In the small photograph that her son keeps in his Warsaw apartment, Wanda J. radiates self-possession, a quality that stood her in good stead during the Second World War and the German occupation of Poland. She lost her husband at war’s end, but saved herself and their two boys. When the Warsaw ghetto was created, she defied German orders and kept her family from resettling there. Denounced as a Jew on the Aryan side of Warsaw, she talked her way out of trouble. She moved her children from place to place, relying upon the help of friends, acquaintances, and strangers. When institutions were obliterated or warped in the aftermath of German invasion, when first the ghetto and then the rest of the city of Warsaw were burned to the ground, what counted, she thought, were the “faultless moral instinct and basic human goodness” of the people who chose to help Jews.
Most of the Jews of Warsaw did go to the ghetto and were murdered at Treblinka. Vasily Grossman, a Soviet Jewish writer working as a journalist in the Red Army who saw and described that place, wrote that “kindness, this stupid kindness, is what is most truly human in a human being.” Hitler denied that any idea, be it religious, philosophical, or political, justified seeing the other (or loving the other) as oneself. He claimed that conventional forms of ethics were Jewish inventions, and that conventional states would collapse during the racial struggle. Throughout Europe, but to different degrees in different places, German occupation destroyed the institutions that made ideas of reciprocity seem plausible. Where Germans obliterated conventional states, or annihilated Soviet institutions that had just destroyed conventional states, they created the abyss where racism and politics pulled together towards nothingness. In this black hole, Jews were murdered. When Jews were saved, it was often thanks to people who could act on behalf of a state or by institutions that could function like a state. When none of the moral illumination of institutions was present, kindness was all that remained, and the pale light of the individual rescuers shone.
The state stood at the middle of the story of those who wished to kill Jews, and of those who wished to save them. Its mutation within Germany after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 and then its destruction in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland in 1938 and 1939 transformed Jews from citizens into objects of exploitation. The double assault upon state institutions in the Baltic states and eastern Poland, at first by the Soviet Union in 1939 and 1940 and then by Nazi Germany in 1941, created the special field of experimentation where ideas of a Final Solution became the practice of mass murder. The Holocaust as mass shooting extended as far east into Soviet Belarus, Soviet Ukraine, and Soviet Russia as German power reached. The German policy of total killing then spread back west into territories that the Germans had conquered before the final, fateful conflict with the USSR that began in 1941. The removal of institutions had been, however, irregular throughout western, central, and southern Europe; the Holocaust spread insofar as states were weakened, but no further. Where political structures held, they provided support and means to people who wished to help Jews.
Wanda J.’s judgment about the decisive importance of a sense of humanity seems like a hopeful conclusion, but it is not. Good and evil can be rendered visible, as in memoirs such as hers, but they are not easy to summon or dismiss. Most of us would like to think that we possess the qualities she named: “moral instinct” and “human goodness.” 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. If we are serious about emulating rescuers, we should build in advance the structures that make it more likely that we would do so. Rescue, in this broad sense, thus requires a firm grasp of the ideas that challenged conventional politics and opened the way to an unprecedented crime.
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To characterize Hitler as an antisemite or an anti-Slavic racist underestimates the potential of Nazi ideas. His ideas about Jews and Slavs were not prejudices that happened to be extreme, but rather emanations of a coherent worldview that contained the potential to change the world. His conflation of politics and science allowed him to pose political problems as scientific ones and scientific problems as political ones. He thereby placed himself at the center of the circle, interpreting all data according to a scheme of a perfect world of racial bloodshed corrupted only by the humanizing influence of Jews. By presenting Jews as an ecological flaw responsible for the disharmony of the planet, Hitler channeled and personalized the inevitable tensions of globalization. The only sound ecology was to eliminate a political enemy; the only sound politics was to purify the earth.
Science in fact possesses and enables a certain autonomy, one which a sound politics must recognize rather than seek to subsume. The invisible forces of the world are not conspiring Jews, but physical, chemical, and biological regularities that we are ever more capable of describing. The experience of a European empire, so important to Hitler, did have a biological component, but not the one that he imagined. The unseen advantage that enabled Europeans to conquer the Americas was not their innate racial superiority but the microbes they unwittingly carried in their bodies. The rapid conquest of the New World so admired by Hitler was possible because the germs aided the conquerors. In imagining that Slavs would fight “like Indians” on a receding frontier, Hitler ignored the battle that Indians could not win: against contagious illnesses. Fighting on their home continent, Germans lacked the immunological advantages that Europeans had in North America. In eastern Europe, Germans feared diseases so much that, when they were not busy calling Jews “typhus bacteria,” they spared Jewish doctors so that they could treat Germans infected with typhus. The colonialist had to bear disease in his own bloodstream, not fear it in the blood of others. He won the world not by cleansing it of imagined impurities but by bringing real impurities with him.
When science is disengaged from politics, simple analyses such as these reveal why Hitler’s territorial solution to ecological crisis made no sense. As Hitler himself knew, there was a political alternative in the 1930s: that the German state abandon colonization and support agricultural technology. The scientific approach to dwindling resources, which Hitler insisted was a Jewish lie, held much more promise for Germans (and for everyone else) than an endless race war. Scientists, many of them Germans, were already preparing the way for the improvements in agriculture known as the Green Revolution. Had Hitler not begun a world war that led to his suicide, he would have lived to see the day when Europe’s problem was not food shortage but surpluses. Science provided food so quickly and bountifully that Hitlerian ideas of struggle lost a good deal of their resonance. In 1989, a hundred years after Hitler’s birth, world food prices were about half of what they had been in 1939 when he began the Second World War—despite a huge increase in world population and thus demand.
