Group items tagged

Without the counterforces that once balanced Europe’s unstable societies — such as the strong left-wing parties and unions that were defeated in the 1970s and ’80s — European rulers lost discipline. Under their watch, inequality rose, economies malfunctioned, and public services began to wither. In this parlous setting, the far right gradually managed to position itself as the only credible challenger to the system. After gathering support on the sidelines, its time has come.

Europe’s far-right drift inevitably invites historical comparisons. A prominent one has been that the continent is experiencing a return to the 1930s, a high tide for extremist forces.

Hitler and Mussolini prevailed after labor movements tried to instigate revolutions. A muscular proletariat is conspicuously absent from the European scene today, fatally weakened by deindustrialization and loose labor markets.

In contrast to the 1930s, when fascist street violence flourished, the contemporary far right thrives on demobilization. Ms. Meloni’s party won a majority of votes in an election in which nearly four out of 10 Italians stayed home, with turnout down by almost 10 percent from the country’s previous vote.

In France, Ms. Le Pen’s National Rally has long received its best tallies in parts of the country that have the highest voter abstention rates.

Hitler and Mussolini promised their national elites the equivalents of the colonial empires that their French and British competitors had long ago acquired. Today’s far right has an alternative worldview. Rather than expand outward, their main desire is to shield Europe from the rest of the world

While Hitler tried to break an Anglo-American order and made a bid for global domination, Europe’s new authoritarians are happy to occupy a niche within the existing power structure. The goal is adaptation to decline, not its reversal.

Introduction: Our Virtue

“There is one thing that a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative…. Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating.” p. 25

Democratic education…wants and needs to produce men and women [who are] supportive of a democratic regime.” p. 26

The historical assumption of the human sciences was (and remains) that an objective human nature exists and can be discovered—if not by reason itself, then at least by empirical science guided by reason. Science was a method to allow us to rise beyond the prejudices of our culture in order to discover the truths of human nature. It was a mechanism for opening our minds, an instrument of openness. p. 37-38

Liberalism has always tended towards increased freedom—i.e., decreased regulation. But “it was possible to expand the space exempt from legitimate social and political regulation only by contracting the claims to moral and political knowledge…. It begins to appear that full freedom can be attained only when there is no such knowledge at all…[and] of course the result is that…the argument justifying freedom disappears, and…all beliefs begin to have an attenuated character.” p. 28

Modern education is concerned mainly with correcting ethnocentrism—showing students that their preferences are merely accidents of their culture and that no single culture is better than any other. The roots of this movement are found in the problems (racism, mistreatment) that arose due to the multicultural nature of American life. p. 29-30

The Founders envisioned a society where individuals were bound together by their belief in and adherence to the rights of the Constitution. Minority factions were seen as a bad thing, detracting from social cohesiveness. p. 31

However, the provision of equal rights did not guarantee equal treatment, and minority groups suffered. This caused them to retreat into their minority identities and oppose the majority—indeed, “much of the intellectual machinery of twentieth-century American political thought and social science was constructed for the purpose of making an assault on [the] majority…. The very idea of a majority—now understood to be selfish interest—is done away with in order to protect the minorities.” p. 32-35

However, its ideas about what this means have changed over time, starting with a faith in the human rights of the U.S. Constitution, but ultimately changing to (now) mean “openness,” i.e., relativism. p. 26-27

“Historicism and cultural relativism actually are a means to avoid testing our own prejudices and asking, for example, whether men are really equal or whether that opinion is a democratic prejudice.” p. 40

Today, “the human sciences want to make us culture-beings with the instruments [science and reason] that were invented to liberate us from culture…: cultural relativism, historicism, the fact-value distinction—are the suicide of science. Culture, hence closedness, reigns supreme. Openness to closedness is what we teach.” p. 38-39

Yet the dogmatic modern assumption is that human nature does not exist, that our ways of being are culturally determined, that our minds are inherently constrained—“closed”—by cultural influences. p. 38

“There are two types of openness, the openness of indifference…and the openness that invites us to the quest for knowledge and certitude.” p. 41

