http://www.15min.lt/en/article/culture-society/us-historian-timothy-snyder-society-not-courts-should-fight-nazis-and-stalinists-528-219695

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304192704577404002010111404.html

Re: Bloodlands. I first read an account of the book in The NY Review of Books in 2010. It is an appalling read:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/worst-madness/

Now that I am rereading the article, I am struck by the Polish poet’s Milosz comment (3rd or 4th paragraph from top)

Miłosz explained, “the man of the East cannot take Americans [or other Westerners] seriously.” Because they hadn’t undergone such experiences, they couldn’t seem to fathom what they meant, and couldn’t seem to imagine how they had happened either. “Their resultant lack of imagination,” he concluded, “is appalling.

I agree with Milosz’s comment. However, I also have some reservations.

The foremost reservation is the fact that these same people “of the East” let the Westerners speak for them. Why?

As horrifying as the Nazi holocaust against the Jews was, and Stalin’s decapitations of the intelligentsia of Eastern Europe no less, the commentary on these events in the media of Eastern Europe, certainly Latvia, is pure fear mongering by the politicians (for the most part) that plays Eastern Europe into the hands of the U.S. and NATO militants, not the best of guides to the future. Whether this serves the victims and their descendants to recover themselves economically or help create human beings able to help determine the future of the world is profoundly to be questioned.

Reflecting on the matter brought me to the following link, re: fear vs courage: http://www.justprove.it/atheism-quotes/909/  and the latest discoveries in science, re: http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/3364

If the observations of the scientists are credible, then there ought to be a law against the provocation of old fears and attempts to rekindle distant remembrances of blood curdling events in times over half a century ago. At the present time, unfortunately, the swing is backward http://www.apollo.lv/portal/printit_v2/21628, not forward in time. I can imagine Timothy Snyder not as a historian, but an agent sent by NATO.

If you Google “Timothy Synder and A. Ezergalais_Comparisons…” in the same line, you should find A. Ezergailis critique of “Bloodlands”.
I wrote down the full address ... but can’t find it right now.
There were some stats in the book that were new to me ... good ... but it was written in a manner that made it a coffee table book.
“Popularist” I think was the word that Ezergailis used.

It strikes me as a useless book. I tried to get into it, but—why write such a thing?

Visu gaišu,
/P

...is pure fear mongering by the politicians (for the most part) that plays Eastern Europe into the hands of the U.S. and NATO militants…

Come off it.

NATO is what saved Western civilization, Johnny Boy.

/P

Posted on LoL by ambersun: BLOODLANDS by Timothy Snyder 24 November 2010    
Book reviews

Review from the Economist
History and its woes
How Stalin and Hitler enabled each other’s crimes
http://www.economist.com/node/17249038?story_id=17249038

http://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2010/10/bloodlands

http://www.economist.com/blogs/multimedia/2010/10/timothy_snyder_bloodlands

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/09/bloodlands-stalin-timothy-snyder-review

http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/rayfield_09_10.html

http://www.thenation.com/article/156518/between-hitler-and-stalin

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703794104575546611651621270.html

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/worst-madness/

on snyder
When a Comparison is not a Comparison
Or isn’t it?
Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, Basic Books, New York, 2010.

Timothy Snyder’s study of Bloodlands, as the lands themselves, is riddled with puzzles and paradoxes. It is a work that is easy to read but also to misread. Facility with Einstein’s concept of ‘relativity of simultaneity’—rather than with that of Ockham’s razor may help.

The most surprising thing about the study is the effusive praise that many reviewers, even historians, have lavished on it. I agree it is an important book, yet I’m not sure that the praise has been for the right reason. After adding up the minuses and subtracting its merits, it is more important that the book’s author is a professor at Yale than that his name is Timothy Snyder. The title is eye-catching and the writing is good. But it is not a book of either high scholarship or a major contribution to our knowledge. Snyder breaks no new ground by telling us that there was an exceptionally blood-soaked patch of land in Eastern Europe or that without the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact we would not have had the war and the Holocaust. People of Eastern Europe, in spite of their captivity, have known it for fifty years. From this aspect the best that one can say about the book is that the author is a superb popularizer of monographic and secondary literature.  He has exceptional skill of milking published literature and playing it back as if it is original. Most historians (and not only they) of Europe, Germany, the Holocaust, Eastern Europe, and Russia/USSR are familiar with lot, if not of all, of the books that Snyder cites.