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The abolition of politics and science empowered a Führer to define what was good for his race, racialize German institutions, and then oversee the destruction of neighboring states. His worldview also compressed time. By combining what seemed like the pattern of the past (racial empire) with what seemed like an urgent summons from the future (ecological panic), Nazi thinking closed the safety valves of contemplation and foresight. 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 than seeing the ecosystem as open to research and rescue, Hitler imagined that a supernatural factor—the Jews—had perverted it. Once defined as an eternal and immutable threat to the human species and the whole natural order, Jews could be targeted for urgent and extraordinary measures.
The test that was supposed to confirm Hitler’s idea of nature, the campaign that was to rescue Germans from the intolerably claustrophobic present, was the colonial war against the Soviet Union. The 1941 invasion of the USSR threw millions of Germans into a war of extermination on lands inhabited by millions of Jews. This was the war that Hitler wanted; the actions of 1938, 1939, and 1940 were preparation and improvisation, generating experience in the destruction of states. The course of the war on the eastern front created two fundamental political opportunities. At first, the zoological portrayal of Slavs justified the elimination of their polities, creating the zones where the Holocaust could become possible. Then, with time, Germany’s uncertain fortune revealed the deep political logic of Hitler’s thinking. The war was presented as both colonial (against the Slavs) and decolonial (against the Jews). As the colonial war for Lebensraum faltered against the resistance of the Red Army, Nazis emphasized instead the struggle to save the planet from Jewish domination. Since Jews were held responsible for the ideas that had supposedly suppressed the stronger races, only their extermination could ensure victory. The SS men who had begun as state destroyers, murdering members of groups thought to be the bastions of enemy polities, now became the mass murderers of Jews. Wherever German power undid Soviet power, significant numbers of local people joined in the killing. In occupied Poland in 1942, most Jews were deported from their ghettos and murdered by gassing, as at Treblinka. The Jews of the rest of Europe would survive Hitler’s murderous logic only insofar as they and their neighbors remained attached to the conventional state institutions. In the dark zones of statelessness, survivors such as Wanda J. needed good fortune and virtuous assistance.
The idea of rescue seems close to us; the ideology of murder seems distant. Ecological panic, state destruction, colonial racism, and global antisemitism might seem exotic. Most people in Europe and North America live in functional states, taking for granted the basic elements of sovereignty that preserved the lives of Jews and others during the war: foreign policy, citizenship, and bureaucracy. After two generations, the Green Revolution has removed the fear of hunger from the emotions of electorates and the vocabulary of politicians. The open expression of antisemitic ideas is a taboo in much of the West, if perhaps a receding one. 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.
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Just as Hitler’s worldview conflated science and politics, his program confused biology with desire. The concept of Lebensraum unified need with want, murder with convenience. It implied a plan to restore the planet by mass murder and a promise of a better life for German families. Since 1945, one of the two senses of Lebensraum has spread across most of the world: a living room, the dream of household comfort in consumer society. The other sense of Lebensraum is habitat, the realm that must be controlled for physical survival, inhabited perhaps temporarily by people characterized as not quite fully human. In uniting these two passions in one word, Hitler conflated lifestyle with life. For the vision of a well-stocked cupboard people should endorse the bloody struggle for other people’s land. Once standard of living is confused with living, a rich society can make war upon those who are poorer in the name of survival. Tens of millions of people died in Hitler’s war not so that Germans could live, but so that Germans could pursue the American dream in a globalized world.
At precisely this point Hitler’s theory allowed him to join globalization with domestic politics. Hitler was right to believe that, in an age of global communication, notions of prosperity had become relative and fluid. After his pursuit of Lebensraum failed with the final German defeat in 1945, the Green Revolution satisfied demand in Europe and much of the world, providing not just the food needed for bare physical survival, but a sense of security and an anticipation of plenitude. Yet no scientific solution is eternal; the political choice to support science buys time, but does not guarantee that future choices will be good ones. Another moment of choice, a bit like the one Germans faced in the 1930s, could be on the way.
The Green Revolution, perhaps the one development that most distinguishes our world from Hitler’s, might be reaching its limits. This is not so much because there are too many people on earth, but because more of the people on earth demand ever larger and more secure supplies of food. World grain production per capita peaked in the 1980s. In 2003, China, the world’s most populous country, became a net importer of grain. In the twenty-first century, world grain stocks have never exceeded more than a few months’ supply. During the hot summer and droughts of 2008, fires in fields led major food suppliers to cease exports altogether, and food riots broke out in Bolivia, Cameroon, Egypt, Haiti, Indonesia, the Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Mozambique, Senegal, Uzbekistan, and Yemen. In 2010, the prices of agricultural commodities spiked again, leading to protests, revolution, ethnic cleansing, and revolution in the Middle East.
