Timothy Snyder: History Does Not End, Nor Do Its Hard Lessons
[Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University. His most recent book is "The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke."]
Americans find it easy to look around the world and see figures like Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden who remind them of Adolf Hitler. But do we remember Hitler's rise, and the rise of the Third Reich, in the right way?
Germany, unlike Iraq, had been a leading democracy before Hitler, and the first lesson to take from German history is that democracies can decline and fall. Bearing that lesson in mind, we should be ever vigilant about the state of our own democracy. For we, like Germans and others, have shown ourselves vulnerable to the politics of terror.
In Germany, the arson of the parliament building, the Reichstag, in 1933 opened the door for Hitler to begin domestic repression and to justify war against enemies. Ponder that when considering our leadership's response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.
President George W. Bush claimed that a single act had brought history to an end, creating a situation that required entirely new rules. This assertion was embraced by members of both parties, as well as by much of the news media and the public. But history never ends, and those who promise new beginnings tend to lead us into old traps.
The history of the 20th Century is full of bad policy choices made in reaction to terrorism. All too often, leaders chose to blame the wrong people and attack the wrong target. Hitler is but one example. Austria invaded Serbia in 1914 in response to an assassination planned by a conspiracy, thus bringing about the first World War. Stalin blamed his enemies for a political assassination in 1934, and used imagined further plots to justify killing hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens. More recently, Russian leaders have used the threat of Chechen terrorism to stifle Russian democracy.
Terror and overreaction are the very stuff of history. History did not end with the burning of the World Trade Center, any more than it ended with the Reichstag fire.
Instead, when leaders made poor or cynical choices, new eras of lawlessness began. The Nazi regime had to dismantle existing law and overcome the principle that law governed the state. A first step was the definition of the concentration camps on German soil as extraterritorial, outside the reach of German and international law.
Here in the United States, the highest officers of the law made the same argument about the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after 9/11.
The German regime declared in launching World War II that international law was not really law at all—a position very similar to that enunciated by lawyers in the Justice Department.
The Germany of the 1930s, like the United States now, declined to apply the Geneva Conventions to all prisoners of war. The justification was the same as the American one for the same policy: Some individuals were not truly soldiers but enemy combatants who did not obey the rules of war...
...Remembering the past is not a matter of condemning others while imagining our own virtues and exempting ourselves from comparisons. It is about bearing in mind the fragility of good government and enforcing the rule of law precisely at those times when this seems most difficult.
Unfortunately, we are likely to be tested again.
Read entire article at Chicago Tribune
Americans find it easy to look around the world and see figures like Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden who remind them of Adolf Hitler. But do we remember Hitler's rise, and the rise of the Third Reich, in the right way?
Germany, unlike Iraq, had been a leading democracy before Hitler, and the first lesson to take from German history is that democracies can decline and fall. Bearing that lesson in mind, we should be ever vigilant about the state of our own democracy. For we, like Germans and others, have shown ourselves vulnerable to the politics of terror.
In Germany, the arson of the parliament building, the Reichstag, in 1933 opened the door for Hitler to begin domestic repression and to justify war against enemies. Ponder that when considering our leadership's response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.
President George W. Bush claimed that a single act had brought history to an end, creating a situation that required entirely new rules. This assertion was embraced by members of both parties, as well as by much of the news media and the public. But history never ends, and those who promise new beginnings tend to lead us into old traps.
The history of the 20th Century is full of bad policy choices made in reaction to terrorism. All too often, leaders chose to blame the wrong people and attack the wrong target. Hitler is but one example. Austria invaded Serbia in 1914 in response to an assassination planned by a conspiracy, thus bringing about the first World War. Stalin blamed his enemies for a political assassination in 1934, and used imagined further plots to justify killing hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens. More recently, Russian leaders have used the threat of Chechen terrorism to stifle Russian democracy.
Terror and overreaction are the very stuff of history. History did not end with the burning of the World Trade Center, any more than it ended with the Reichstag fire.
Instead, when leaders made poor or cynical choices, new eras of lawlessness began. The Nazi regime had to dismantle existing law and overcome the principle that law governed the state. A first step was the definition of the concentration camps on German soil as extraterritorial, outside the reach of German and international law.
Here in the United States, the highest officers of the law made the same argument about the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after 9/11.
The German regime declared in launching World War II that international law was not really law at all—a position very similar to that enunciated by lawyers in the Justice Department.
The Germany of the 1930s, like the United States now, declined to apply the Geneva Conventions to all prisoners of war. The justification was the same as the American one for the same policy: Some individuals were not truly soldiers but enemy combatants who did not obey the rules of war...
...Remembering the past is not a matter of condemning others while imagining our own virtues and exempting ourselves from comparisons. It is about bearing in mind the fragility of good government and enforcing the rule of law precisely at those times when this seems most difficult.
Unfortunately, we are likely to be tested again.