Some reviewers have presented the book as a study of the Holocaust, yet the Holocaust parts are the weakest, the most derivative, of the book. The author displays much deeper knowledge when discussing Hitler and Stalin, their criminal minds and plots. His discussion of the Holocaust in the Baltics is thin to threadbare. The total space that Snyder devotes to the area, where arguably the Holocaust began, would not exceed two pages. In explicating the patterns of the Holocaust in this important territory, the author uses no recent primary scholarship, certainly he cites none. To explain the Holocaust in Latvia, the only work that the author notes is the one by Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein. The author shows no awareness that the book is three removes from being a primary study and in some sinuous particulars it is still a book of the old regime.

It is the kind of a book in which the argument has a higher value than facts. Yet it seems important to question the basis for the following sentence on page 393 that a friend of mine pointed out: “…independent Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and eastern Poland…the number of people killed either by the state or in civil strife in the 1930s was no more than a few thousand in all of the countries taken together.”  Not knowing about Poland, vouching for the Baltic countries, during the 1930 there were no political victims.

However, there is a flip side that makes the book a healing, even perhaps a therapeutic one. Especially it is curative for that part of Europe, Snyder’s Bloodlands,  that has not fully woken from the sleep and in part are still addicted to the Murti-Bing pill that the empire of the East had imposed on themselves and the Bloodlands.  While I’m minimizing the book’s scholarly contribution,  I want to maximize its polemical significance in contemporary discourse about the war and the Holocaust, the evil that was Hitler and Stalin. I am sure the author wanted to write a polemical book; that it has also come out to be a healing one may be an unintended consequence.  By intention or contrariwise, Snyder has floundered upon some truths that are pleasing to the people of the Bloodlands. It is especially gratifying because the author of the book is a professor of Yale University, an abode of scholars that frequently have finessed the Bloodlands for some “higher” stake. When the war ended, unlike the lands of the West, peace did not arrived to the Bloodlands, but rather a new wave of victimization began. Not infrequently in abstentia in “public squares” of the West, USA not excluding, hand cuffed and gagged, the people of the lands were deemed to be worse than the Nazis, the “real” criminals of Europe.

To the folks of the Bloodlands the basic conclusions of study are no news, but it is nice for them to hear the author with Solzhenitsyn’s intensity assert that Stalin was a criminal: gave Hitler permission to attack and attacked himself the countries of the East, and along with the Nazis, victimized, unarmed and peace loving populations. If there is a novelty in Snyder’s work it is unequivocally seeing Stalin as a significant perpetrator of the Holocaust, asserting that without Stalin there could not have been a Holocaust.

I wonder about the reviewers who have deemed Snyder’s work courageous, as if professors at Yale need courage to speak their mind. By praising Snyder are the reviewers saying that no other elite authors have dared to speak the truth? I venture to think it is in his seemingly unrelenting comparison of Stalin with Hitler that they find Snyder worthy of praise! Since, in Germany it is the “left”, and in Israel the “right” that consider a comparison of Stalin with Hitler a betrayal. Snyder already has and will continue to learn that that the comparison is a sticky wicket.[cont’d]

[cont’d from above from Ezergailis]
About the Stalin/Hitler conundrum, one needs to note that while Churchill and French intellectuals used it during the Cold War, it was not an issue, but it began to arise after the Soviet transformation when the so called “nationalists” began to bundle the two dictators. It is a truism that Stalin is not essentially like Hitler, but it is not likenesses that elicit comparisons, but similarities. If we don’t extract similarities and differences between frogs and apples, oranges and basketballs, we have surrendered an important principle of scientific inquiry and historical truth-finding. There is little that adversaries can do about limiting speech. One can call somebody a fascist but can’t stop one from saying that my smart brother was killed by Stalin and the dumb one by Hitler.

So far Snyder has played the issue as softly as possible:

„I try to reckon with the crimes that both regimes committed in the lands between Berlin and Moscow, where 14 million people, including more than 5 million Jews, were killed in the 12 years“

In effect saying:

“I make no comparisons: only facts, maam.”

Anne Applebaum, a sympathetic reviewer of Snyder’s work explicated the problem more fully, thus:

“…his intention is not to compare the two dictators or their systems, but rather, to show that the two systems committed the same kinds of crimes at the same times and in the same places, that they aided and abetted one another, and above all that their interaction with one another led to more mass killing than either might have carried out alone.”