Though the world is not likely to run out of food as such, richer societies may again become concerned about future supplies. Their elites could find themselves once again facing choices about how to define the relationship between politics and science. As Hitler demonstrated, merging the two opens the way to ideology that can seem to both explain and resolve the sense of panic. In a scenario of mass killing that resembled the Holocaust, leaders of a developed country might follow or induce panic about future shortages and act preemptively, specifying a human group as the source of an ecological problem, destroying other states by design or by accident. There need not be any compelling reason for concern about life and death, as the Nazi example shows, only a momentary conviction that dramatic action is needed to preserve a way of life.
It seems reasonable to worry that the second sense of the term Lebensraum, seeing other people’s land as habitat, is latent. In much of the world, the dominant sense of time is coming to resemble, in some respects, the catastrophism of Hitler’s era. During the second half of the twentieth century—the decades of the Green Revolution—the future appeared as a gift that was on the way. The dueling ideologies of capitalism and communism accepted the future as their realm of competition and promised a coming bounty. In the plans of government agencies, the plotlines of novels, and the drawings of children, the future was resplendent in anticipation. This sensibility seems to have disappeared. In high culture the future now clings to us, heavy with complications and crises, dense with dilemmas and disappointments. In vernacular media—films, video games, and graphic novels—the future is presented as post-catastrophic. Nature has taken some revenge that makes conventional politics seem irrelevant, reducing society to struggle and rescue. The earth’s surface grows wild, humans go feral, and anything is possible.
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, and 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.
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The planet is changing in ways that might make Hitlerian descriptions of life, space, and time more plausible. The expected increase of average global temperatures by four degrees Celsius this century would transform human life on much of the globe. Climate change is unpredictable, which exacerbates the problem. Present trends can mislead, since feedback effects await. If ice sheets collapse, heat from the sun will be absorbed by seawater rather than reflected back into space. If the Siberian tundra melts, methane will rise from the earth, trapping heat in the atmosphere. If the Amazon basin is stripped of jungle, it will release a massive pulse of carbon dioxide. Global processes are always experienced locally, and local factors can either restrain or amplify them. The coasts are likely to flood, but where and when is impossible to say. Half of the world’s cities are threatened, but which one will be lost first cannot be known. Its end will not come in one huge wave, but after countless cumulative breaches. No individual storm will be subject to prediction more than a few days in advance. Each will be unique, and yet each will belong to a cumulative trend.
Perhaps the experience of unprecedented storms or relentless droughts will jar expectations about the security of basic resources and make Hitlerian politics more resonant. As Hitler demonstrated during the Great Depression, humans are able to portray a looming crisis in such a way as to justify drastic measures in the present. Under enough stress, or with enough skill, politicians can effect the conflations Hitler pioneered: between nature and politics, between ecosystem and household, between need and desire. A global problem that seems otherwise insoluble can be blamed upon a specific group of human beings.
Hitler was a child of the first globalization, which arose under imperial auspices at the end of the nineteenth century. We are the children of the second, that of the late twentieth century. Globalization is neither a problem nor a solution; it is a condition with a history. It brings a specific intellectual danger. People have no choice but to think on a planetary scale—as Hitler and Carl Schmitt never tired of emphasizing. Since the world is more complex than a country or a city, the temptation is all the greater to find some master key to understanding everything. When a global order collapses, as was the experience of many Europeans in the second, third, and fourth decades of the twentieth century, a simplistic diagnosis such as Hitler’s can seem to clarify the global by referring to the ecological, the supernatural, or the conspiratorial. When the normal rules seem to have been broken and expectations have been shattered, a suspicion can be burnished that someone (the Jews, for example) has somehow diverted nature from its proper course. A problem that is truly planetary in scale, such as climate change, obviously demands global solutions—and one apparent solution is to define a global enemy.
The Holocaust was different from other episodes of mass killing or ethnic cleansing because German policy aimed for the murder of every Jewish child, woman, and man. This was only thinkable because the Jews were understood as the makers and enforcers of a corrupt planetary order. Jews can again be seen as a universal threat, as indeed they already are by increasingly important political formations in Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. So might Muslims, gays, or other groups that can be associated with changes on a worldwide scale.
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Climate change as a local problem can produce local conflicts; climate change as a global crisis might generate the demand for global victims. Over the past two decades, the continent of Africa has provided some indications of what these local conflicts will be like, and hints about how they might become global. It is a continent of weak states. In conditions of state collapse, droughts can bring hundreds of thousands of deaths from starvation, as in Somalia in 2010. Climate change can also increase the likelihood that Africans will find ideological reasons to kill other Africans in times of apparent shortage. In the future, Africa might also become the site of a global competition for food, perhaps with accompanying global ideological justifications.
Africa was a part of Germany’s colonial past when Hitler came to power. The conquest of Africa was the final stage of the first globalization, at the time of Hitler’s childhood. It was in sub-Saharan Africa that Germans and other Europeans relearned their lessons of race. Rwanda is an artifact of Europe’s scramble for Africa in general and of German East Africa in particular. The division of its population into Hutu and Tutsi clans was the typical European method of rule: to favor one group in order to govern another. It made no more and no less sense than the idea that Poles and Ukrainians belonged to a different race than Germans, or that Slavs should be recruited from starvation camps in order to aid in the killing of Jews. Today’s Africans can and do apply racial divisions and fantasies to one another, just as Europeans did to Africans in the 1880s and 1890s and Europeans did to Europeans in the 1930s and 1940s.
