Snyder/ Black Earth : vertical Race exclusivity versus horizontal Jewish inclusivity

Unlike most other book reviewers I have read to date, I fully support Timothy Snyder's key claim in his newest work on the Holocaust, BLACK EARTH.

Perhaps because, selfishly, I thought it was my insight.

Or if not mine alone, at least an insight shared by many of us environmentalists who are now looking much more closely at the work of conservationists and their 'science' of Invasion Ecology, realizing the uneasy parallels they hold with the mindset of people like Hitler and Stalin.

(Or in my case, the parallels they hold with the mindset of all of prewar 'pure is simple' modernity.)

But actually I don't think anyone has ever done a better job than Dr Snyder at actually close reading Hitler's two early books.

In that reading, Snyder shows how Hitler repeatedly faults the Jews for infecting Hitler's forever vertically separate and forever vertically unequal human races with horizontally inclined notions : cosmopolitan and universalistic ideas about all the things that all humans hold together in common.

These inclusive ideas, just like what the physical fungus do with damp wood, dissolve the mental barriers separating the races and unite them in a miscegenative matrix that is a bit of both.

Bond together as brothers under God, they refused to do what Hitler's Mother Nature demanded of all species -- to fight each other onto death, to obtain their daily bread.

So, in his mind, when Hitler called the Jews a human fungus growth he was not at all being metaphorical but rather biological and factual....