What is to be made out of Snyder’s book? Did he or did he not compare Stalin with Hitler? By what logic can we say that Hitler is beyond comparison? Who has committed an error if a blind reader sees a comparison where an author did not? Speaking of sticky wickets,  isn’t a refusal to make a comparison a comparison?

What is the power of this taboo that one dares not name? Has a Sphinx beleaguered the land and do we need an impetuous king to solve an obvious puzzle and get us in yet deeper muck?

Snyder’s book, for whatever light it has brought to us, also marks the misunderstandings that occasionally erupts between the Bloodlands and the West. It needs to be understood that although the laceration originated in history and the misuse of language had much to do with it, the solution may not be found in language or history, although words need to be watched and facts respected.

Andrew Ezergailis, retired Prof. of History
Author of The Holocaust in Latvia

“independent Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and eastern Poland…the number of people killed either by the state or in civil strife in the 1930s was no more than a few thousand in all of the countries taken together.”

Snyder’s book, for whatever light it has brought to us, also marks the misunderstandings that occasionally erupts between the Bloodlands and the West. It needs to be understood that although the laceration originated in history and the misuse of language had much to do with it, the solution may not be found in language or history, although words need to be watched and facts respected.

Superb condensation.

/P

http://www.algemeiner.com/2012/05/21/an-open-letter-to-yale-history-professor-timothy-snyder/
An Open Letter to Yale History Professor Timothy Snyder
May 21, 2012
Author: Dovid Katz Dovid Katz

Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University, the author of the famous (and controversial) book “Bloodlands” was brought to Lithuania last week for a symposium on the Holocaust attended also by the director of YIVO in New York. In the course of the same week, the Lithuanian government repatriated, reburied with full honors and held a series of events honoring the 1941 Nazi-puppet prime minister who signed off on the German order for all Jews in Kaunas (Kovno) to be forced into a ghetto.

Dear Tim,
Greetings, and sorry we missed each other in Vilnius this time. I write in the context of our ongoing and respectful conversation, which started in the Guardian (thanks to Matt Seaton, and prominently including Efraim Zuroff) back in 2010 (I, II, III, IV); continuing through our meeting at Yale, the Aftermath Conference in Melbourne, Australia, in 2011 (thanks to Mark Baker, and with participation of Jan Gross and Patrick Desbois), and more recently, via my review of your book Bloodlands (along with Alexander Prusin’s The Lands Between), in East European Jewish Affairs.

In that review, I dealt with a number of areas of disagreement that are on the table concerning the Holocaust in Eastern Europe and the efforts underway to use state funds to downgrade it in a number of countries, particularly the Baltics.

But these debates are inherently separate from the troubling issue on which I’m addressing you today: the ongoing instrumentalization and abuse of your important work by well-oiled government-financed ultra-nationalist and often antisemitic forces in Eastern Europe who have (wrongly) found in your work the ammunition for a discernible slide in the direction of the Double Genocide movement, which reached its zenith with the 2008 Prague Declaration (critiques here), and in the direction of positing the sort of “complexity” that is regularly invoked, particularly here in the Baltics, as euphemism for what is now called Holocaust Obfuscation.

There is, alas, in nationalist and antisemitic circles in some East European states a movement to sanitize or actually glorify local Holocaust collaborators and perpetrators (who were after all, usually quite reliably “anti-Soviet” and “anti-Russian”). In Lithuania alone, this effort has gone hand in hand with a tragic effort to concurrently blame the victims by trying to criminalize, in the absence of any evidence, Holocaust survivors who are alive because they joined the anti-Nazi resistance. Not one of these kangaroo cases has yet led to a public apology, not even to 90 year old Dr. Rachel Margolis in Rechovot, who still dreams of one last visit to her native Vilna.

As reported in DefendingHistory.com last September, a foreign-ministry hosted event in Vilnius in September 2011 included a speech by a leading local historian in which he claimed (wrongly) that your book offers support for the condemnation of Jewish partisans who fought against the Nazis. In May 2011, a historian speaking on Lithuanian radio boasted that “It’s not all hopeless” because of Bloodlands.

Even before that, in late 2010, a far-right film production cited you as an expert consultant in a project to glorify the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF) perpetrators who unleashed murder and mutilation of Jewish civilians in dozens of Lithuanian towns before the Nazis even arrived (and who announced their intentions before the war even started). (I trust you withdrew from that project, and offer my belated congratulations for so doing).