The openness of indifference advocates the removal of all requirements in education—why should students learn languages or philosophy? But the reality is that, “to be open to knowing, there are certain types of things one must know which most people don’t want to bother to learn and which appear boring and irrelevant…true openness means closedness to all the charms that make us comfortable with the present.” p. 41

The Clean Slate

On the surface, Americans seems to lack a true culture or set of traditions. But most of them grew up with a shared knowledge of the Bible and the Declaration of Independence, and “contrary to much contemporary wisdom, the United States has one of the longest uninterrupted political [and intellectual] traditions of any nation in the world.” And this tradition is not confused or counterbalanced by a history of monarchy or aristocracy. p. 52-55

So we have a culture in which to root education, but we have begun to undermine it. The idealism of the American founding has been explained away as mythical, selfishly-motivated, and racist. And so our culture has been devalued. p. 55-56

Religion, too, has been explained away, but this has left us without a standpoint from which to understand our experience as humans. Parents “have nothing to give their children in the way of a vision of the world.” p. 56-57

“As it now stands, students have powerful images of what the perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one. They do not even imagine that there is such a thing.” p. 67

Books

“I have begun to wonder whether the experience of the greatest texts from early childhood is not a prerequisite for a concern throughout life for them and for lesser but important literature. The soul’s longing…may well require encouragement at the outset.” p. 62

Literature is critical because it presents to young people the range of possibilities of human types—both good and bad. p. 62-64

But students are less and less exposed to literature, and as a result, “they have only pop psychology to tell them what people are like, and the range of their motives…. [Therefore,] people become more alike, for want of knowing they can be otherwise. What poor substitutes for real diversity are the wild rainbows of dyed hair and other external differences that tell the observer nothing about what is inside.” p. 64

Without exposure to literature, students usually resort to the movies. But movies do not provide the “distance from the contemporary” that students need, and so this only reinforces the belief that the here and now is all there is. p. 64

The loss of literature has also meant the loss of heroes. In a “perversion of the democratic principle,” this lack is almost admired, since being oneself is the supposed goal. But whether or not it is seen as desirable, students invariably seek role models. And without literature, they only have those around them (and in the media) to emulate. p. 66-67

“Nobody believes that the old books do, or even could, contain the truth…. Tradition has become superfluous.” p. 58

We are left with a culture filled with “the intense, changing, crude and immediate, which Tocqueville warned us would be the character of democratic art…. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy. This description may seem exaggerated, but only because some would prefer to regard it as such.” p. 74-75

Relationships

“In short, after the war, while America was sending out its blue jeans to unite the young of all nations, a concrete form of democratic universalism that has had liberalizing effects on many enslaved nations, it was importing a clothing of German fabrication for its souls, which clashed with all that and cast doubt on the Americanization of the world on which we had embarked, thinking it was good and in conformity with the rights of man

“This indeterminate or open-ended future and the lack of a binding past mean that the souls of young people are in a condition like that of the first men in the state of nature—spiritually unclad, unconnected, isolated, with no inherited or unconditional connection with anything or anyone…. Why are we surprised that such unfurnished persons should be preoccupied principally with themselves?” p. 87-88

“The one eccentric element in this portrait, the one failure…is the relation between blacks and whites.” Although black students are present on campuses, they “have, by and large, proved indigestible.” p. 91

the Black Power movement arrived and the universities conceded to identity politics, which took the form of Black-themed courses, quotas, and an unwillingness to fail black students. p. 94-95

“The black student who wants to be just a student and to avoid allegiance to the black group has to pay a terrific price, because he is judged negatively by his black peers and because his behavior is atypical in the eyes of whites. White students have silently and unconsciously adjusted to a group presence of blacks, and they must readjust for a black who does not define himself by the group.” Affirmative action cements this dynamic. p. 95-96

The restructuring of the family requires that men subdue their masculine character. “And it is indeed possible to soften men. But to make them ‘care’ is another thing, and the project must inevitably fail…. The old moral order, however imperfect it may have been, at least moved towards the virtues by way of the passions. If men were self-concerned, that order tried to expand the scope of self-concern to include others [i.e., his wife and children], rather than commanding men to cease being concerned with themselves.” p. 129