Mass killing in Rwanda provides an example of a political response to ecological crisis on a national scale. The exhaustion of the country’s arable land in the late 1980s was followed by an absolute decline in crop yields in 1993. The government recognized overpopulation as a problem and was accordingly seeking ways to export its own people to neighboring countries. It faced a political rival associated with the Tutsis whose invasion plans involved the redistribution of precious farms. The government’s policy of encouraging Hutus to kill Tutsis in spring 1994 was most successful where there were land shortages. People who wanted land denounced their neighbors. Perpetrators said that they were motivated by the desire to seize land and by the fear that others would do so before them. During the campaign of killing, Hutus did indeed kill Tutsis, but when no Tutsis were available Hutus also killed other Hutus—and took their land. Because Tutsis had been favored by the colonial powers, Hutus who killed them could cloak themselves in a myth of colonial liberation. Between April and July 1994, at least half a million people were murdered.
The starvation in Somalia and the mass killing in Rwanda are dreadful suggestions of what climate change might bring to Africa. The first exemplifies death brought directly by climate, and the second, racial conflict brought by the interaction of climate and political creativity. The future might hold the third and most fearsome possibility: an interaction between local scarcity and a colonial power capable of extracting food while exporting global ideology. Even as Africans themselves struggle for access to arable soil and potable water, their continent presents itself as the solution to the food security problems of Asians. The combination of weak property rights, corrupt regimes, and one half of the world’s untilled soil has placed Africa at the center of Asian food security planning. The United Arab Emirates and South Korea have tried to control large swathes of Sudan. They have been joined by Japan, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia in consistent efforts to buy or lease agrarian terrain in Africa. A South Korean company has tried to lease half of Madagascar.
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One Asian country exhibits a unique combination of enormous need for food and a commensurate ability to pursue resources: the People’s Republic of China. China is a rising industrial and exporting power that cannot from its own territory ensure the basic supplies needed for the expanding prosperity that its population takes for granted. In some respects, China might be in a worse position now than Germany was in the 1930s. Its supply of arable soil per person is about forty percent of the world average, and is diminishing at a rate of about a million hectares per year. The Chinese people have experienced mass hunger. The Second World War and the succeeding civil war in China brought starvation to millions of people. A decade after the victory of the communists, the famine caused by Mao’s Great Leap Forward of 1958–1962 killed tens of millions of people.
In twenty-first-century China, the gap between the two senses of the word Lebensraum—comfort and survival—appears to be small. There are tens of millions of prosperous Chinese today whose family members died of starvation in living memory. The Chinese populace will likely require more and more calories because prosperous Chinese, like prosperous people everywhere, demand greater food security as well as more and different kinds of food. The same Chinese communist party that starved its own people during its revolutionary phase still rules the country. Since it is responsible both for past famine and for future plenty, it is hugely sensitive to food supplies. This can be seen in the market-distorting purchases of agricultural commodities whenever global supply seems threatened. It is improbable that China, given its growing wealth, will actually run out of food. Much more likely are overreactions to momentary anxieties that punish peoples beyond China. Regardless of whether large numbers of Chinese are actually threatened with physical hunger, the politics of national prosperity will tend towards decisive international action when a sense of threat emerges.
Facing some future crisis, perhaps a series of annual droughts, leaders in Beijing might draw the conclusion in the 2030s that leaders in Berlin drew in the 1930s: that the globalization that serves a booming export sector must be complemented by durable control of living space that ensures food supplies. The Chinese leadership has described Africa as a source of needed resources, including food. Chinese authorities demonstrated during the climate-related civil war that began in Sudan in 2003 that they would support mass murderers when doing so seemed to serve their investments. In Sudan, drought drove Arabs southward into the lands of African pastoralists. The Sudanese government sided with the Arabs and designed a policy to eliminate the Zaghawa, Masseleit, and Fur peoples as such. This Sudanese government was armed by China and Russia.
China also faces a shortage that was unheard of in the 1930s: potable water. Climate change seems to intensify the water cycle, bringing more droughts as well as more floods. Places that are drenched are getting more water; places that are parched are getting less. Close to a billion people worldwide lack the half gallon a day needed for drinking, and more than two billion lack the five gallons a day needed for hygiene. In the twenty-first century, people have rioted for water not only in China but in Bolivia, India, Kenya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Sudan. China disposes of only about a third as much freshwater per person as the global average, and much of it comes from glaciers that are melting away in the warming air. Half of Chinese freshwater and about twenty percent of Chinese groundwater are already polluted beyond potability. By 2030, Chinese demand for water will likely be close to twice the current supply. It is quite possible, of course, that China, or at least its more prosperous citizens, will be able to afford desalination of seawater in the future as technology improves.
Less peaceful approaches to the problem of uncertain water and food supplies are also possible. China has a long border with a country that has considerable supplies of water: the Russian Federation. Chinese farmers are cultivating the land on their side of the Chinese-Russian border ever more intensively, Russian farmers ever less so. In the early twenty-first century, Beijing invested more capital in eastern Russia than did Moscow. As time passes, Beijing might look to Siberian water, just as it now looks to Siberian natural gas and oil. Beijing’s preferred method of control, in Russia as in Africa, has been legal contracts on terms advantageous to itself. Russian leaders, like African ones, have been amenable to this form of submission. This Chinese approach to Moscow has worked with natural gas, and it might work with water.