But that episode somehow connects with this week. The same ultranationalist filmmakers recently announced their premiere on Sunday 20 May 2012 in Kaunas of a new “documentary” (promo clip here) adulating Juozas Ambrazevičius (later Brazaitis), the 1941 Nazi puppet “prime minister” in Kaunas who signed off on orders for the setting up of a concentration camp for Jews, and the requirement that “all the Jews of Kaunas” be moved within four weeks to a ghetto.

The new film premiered yesterday in Kaunas as the grand finale of four days of Lithuanian government financed events (May 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th) focused on the reburial with full honors and the elaborate honoring of the World War II Nazi puppet prime minister.

What do these four events have to do with you, or with the director of Yivo from New York who joined you? Directly speaking – absolutely nothing. In fact, people in the Jewish community here in Vilnius feel certain that when you (and he) accepted the invitations for the May 2012 symposium and related events here in Lithuania that you had no idea your presence would coincide with the long-planned glorification of a major Holocaust collaborator.

But when such things happen, it becomes necessary to react, if not by postponing one’s trip then by speaking out unambiguously with moral clarity.

[cont’d]

[cont’d from above - Katz]
Events featuring a Yale historian and the head of Yivo, coming at the same time as the state-sponsored events to honor the collaborator, have been used, first:  to deflect foreign and diplomatic attention from the Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis outrage, which has drawn protests this past week from B’nai B’rith, the Wiesenthal Center, an international petition, and critically, the remnant Jewish Community of Lithuania; second: to use your appearance to legitimize those events. After all, if a Yale professor and the head of Yivo are happy to appear the same week about the Holocaust and not come out publicly and firmly against the concurrent glorification of the collaborator, well, then it can’t be such a big deal…

It was sad that neither of you publicly condemned the Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis events during your symposium on the Holocaust in Lithuania. However, it did come up in an interviewer’s question to yourself.

According to the interview published on 15min.lt on 18 May 2012 (and for the sake of the Almighty, please do tell us if they misquoted you), your answer to the question about the repatriation, honoring and reburial of the Nazi puppet prime minister underway during your visit was as follows:

“I am going to choose my words very carefully here. I think before you rebury anyone, you should think very very hard and probably wait a very very long time because once you rebury somebody once, you can’t rebury them again.”
Is that really all you have to say to Lithuanian society, during your visit here, regarding the latest in a litany of government sponsored events to honor collaborators and perpetrators of the Lithuanian Holocaust and not seldom to use your own name and book as artillery?

During this past week, very courageous Lithuanian citizens (who remain here and may even have to face this or that consequence in their careers) have raised their proud voices in dignified protest. They include the members of parliament Vytenis Povilas Andriukaitis and Algirdas Sysas; member of the European Parliament Leonidas Donskis; political scientist Darius Udrys; former editor of the Jewish newspaper here, Milan Chersonski; dozens of Lithuanian citizens who have signed Krystyna Anna Steiger’s petition; and, not least, the small remnant Jewish community itself, which issued a bold statement in partnership with the Jewish museum.

As a famous professor soon returning to Yale, would it be too much respectfully to ask you to reconsider your public reaction to the week’s events. You can phrase this much more eloquently and elegantly. Here is just a first thought:

“There are certainly many historical complexities, but as a true friend of Lithuania, I have to tell you frankly that state financing of the honoring of a Nazi-puppet prime minister on whose watch the mass murder of Lithuanian Jewry got underway, one who actually signed orders separating out for persecution and worse those citizens who were Jewish, is the worst possible message your government could be sending. It is a tragic mistake, and if I had known it would coincide with my visit, I would have asked to come some other week out of respect for the victims of the Holocaust. As someone who passionately shares your cause of educating the West about Stalinist crimes, I have to tell you that this sort of thing undermines that noble effort through and through.”

Wishing you, as ever, the best of everything,

Dovid

Dovid Katz was visiting professor in Judaic studies at Yale in 1989-1999. From 1999 to 2010 he was professor of Yiddish language, literature and culture at Vilnius University, Lithuania. He is based in Vilnius, where he edits wwwDefendingHistory.com. His personal website is http://www.dovidkatz.net.

There are certainly many historical complexities…

Ya don’t say.

/P

There remain mysteries that need solving, because orthodox explanations do not suffice.