“I am not arguing here that the old family arrangements were good or that we should go back to them. I am only insisting that we not cloud our vision to such an extent that we believe that there are viable substitutes for them just because we want or need them.” p. 130

“All of our reforms have helped strip the teeth of our gears, which can therefore no longer mesh. They spin idly, side by side, unable to set the social machine in motion.” p. 131

Modern students are lacking the longing that is critical for a full enjoyment of life. They are complacent. And the universities do not see themselves as providing for such a longing. p. 134-136

The German Connection

Value relativism is the modern replacement for traditional morality, and “constitutes a change in our view of things moral and political as great as the one that took place when Christianity replaced Greek and Roman paganism.” p. 141

Value relativism has sunk so far into the American consciousness that its vocabulary has become colloquial: we talk about ‘charisma,’ ‘life-style,’ ‘commitment,’ ‘identity,’ etc. “Although they, and the things to which they refer, would have been incomprehensible to our fathers, not to speak of our Founding Fathers.” p. 147

Students today are largely apathetic about any concerns outside of themselves. There isn’t any malice in this self-centeredness; but it has become so entrenched in American culture that it isn’t even recognized as unusual. p. 82-86

“We chose [to import] a system of thought that, like some wines, does not travel; we chose a way of looking at things that could never be ours and had its starting point dislike of us and our goals.” p. 153

The question isn’t even asked whether the German doctrine of value-creation is contrary to democratic and egalitarian ideals; but it certainly seems to leave room for their opposites and perhaps promote them—i.e., value relativism seems to allow for fascism. p. 154

The Self

Although a precise definition remains elusive, “the self is the modern substitute for the soul.” p. 173

Man used to strive for fulfillment by taming his bodily desires in order to live virtuously. But this changed after Machiavelli (and Hobbes after him) suggested that instead we ignore virtue and follow our desires, which find their root in the state of nature. p. 174-175

Following their advice, “our desire becomes a kind of oracle we consult; it is the last word, while in the past it was the questionable and dangerous part of us.” p. 175

Locke then replaced the virtuous man with the rationally selfish one. “Beneath his selfishness, of course, lies an expectation that it conduces more to the good of others than does moralism.” p. 175-176

“All higher purposiveness in nature, which might have been consulted by men’s reason and used to limit human passion, has disappeared.” p. 176

That reason “is unable to rule in culture or in soul…constitutes a crisis of the West…[whose] regimes are founded on reason.” Previous regimes relied on religion, but Enlightenment undermined religion. p. 196

Psychology came to us “in order to treat the parts of man which had been so long neglected by liberal society…. Modern psychology has this in common with what was always a popular opinion, fathered by Machiavelli—that selfishness is somehow good. Man is self, and the self must be selfish. What is new is that we are told to look more deeply into the self, that we assumed too easily that we know it and have access to it.” p. 178

Prior to this, it was only God who was dignified—not man. And God was dignified in his freedom, his ability to create. If man was to be elevated, he, too, must be free; he, too, must be able to create. p. 180

And so, following Rousseau and our dissatisfaction with the Enlightenment, we have elevated creativity above reason as the ultimate virtue, and the artist replaced the philosopher and scientist at the admired human type. p. 181-182

Yet those who praise creativity don’t realize why. They admire it without seeing that it is the result of Romantic thought absorbed into democratic public opinion. And it has influenced the whole political spectrum, from Left to Right. p. 181-182

The Germans (Nietzsche and Weber) recognized as early as 1919 that the scientific spirit was dead, that reason cannot establish values. But Americans (naïvely, and largely unknowingly) still held onto the rationalist dream, written as they were into our political foundations. p. 194-195

When those ideas came to the U.S. (via Weber), “a very dark view of the future was superimposed on our incorrigible optimism. We are children playing with adult toys.” p. 195

“The psychology of the self has succeeded so well that it is now the instinct of most of us to turn for a cure for our ills back within ourselves rather than to the nature of things.” p. 179