Yet as climate change continues, and as unpredictable events accumulate, land in Africa and Russia might seem more precious to Africans and Russians themselves. Under pressure, the Chinese will perhaps find the ideas that seem to justify the impoverishment and death of Africans and Russians. Or perhaps Russians and Africans will find the ideas that justify putting an end to Chinese globalization and to the people who seem to be behind it.
None of these Chinese scenarios is inevitable. China’s preoccupations resemble those of interwar Germany, but Chinese leaders do not exhibit Hitler’s unusual opposition to scientific solutions. Whereas Hitler opposed the agricultural science that eventually resolved any sense of ecological panic in Germany, Chinese authorities fund the energy research that could slow climate change and thus lessen concern about food and water. Beijing has invested in solar, wind, fission, and fusion energy, and has committed itself to reaching voluntary targets for greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Because it imports rather than exports natural gas and oil, China has no powerful domestic constituencies that oppose alternative forms of energy. China is a contributor to climate change and might find itself involved in Africa and Russia as climate change continues. At the same time, Chinese engineers are also developing and implementing technical solutions that slow climate change, thereby reducing the risk of these and other possible future conflicts.
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Russian governments of the early twenty-first century, by contrast, have based their budgets and staked their popular support on the export of hydrocarbons to Europe and China. Because Russian governments seek to maintain demand for natural gas and oil in these great neighboring markets, they have indirectly committed themselves to a future of carbon pollution and climate change. Perhaps relatedly, the sense of coming catastrophe has been more evident in Russian culture than in China or in the West. Gifted Russian thinkers, novelists, artists, and filmmakers have presented diverse and arresting images of human decadence and downfall. Like a century ago, when Russia was riven by revolution and counterrevolution, the Russian political class surpasses any of its neighbors in formulating and transmitting catastrophist ideology.
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 the Russian war against Ukraine that this rhetoric was meant to justify, the first gains were the natural gas fields in the Black Sea near the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia invaded and annexed in 2014. The fertile soil of mainland Ukraine, its black earth, makes it a very important exporter of food, which Russia is not.
President Vladimir Putin of Russia developed a foreign policy doctrine of ethnic war. This argument from language to invasion, whether pressed in Czechoslovakia by Hitler or in Ukraine by Putin, undoes the logics of sovereignty and rights and prepares the ground for the destruction of states. It transforms recognized polities into targets of willful aggression, and individuals into ethnic objects whose putative interests are determined from abroad. Putin also placed himself at the head of populist, fascist, and neo-Nazi forces in Europe. While supporting politicians who blame global Jews for planetary problems and applying techniques of state destruction, Moscow generated a new global scapegoat—the homosexuals. The new Russian idea of a “gay lobby” responsible for the decadence of the world makes no more sense than the old Nazi idea of a “Jewish lobby” responsible for the same, but such an ideology is now at large in the world.
As Russia demonstrated, the Second World War can shift quickly from being a cautionary tale to an instructive precedent. In 1939, Stalin made an alliance with Hitler, that is, with the European Far Right of the time, on the logic that doing so would cause Europe to destroy itself. Stalin imagined that Germany and its western neighbors would then clash and that their power would dissolve. Putin seems to have made a similar calculation. Just as the purpose of alliance with Hitler in 1939 was supposed to turn the most radical force in Europe against Europe itself, so Russian support of the European Far Right is meant to disrupt and disintegrate the most peaceful and prosperous order of the early twenty-first century—the European Union. In 2014 and 2015, Putin rehabilitated the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that began the Second World War and created some of the preconditions for the Holocaust.
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Africa demonstrates the risks of local shortages, China suggests the problems of global power and national anxiety, and Russia shows how practices of the 1930s can come to seem like positive examples. Thanks in large measure to Moscow, state destruction and the construction of planetary enemies have returned to vogue in Europe. In the Middle East, states tend to be weak, and Islamic fundamentalists have long presented Jews, Americans, and Europeans as planetary enemies. The Russian anti-gay campaign, which associates European and American power with the hidden hand of the gay international, was targeted to the Muslim world as well as to domestic constituencies.
These forms of counterglobal thinking increase the possibility that particular groups can be blamed for planetary phenomena. In large parts of the world, hundreds of millions of Muslims are likely to face, as a result of climate change, a collapse of possibilities for life that will have no local explanation. Places that contribute almost nothing to climate change are battered by its consequences. Bangladesh, a Muslim country with half the population of the United States, is wracked by storms and floods exacerbated by the rising seas. In Libya, by contrast, the annual drought is expected to lengthen from one hundred to two hundred days. The people of Egypt depend upon the Nile, which runs four thousand miles through desert before it reaches Cairo. Forces beyond the control of Egyptians have made ours a planet where the Nile can run dry.
