If you have not picked up or borrowed Blood Lands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder yet, I suggest you do so. It is a shockingly candid dissertation on what happened to the people on the Eastern Front between Stalin and Hitler. I quote from that text:
“Partisan operations, effective as they sometimes were, brought inevitable destruction to the Belarusian civilian population, Jewish and gentile alike. When the Soviet partisans prevented peasant from giving food to the Germans, they all but guaranteed that the Germans would kill the peasants. A Soviet gun threatened a peasant, and then a German gun killed him. Once the Germans believed that they had lost control of a given village to the partisans, they would simply torch the houses and the fields. If they could not reliably get grain, the could keep it from the Soviets by seeing that it was never harvested. When Soviet partisans sabotaged trains, they were in effect ensuring that the population near the site would be exterminated. When Soviet partisans laid mines, they knew that some would detonate under the bodies of Soviet Citizens. The Germans swept mines by forcing locals, Belarusians and Jews, to walk hand in hand over minefields. In general, such loss of human life was of little concern to the Soviet leadership. The people who died had been under German occupation, and were therefore suspect and perhaps even more expendable than the average Soviet citizen. German reprisals also ensured that the ranks of the partisans swelled, as survivors often had no home, no livelihood, and no family to which to return.
The Soviet leadership was not especially concerned with the plight of Jews. After November 1941 Stalin never singled out the Jews as victims of Hitler. Some partisan commanders did try to protect the Jews. But the Soviets, like the Americans or the British, seem not to have seriously contemplated direct military action to rescue Jews. The logic of the Soviet system was always to resist independent initiatives and to value life very cheaply. Jews in ghettos were aiding the German war effort as forced laborers, so their death over pits was of little concern to the authorities in Moscow. Jews who were not aiding but hindering the Germans were showing signs of a dangerous capacity for initiative, and might later resist the reimposition of Soviet rule. By Stalinist logic, Jews were suspect either way: if they remained in the ghetto and worked for the Germans, of if they left the ghetto and showed a capacity for independent action. The previous hesitation of local Minsk communists turned out to be justified: their resistance organization was treated as a front of the Gestapo by the Central Staff of the Partisan Movement in Moscow. The people who rescued Minsk Jews and supplied Soviet partisans were labeled a tool of Hitler.”
-Timothy Snyder. Bloodlands, Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. p 238-239.
That is a small sliver of what war is. The systematic destruction of empathetic thoughts in pursuit of ideology and conformity.
The first step – always the first step – is to identify another human being as the ‘other’. Once that othering has been established there is no evil, no heinous action, that is out of reach. (Funny how religious belief is all about othering, but I’m sure it’s a completely different situation.)
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This book is best read in small doses, as it is chock full of humanity doing horrible things to itself. Consider yourself warned.
5 comments
April 27, 2014 at 4:18 pm
liam
This isn’t just about Jews.
My family comes a little corner of Europe called Silesia in Poland. It was popular for industrialists because it was ‘blessed’ with a lot of natural resources.
My grandfather came to Canada in the 1920s, just before Middle Europe was crushed by the Russians. After he left, the family was annihilated: nearly every male over 11 years old was stabbed and murdered and every female over 11 was raped. His guilt haunted him for decades.
any hell was better than that brought by the Russians.Obviously, the Nazis earned their reputation for similar acts of cruelty, but once I came to learn about this history, I find myself blindly confused by the situation because had I been there, I would have thrown open my doors to the Germans.
How sad we humans are.
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April 27, 2014 at 4:48 pm
N℮üґ☼N☮☂℮ṧ
“The first step – always the first step – is to identify another human being as the ‘other’. Once that othering has been established there is no evil, no heinous action, that is out of reach.”
So true. Dehumanization techniques are powerfully effective on the brain/psyche. Your post reminded me of an excellent lecture at Stanford by Psychologist Philip Zimbardo. I highly recommend it.
“The basic paradigm to be presented illustrates the relative ease with which “ordinary,” good men and women are induced into behaving in “evil ways” by turning on or off one or another social situational variable. This body of research demonstrates the under-recognized power of social situations to alter the mental representations and behavior of individuals, groups and nations.”
He further states that those influences have not been fully recognized within psychology or society in trying to explain unusual or “evil” behaviors, such as that of the abuses of Iraqi prisoners by United States military police guards at Abu Ghraib Prison. He says that how one understands the root causes of such behaviors will then impact treatment and prevention strategies.
— http://youtu.be/cMoZ3ThW6x0 —
Thanks for the book recommendation.
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April 27, 2014 at 11:03 pm
The Arbourist
Thank you for the steer to the video. :) If you’re into the psychological aspects I would recommend the Lucifer Effect by Zimbardo, as it goes into great detail about the Stanford Prison Experiment and the fallout it created.
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April 28, 2014 at 5:23 am
N℮üґ☼N☮☂℮ṧ
My pleasure. I read the Lucifer Effect and the SPE a few years back. Zimbardo also talks about it in the lecture. But the lecture is eye opening — more so than just reading the LE and SPE. You begin to see how prevalent it is in our cultures, and yet most don’t see it. It’s not the ‘bad’ applies — it’s the barrel. Forgot to mention previously, the lecture does contain explicit content — images from at Abu Ghraib Prison.
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April 28, 2014 at 1:47 pm
The Arbourist
@Liam
Absolutely. The more I’ve read of Bloodlands the more it becomes apparent the depth of horror and genocide visited on the people of Poland and the Ukraine. There are multiple tragic narratives during WWII and all need attention.
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