Rousseau and others recognized this. “The very idea of culture was a way of preserving something like religion without talking about it.” But Nietzsche saw this was impossible. p. 196-197

We are left with no religion, but we still have religious impulses. p. 197

“The disenchantment of God and nature necessitated a new description of good and evil. To adapt a formula of Plato about the gods, we do not love a thing because it is good, it is good because we love it. It [became] our decision to esteem that makes something estimable.” p. 197

“Since values are not rational…they must be imposed.” Will, or commitment, is the primary virtue; it is the equivalent of (what used to be) faith. “Nietzsche was not a fascist; but this project inspired fascist rhetoric, which looked to the revitalization of old cultures or the foundation of new ones, as opposed to the rational, rootless cosmopolitanism of the revolutions of the Left.” p. 201-202

Nietzsche was a cultural relativist. This meant he anticipated war, because wars are inevitable when values are imposed and unrooted in truth or anything objective. p. 202

“Just over the horizon, when Weber wrote, lay Hitler…. He was the mad, horrible parody of the charismatic leader—the demagogue—hoped for by Weber.” Weber was not looking for something so extreme, but “when one ventures out into the vast spaces opened up by Nietzsche, it is hard to set limits.” p. 213-214

“Hitler did not cause a rethinking of the politics here or in Europe. All to the contrary—it was while we were fighting him that the thought that had preceded him in Europe conquered here.” And it remains dominant. p. 214

The language of values implies that the religious is the source of everything political, social, and personal. It has been facilitated by a softening and blurring of the idea of religion and “the sacred,” which are no longer seen as dangerous.

“As an image of our current intellectual condition, I keep being reminded of the newsreel pictures of Frenchmen splashing happily in the water at the seashore, enjoying the paid annual vacations legislated by Leon Blum’s Popular Front government. It was 1936, the same year Hitler was permitted to occupy the Rhineland. All our big causes amount to that kind of vacation.” p. 239

This is our educational crisis and opportunity. Western rationalism has culminated in a rejection of reason. Is this result necessary?” p. 240

He describes 9/11 as “a turning point for me.” He was by then hosting a show in New York, and remembers walking from Ground Zero to his studio and reading on air a 19th-century hymn written by a Mormon pioneer fleeing Missouri on his way to Utah. Beck says he felt a special calling at that moment. “If you have a position on the gate and you don’t warn the people of what you see,” he remembers thinking, “you’re to blame.”

In Doctrine and Covenants, a book of Mormon scripture, God says, “I have established the Constitution of this land by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose.” According to polling by David Campbell, a Notre Dame political scientist, 94 percent of American Mormons believe that the “Constitution and the Bill of Rights are divinely inspired.”

Mormons don’t just consider the Constitution sacred. They believe that its violation has allowed their persecution.

Today, many Mormons see defending the Constitution the way many Jews see opposing genocide: as a way of honoring their ancestors and affirming their identity.

Mormons tend not to accentuate these views publicly. Mormon culture, he told me, emphasizes a “moderate way of speaking.” Think Mitt Romney

The same doomsday sensibility that helps him appreciate the menace posed by Trump led him to massively exaggerate the menace posed by Obama—and thus to breed the hateful paranoia on which Trump now feeds. Beck, in fact, pioneered some of Trump’s most disturbing themes

during the first 14 months of the Obama administration, according to Dana Milbank’s book Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America, Beck and guests on his Fox News show invoked “fascism,” “Nazis,” “Hitler,” “the Holocaust” and “Joseph Goebbels” 487 times. For good measure, Beck in 2007 said that Hillary Clinton sounds like “the stereotypical bitch.”

Beck says he’s sorry for all that. “I played a role, unfortunately,” he told Megyn Kelly during a 2014 interview on Fox News, “in helping tear the country apart.” He told me that now that America has “hit the iceberg,” he wants to help it heal

Although still generally conservative, Beck now insists that America’s real moral divide isn’t between left and right. He recently angered some conservatives by sending aid to undocumented children detained at the Mexican border. In a New York Times op-ed this fall, he called on conservatives to show “empathy” for Black Lives Matter activists. He says Americans must stop thinking in terms of ideological sides

When Barack Obama rose to the presidency after insisting, “There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America,” Glenn Beck called him a racist. Now that Donald Trump is president, Beck wants to bind the country’s racial and ideological wounds. He really does.

