictures the enemy more as apes than as human beings. Dehumanization makes it easy for some people to kill other people, and the powers that so often want some people to kill other people know it.

For Stalin, the people he starved to death in Ukraine were not human beings. They were Ukrainians (not Russians) who opposed his disastrous policy of the forced collectivization of agriculture. For him, their lives had no value whatsoever, so he and the people following him went ahead and starved millions of them to death. For Stalin and his henchmen, Poles weren’t human beings either. They were subhuman enemies, or at least could be made out to be subhuman enemies. To Stalin, they weren’t worth anything, and the victory of communism (supposedly) required their death. So kill them. Why not?

For Hitler and his followers, Poles weren’t really people. They were subhuman Slavs. They stood in the way of Germany’s Lebensraum. The same was true of the eastern Slavs too, especially the Ukrainians. They had something Germany wanted, and they weren’t about to give it to the Germans peacefully. So kill them. Why not? They aren’t worth anything. They aren’t even human.

For Hitler, the Jews were even less human than the Slavs. They didn’t just stand in the way of Germany getting what it wanted the way the Poles and Ukrainians did, they caused all of Germany’s problems. Just how they did that remains a mystery, for in truth they never did. But never mind about that. Hitler said they did, so they did. So build concentration camps. Put gas chambers and crematoria in them. Round up the Jews, all of Europe’s Jews, force them into the camps, work some of them to death, gas and cremate others of them. Why not? For Hitler, the SS, and others of Hitlers thugs, Jews weren’t human, and they were a massive problem, so wipe them out without regrets.

Dehumanization and ideology produced the horrors of Soviet communism and Nazism. Dehumanization of the one identified as other combined with ideology overcame whatever Christian scruples against mass murder a great many Europeans might otherwise have had. I suppose it’s possible that the Christianity of most Europeans was shallow and relatively easy to overcome. Still, anyone who is even superficially Christian knows that killing is wrong. They know that every human life has value because every person is a child of God. In Europe, indeed in most of the world, in the first half of the twentieth century, none of that mattered. Dehumanization and non-religious ideology led to murder on a scale unparalleled in history and beyond the comprehension of most of us who didn’t live through it.

Now, knowing history is all very fine and good. I did, after all, spend seven years of my life earning a PhD in it. For most professional historians, history is important in its own right. They study it because it is history, and that’s what they study. But history becomes far more important when we can see the light that it can shed on our contemporary context. Does the learning that dehumanization combined with secular ideology leads to mass murder and genocide tell us anything about the United States today? I believe that it does. Here’s how.

All the signs indicate that the politics of the United States are about to be taken over by Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. That movement is all about dehumanization and ideology. First dehumanization. Trump and his acolytes dehumanize two significant groups of people. One consists of Trump’s political opponents. Trump does not speak of them as being legitimate political opponents within a democracy. He and his minions throw around absolutely absurd claims about them, presumably hoping that most Americans won’t see how false they are. They call liberals communists and Marxists, which American liberals definitely are not. But “communism” and “Marxism” are hate words for most Americans. Communism and Marxism are indeed dangerous, but Trump is setting up a straw man here. Not even Senator Bernie Sanders, who self-identifies as a socialist, is a communist or a Marxist. By calling liberals communists, Trump makes them people not of disagreement but of outright evil. That, folks, is dehumanizing.

There is, however, another group of innocent people whom Trump does even more to dehumanize. That group is the immigrants who come into this country seeking political asylum, something they have every right to do under international law. Trump works hard to give the American people the idea that these immigrants are evil people who are very dangerous for the United States. They are, of course, nothing of the kind. They are mostly ordinary people fleeing violence and poverty in their home countries. Trump has his followers believing that they are all murderers, rapists, and terrorists. In fact, the crime rate among these people is lower than it is among Americans as a whole. Sure. It’s possible that some bad actors cross into this country along with legitimate asylum seekers. But we produce more than enough of our own bad actors. A few more getting in can’t possibly make any statistical difference to the safety of us Americans and our country.

Trump’s administration treated immigrants at the US-Mexico border as less than human during his first horrific administration. He tore children away from their parents. He put both the children and the parents in cages. Trump has said that these folk “poison the blood” of the American people. That is a phrase straight out of Nazism, and it dehumanizes the people at whom it is directed.

Trump has announced plans to treat these people as subhuman if he gets a second administration. He wants to build huge camps into which to herd them as he works to deport them in huge numbers. Trump hasn’t said that these camps will have gas chambers and crematoria, or at least he hasn’t said that yet. But Trump’s plan for these camps is chillingly familiar. It reeks of what the Nazis did to the Jews. Depriving people of their rights and their liberty and locking them up in concentration camps as Trump wants to do with immigrants dehumanizes immigrants.

Then there is the question of ideology. Trump’s ideology is a bit hard to nail down. He says so many contradictory things, and nearly everything he says is a lie. But his ideology, such as it is, is summed up most succinctly in his phrase “America First.” That phrase comes from the 1930s, when American Nazi sympathizers and isolationists, who were often the same people,  used it against America’s engagement with the world. It has nasty associations and connotations in this country’s history. Trump throws it around as though it were morally positive, which it is not. Trump’s policies to which the phrase points include withdrawing the US from NATO, kissing Vladimir Putin’s ring, and destroying the US economy with ridiculously and damagingly high tariffs on imported good.

“America First” is dangerous because it makes a purely secular thing the nation’s highest value. A great many of Trump’s followers try to combine the nationalism of “America First” with the Christian religion, but that they do so would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous. Only bastardized Christianity can be said to be consistent with xenophobic nationalism the way our Christian nationalists say it is. True Christianity is about God’s love and grace for the whole world, certainly not just for the one little corner of the world the US occupies. Christianity puts no nation first. It puts God first—always. And God is the God of all people not only of the Americans. “America First” supplants spiritual values with purely secular ones.

Which is precisely what Soviet communism and Nazism did, each in its own way. Soviet communism made obedience to the CPSU its highest value. Nazism made Germanness its highest value. Both of those displacements of spiritual values led to mass murder and genocide. Making purely secular values primary always carries with it the risk of such unspeakable horrors.

Will Donald Trump’s MAGA movement with its slogan of American First and its demonization of political opponents and immigrants lead to an American Auschwitz? Will it lead to an American NKVD? I like to believe that it will not. I like to believe that the American people would never let that happen. But none of us ever thought Donald Trump and the MAGA movement would ever happen either. Tragically, they did happen. They are still happening all across our country. They may well make Donald Trump president again later this year. That anyone would vote again for Donald Trump after the disaster that was his first presidency boggles the mind, yet millions upon millions of Americans will do it this coming November 5.

Hitler’s horror didn’t break out all at once. It emerged bit by bit. That’s how most violent, dictatorial regimes condition their people to do what the dictator ultimately wants. Trump is a master at that kind of popular manipulation. Will he manipulate the American people into mass murder against Trump’s political opponents and American immigrants? We like to think he couldn’t, but white America has committed genocide before. We committed genocide against the people of the First Nations of North America. We have killed millions of people during wars. We fire bombed Tokyo. We dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We have been far from averse to killing when we want to or when our government tells us to do it.

I still tell myself there will never be an American Auschwitz. I know, however, that those of us who would never countenance such a thing must remain vigilant. We must be aware of the danger. We must do everything we possibly can to stop it from happening. Donald Trump and MAGA create the real possibility that it might. Only we can stop it. I pray that we will.