Timothy Snyder is a history professor at Yale. He is perhaps best known for two of his books: ”Bloodlands” (2010), primarily the story of Hitler’s move to the East and the fate of Poland, and “Black Earth” (2015), primarily the story of the Holocaust and the fight for Ukraine. I have read them both and recommend them highly.

In addition, Snyder is one of those people that MSNBC calls on for 2 minute appearances to put into context some of what is happening today in Eastern Europe, Ukraine and Russia. He looks friendly, speaks well, and always has something of interest to say. But you don’t get a real feel of what he would be like as, say, a teacher, or to hear in a lengthier presentation.

By the miracle of YouTube, of course, you can remedy that, and that is what I did yesterday, listening to a presentation that Snyder made a few weeks ago at the Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee. You can find it by simply Googling “Tim Snyder Marquette” (at least, I could); it is just under an hour.

I scribbled down seven points that are worth repeating (there were in fact many more), some of which might surprise you.

1. Hitler was not a madman. He was a wrongheaded, but rational, thinker with a lot of charisma, who knew exactly what the German population in the early 1930s wanted to hear (sound familiar?). Hitler was also not a German nationalist per se; he didn’t think in nationalist terms, but in racist terms. He believed that mankind was divided into various races (including the Aryan race to which Germans belonged), and that these races competed against each other for space and power. This was not something to be sad about; this is the way it was and the way it should be.
2. The Jews were a class by themselves. They were not a race as the major races were. They did not have a territory, and you needed a territory to truly be a race. The Jews, on the other hand, were interrupters. They lived amongst other races, and did their best to deter other races from pursuing their natural competitive activities. They were universalist, cosmopolitans, who interfered with world history, and therefore must be shunted aside, isolated and, eventually, eliminated.
3. Races needed to have enough land to assure a ready supply of food, and to assure security. Thus, the concept of Lebensraum (living room), which led to German expansion and conquest, particularly to the east, where the “black earth” of Ukraine was necessary to feed the German race.
4. As they moved East, the Germans learned to their surprise that the people of the races they were conquering would buy Hitler’s theory about racial struggle and the role of the Jews in affecting that struggle, and agree to the need to isolate or eliminate the Jews. They saw, to their surprise, that they had allies in this action, and that the allies included individuals and groups who, prior to the German invasion, seemed to have no animosity towards Jews, and who had lived near or next to Jews for generations.
5. Some countries, obviously, did have histories of antisemitism (not to the extent of Nazi antisemitism, of course), and some did not. But the treatment of the Jews and their fate in various countries had little to do with prior instances of antisemitic behavior in those countries. In Holland, perhaps the most tolerant of European countries, almost all Jews were killed. In France, where there was a consistent history of antisemitism, most Jews survived.
6. One of the most important elements of Jewish survival during the Holocaust was whether Jews were, or were not, citizens of a country. The Nuremberg laws deprived Jews of German citizenship, the abolition of the government of Poland, or of the Austrian state, for example, made Jews stateless, with no one to protect them, no laws that they could turn to. At some point, he said, Romania, whose Jews had been declared non-citizens, reversed itself and the Jews were once again Romanian citizens. With this act, they were protected for the duration of the war.
7. Hitler admired the United States. Here was a country, he thought, whose main population was Aryan, and which conquered another race, the African race, and held them in slavery, using them to help annihilate a third competing race, the American Indian, and enable the Aryan country to provide sufficient Lebensraum for itself through the conquering of and settlement of the Great Plains. The Great Plains, in Hitler’s view, was America’s Ukraine.

Now, if I put these seven points in front of Tim Snyder, he might say “I’ll give you a B-. You left some things out, and you misinterpreted or misquoted other things I said. But you got the gist.” I don’t know.

Wait a minute! I do know. He’d give me an “A”. He teaches at Yale. (For the academic year 2022-2023, 79% of Yale grades were A or A-. I think I would have made the grade.)

On a totally different point, what do we think of the Israeli bombing a Hamas office and killing vice-chief Saleh al-Arouri in Beirut? (I can’t imagine anyone else did it.) What are they going to do about the head of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh? He lives not in Beirut, but in Qatar. Will they go after him there, too?

And what will the repercussions of all of this be? Can’t be good. Hope they’ll be neutral, but afraid they won’t, especially after the killing of over 100 at the grave of Qasem Soleimani in Kerman, Iran? No reason to think that Israel would do this at this time, but clearly Iran might want to put the blame on Israel. More likely it was a group of Iranian dissidents, or Sunni radicals that target Shia sites throughout the Middle East. But Iran’s leadership will have to respond. 

The earthquake last week in Japan registered at 7.6. The earthquake in the Middle East may exceed that, I fear.