But for years and years, he called sheep wolves. Now that the wolf is here, it may be too late

Hitler wasn’t Hitler—until he was. At each step of the way, the shock was tempered by acceptance. It depended on conservatives pretending he wasn’t so bad, compared with the Communists, while at the same time the militant left decided that their real enemies were the moderate leftists, who were really indistinguishable from the Nazis.

The American Republic stands threatened by the first overtly anti-democratic leader of a large party in its modern history—an authoritarian with no grasp of history, no impulse control, and no apparent barriers on his will to power.

The national psyche never gets over learning that its institutions are that fragile and their ability to resist a dictator that weak.

If Trump came to power, there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over. This is not a hyperbolic prediction; it is not a hysterical prediction; it is simply a candid reading of what history tells us happens in countries with leaders like Trump.

Countries don’t really recover from being taken over by unstable authoritarian nationalists of any political bent, left or right—not by Peróns or Castros or Putins or Francos or Lenins

The nation may survive, but the wound to hope and order will never fully heal. Ask Argentinians or Chileans or Venezuelans or Russians or Italians—or Germans.

The right thing to do, for everyone who believes in liberal democracy, is to gather around and work to defeat him on Election Day. Instead, we seem to be either engaged in parochial feuding or caught by habits of tribal hatred so ingrained that they have become impossible to escape even at moments of maximum danger.

under any label Trump is a declared enemy of the liberal constitutional order of the United States—the order that has made it, in fact, the great and plural country that it already is.

He announces his enmity to America by word and action every day. It is articulated in his insistence on the rightness of torture and the acceptable murder of noncombatants. It is self-evident in the threats he makes daily to destroy his political enemies, made only worse by the frivolity and transience of the tone of those threats. He makes his enmity to American values clear when he suggests that the Presidency holds absolute power, through which he will be able to end opposition—whether by questioning the ownership of newspapers or talking about changing libel laws or threatening to take away F.C.C. licenses

To say “Well, he would not really have the power to accomplish that” is to misunderstand the nature of thin-skinned authoritarians in power. They do not arrive in office and discover, as constitutionalists do, that their capabilities are more limited than they imagined. They arrive, and then make their power as large as they can.

Ludwig Spaenle, culture minister in Bavaria, said he was startled by a find of “singular significance for German history.” Historians, political experts and the White Rose Foundation, named after the student resistance, should decide what to do with it, Mr. Spaenle said.

Instead, the guillotine — of a type used in Germany in the 19th century and revived for broader use under the Nazis — was taken from the Munich jail where the Scholls and hundreds of others were executed and taken first to nearby Straubing, she said

How the “historically significant” instrument is now treated, and whether it can be exhibited at all to the public, is a matter “for the utmost sensitivity and reverence,” she added.

Mr. Newborn, the American expert on White Rose, called the find “really remarkable” and of great significance in modern Germany, where the story of the Scholls is widely known and used to reinforce the message that Nazi crimes should never be repeated and that civil courage and resistance are important.

The very reasons that we know something about Auschwitz warp our understanding of the Holocaust: we know about Auschwitz because there were survivors, and there were survivors because Auschwitz was a labor camp as well as a death factory. These survivors were largely West European Jews, because Auschwitz is where West European Jews were usually sent. After World War II, West European Jewish survivors were free to write and publish as they liked, whereas East European Jewish survivors, if caught behind the iron curtain, could not. In the West, memoirs of the Holocaust could (although very slowly) enter into historical writing and public consciousness.

By 1943 and 1944, when most of the killing of West European Jews took place, the Holocaust was in considerable measure complete. Two thirds of the Jews who would be killed during the war were already dead by the end of 1942. The main victims, the Polish and Soviet Jews, had been killed by bullets fired over death pits or by carbon monoxide from internal combustion engines pumped into gas chambers at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor in occupied Poland.

