Those Who Pay the Price of War

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 118
Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

Although Germany performed the Holocaust, as we all know, iconic sites like Auschwitz and Sobibor are actually in Poland. Most victims of Hitler’s terror didn’t speak German. Most history students broadly know this, but seldom think about it. American historian Timothy Snyder made a connection that most Western scholars couldn’t have investigated before 1991: Germany conducted its purges on territory already softened by Stalin’s Great Terror.

Timothy Snyder specializes in Twentieth Century European history, focusing on the why strongman states like Germany and the Soviet Union turned into totalitarian dystopias. Commencing his career during the Soviet collapse, he had access to primary sources which prior historians never dreamed of. But he discovered something jarring: the worst Soviet and National Socialist excesses happened not at home, but in satellite states like Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine.

Because both the Great Terror and most of the Holocaust took place in the bumper states between Russia and Germany, a thorough history wasn’t possible for decades. Both the physical artifacts and the necessary documents resided in Warsaw Pact nations. Western historians had only limited access, while Soviet-bloc historians were censored from a through history. Therefore an unvarnished history languished, waiting for someone to tell it thoroughly.

Stalin believed a combination of state-sponsored propaganda and force could collectivize peasant farming in a matter of weeks. Therefore he generated “othering language,” creating the social class of “kulaks,” enemies of Soviet economics whose supposed resource hoarding made them social criminals. This served greater Soviet aims of attempting to abolish national identities, remaking everyone into transnational Soviet citizens.

Whatever the ideological motivations, the consequence was famine. In the early 1930s, rural Ukrainian and Belorussian civilians died in Biblical numbers, even as Stalinist functionaries stole their grain and resold it on export markets. Starvation happened amid perfectly robust harvests, because famine isn’t a product of shortage, but usually of policy. Stalinists were simply okay if the “lumpenproletariat” were so hungry, they were reduced to grave-robbing and cannibalism.

Timothy Snyder

Although Westerners have long known about Stalin’s “Great Terror” in general terms, lack of press freedom kept outsiders from discovering the details at the time, and censorship concealed the worst from history for decades. Stalin claimed victory over his hated kulaks after approximately two years and rescinded his cruelest policies. Indeed, he did succeed at his deepest goals: shattering farmers’ ties to land and community, and driving national minorities into industrialized cities.

In Snyder’s painfully detailed telling, the Great Terror provided the blueprints Hitler used to perpetrate the Holocaust. Snyder carefully states that the two aren’t interchangeable events in history. Stalin inflicted his Terror upon his own citizens during peacetime, for instance, while Hitler inflicted the Holocaust upon conquered nations during war. Also, Stalin at least nominally served an ideological goal, while Hitler ruled according to his strongman whimsy.

Despite the differences, in Snyder’s telling, the similarities are glaring. The punitive conditions Stalin created in his gulags, Hitler copied in his labor camps. But Hitler exceeded Stalin, because he wasn’t circumscribed by Marxist doctrine. Where Stalin simply didn’t care if “superfluous workers” simply died, Hitler skipped the middleman of chance, and started killing. And the peoples he killed were mostly Polish, Lithuanian, and citizens of occupied Soviet territories.

Snyder takes an approach he admits is academically risky and impolitic. The accepted Holocaust narrative of the first half-century after World War II, he claims, needs revision. Our accepted narrative was written by internees at National Socialist labor camps like Auschwitz, and the prisoners held there, Snyder writes, had a disproportionate likelihood to survive. The reality, which Snyder describes in heartrending detail, is considerably worse and more gruesome.

This isn’t casual reading. Besides his historically dense and painful subject, Snyder’s style requires a strong constitution. He writes in long chapters that, despite their physical heft, have no discernable flab; his storytelling is dense, and provides few clear places to pause and ruminate. We must simply keep moving, much like the terror victims his story describes. He also mostly eschews interpretation until his conclusion, preferring specific details over synoptic morality.

Despite this difficulty, Snyder’s writing is eye-opening and emotionally moving. He rejects the standard Holocaust historiography, which is frequently as abstracted as a medieval morality play. Instead, he places the Holocaust in a historical context of strongman leaders who considere themselves scientists, and therefore unbound by conventional morality. He presents Stalin and Hitler as allies turned rivals, and history as a movement of forces that divulge their lessons only slowly, painfully, and at great human cost.

