Timothy Snyder: Hitler and Stalin Today: Class 8: Back to Colonialism

After each World War, the structure of global empire changed. At the end of the First World War, the victorious maritime empires condemned the land empires—the Germans, the Habsburgs, the Ottomans—for their imperialism, and supported, with many qualifications, the rights of nations to have states. The maritime empires continued. In the Second World War, victory was not enough: in the decades that followed, all of the European maritime empires lost their direct overseas power. The cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union used the language of colonialism and imperialism, as each intervened in the territories closest to it on a regular basis, and as each presented itself as the antidote to the aggression of the other. With or without (or after) an allegiance to communism or the far Left, African-Americans and others could reasonably see the United States as a racial frontier empire; some found resemblances to Nazi practices, and made arguments that were also used by Hannah Arendt. Readings: • Hannah Arendt, "We Refugees," 1943. • W.E.B Du Bois, "The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto," 1952. • Richard Wright, in Crossman, ed., The God that Failed, 1949, 115-163. • Paul Robeson, "Genocide Stalks the U.S.A.," 1952. • James Baldwin, "An Open Letter to My Sister Angela Davis," NY Review of Books, 1971. --- 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/