In the course of a column about whether a nuclear Iran can be trusted not to attack Israel, George Will reviews Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning
. I woud just add that his account of Hitler’s worldview and why he hated the Jews is in accord with my book on the subject.
From George Will, Does Iran’s anti-Semitism run too deep for deterrence? – The Washington Post:
Snyder presents a Hitler more troubling than a madman, a Hitler implementing the logic of a coherent worldview. His life was a single-minded response to an idea so radical that it rejected not only the entire tradition of political philosophy but also the possibility of philosophy, which Hitler supplanted by zoology.
“In Hitler’s world,” Snyder writes, “the law of the jungle was the only law.” The immutable structure of life casts the various human races as separate species. Only races are real and they are locked in mutual and unassuageable enmity, in Hitler’s mind-set, because life is constant struggle over scarcities — of land, food and other necessities.
One group, however, poisoned the planet with another idea. To Hitler, says Snyder, “It was the Jew who told humans that they were above other animals, and had the capacity to decide their future for themselves.” To Hitler, “Ethics as such was the error; the only morality was fidelity to race.”
[Keep reading. . .]
Darwinism, ecological worries (a big focus of Snyder’s book), the rejection of objective ethics–any of that sound familiar?
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