The Germans killed somewhat more than ten million civilians in the major mass killing actions, about half of them Jews, about half of them non-Jews. The Jews and the non-Jews mostly came from the same part of Europe. The project to kill all Jews was substantially realized; the project to destroy Slavic populations was only very partially implemented.

In shorthand, then, the Holocaust was, in order: Operation Reinhardt, Shoah by bullets, Auschwitz; or Poland, the Soviet Union, the rest. Of the 5.7 million or so Jews killed, roughly 3 million were pre-war Polish citizens, and another 1 million or so pre-war Soviet citizens: taken together, 70 percent of the total. (After the Polish and Soviet Jews, the next-largest groups of Jews killed were Romanian, Hungarian, and Czechoslovak. If these people are considered, the East European character of the Holocaust becomes even clearer.)

The Final Solution, as the Nazis called it, was originally only one of the exterminatory projects to be implemented after a victorious war against the Soviet Union. Had things gone the way that Hitler, Himmler, and Göring expected, German forces would have implemented a Hunger Plan in the Soviet Union in the winter of 1941–1942. As Ukrainian and south Russian agricultural products were diverted to Germany, some 30 million people in Belarus, northern Russia, and Soviet cities were to be starved to death. The Hunger Plan was only a prelude to Generalplan Ost, the colonization plan for the western Soviet Union, which foresaw the elimination of some 50 million people.

The Germans did manage to carry out policies that bore some resemblance to these plans

the other state that killed Europeans en masse in the middle of the century: the Soviet Union. In the entire Stalinist period, between 1928 and 1953, Soviet policies killed, in a conservative estimate, well over five million Europeans

German suffering under Hitler and during the war, though dreadful in scale, does not figure at the center of the history of mass killing. Even if the ethnic Germans killed during flight from the Red Army, expulsion from Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1945–1947, and the firebombings in Germany are included, the total number of German civilians killed by state power remains comparatively small

when one considers the total number of European civilians killed by totalitarian powers in the middle of the twentieth century, one should have in mind three groups of roughly equal size: Jews killed by Germans, non-Jews killed by Germans, and Soviet citizens killed by the Soviet state.

Soviet repressions are identified with the Gulag

We know about the Gulag because it was a system of labor camps, but not a set of killing facilities. The Gulag held about 30 million people and shortened some three million lives. But a vast majority of those people who were sent to the camps returned alive.

the Gulag distracts us from the Soviet policies that killed people directly and purposefully, by starvation and bullets. Of the Stalinist killing policies, two were the most significant: the collectivization famines of 1930–1933 and the Great Terror of 1937–1938.

It is established beyond reasonable doubt that Stalin intentionally starved to death Soviet Ukrainians in the winter of 1932–1933. Soviet documents reveal a series of orders of October–December 1932 with evident malice and intention to kill. By the end, more than three million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine had died.

The largest action of the Great Terror, Operation 00447, was aimed chiefly at “kulaks,” which is to say peasants who had already been oppressed during collectivization. It claimed 386,798 lives. A few national minorities, representing together less than 2 percent of the Soviet population, yielded more than a third of the fatalities of the Great Terror.

If we concentrate on Auschwitz and the Gulag, we fail to notice that over a period of twelve years, between 1933 and 1944, some 12 million victims of Nazi and Soviet mass killing policies perished in a particular region of Europe, one defined more or less by today’s Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia.

mass killing happened, predominantly, in the parts of Europe between Germany and Russia, not in Germany and Russia themselves.

An adequate vision of the Holocaust would place Operation Reinhardt, the murder of the Polish Jews in 1942, at the center of its history. Polish Jews were the largest Jewish community in the world, Warsaw the most important Jewish city. This community was exterminated at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor. Some 1.5 million Jews were killed at those three facilities, about 780,863 at Treblinka alone. Only a few dozen people survived these three death facilities. Be zec, though the third most important killing site of the Holocaust, after Auschwitz and Treblinka, is hardly known. Some 434,508 Jews perished at that death factory, and only two or three survived.

