Michael Perkins's Reviews > Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

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Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning
by

Timothy Snyder (Goodreads Author)

Michael Perkins's review

Aug 07, 2019

really liked it

1 note & 3 highlights

some timely quotes from this book....

“Most of us would like to think that we possess a “moral instinct.” 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.”

“When we lack a sense of past and future, the present feels like a shaky platform, an uncertain basis for action.”

“We are in the presence,” said Winston Churchill, “of a crime without a name.” Its perpetrators were human beings, operating with initiative and creativity in political circumstances of their own making. State destruction did not alter politics, but rather created a new form of politics, which enabled a new kind of crime."

==============

Excellent new documentary. About 95% of the photos and film footage were new to me.

https://www.ricksteves.com/watch-read...

14 likes · Like ∙ flag

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Quotes Michael Liked

“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. —”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

6 likes

“A common American error is to believe that freedom is the absence of state authority.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

11 likes

“The ideal capitalism envisioned by advocates of the free market depends upon social virtues and wise policies that it does not itself generate.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

8 likes

“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”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

5 likes

“Since homo sapiens can survive only by unrestrained racial killing, a Jewish triumph of reason over impulse would mean the end of the species. What a race needed, thought Hitler, was a “worldview” that permitted it to triumph, which meant, in the final analysis, “faith” in its own mindless mission.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

4 likes

“Who,” asked Hitler, “remembers the Red Indians?” For Hitler, Africa was the source of the imperial references but not the actual site of empire; eastern Europe was that actual site, and it was to be remade just as North America had been remade.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

5 likes

“Most of us would like to think that we possess a “moral instinct.” 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. A”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

3 likes

“When the mass murder of Jews is limited to an exceptional place and treated as the result of impersonal procedures, then we need not confront the fact that people not very different from us murdered other people not very different from us at close quarters.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

4 likes

“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.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

2 likes

“all major German crimes took place in areas where state institutions had been destroyed, dismantled, or seriously compromised.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

2 likes

“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.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

2 likes

“When we lack a sense of past and future, the present feels like a shaky platform, an uncertain basis for action.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

2 likes

“We are in the presence,” said Winston Churchill, “of a crime without a name.” Its perpetrators were human beings, operating with initiative and creativity in political circumstances of their own making. State destruction did not alter politics, but rather created a new form of politics, which enabled a new kind of crime. The”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

2 likes