Taking bad ideas seriously: How to read Hitler and Ilyin? SIMAS ČELUTKA interviews TIMOTHY SNYDER
SC: Reading your
book Black Earth and
your article on Ivan Ilyin, what struck me was a very close and attentive
reading of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Ivan Ilyin’s writings. You
treat their ideas very seriously. It’s especially unusual with regards to
Hitler, whose Mein Kampf is not extensively studied among
historians – most of them concentrate almost exclusively on his actions, but
not his thinking. In my view, the seriousness with which you take ideas makes
your scholarship as a historian exceptional and refreshing. Henry Kissinger
noted this by claiming that Black Earth is partly a book of
history, and partly a book of political theory. What is your take on the
relationship between ideas and actions, words and deeds?
TS: First of all, there’s
a danger in separating intellectual and political history, where intellectual
historians are concerned with ideas that are interesting, and political
historians are not concerned with ideas at all. Often ideas that are most
significant are bad ideas, i.e. ideas that are not interesting
in and of themselves, but nevertheless exert psychological, sociological, and
political power. And we don’t have to go all the way back to Hitler to see an
example of this. In our own societies, we know perfectly well at least a few
ideas that are significant, although they may not be good ideas. An
intellectual historian 80 years from now may not be concerned with them, but
they are nevertheless powerful.
That said, to understand Mein Kampf I think you have to have a certain amount of intellectual history background to realize how Hitler is working from Biblical traditions, from traditions of Victorian science, Darwinism etc. Not so much because he needs to be classified as a thinker, but in order to see and comprehend how Mein Kampf makes sense, how it holds together. You’re right, it is very unusual to spend as much time on Mein Kampf as I do at the beginning of Black Earth. I put it at the beginning of my book because Black Earth is a book about the Holocaust of the Jews, and the history of the Holocaust of the Jews has to be understood as a realization of a particular worldview. The worldview, a vision of the world without Jews, is stated in Mein Kampf, and is realized in the history of Germany and also in the history of German actions towards states and societies beyond Germany. I don’t think you can understand the Holocaust without analysing the worldview.
There are many ways
you can make this argument. One is the classical question of the different
forms of extermination policies applied to Jews and Slavs. If one ignores
the ideology one easily falls into questions of comparison rather than
questions of origins. The difference between how Germany treats the Slavs
and how it treats the Jews is ideological – it goes back to the difference
between colonizing the Slavs and a world without the Jews. You can have
massively murderous policies towards both groups of people, but at the end of
the day there is a difference, and the difference is ideological. Slavs were to
be colonized and Jews were to be removed from the planet because Slavs were
seen as an inferior race whereas Jews were seen as a non-race that prevented
the racial struggle from getting underway.
Or, in a case of my
own central argument, I am saying that the Holocaust happened because of a
certain kind of politically generated anarchy, in the course of which German
power was used to get rid of traditional political institutions, and that
created an environment that made mass killing in these stateless zones possible.
It is easier for me to see that when I read Mein Kampf and
realize that Hitler is not a German nationalist, that he is not a
state-builder. Instead, he is someone who is trying to restore the world to its
natural condition of being which is precisely a competition among races.
Competition among races is not a political-institutional idea, it’s some other
kind of idea. And so then it’s easier to see the German campaign in the East
with its destruction of institutions as a normal part of the destructive
process. If you ignore the ideas and start from the premise that it’s all about
institutions and what institutions do, you cannot understand the destruction of
other institutions as part of the argument.
SC: What about Ivan
Ilyin and his ideas? Despite the fact that Vladimir Putin has brought Ilyin’s
ideas into high politics and justified his foreign policy quoting Ilyin’s
writings, Western observers are yet to discover this author. You, on the other
hand, have read a lot of him lately and have written about him. Why are you
taking Ilyin’s writings so seriously?
TS: I’m trying to show
respect. Not moral respect necessarily, but intellectual respect. .. read more:
Snyder's article on Ivan Ilyin: According to Ilyin, the purpose of politics is to overcome individuality, and establish a “living totality” of the nation. Writing in the 1920s and ’30s after his expulsion from the Soviet Union, when he became a leading emigré ideologue of the anti-Communist White Russians, Ilyin looked on Mussolini and Hitler as exemplary leaders who were saving Europe by dissolving democracy. His 1927 article “On Russian Fascism” was addressed to “My White brothers, the fascists.” Later, in the 1940s and ’50s, he provided the outlines for a constitution of a fascist Holy Russia governed by a “national dictator” who would be “inspired by the spirit of totality.”