1] Why does religious scholarship know so little about the origins of the Cathars, eliminated by the Catholic crusaders?
2] Why does the Wandering Jew so closely resemble the Wandering Heretics of the Middle Ages? Why were they eliminated?
3] Why do the Latvians know nothing about the origins of their Children of Johns? Who eliminated and continues to eliminate them to this day?

It appears to me that the answer to all three (3) questions—when the questions will, at last, be reanalyzed, researched and discussed—will point to a common ancestor or closely related ancestors.

As for professor Dovid Katz’s letter, though I am profoundly sympathetic to his angst, I am not persuaded that his letter is more than orthodox rehash of matters not yet fully explained, because the background against which the horrors occured remain hazy and purposefully untouched by further research.

Peteris C.,
Reading those dense and exasperatingly contradictory history stories can be tedious.  Thanks for sharing that BLOODLANDS and Yale Historian Timothy Snyder’s writing are not up to your history and story-telling standards.  Moving along to a “Soviet story” that intersted you more, did you ever finish reading Jūlijas Kantores grāmatu “Baltija: karš bez noteikumiem”  - your LoL feature of some months ago (Karš bez noteikumiem)?

(From your link to Kaspars Zellis review)
Karš bez noteikumiem
Par Jūlijas Kantores grāmatu “Baltija: karš bez noteikumiem” Ю. Кантор. Прибалтика: война без правил (1939–1945). Санкт-Петербург: Журнал Звезда, 2011

Sanktpēterburgas A. Hercena Valsts pedagoģiskās universitātes profesore un Ermitāžas direktora padomniece Jūlija Kantore, vēsturniece, kuras monogrāfijas veltītas maršala Mihaila Tuhačevska personībai staļinisma periodā un Padomju Savienības un Vācijas slepenajai sadarbībai 20.–30. gados (Война и мир Михаила Тухачевского. Санкт-Петербург, 2008; Заклятая дружба: Секретное сотрудничество СССР и Германии в 1920–1930-е годы. Санкт-Петербург, 2009), bet 2011. gada nogalē klajā nāca arī autores un Polijas vēsturnieka Mariuša Volosa (Wołos) darbs, kas veltīts starpkaru perioda ārpolitikas jautājumiem (Ю. Кантор, М. Волос. Треугольник Москва – Варшава – Берлин. Санкт-Петербург, 2011). Tā kā pats esmu palīdzējis autorei, precizējot faktus par nacisma okupāciju Latvijā, es negribētu, ka šeit rakstītais tiktu uztverts kā kritiska recenzija.

K. Z. [my bold]

jandžs writes with disdain and no sympathy:

If the observations of the scientists are credible, then there ought to be a law against the provocation of old fears and attempts to rekindle distant remembrances of blood curdling events in times over half a century ago. At the present time, unfortunately, the swing is backward http://www.apollo.lv/portal/printit_v2/21628, not forward in time. I can imagine Timothy Snyder not as a historian, but an agent sent by NATO.

jandžs writes again, with “profound sympathy”:

As for professor Dovid Katz’s letter [to “Tim” - imagined as “agent sent by NATO” to jandzs] though I am profoundly sympathetic to his angst, I am not persuaded that his letter is more than orthodox rehash of matters not yet fully explained, because the background against which the horrors occured remain hazy and purposefully untouched by further research.

jandžs, what are the “blood curdling events” you’re thinking of - there were so many - and should we or should we not “rekindle distant remembrances of [which, if any] blood curdling events in time over half a century ago” - or should we do “further research” - of any?

Ambersun,
“Blood curdling events” mean to me the loss of eight family members to Stalin’s gulags. Five of them dead.
I’ve been at the gates of Buchenwald. I have made and given sandwiches to the victims.
I have been miliseconds close to death thanks to Allied bombs.
I have lived through WW2 and know the aftermath well.

Unless you state to the contrary, you are one of the ones the poet Milosz had in mind, re:  “the man of the East cannot take Americans [or other Westerners] seriously.” Because they hadn’t undergone such experiences, they couldn’t seem to fathom what they meant, and couldn’t seem to imagine how they had happened either. “Their resultant lack of imagination,” he concluded, “is appalling.

I am guessing that the only response to the horror that you understand is to further kindle hatered (specifically against Russians by harping, harping, harping on a harp that has no sound left but a scream), which continues to delay Latvia’s development in many areas by preventing the populace from unifying in a common effort (yes, I have also Russian ancestors). I also know Latvia from my nose rather close to the ground, not up in the air.