It is already the case that North African Muslims bring antisemitic beliefs to Europe. But what if such Muslims in North Africa and the Middle East actually blamed Jews for environmental disasters? In Exodus 4:9, a text shared by Muslim, Jewish, and Christian traditions, God warns that “the water which thou takest out of the river shall become blood upon the dry land.” The Jews who live in the Middle East, citizens of Israel, might be at risk in a time of water shortages. One element of the struggle for control of the West Bank and the Golan Heights is concern about water supplies. Israelis drink from aquifers under the occupied territories. Although Israel has the military and technological capacity to protect its population from the consequences of climate change, the continuing desertification of the Middle East might generate both regional conflict and the demand for scapegoats. In a Middle Eastern war for resources, Muslims might blame Jews for both local problems and the general ecological crisis; that was, after all, Hitler’s approach. Naturally, Israelis could also blame Muslims and seek to draw their American allies into a larger conflict.
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Zionists of all orientations were correct to believe that statehood was crucial to future national existence. The destruction of European states in the 1930s was a precondition to all of the major Nazi crimes, including the Holocaust itself. Most Zionists of the Left and Center believed that a state of Israel could be established by some arrangement of international law. This proved to be correct, but only after the perpetration of the Holocaust. The Revisionist Zionists of the Far Right were correct in fearing an imminent catastrophe in the 1930s and reasoned that covert cooperation with the Polish state was therefore justified.
Since 1977, when Menachem Begin came to power in Israel, national terrorism has moved closer to the center of Israeli national myth. What the glorious retellings of the history of Irgun and Lehi often omit is the Polish connection. The careers of Irgun’s commander Begin and Lehi’s leaders Avraham Stern and Yitzhak Shamir are inconceivable without their Polish background and backers. After Begin, Shamir would serve as prime minister from 1983 to 1984 and then again from 1986 to 1992. Other comrades in arms and Polish clients resurfaced in positions of authority. Eliahu Meridor, once trained in the tactics of terrorism by the Poles, would be elected to the Israeli parliament three times. Lankin, also trained by the Poles, would be Israel’s ambassador in South Africa. Their political tradition, Likud, was the extension of the Revisionist Zionism that had flourished under the protection of the Polish state in the second half of the 1930s. The Polish connection might seem to have been broken with the rise of Benjamin Netanyahu, the first Israeli prime minister born in Israel and the first from Likud who is not a native speaker of Polish. Netanyahu speaks American English instead, in line with his own education and with Israel’s present geopolitical affiliation. Yet even here the link to Polish policy is strong: During the high tide of cooperation with Poland, Netanyahu’s father was the private secretary to Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism.
The ambivalence of interwar Polish support for Revisionist Zionists suggests a similar tension within American support for an Israel governed by their successors. In the late 1930s, Polish leaders and much of the Polish population were pro-Zionist because they wanted Jews to leave Poland during an economic crisis. Some Americans of the early twenty-first century are pro-Israel because they want Jews in the Holy Land during the coming apocalypse. The United States of today resembles Poland in the 1930s in the sense that more Christians are active supporters of the Zionist idea than are Jews. Some of Israel’s American political allies—evangelical Christians—tend to deny the reality of climate change while supporting hydrocarbon policies that accelerate it. Among these American evangelicals are millions of dispensationalists, who support Israel because they believe that disasters there herald the second coming of Jesus Christ. In the 1940s, dispensationalists maintained that the Holocaust was the work of God because it forced Jews to reconsider their errors and move to the Promised Land. Although such a sharp substitution of politics by apocalypse is a minority view, a displacement of the political history of the State of Israel within a story of the end times is common in American society.
As prime minister of Israel, Begin sought and found alliances with American evangelicals beginning in 1977, about forty years after he had made contact with Polish officials. In the 1930s, Revisionists such as Begin, Stern, and Shamir made the case, entirely correctly, that Jews needed state protection. Their Polish patrons supported the ideas of a state of Israel in an attempt to defuse economic crisis and mass antisemitism. The irony that confronts their successors, the second generation of Revisionist Zionists who now rule Israel, is perhaps more vexing. Some of their American patrons support policies that could hasten a catastrophe that would endanger the State of Israel, whose destruction they see as a stage in the redemption of the world. Zionists were correct that statehood protects Jews, but their allies can be people who see Israel as a means to some other end.
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Americans, when they think about the Holocaust at all, take for granted that they could never commit such a crime. The U.S. Army, after all, was on the right side of the Second World War. The historical reality is somewhat more complicated. Franklin D. Roosevelt sent racially segregated armed forces to liberate Europe. Antisemitism was prominent in the United States at the time. The Holocaust was largely over by the time American soldiers landed in Normandy. Although they liberated some concentration camps, American troops reached none of the major killing sites of the Holocaust and saw none of the hundreds of death pits of the East. The American trial of guards at the Mauthausen concentration camp, like the British trial at Bergen-Belsen, reattributed prewar citizenship to the Jewish victims. This helped later generations to overlook the basic fact that denial of citizenship, usually by the destruction of states, was what permitted the mass murder of Jews.
A misunderstanding about the relationship between state authority and mass killing underlay an American myth of the Holocaust that prevailed in the early twenty-first century: that the United States was a country that intentionally rescued people from the genocides caused by overweening states. Following this reasoning, the destruction of a state could be associated with rescue rather than risk. To be sure, the United States contributed to the destruction of regimes in Germany and Japan in 1945. But it also undertook to rebuild state structures. 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. In fact, the succession of events precipitated by the illegal American invasion of a sovereign state confirmed one of the unlearned lessons of the history of the Second World War.
