I recently mentioned that I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Now I've been reading books about the formation of the Soviet Union, another about the collapse thereof, and Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder, which is about both Hitler and Stalin.
What I had probably not sufficiently appreciated is that both of them, and their followers, really believed in National Socialism and Marxism-Leninism, respectively. These weren't just invented to brainwash the masses and keep the regimes in power, they were the real, subjectively coherent worldviews of the dictators and their lieutenants (though they appear incoherent from the outside). To be sure, Hitler and Stalin had grandiose delusions. They believed themselves to be the chosen instruments of destiny, and so their absolute, unchallenged rule was necessary for destiny to be fulfilled. But the destiny was real in their minds.
The absurdity of their beliefs made them all the more dangerous. There were very few Jews in Germany when Hitler took power, and many of them got out in time. The vast majority of the millions of Jews Hitler and his cohorts murdered were Ukrainian, Polish and Belorussian peasants and shopkeepers. They manifestly were not to blame for Germany's defeat by the western powers in WWI or the terms of surrender at Versailles, nor were they barons of international finance. Stalin literally came to believe that the Ukrainian peasants were starving to death on purpose to discredit the collectivization of agriculture, and that the more they starved, the more he was vindicated. The dictators truly believed their own manifest nonsense.
It's important to keep this in mind today.
1 comment:
It's obviously not a good idea for one man to rule a country. Moreover, it it's a really bad idea for one crazy man to rule anything, even a candy store.
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