Timothy Snyder: Hitler and Stalin Today: Class 2: A world of empire

Totalitarianism did not emerge from nowhere. It was a response to the world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and more particularly to the empires that Europeans had created during the previous four or five centuries. In order to understand the aims of Hitler and other fascists, of Lenin and Stalin, we must first understand the world in which they matured, one in which Europeans dominated others and applied law only to themselves. In some ways the fascists and the Leninists sought to break this world order, in that they wanted to transcend other empires; in some ways they took imperial practices to a radical extreme. Readings: • Marc Ferro, Colonization: A Global History, 1997, 1-23. • Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 2008 (1952), chapter 5. --- Timothy Snyder holds the inaugural Chair in Modern European History, supported by the Temerty Endowment for Ukrainian Studies, at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. He is also a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and the head of the academic advisory council of Ukrainian History Global Initiative. To see other videos in this course, please click on this playlist link: https://bit.ly/3SLpx4d Follow Professor Snyder: snyder.substack.com @timothydsnyder (Twitter/X; BlueSky & TikTok) @thetimothysnyder (Instagram) Learn more about the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy: https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/