The last colonial war?

Ian Kershaw’s two-volume Hitler biography (“Hubris, 1889-1936” and “Nemesis, 1936-1945”) is considered by many a “definitive biography” of Hitler. One probably can say that, with some degree of certainty, for the 21st century because the perceptions of Hitler, as John Lukacs wrote in his excellent slender volume “The Hitler of history”, do change in accordance with the spirit of the times.

Kershaw’s two volumes are extraordinarily well-documented (the second volume runs to more than 1100 pages, with some 300 pages of notes), well-written, and persuasive. Kershaw is an excellent writer even if he lacks the skills of historians like AJP Taylor or Hobsbawm to illuminate with one single sentence a very complicated issue, or to display in one dazzling paragraph many contradictions of  Hitler’s long political life (such, as for example, that in 1939, his “very clever” maneuvering brought him into a war with England, which he admired, and made him an ally of the Soviet Union which he loathed).

I read the first volume around the time when it was published (2000), and began the second, but then misplaced the book. But it stayed in my mind, and I recently reordered “Nemesis” and found it even more fascinating than “Hubris”.

Kershaw organizes the book around the two lodestars of Hitler’s political thinking. They also became his central war aims: elimination of Jews from Europe, and conquest of the living space in the East. “Hubris” begins with these two aims, as they were defined by the young Hitler in the 1920s, but whose  full significance became clear at the time when Hitler, the warlord, was able to put them in practice. The two objectives fused thanks to the fact that the inhabitants of the Eastern spaces, that Hitler believed were indispensable for Germany’s thriving future, were “Judeo-Bolsheviks”. Thus, conveniently, the struggle for Lebensraum became  at the same time also a “crusade” against communism, and for the destruction of Jews and the enslavement of Russians.

Hitler’s ideology and his aims were, in Kershaw’s view, remarkably constant throughout his life (even if tactically he would privilege one aim over the other at a time).  Jews were considered the “parasites” who, at first had to be shipped out of Europe (it is remarkable how seriously the Madagascar plan was taken by the Nazi leadership in the late 1930s) until the “territorial solution” became impracticable. It was then substituted by the “final solution”(the term was apparently used first by Heydrich) of annihilation. Absence of clear written or even verbal records by Hitler regarding the Shoah is one of the auxiliary topics of the book, and Kershaw’s attempt to solve that puzzle seems the best that one can come up with—although, of course, the question of Hitler’s secretiveness on this topic, even among his closest circle, can probably be never entirely convincingly answered. His similar secretiveness regarding the killings of thousands of “lives not worth living” (mental patients and handicapped), which preceded the Holocaust, does however provide some clues.

The Lebensraum objective, as Hitler’s numerous statements  such as “Russia will be for us what India is for England” or “Russians will be destroyed as the red-skins were dealt with” can be understood only in a strict colonial context. As indeed Mark Mazower argued in “Hitler’s Empire” (see my review here), and before him Aimé Césaire, it was “colonialism applied to Europe”.

Hitler’s post-War imagination of how the immense Ukrainian and Russian spaces would look like was not dissimilar to what King Leopold accomplished in Congo, or Spanish conquistadores in Peru. First, all existing cities had to be razed to the ground—Hitler especially wished to destroy St Petersburg (“even if it is architecturally more beautiful than Moscow”) because it was the cradle of “Judeo-Bolshevism”.  Then, after the Soviet or Russian government of whatever stripe has been pushed beyond the Urals, that is, out of Europe—once there, it was to Hitler a matter of indifference what type of government it would be—the European Russia, Belarus, and the Ukraine would be settled by German soldier-farmers who would live in clean and even palatial agro-towns, connected by beautiful autobahns, and served by Russian helots. The latter will be given only a very elementary education. It would suffice, according to Hitler, that they be able to read traffic signs (one thinks of Congo having, at the independence only a dozen graduates). The Russian helots would work on German-owned estates in a form of modern-day encomienda, and return in the evening to their filthy huts.

It was to be European colonialism complete with slavery and forced labor, but augmented by racial pseudo-science, and implemented by modern technological means that were lacking in earlier colonizations. It was colonialism for the 20^th century: the most extreme, barbaric and at the same time most technologically advanced, and undergirded by “science”.

The realization that the Second World War in the East was a colonial war is often blurred by an apparent equivalency drawn between the Western and Eastern fronts. The Western war however was a standard European  war which, in terms of casualties, was much less murderous than the First World War. The Eastern part of the war was entirely different: it was a war of extermination (primarily against the Jews) and of colonial enslavement.  Thus the two wars (Western and Eastern) were entirely different in their aims and the way they were prosecuted. Kershaw’s use of the two Hitler’s war aims (destruction of Jews and Lebensraum) enables him to explain why in 1944 and even in 1945 Holocaust continued unabated while the German military situation on both Eastern and Western fronts grew ever more desperate. Would not train cars, soldiers, and even death camps guards be better used, from the German point of view, in fighting on the front rather than in rounding off the Jews? Not, as Kershaw argues, because once Hitler realized that the war was lost (most likely by Summer of 1943 and the failure of the big German offensive in Russia), the attainment of the other goal (destruction of the Jews) acquired an even greater importance than before.

It is an extraordinary book, particularly worth reading now at the time when racial issues are back on the agenda, to see where the pseudo-scientific madness of racial hierarchy can lead. On a more positive note, one can hope that this particular form of colonialism-cum-genocide, on such a big scale, is unlikely to be repeated this century.