During the war, many Soviet Russians were killed by the Germans, but far fewer proportionately than Belarusians and Ukrainians, not to mention Jews. Soviet civilian deaths are estimated at about 15 million. About one in twenty-five civilians in Russia was killed by the Germans during the war, as opposed to about one in ten in Ukraine (or Poland) or about one in five in Belarus.

Poland was attacked and occupied not by one but by both totalitarian states between 1939 and 1941, as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, then allies, exploited its territories and exterminated much of its intelligentsia at that time. Poland’s capital was the site of not one but two of the major uprisings against German power during World War II: the ghetto uprising of Warsaw Jews in 1943, after which the ghetto was leveled; and the Warsaw Uprising of the Polish Home Army in 1944, after which the rest of the city was destroyed.

By starving Soviet prisoners of war, shooting and gassing Jews, and shooting civilians in anti-partisan actions, German forces made Belarus the deadliest place in the world between 1941 and 1944. Half of the population of Soviet Belarus was either killed or forcibly displaced during World War II: nothing of the kind can be said of any other European country.

Although the history of mass killing has much to do with economic calculation, memory shuns anything that might seem to make murder appear rational. Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union followed a path to economic self-sufficiency, Germany wishing to balance industry with an agrarian utopia in the East, the USSR wishing to overcome its agrarian backwardness with rapid industrialization and urbanization. Both regimes were aiming for economic autarky in a large empire, in which both sought to control Eastern Europe. Both of them saw the Polish state as a historical aberration; both saw Ukraine and its rich soil as indispensable. They defined different groups as the enemies of their designs, although the German plan to kill every Jew is unmatched by any Soviet policy in the totality of its aims. What is crucial is that the ideology that legitimated mass death was also a vision of economic develop-ment. In a world of scarcity, particularly of food supplies, both regimes integrated mass murder with economic planning.

If there is a general political lesson of the history of mass killing, it is the need to be wary of what might be called privileged development: attempts by states to realize a form of economic expansion that designates victims, that motivates prosperity by mortality. The possibility cannot be excluded that the murder of one group can benefit another, or at least can be seen to do so. That is a version of politics that Europe has in fact witnessed and may witness again. The only sufficient answer is an ethical commitment to the individual, such that the individual counts in life rather than in death, and schemes of this sort become unthinkable.

It’s not that such leaders are necessarily trying to incite violence or hysteria; in fact, they’re not. It’s more that they are so caught up in a culture of hyperbole, so amused with their own verbal flourishes and the ensuing applause, that — like the bloggers and TV hosts to which they cater — they seem to lose their hold on the power of words.

the dominant imagery of the moment — a portrayal of 21st-century Washington as being like 18th-century Lexington and Concord, an occupied country on the verge of armed rebellion.

there were constant intimations during George W. Bush’s presidency that he was a modern Hitler or the devious designer of an attack on the World Trade Center, a man whose very existence threatened the most cherished American ideals.

Gandhi was of course entirely unsympathetic to Hitler, but he showed no grasp of the nature of fascism, of the dark reality that it was more dangerous even than the worst of British colonialism in both India and South Africa.

when the war began in earnest and India was faced with a Japanese invasion, Gandhi seemed completely unprepared, morally and practically.

He believed in “arousing the world,” which is only possible if the world gets a chance to hear what you are doing. It is difficult to see how Gandhi’s methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the régime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary.

let it be granted that non-violent resistance can be effective against one’s own government, or against an occupying power: even so, how does one put it into practice internationally? Gandhi’s various conflicting statements on the late war seem to show that he felt the difficulty of this. Applied to foreign politics, pacifism either stops being pacifist or becomes appeasement. Moreover the assumption, which served Gandhi so well in dealing with individuals, that all human beings are more or less approachable and will respond to a generous gesture, needs to be seriously questioned. It is not necessarily true, for example, when you are dealing with lunatics. Then the question becomes: Who is sane? Was Hitler sane?

