Where's the moral responsibility? How can we see it?

As a side effect of trying to learn more about the Ukraine war, I've watched all of historian Timothy Snyder's Yale course on the convoluted history of that country. It's free and well worth your time.

I also branched out to read Snyder's broader account of the Nazi "final solution," Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. This is a horrifying volume advancing a tendentious thesis about the criminal destruction of European Jews. I find his approach both convincing and possibly not fully proven, despite Snyder's evident command of the incidents of the atrocity. I don't know whether I'll ever feel I have enough background to write about my questions. Or whether I have the stomach to acquire that background. But I feel drawn into this historiographic discussion by encountering Snyder.

Meanwhile, here's a short exposition of his view that we must understand the Holocaust as history in a particular time, place, and institutional framework. The center of Snyder's thesis is that Nazi destruction of states was what made mass murder possible, while Nazi anthropology made it necessary. From there he engages to the ethical questions this historical perspective raises.

"When we get down to the question of why people collaborate, or why people in some way take part in the murder of their Jewish neighbors, we can't really handle that question without talking about the material and legal reality. ..."

".. if we treat this only as memory, it becomes a matter of respect for something that we don't really understand anymore."

All this has left me attuned to contemporary discussions of personal moral and practical responsibility when the state which we would call our own acts badly or even evilly. (Yes, I'm from the Vietnam generation. Many of us stewed in this as young people and some of us have never stopped.)

I thought I'd share a couple of interesting current tidbits from this discussion:

At the academic blog Crooked Timber, a commenter chimed in with this:

As an earnest young undergraduate I went to see Die Weisse Rose with friends, all of us not knowing what to expect. We were not alone in not leaving the theatre for quite some time after the credits rolled. We sat there literally stunned into silence and a discomforting degree of introspection. On our way home, finally, I reminded my friends of a comment aimed at western commentators in general that had very recently been offered by, I think, either Natan Sharansky or Andrei Sakharov: “The question is not, whose side are you on? The question is, whose side would you be on in our situation?” I was not alone in coming away from Die Weisse Rose knowing whose side I should have been on but now, thanks to the power of the film, quite unsure whose side I would have been on had I been in that situation, given the courage and integrity the right answer would have required.

This week the New York Times passed on a fascinating story about the controversy stirred by a Dutch museum which tried to display a balanced picture of both resistance and collaboration with the Nazi occupation of 1940-1944.

The Netherlands lost a higher percentage of its Jewish population than any other country in Western Europe. Nearly 75 percent of Dutch Jews — a total of 102,200 — were deported and murdered during the war, while in neighboring Belgium the number was closer to 40 percent, and in France 25 percent.

... [Liesbeth van der Horst, the museum’s director] agreed that the Dutch resistance was diffuse, “but some people may be surprised that there was more resistance than they realized.” However, she said, the museum sought to show that resisting the Nazis was difficult. “In the face of a threatening dictatorial regime, it’s not easy to just act,” she said.

... The exhibit portrays the lives of victims and perpetrators, bystanders and resisters, “and everything in between,” said Liesbeth van der Horst, the museum’s director, in an interview. “We wanted to tell the story of all the Dutch people.” 

“Sometimes people judge too easily, in hindsight,” she added. “They say, ‘More people should have been involved in the resistance,’ and ‘They didn’t do enough.’ Of course, it’s true, they didn’t do enough, but it was not that easy to do enough. You had to be prepared to die if you wanted to go into the resistance.”

In Black Earth, Snyder briefly applies his historical thesis to the Dutch occupation; this is both plausible and the sort of tendentious fitting of fact to thesis that his book leaves me wondering about.

The Netherlands was ... the closest approximation to statelessness in Western Europe. ... There was no head of state once Queen Wilhelmina left for London in May 1940. The Dutch government followed her into exile. The bureaucracy, in effect decapitated, was left with instructions to behave in a way that would serve the Dutch nation. Uniquely in western Europe, the SS sought and attained fundamental control of domestic policy. ... The Dutch police, like the Polish police, was ... directly subordinate to the German occupier. ... In the Netherlands, all religions had been organized into communities for purposes of legal recognition, and all citizens were registered according to religion. This meant Germans could make use of precise preexisting lists of Jewish citizens. Dutch citizens protested, but it made little difference. ... The Dutch were treated as citizens of an occupied country, unless they were Jewish. ...

I study history's horrors to engage the moral issues which events and actors raise. None of us know how we would react if push came to shove. And none of us want to find out.