Mass killings generally take place during civil wars or regime changes. It was the deliberate policy of Nazi Germany to artificially create conditions of state destruction and then steer the consequences towards Jews. Destroying states without such malign intentions produces more conventional disasters. The invasion of Iraq killed at least as many people as did the prior Iraqi regime. It exposed the members of the Iraqi ruling party to religious cleansing and prepared the way for chaos throughout the country. The American invaders eventually sided with the political clan they had initially defeated, so desperate were they to restore order. This permitted a troop withdrawal, which was then followed by Islamist uprisings. The destruction of the Iraqi state in 2003 and the political disturbances brought by the hot summer of 2010 created the space for the terrorists of the Islamic State in 2014.
A common American error is to believe that freedom is the absence of state authority. The genealogy of this confusion leads us back to the Germany and the Austria of the 1930s.
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The dominant stereotype of Nazi Germany is of an all-powerful state that catalogued, repressed, and then exterminated an entire class of its own citizens. This was not how the Nazis achieved the Holocaust, nor how they even thought about it. The enormous majority of the victims of the Holocaust were not German citizens; Jews who were German citizens were much more likely to survive than Jews who were citizens of states that the Germans destroyed. The Nazis knew that they had to go abroad and lay waste to neighboring societies before they could hope to bring their revolution to their own. Had Hitler been assassinated in 1939, as he almost was, Nazi Germany would likely be remembered as one fascist state among others. Not only the Holocaust, but all major German crimes took place in areas where state institutions had been destroyed, dismantled, or seriously compromised. The German murder of five and a half million Jews, more than three million Soviet prisoners of war, and about a million civilians in so-called anti-partisan operations all took place in stateless zones.
Since the Holocaust is an axial event of modern history, its misunderstanding turns our minds in the wrong direction. When the Holocaust is blamed on the modern state, the weakening of state authority appears salutary. On the political Right, the erosion of state power by international capitalism seems natural; on the political Left, rudderless revolutions portray themselves as virtuous. In the twenty-first century, anarchical protest movements join in a friendly tussle with global oligarchy, in which neither side can be hurt since both see the real enemy as the state. Both the Left and the Right tend to fear order rather than its destruction or absence. The common ideological reflex has been postmodernity: a preference for the small over the large, the fragment over the structure, the glimpse over the view, the feeling over the fact. On both the Left and the Right, postmodern explanations of the Holocaust tend to follow German and Austrian traditions of the 1930s. As a result, they generate errors that can make future crimes more rather than less likely.
On the Left, the dominant current of interpretation of the Holocaust can be called the Frankfurt School. The members of the group known by this name, largely German Jews who immigrated to the United States, portrayed the Nazi state as an expression of overgrown modernity. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in their influential Dialectic of Enlightenment, began (as did Hitler) from the premise that “bourgeois civilization” was about to collapse. They reduced scientific method to practical mastery, failing (as did Hitler) to grasp the reflective and unpredictable character of scientific investigation. Whereas Hitler presented the Jews as the creators of bogus universalisms that served as façades for Jewish mastery, Adorno and Horkheimer opposed all universalisms as façades for mastery in general. The murder of Jews, they claimed, was just one instance of the general intolerance for variety that was inherent in attempts to inform politics with reason. It is hard to overstate the depth and significance of this error. Hitler was not a supporter of the Enlightenment but its enemy. He did not champion science but conflated nature with politics.
On the Right, the dominant explanation of the Holocaust can be called the Vienna School. Followers of the Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek claim that the overweening welfare state led to National Socialism, and thus prescribe deregulation and privatization as the cure for political evil. This narrative, though convenient, is historically indefensible. There has never been a democratic state that built a social welfare system and then succumbed to fascism (or communism) as a result. What happened in central Europe was rather the opposite. Hitler came to power during a Great Depression which had spread around the world precisely because governments did not yet know how to intervene in the business cycle. Hayek’s homeland Austria practiced capitalism according to the free-market orthodoxies of the time, with the consequence that the downturn was awful and seemingly endless. The oppression of Austrian Jews began not as the state grew, but as it collapsed in 1938.
The ideal capitalism envisioned by advocates of the free market depends upon social virtues and wise policies that it does not itself generate. In the particular form of capitalism generated by German policy and experienced by Jews and their rescuers during the Holocaust, every exchange depended upon personal trust, in the sense that the other party in the arrangement could betray and kill. In an extreme version of market utopianism, which Hayek himself opposed, the 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. For Hitler, those people were Jews and those institutions were states.
As all economists know, markets do not function perfectly at either the macro or the micro level. At the macro level, unregulated capitalism is subject to the extremes of the business cycle. In theory, markets always recover from depression; in practice, the human suffering induced by economic collapse can have profound political consequences, including the end of capitalism itself, before any recovery takes place. At the micro level, firms in theory provide goods that are desired and affordable. In practice, companies seeking profits can generate external costs that they do not themselves remediate. The classical example of such an externality is pollution, which costs its producers nothing but harms other people.
A government can assign a cost to pollution, which internalizes the externality and thus reduces the undesired consequence. It would be simple to internalize the costs of the carbon pollution that causes climate change. It requires a dogma to oppose such an operation, which depends upon markets and in the long run will preserve them, as anticapitalist. On the American secular right, some supporters of the unrestrained free market have found that dogma: the claim that science is nothing more than politics. Since the science of climate change is clear, some American conservatives and libertarians deny the validity of science itself by presenting its findings as a cover for conniving politicians. This is a merger of science and politics—quite possibly a dangerous one.
