Vasily Grossman's novel Life and Fate was long delayed in its publication because of Soviet censorship but has come to be recognized as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Grossman was a complex and appealing intellectual. Born in 1905, he was raised in a secular Jewish family in Berdichev, Ukraine. He was educated as …
The Holodomor
The Holodomor is one of the great evils of the twentieth century. The facts are grim and horrific. Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine was the first major historical account in English in 1986. Here is a brief summary of the history provided by Conquest to the US Congress. Conquest summarizes the …
Bauman on the Holocaust
There sometimes seems to be an important intertwining between personal biography and a person's sociological and historical imagination. Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) was a Jew of the generation in Poland who were destined to die -- most did in his generation of Polish Jews -- and he was exposed at various times to the murderous regime …
Vasily Grossman on Treblinka
Vasily Grossman was an important Soviet writer and journalist from the 1930s through his death in 1964. He was a Ukrainian Jew born in 1905, and his mother died in a mass execution of Jews in Berdichev, Ukraine, in 1941. He was a man of the "bloodlands", in Tim Snyder's term. During World War II …
Fascist populism and the threat to democracy
What features of a political regime contribute to political loyalty and commitment on the part of its citizens? Can a fascist dictatorship inspire political loyalty and commitment from the mass of society? And what about liberal democracy; can a liberal democratic regime maintain mass support? We have the makings of an answer to the first …
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Snyder’s big idea about genocide: state smashing
Tim Snyder's Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning is an exceptional and innovative history of the Holocaust, and of the mass killings that occurred during the Second World War in the territories he refers to as the Bloodlands. There are tormenting questions raised by the facts of the Holocaust and the deliberate killing of six …
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A Socratic morality of war?
An earlier post raised the question of whether Socrates had participated, directly or indirectly, in atrocities in war during his celebrated service as hoplite in numerous campaigns in the Peloponnesian War. And, further, it seems that Socrates never explicitly criticized the practice of massacring and enslaving the defeated foe (as was practiced by Cleon). Several …
Probing atrocity in Miropol
photo: execution site at Babi Yar, Kiev, Ukraine, September 1941 It is challenging to form a mental picture of the significance and reality of the events and enormity of the Holocaust. Many of the summary facts that we "know" about the Nazi plan for extermination of the Jewish people are both inadequate to capture the …
Socrates the hoplite
An earlier post considered the Melian massacre and the Athenian conduct of war during the Peloponnesian War (link). Since we know that Socrates served as an armored infantry soldier during that war (a hoplite), it is reasonable to ask whether Socrates would have carried out atrocious orders involving the execution of prisoners, enslavement of women …
Do norms and moral attitudes change over generations?
Moral philosophers have often written of ethical obligations, principles, and theories as if they were timeless and unchanging. Kant, for example, argued that moral obligations follow from the structure of rationality itself. The utilitarians -- Bentham, Mill, Sidgwick -- held that moral obligations are defined by the principle of maximizing happiness -- whether in the …
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Understanding Society 