Politics and procedures obviously enabled the killings; we owe Snyder a debt for his realism about this. But the desire to maim and murder had its roots in a disease of the mind so powerful and passionate that to call it political or procedural hardly seems to capture its nature, or its prevalence.
When [Snyder] reaches beyond the how—the conditions for mass killing—to the why, the ability to flip morality and kill neighbors, it all seems too clean.
Even minimally informed readers are likely to find at least some of Snyder’s so-called failures inapplicable and at least some of his remedies familiar.
Black Earth is a challenging book in part because it has not just one historical thesis, but a whole handful, whose connections are not always obvious. It reads less like a chronological history than like an extended essay, in which Snyder zeroes in on particular themes and problems that he believes are misunderstood by the educated public.