Also by Timothy Snyder:
A Short Handbook for Confronting Dictators

Stormy Daniels and the Evils of “Purity Culture”

Content Warning: This essay includes discussions of sexual assault, exploitation, and—obviously—Donald Trump's criminal accusations.

Stormy Daniels

I can’t imagine the widespread trauma and lingering hurt that Stormy Daniels’ testimony last week must’ve reawakened in some people. As key to the prosecution’s case in Donald Trump’s criminal indictment, she garnered national attention. Newscasters, commentators, and comedians hungrily consumed, and relentlessly regurgitated, salacious details of Daniels’ sexual encounter with Trump—an encounter that, on testimony, sure sounds like rape.

Yet I also can’t imagine the damage done by repeated mention of Daniels’ former longtime career. Even sources sympathetic to Daniels reflexively describe her as an “adult film actor” or “former porn star.” Journalists persistently describe the source of this story as one of Trump paying money to conceal sex with a porn star, as though her paying career matters. They even persist in using her stage name over her government name, Stephanie Clifford.

This bespeaks the importance of purity in American culture. From the Puritans to the present, Americans have believed that anybody sexually stained must forever bear that stain. Daniels joins the ranks of other would-be serious actors, like Traci Lords and Belle Delphine, whom nobody can ever write about without mentioning their previous “adult film” careers. They wear their sexual histories like Hester Prynne’s notorious scarlet letter.

Sex work is the only occupational category I know where a perfectly legal activity becomes criminal because money changes hands. Making adult films is perfectly legal, as millions of couples who’ve recorded themselves in the throes of passion already know. But making money from adult films makes participants into criminals, and worse, taints their ability to pursue future above-the-table employment. Once a sex worker, always a sex worker.

I remember once discussing with a loved one why prostitution is illegal. For clarity’s sake, I was younger and more libertarian back then; I believed prostitution should be decriminalized for free-market reasons. My loved one responded, with audible indignation: “Women are forced into prostitution because of poverty and systemic injustice!” I responded by asking who’s helped when we criminalize a commodity they have, that others willingly pay for.

Former President Donald Trump

Looking back at that conversation twenty-five years later, from a more progressive and justice-minded worldview, I realize that conversation cuts to the heart of society’s attitudes toward sex work. When our society classifies sex work as “crime,” it isn’t really about sex; it’s about finding more punitive ways to prevent poor people escaping poverty. Like laws against gambling, loitering, and drugs, anti-sex work laws are mainly enforced against the poor.

American society prizes purity. This overlaps heavily with something I’ve written before, about Mary Magdalene, but it bears repeating: once you’ve compromised your purity, Americans frequently refuse your return to polite society. The phrase “purity culture” comes from White evangelical Christianity, which fetishizes virginity, especially female virginity. But it also reflects the Temperence Movement’s attitudes toward alcohol: you’re either Wet or Dry, and once Wet, you’re never Dry again.

Thus you see not only the vilification of Stormy Daniels, but also Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Some conservative commentators seemingly have a knee-jerk need, when discussing AOC, to describe her as a former bartender. If you’ve ever done bar work, or even sat at one for any length of time, you know the work is poorly paid. But women working in bars also face constant sexual come-ons, catcalls, and requests for dates.

Stormy Daniels, like Monica Lewinsky before her, has become a synecdoche for male sexual malfeasance. Both Daniels and Lewinsky were exploited by powerful men who made promises of future networking and career opportunities which never materialized. Following her public disgrace in the 1990s, Lewinsky retreated into years-long seclusion, while the President who exploited her took a victory lap. Daniels, presumably more prepared for public scrutiny, has remained visible.

To be completely fair, we’ve witnessed some revision in public perception. Some men who traded sexual favors for insider access, like Ryan Adams and Joss Whedon, have faced consequences in recent years. Yet those examples remain outliers, and the prosecution of chromic exploiters like Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein have chugged on, producing minimal outcomes, for years. Culpability still resides mostly on women, especially poor women.

The simple fact that Donald Trump is only now facing any charges for a sexual assault which occurred in 2006, speaks volumes about who faces consequences in American society. Stormy Daniels will probably forever remain a “former adult film performer,” while Trump flourished for decades after his assault. He had to fuck the entire country before anybody thought he deserved meaningful consequences for entrapping one woman and lying about it.

