I love a good history. This week, while I’ve been healing, I’ve been reading a history on my Kindle. BLOODLANDS, by Timothy Snyder. It is the true story of the largest loss of human life in human history, and all due to the efforts of two men: Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Hitler is the illustration for evil, but Stalin made Hitler look like Mother Theressa. I’m not talking about their soldiers killing each other, and people in the way of those battling forces, but innocent people targeted specifically. Genocide and ethnic cleansing and murder and destruction of life on such a scale that it is inconceivable. The thought of having tens of thousands of people to slaughter millions is so stunning there is no word to describe it.
We write books about threats on a personal level, not wholesale butchery. As I read the statistics––fifty thousand here, three hundred thousand there ––I realized that the scale made less of an impression than two here and ten there. Each of these forty or fifty million individuals had a life and a story, as each killer had, but with few exceptions they were never recorded except as a name and number, a space in a hole or bones under the sky. If you want to read the whys and hows of the mega murder of whole ethnic populations, political movements, and religious groups, it’s a good enough book. But in all of the numbers and statistics and justifications and evil there was one scene that most horrified and affected me. There were two orphaned Jewish children on the street in the Warsaw ghetto when a van stopped to collect them for death. The girl, holding her brother’s hand, told the German soldiers, “Please, sir, don’t hit us. We will get into the truck ourselves.” I am more haunted by those words, and that scene, than by all the murder and mayhem in the entire book. Sometimes, one personalizing paragraph is worth a library of facts and figures. You suddenly can imagine your own children or grandchildren in the same situation and it breaks your heart on a whole new level.
What I’m driving at here is the small stories within larger ones often make the difference to the reader.
Absolutely, John. There’s nothing really scary about statistics. They can overwhelm us, as in the case of Hitler and Stalin, but it’s when it gets down to the personal that you reach the emotional level of story.
There’s a scene in Dr. Zhivago where the Czar’s calvary slaughters a bunch of street demonstrators. Director David Lean doesn’t show that. He shows us Yuri Zhivago’s face as he witnesses this from his balcony.
Russian history doesn’t mention the murders of 6 million Jews, or the fact that Russia and Germany divided up Poland, and the Russians murdered the Polish army’s officers and as many of their intellectuals as they could identify. Russia kept slaughtering its own citizens until Stalin’s death.
Recently Russia was sending an assassin after a double agent the way Stalin sent one after Trotsky. How little things change over time.
I wonder how many of the men who committed such atrocities suffered psychologically from it with nightmares or PTSD. Or were they were so far gone in their murderous psychosis that they still look with relish on it now that they are in their later years. Some of those murderers would still be living grandparents today. How does that little old man in the suburbs look at his neighbors? What does he think when he sees other little children playing?
I cannot say that I am shocked anymore by these numbers or even the individual instances. I have been a student of history, especially the mid-twentieth century events but including studies going all the way back to Sargon’s Akkadian empire. Mankind, left to his own devices will devour himself. What Hitler and Stalin did was massive, perhaps the greatest slaughter in history. But empires of the past tried to attain those goals. Armies would face off and in a single day kill 125,000 soldiers or more on the battlefield then the victor, if his forces were still strong enough, would move on to kill or enslave every man, woman and child left standing.
Maybe sometimes a society was evil enough to warrant their utter destruction to stop their vile practices. Look at the Maya and Aztecs who sacrificed their own people till blood covered their pyramids. Or the ancient Canaanites who practiced worship of Asherah and Molech. Having babies born of orgies, solely for the purpose of burning them as sacrifices. Or in this past July in Nigeria when Islamic Jihadists stole into Maza village late at night and hacked to death nine people whose only crime was to be the spouse and children and church members of a Christian pastor. They joined 500 others who were killed in the Nigerian city of Jos on March 7th.
These genocides, no matter how they were justified, have occurred throughout the ages and have served to illustrate one thing. The total depravity of man.
Looking at the lay of the land today, I surmise that it ain’t getting any better. For that matter, one day we will see it here in the “Beautiful Land” as it is called in Korean.
In a sense this is good for us because, sadly, bringing justice to a vilely depraved world is our bread and butter.