Black Earth(174)

Though no American would deny Hitler denial: Hitler and His Generals, 62. See Thom?, “Sein und Zeit im Rückblick,” 285; Genette, Figures I, 101; Robbe-Grillet, Pour un nouveau roman, 133. The denial of climate science poses serious problems for the U.S. Navy, which faces the likelihood of flooding bases and the reality of competition for the waters of the melting Arctic. Christian Science Monitor, 2 March 2010.

The popular notion The market is not nature: Bloom, Closing, 84; Bauman, Modernity, 235. Cf. Moses, “Gespr?ch.” At this point in the argument I am demonstrating the relationships between the concepts rather than educing the historical relationship. Cf. Moyn, Last Utopia, 82–83.

When states are absent Nazi Germany murdered chiefly the citizens of other countries. What about the states that carried our mass murder of their own citizens? The three most horrifying twentieth-century cases—the People’s Republic of China, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and Cambodia under Pol Pot—were all party-states, where both ideology and practice demanded that the state institutions be secondary to party institutions, and where the legitimacy of the state was completely undercut by the ideological appeal made by party leaders to the future of the collectivity. These histories follow a different trajectory than that of Nazi Germany and its neighbors but in one respect teach the same lesson: the significance of the state in the banal conservative sense of a monopolist of violence and an object of reciprocal duties and rights. The subject is vast and requires separate treatment; some of the relevant issues are raised in the Soviet chapters of my Bloodlands.

Gustaw Herling-Grudziński Herling, World Apart, 132.

In the case of climate Only the state can create the structures within which scientists and engineers can develop fruitful technologies. Individuals might follow market incentives in developing fusion and other technologies, but only insofar as the state molds those incentives. The simple decision by a state or states to invest in science would change the mood and deepen confidence in the future.

Understanding the Holocaust For case studies of the practical dilemmas of rescue, see Power, Problem from Hell.





A Note on Usages


By “Final Solution” I mean the German intention to eliminate the Jews by some means from the territory under their control. By “Holocaust” I mean the version of the Final Solution that was implemented, the mass murder of Jews in Europe.

This book covers a broad linguistic territory. The Jews killed in the Holocaust generally spoke different languages than the people who write about the Holocaust today. My own coverage tilts towards the territories where most European Jews lived and died, and towards their languages at the time, including Yiddish, Polish, and Russian. These languages are written in three different alphabets, the Hebrew, Latin, and Cyrillic. The people who used them were usually multilingual and often known by different names at different stages of life. I transliterate according to simplified versions of the Library of Congress guidelines. Sometimes I spell names as the people in question preferred. I have done my best to keep the complexities arising from transliteration and translation from interfering with voices and arguments. Localities were also known by different names to their different inhabitants at the same time and by different official names as regimes changed over time. I have opted for known English toponyms where such exist and otherwise have used the official name according to the political entity that governed when a locality is first mentioned. Naturally, this does not imply any revanchism on my part. I use “Lwów,” for example, because there is no good English equivalent (no one says “Leopolis”), and this was the official name of the city in Poland at the time when it enters the chronicle. Today the city is in Ukraine and is known as Lviv. I use “Stalino” to describe the major city of the Donbas because this is how it was known in Soviet Ukraine after 1924. Today it is called “Donetsk.” Translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own.

Biblical citations follow the King James Bible. In the bibliography I have indicated a date of first publication of a book when this might be of interest. In the endnotes I use brackets to indicate that encrypted archival material has been decrypted. The notes are coded to the first words of a paragraph rather than to a superscript number. They use a short citation formula of author and brief title; the full citations can be easily located in the bibliography.





Archives and Abbreviations


AAN Archiwum Akt Nowych (Archive of New Files), Warsaw

AW Archiwum Wschodnie, Karta (Eastern Archive, Karta Institute), Warsaw