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Note: Kershaw is inconsistent in the use of city names/topographic locales: they vary from standard English names (like Warsaw or Prague) to German names for the cities that are now better known under their Polish, Lithuanian or Croatian names. It would have been useful to give both names. In a couple of instances, Czech last names are “Germanized”, and there is one howler when Sladko (actually, Slavko) Kvaternik is introduced as Slovak, rather than Croatian, Fascist minister of defense.  

Why making economic predictions now is useless

In one of his poems, Constantine Cavafy distinguished, in the art of foretelling future events, three groups: men who are able to see what exists now, Gods who alone know the future, and wise men who perceive "what is just about to happen":

Ordinary mortals know what's happening now,
the Gods know what the future holds
because they alone are totally enlightened.
Wise men are aware of future things
just about to happen.

            We all aspire to be the wise men and women who can see the immediate future (Cavafy does not believe that even wise men can see the distant future) and the demand for such seers is high when the times are troubled as they are now. Economists are often in particular demand because they claim they can tell the shape of future demand and supply, unemployment and growth. To do that they resort to models that through behavioral equations and identities, show the future evolution of key variables and pretend to predict how long the depression will last and how quick and strong the recovery will be.

            My argument is that such models are useless under today’s conditions. There are several reasons for that.

All economic models, by definition, take the economy as a self-contained system which is exposed  to economic shocks, whether in form of more or less relaxed monetary policy, higher or lower taxes, higher or lower minimum wage etc. They cannot by their very nature take into account extra-economic discrete shocks. Such shocks are simply not predictable. One cannot tell today whether China might invade Hong Kong, or whether Trump might ban all imports from China, or whether the race riots in the US can continue for months, or similar riots break out elsewhere in the world (Latin America, Africa, Indonesia) or even if the US may not end this year with a military government in charge.

All of these social and political shocks that I have listed are due to, or have been exacerbated, by the pandemic. There is little doubt that the “most important relationship” (to quote Henry Kissinger), the one between China and the United States, has significantly deteriorated because of the pandemic. Some in the United States see the pandemic as intentionally engineered by China to weaken the US economy and its president. There is also little doubt that the differential reactions, between the countries, in countering the pandemic have either destabilized domestic political situations (Brazil, United States, Hungary, Great Britain) or changed the relative correlation of global economic and political power (most notably between the US and China).

            It is therefore utterly wrong to believe that history does not matter and that the social and political changes wrought by the pandemic can be ignored so that, if the pandemic is miraculously over in December 2020, December 2020 will be just like December 2019 with a twelve-month lag. Not at all: even if the pandemic is over by then, December 2020 will be entirely different than  December 2019, and the political forces that these twelve months will have set in motion—and which we currently cannot predict—will fundamentally affect how economies behave in the future.

            With covid-19 we are facing a situation that (with the exception of the two world wars) has no precedent. This, in two respects: the global nature of the problem, and its open-ended,  uncontrollable nature. This pandemic, unlike the most recent other pandemics (SARS, MERS, swine flu) is truly global. It has affected almost all territories in the world. Compared to the previous economic crises, its global nature also stands out. Whether we think of the debt crisis of the 1980s, the crisis faced by post-communist economies in the 1990s, the 1998 Asian financial crisis, or even the Great Recession, they were all regionally contained crises. To be sure, there were spillovers, but we could essentially, in our assessment or prediction of global affairs, place the countries that were most affected between the brackets (so to speak) and look at the rest of the world using the standard economic approach. We cannot do that now when the entire world is affected.

            The second feature of today’s situation is its open-ended nature: no one knows when the pandemic will end, how it will affect different countries, and even whether thinking of a sharp and clear end to the pandemic makes sense at all. In fact, we may live for years with stop-and-go policies where movements to open up the economy are followed by increased flare-ups of the infection, and then new closures and lockdowns. We also have no idea not only what countries and continents would be hit next by the pandemic and whether there would be a second wave, but we cannot at all predict how successful individual countries will be in curbing it.  No one could have predicted that a country with the highest health expenditures per capita in the world, and with hundreds of universities that sport public health  departments and publish probably thousands of scientific papers annually, would totally fail in the control of the pandemic and have the highest number of cases and fatalities. Similarly very few would have predicted that the UK, with its fabled NHS, would lead Europe in the number of deaths. Or that modestly wealthy Vietnam would have zero deaths from the pandemic.

            Similar unknowns abound. These are not one-level unknowns, but unknowns at three or four dimensions.  The future geographic spread of the pandemic is unknown (will it severely hit Africa?), the reactions of countries, as we have just seen, are equally impossible to predict (how successful may be India? Will China stop the second wave?), and perhaps most importantly the social and political consequences are unknown. They may turn out to be, as I argued in March 2020 article in Foreign Affairs, the most nefarious long-term product of the pandemic with obvious effects on global recovery.

            There are only a few things—the same ones that I  mentioned in mid-March—that we can, with some dose of confidence, predict:

1. aggravation of the conflict between the US and China with China being “upgraded” to the status of “challenger”;

2. tendency toward greater state role in many countries;

3. set-back for globalization, in terms of ability of people to travel internationally and capital to move across borders (driven in part by political uncertainties); and

4. increasing political instability both internally and globally.

            This crisis is like “the warrior that leaves devastation in its stead”, and to make projections assuming that none of that devastation has occurred, and even if has occurred, that it will have no impact on future functioning of the economy is simply wrong. We  have to admit that there are limits to our ability to tell the future: we are not “Gods that are totally enlightened".