Though no American would deny that tanks work in the desert, some Americans do deny that deserts are growing larger. Though no American would deny ballistics, some Americans do deny climate science. Hitler denied that science could solve the basic problem of nutrition, but assumed that technology could win territory. It seemed to follow that waiting for research was pointless and that immediate military action was necessary. In the case of climate change, the denial of science likewise legitimates military action rather than investment in technology. If people do not take responsibility for the climate themselves, they will shift responsibility for the associated calamities to other people. Insofar as climate denial hinders technical progress, it might hasten real disasters, which in their turn can make catastrophic thinking still more credible. A vicious circle can begin in which politics collapses into ecological panic.
The popular notion that free markets are natural is also a merger of science and politics. The market is not nature; it depends upon nature. The climate is not a commodity that can be traded but rather a precondition to economic activity as such. The claim of a “right” to destroy the world in the name of profits for a few people reveals an important conceptual problem. Rights mean restraint. Each person is an end in himself or herself; the significance of a person is not exhausted by what someone else wants from him or her. Individuals have the right not to be defined as parts of a planetary conspiracy or a doomed race. They have the right not to have their homelands defined as habitat. They have the right not to have their polities destroyed.
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. It is tempting but dangerous to gleefully fragment the state from the Right or knowingly gaze at the shards from the Left. Political thought is neither destruction nor critique, but rather the historically informed imagination of plural structures—a labor of the present that can preserve life and decency in the future. One plurality is between politics and science. A recognition of their distinct purposes makes possible thinking about rights and states; their conflation is a step toward a total ideology such as National Socialism. Another plurality is between order and freedom: each depends upon the other, although each is different from the other. The claim that order is freedom or that freedom is order ends in tyranny. The claim that freedom is the lack of order must end in anarchy—which is nothing more than tyranny of a special kind. The point of politics is to keep multiple and irreducible goods in play, rather than yielding to some dream, Nazi or otherwise, of totality.
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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.
A final plurality thus has to do with time. When we lack a sense of past and future, the present feels like a shaky platform, an uncertain basis for action. The defense of states and rights is impossible to undertake if no one learns from the past or believes in the future. Awareness of history permits recognition of ideological traps and generates skepticism about demands for immediate action because everything has suddenly changed. Confidence in the future can make the world seem like something more than, in Hitler’s words, “the surface area of a precisely measured space.” Time, the fourth dimension, can make the three dimensions of space seem less claustrophobic. Confidence in duration is the antidote to panic and the tonic of demagogy. A sense of the future has to be created in the present from what we know of the past, the fourth dimension built out from the three of daily life.
In the case of climate change, we know what the state can do to tame panic and befriend time. We know that it is easier and less costly to draw nourishment from plants than animals. We know that improvements in agricultural productivity continue and that the desalination of seawater is possible. We know that efficiency of energy use is the simplest way to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. We know that governments can assign prices to carbon pollution and can pledge reductions of future emissions to one another and review one another’s pledges. We also know that governments can stimulate the development of appropriate energy technologies. Solar and wind energy are ever cheaper. Fusion, advanced fission, tidal stream power, and non-crop-based biofuels offer real hope for a new energy economy. In the long run, we will need techniques to capture and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. All of this is not only thinkable but attainable.
States should invest in science so that the future can be calmly contemplated. The study of the past suggests why this would be a wise course. Time supports thought, thought supports time; structure supports plurality, and plurality, structure. This line of reasoning is less glamorous than waiting for general disaster and dreaming of personal redemption. Effective prevention of mass killings is incremental and its heroes are invisible. No conception of a durable state can compete with visions of totality. No green politics will ever be as exciting as red blood on black earth. But opposing evil requires inspiration by what is sound rather than by what is resonant. The pluralities of nature and politics, order and freedom, past and future, are not as intoxicating as the totalitarian utopias of the last century. Every unity is beautiful as image but circular as logic and tyrannical as politics. The answer to those who seek totality is not anarchy, which is not totality’s enemy but its handmaiden. The answer is thoughtful, plural institutions: an unending labor of differentiated creation. This is a matter of imagination, maturity, and survival.
We share Hitler’s planet and several of his preoccupations; we have changed less than we think. We like our living space, we fantasize about destroying governments, we denigrate science, we dream of catastrophe. If we think that we are victims of some planetary conspiracy, we edge towards Hitler. 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.
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Understanding the Holocaust is our chance, perhaps our last one, to preserve humanity. That is not enough for its victims. No accumulation of good, no matter how vast, undoes an evil; no rescue of the future, no matter how successful, undoes a murder in the past. Perhaps it is true that to save one life is to save the world. But the converse is not true: saving the world does not restore a single lost life.
The family tree of that boy in Vienna, like that of all of the Jewish children born and unborn, has been sheared at the roots: “I the root was once the flower under these dim tons my bower comes the shearing of the thread / death saw wailing overhead.” The evil that was done to the Jews—to each Jewish child, woman, and man—cannot be undone. Yet it can be recorded, and it can be understood. Indeed, it must be understood so that its like can be prevented in the future.
That must be enough for us and for those who, let us hope, shall follow.