Those Who Don’t Learn From History

Vladimir Putin and friends, in a still from Netflix’s
Turning Point: the Bomb and the Cold War

College-educated progressives might have a natural tendency to sneer at the 2024 Netflix docuseries Turning Point: the Bomb and the Cold War. The entire series has a ponderous, intensely self-serious tone, backed by a Philip Glass-inspired soundtrack that emphasizes the series’ intended Great Deeds of Great Men themes. Letting political insiders like Robert Gates and Condoleeza Rice narrate history risks letting the guilty write their own exoneration.

So sure, there’s a knee-jerk desire to impose a Noam Chomskian interpretation of the series as pro-American propaganda. Yet series creator Brian Knappenberger doesn’t let America off lightly either. Knappenberger’s sources are preponderantly American, yet many willingly doubt America’s official story spotlighting the country’s culpability in constant geopolitical escalation. American policy provides the precedents now bearing fruit in places like Ukraine.

I don’t mention Ukraine lightly. Each of the nine episodes begins with a teaser relating to Russia’s 2022 Ukraine invasion, casting that event in light of Vladimir Putin’s Cold War history. Though Knappenberger avoids anything as high-handed as a thesis statement, his comparisons of current events with Twentieth Century history emphasizes that there’s an arc of continuity which we ignore only at our peril. Sadly, ignorance is something we certainly have.

Despite the series’ title, Knappenberger doesn’t get into the Manhattan Project until episode 2, or the Cold War until Episode 3. His account begins during World War II, when the Allied Powers combined to fight global fascism, but only reluctantly. The “enemy of my enemy” arrangement forced Roosevelt and Stalin to sit down together, despite openly opposing one another politically. Both leaders exposed one united face to the world, while plotting separately in private.

Knappenberger’s style demonstrates influence from legendary documentarian Errol Morris. Like Morris, Knappenberger centers interview subjects largely front-and-center, narrating heir interpretation of events to an interviewer just slightly off-camera. Despite the dramatic importance of the subjects’ narrative (underscored by the soundtrack), they remain largely static. Visual drama comes from the intercutting of archival footage of historical events as they actually happened.

Early episodes involve mostly scholars and historians. As events like the Potsdam Conference, the Trinity test, or Hiroshima largely pass from living memory, we’re left with experts’ interpretations. Not that we’ve entirely forgotten these events. Knappenberger interviews two Hiroshima survivors, reminding us that history isn’t a collection of numbers and heuristics; it’s the combined story of what actually happened to real, living people.

The closer Knappenberger brings us to the present, the more he involves those who participated. Sure, he asks military and academic historians to interpret, say, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. But he also interviews a Spanish-speaking participant who banked everything on American support, then got captured in Cuba. The horror etched on that survivor’s face speaks volumes to history’s human impact, and America’s opportunistic betrayal of its international allies.

Beginning around 1980, Knappenberger relegates historians and scholars to a supporting role. The narrative kicks over to those who participated in, and often caused, history. Archival footage of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev intercuts with interview subjects, including Defense Secretaries, global journalists, and Gorbachev’s official English-language interpreter. Taken together, we receive a working view of how the late Cold War unfolded.

It's possible to raise objections to Knappenberger’s historical lens. He accepts the notion of history as the Great Doings of Great Men—and we indeed mean men, as only in the last twenty years do women drive the story, except as wives or survivors. Knappenberger sees history as happening mainly inside the corridors of power. He includes archival footage of, say, the demolition of the Berlin Wall or the Orange Revolution, but only overlaid with scholars’ and politicians’ exegesis.

Nevertheless, it’s impossible to escape Knappenberger’s final resolution. He wants us to understand that current events don’t exist in a vacuum; specifically, Putin chose war in Ukraine to reverse massive humiliations which the Cold War forced on Russia. The series’ final two episodes deep-dive into Putin personally, and how he views history through the humiliations which collapse of the Soviet Union forced on his people. Putin’s Ukraine invasion makes sense in that context.

In the final ten minutes, Knappenberger finally allows interview subjects to spell out his intended lesson: Putin’s military adventures aren’t unprecedented. America’s continued post-Cold War interventions in other nations provide political justification for Putin’s invasions in Ukraine, Georgia, and elsewhere. History didn’t happen only in the past, and contra conservative dogma, history didn’t end. Only when we know history, and use it proactively, can we prevent the disasters continuing around us.