As Reinhold Niebuhr observed, “Gandhi’s identification of ‘soul force’ with non-egoistic motives and body force with egoistic ones is almost entirely mistaken. The type of power used by the will to effect its purposes does not determine the quality of the purpose or motive.”

Nelson Mandela, while always admiring and reverent toward Gandhi and his teachings, once said acutely, “Many of us did not believe in non-violence [as a principle].... Because when you regard it as a principle, you mean throughout, whatever the position is, you’ll stick to non-violence ... We took up the attitude that we would stick to non-violence only insofar as the conditions permitted that. Once the conditions were against that, we would automatically abandon nonviolence and use the methods which were dictated by the condition.... Our approach was to empower the organization to be effective.” This pragmatic approach to leadership is not at all lacking in moral grounds, but it eluded Gandhi’s grasp.

Gandhi’s desire to subordinate everything to considerations of faith and religious communities finally marred his leadership. In the early 1920s, he had gone so far as to support the radical Khilafat movement among Muslims in India, which called for reinstatement of the caliphate after World War I. Gandhi may have been willing to go a long way to insure support for self-rule from different interest groups and religious denominations, but the cost was an entrenchment of the sectarianism that would break India.

In the end, it has been calculated, Germany paid less in real terms than France did after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 to ’71 (and France paid off those obligations in just a few years).

Hitler did not attain power because of reparations — the Great Depression and the folly of the German ruling classes did that — but their existence gave him a political cudgel against Weimar. The wrangling over reparations also helped turn the German people against co-operation with the international system.

the issue helped drive a wedge between France and Britain at a time when the liberal democracies needed to stand together. Many in the English-speaking world came to agree with the Germans that the Treaty of Versailles, and the reparations in particular, were unjust, and that Lloyd George had capitulated to the vengeful French. That sense of guilt played a role in the efforts by successive British governments to appease Hitler in the 1930s.

many if not most Germans came to believe that World War I was a sort of natural catastrophe, with no human authors. The arms race, nationalism, imperialism, fear, hatred: all were seen in retrospect as impersonal forces that had simply swept Europeans along in 1914. The German Foreign Ministry in the 1920s even had a propaganda unit that took every opportunity to encourage attacks on the treaty and, by selectively releasing documents, to suggest that Germany bore no more responsibility for the war than any other nation. All were guilty or none were

Research since 1945, by German historians among others, has produced a more complicated picture, that of a reckless Austria-Hungary determined to crush Serbia and of Germany providing a blank check for its allies in Vienna. German military planners, if they did not welcome war, by 1914 were increasingly inclined to expect it. Their nightmare was a rapidly industrializing Russia. Rather like the Japanese in 1941 who decided to attack the United States, the Germans thought it would be better to have the inevitable conflict sooner rather than later, while they could still take the offensive.

In a remarkably short time after 1918, many Germans also came to think that they had not really lost the war.

Germany has become more diverse through immigration - religiously, culturally and mentally,

"we all mourn" with the victims' families and France

counter the growing support for the Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West

25,000 people

Mr. Abbott’s intervention, which came in an email to The Independent, argued that it was possible to lament that Rhodes “failed to oppose unjust features of his society while still celebrating the genius” that led to the Rhodes scholarships.

Some British politicians have sought to depict the campaign as a demonstration of political correctness and an effort to erase history, a notion that supporters reject.

R. W. Johnson, an author who is an emeritus fellow of Magdalen College at Oxford, compared the campaign to remove the monument to what Al Qaeda and the Islamic State “are doing in places like Mali when destroying statues.

“The significance of taking down the statue is simple,” he added. “Cecil Rhodes is the Hitler of southern Africa. Would anyone countenance a statue to Hitler?”

Brian Kwoba, a doctoral student, told The Independent newspaper that Rhodes was responsible for “stealing land, massacring tens of thousands of black Africans, imposing a regime of unspeakable labor exploitation in the diamond mines and devising pro-apartheid policies.”

Now, Brown's sources in all likelihood did tell him that Hitler's anti-Semitism was for show. That was a popular opinion during Nazism's early days.