Black earth
"It comforts us to believe that the Holocaust was a unique event. But as Timothy Snyder shows, we have missed basic lessons of the history of the Holocaust, and some of our beliefs are frighteningly close to the ecological panic that Hitler expressed in the 1920s. As ideological and environmental challenges to the world order mount, our societies might be more vulnerable than we would like to think." --publisher's description "In this epic history of extermination and survival, Timothy Snyder presents a new explanation of the great atrocity of the twentieth century, and reveals the risks that we face in the twenty-first. Based on untapped sources from eastern Europe and forgotten testimonies from Jewish survivors, Black Earth recounts the mass murder of the Jews as an event that is still close to us, more comprehensible than we would like to think, and thus all the more terrifying. By overlooking the lessons of the Holocaust, Snyder concludes, we have misunderstood modernity and endangered the future. The early twenty-first century is coming to resemble the early twentieth, as growing preoccupations with food and water accompany ideological challenges to global order. Our world is closer to Hitler's than we like to admit, and saving it requires us to see the Holocaust as it was -- and ourselves as we are. Groundbreaking, authoritative, and utterly absorbing, Black Earth reveals a Holocaust that is not only history but warning."--Jacket.
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2015–2025years
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What Hacker News says
- Hah. I have a friend like this and we find it hilarious. Literally every time a cryptocurrency or a meme stock blows up, he's shot himself in the face.
Not for nothing, he's also prone to talking about taking radical measures to protect his kids from climate change, and doesn't feel it's worth living if the climate warms up by 3ºC.
He's one of my oldest and best friends, so I've spent a lot of time thinking about where this all comes from. His grandfather was an SS officer (and I'm a Jew- my grandparents, of course, were also Jews)... his father, a wonderful human being, and a serious anti-racist Austrian. Yet this form of obsession continues.
Timothy Snyder makes some great remarks in "The Black Earth"-
"There need not be any compelling reason for concern about life and death, as the Nazi example shows, only a momentary conviction that dramatic action is needed to preserve a way of life. [...] Perhaps the experience of unprecedented storms or relentless droughts will jar expectations about the security of basic resources and make Hitlerian politics more resonant. As Hitler demonstrated [...] humans are able to portray a looming crisis in such a way as to justify drastic measures in the present."
No one is immune from this kind of thought process, but all of us should be immunized by our socialization with one another. And rational investment (as opposed to irrational risk-taking) is a security token for society. The opposite is a bet against a rational future.
- Reading more than 3-4 paragraphs in more than one stretch is usually too hard for me. When I was a kid (plus in university), I just thought I was lazy (also I did not think my eyes had a problem, either).
Anyways, I have to get my eyes checked out every year because I have type 1 diabetes, and my print-related disability was missed by ophthalmologists, year after year, until I was diagnosed with a medical problem that affects my peripheral nervous system, that is unrelated to the diabetes.
This article may help you with making the reading less of a daunting task. I know it is not easy: https://untappedbrilliance.com/how-to-read-books-when-you-ha...
You need to get into books. It affects your income (accurate, but not the best visual representation of the data): https://www.statista.com/statistics/896534/number-of-books-c... [Sorry broken link...a screenshot is here: https://ibb.co/s5SJpHp ]
I posted on this thread how I manage to read several books per year, via screen readers. That takes time to get used to. I would recommend Voice Dream Reader, if you are interested.
You may want to try audio books via your local library, for just starting out. You can join some libraries in the US for a very nominal fee, if your local one does not have good media databases. That way, you get some of the best media databases of any public library imaginable.
Personally, I enjoy history books the most. On Tyranny and Black Earth are the books that got me in to reading. I also love seeing whatever book reviews FinancialTimes.com (subscription site) posted, and I usually will read at least 2 books per week.
- Heil Hitler! /s
(Seriously, read Snyder's _Black Earth: the Holocaust as History and Warning_ for how Hitler saw the US as a role model.)
- (Sorry for the late response!)
"Better" here just involves the assumptions that pain is worse than not pain, and that human life is intrinsically valuable. I'm fine with making both assumptions -- especially since I've read Timothy Snyder's _Black Earth: the Holocaust as History and Warning_, which explores the thought of the most famous proponent of the mankind-needs-more-Darwinian-selection-pressure alternative. "I disagree with Hitler" isn't exactly compelling evidence for "my opinions are fundamentally subjective."
(I'm also of the opinion that the earth isn't flat, and that both sides of a contradiction can't be true. In those cases, too, I'm comfortable with saying that those who disagree with me are wrong -- and in uninteresting ways, too.)
- The book that completely changed my view on Hitler was 'Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning' by Timothy Snyder. It explained a lot of the inner logic of WWII and the Holocaust.
- So, interestingly, the places that actually did the worst in the Holocaust were generally the places where there were the least legal structures--even though you would expect it to be worst for Jews in Germany, it was often Poland and other states that had all legal structures and civil institutions destroyed who had it the worst.
https://www.amazon.nl/Black-Earth-Holocaust-History-Warning/...