The Matrix and the Messianic Lie

Much of the advance publicity surrounding The Matrix Resurrections focused on Act One’s satirical nature. The movie mocked the production house, Warner Bros., by name, for their demand for a lucrative sequel, whether the art demanded it or not. Warner, in a remarkable show of grace, leaned into that mockery and included it in the PR packet. Sounds cool, I remember thinking, but not compelling; I’ll wait for home video.

Now that it’s streaming, I find myself struck by what the PR omitted: a much more fatalistic tone, admitting that the original trilogy’s prophecies fell flat. The original movie remains relevant and talked-about a quarter century after its release, but its messianic promise of deliverance from corporatized autocracy seems naïve now. We haven’t escaped the machine, this movie warns us. If anything, it’s stronger now than it appeared in 1999.

The movie begins with Neo, having returned to his pre-liberation name of Thomas, working a soulless corporate job, like he did in the first movie. Instead of toiling in the anonymous cube farm, however, he now occupies the corner office, and has personal confabs with the corporate straw-boss. But he’s profoundly dissatisfied, treating his malaise by chronically overdosing psychiatric medications. Then word comes that Warner wants a sequel.

Fans embraced the first movie for two defining characteristics: cutting-edge visual effects, and long, maundering philosophical monologues. We who are old enough to remember the first movie, without the historical baggage that followed thereafter, probably remember feeling almost vindicated by the Wachowskis’ take on the decade between the Cold War and 9/11. That decade was slick, shiny, and frequently fun, but also stultifyingly boring in its safety.

Thereafter, some aspects of the first movie seemed downright prophetic. Scenes of urban destruction and gun violence looked eerily like footage of both 9/11 and the War on Terror. It’s hard to watch Neo and Trinity piloting a helicopter gunship into a skyscraper, without remembering the street-to-street fighting of the Siege of Fallujah. The videogame-like violence would become only worse as footage of American drone strikes became cable news fodder.

Unfortunately, if the first movie evidently recognized the boredom of safety, and the violence which boredom begets, the sequels fell flat. They pushed heavily on images of neo as messianic deliverer, whose unique person promises to challenge the system. As Agent Smith increasingly possesses everyone and everything, remaking the Matrix in his self-serving image, the movie promises that Neo, operating alone, will reset the changes and release the captives.

Christians worldwide have, certainly, believed their singular messiah would bring that promised deliverance. But often, instead of acting boldly in trust that Christ would vindicate the just, Christians used the promise of future deliverance to sit idly by, expecting Jesus to fix everything. Christians tolerated, if not outright participated in, war, slavery, exploitation, and empire. Molding ourselves to the world is okay, if the Messiah will triumph eventually.

Mass media in the post-Matrix decades has embraced the Chosen One myth. Rey Skywalker, Captain America, Katniss Everdeen, and even Keanu Reeves’ own John Wick have raced headlong into pits of vipers which seems insuperably large, and emerged triumphant. Despite occasional interludes, like the cinematic Les Misérables, American corporate media keeps promising a singular messiah that will redeem us from… well, from America, mostly.

Meanwhile, The Matrix Resurrections acknowledges directly that conditions have gotten worse. English-speaking conservative parties repeatedly promise to actively make oppression more oppressive, while progressive parties limply pledge that, under their supervision, things won’t get much worse. War, disease, and poverty have gotten worse, not better, since 1999. As Ian Haney López writes, the machinery of oppression proves infinitely capable of adapting to every direct challenge.

This movie takes that adaptability literally. A machine learning heuristic seizes the heroes that previously challenged the Matrix, and turns them into the Matrix’s driving engines. It uses the very human embodiment of justice to fuel injustice—shades of Republicans appropriating one orphan MLK quote to proclaim themselves the real arbiters of fairness. This movie admits that we who believe in freedom must adapt faster than the oppressors.

Hovering over San Francisco streets, Neo realizes something the original trilogy missed: if he hoards the power of salvation, then he’s already failed. The messianic impulse may begin with one individual, but unless it radiates outward, unless others join the kingdom as priests and kings themselves, messianic deliverance will never arrive. Humans, even messiahs, eventually die. The final shot abjures the sequels, and restores the “we”-centered salvation the first movie promised.