The Afterword of @TimothyDSnyder's "Bloodlands" makes staggeringly inaccurate statements. Portraying the #Holocaust as just one element of a territorially-determined phenomenon of mass killing in East Europe, Snyder plays down the extent of West and Central European victims. 1/
He asserts: "German Jews were not very numerous, and most of them survived." In fact, of Germany's pre-Third Reich population of approximately 525,000 Jews, an estimated 160,000 were murdered. The survivors consisted almost entirely of Jews who had left Germany before 1939. 2/
Snyder continues: "Ninety-seven percent of the Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust had nothing to do with German culture." A peculiar choice of words. Does this exclude Dutch Jews, of whom approximately 120,000 (out of a pre-war population of 140,000) were murdered? 3/
What about Austrian Jews, of whom approximately 65,000 out of 192,000 were killed? And in what category does Snyder place the Jews of France (90,000 killed), Belgium (30,000 killed), Hungary (over 500,000 killed), and Greece (67,000 killed)? 4/
Snyder minimizes the all-European scale of the Holocaust by placing primary emphasis not on the national origins of the victims, but on the location of the death camps to which they were deported. 5/
"Those German Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust died beyond the borders of prewar Germany, in places such as Łódz, Minsk, or Riga." /6
Thus, a German Jew transported to and gassed in an East European death camp becomes a victim of the "Bloodlands," where the deaths were the outcome of the interaction of the German and Soviet regimes. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union are equated and made equally responsible. 7/
This thesis has long been associated with pro-Nazi apologetics and anti-communism. Like all historical falsifications, Snyder's are sustained by bizarre claims and outright lies. 8/
Snyder writes: "Yet it was precisely in 'the East,' not in Germany, that Jews had lived in large numbers for hundreds of years." In fact, Jewish presence in German lands can be traced back more than 1,000 years. Jews played a significant role in Charlemagne's administration. 9/
Snyder also claims: "Ironically [!], most of the Jews the Germans wished to send to Auschwitz actually survived." He provides no evidence to support this extraordinary statement. Approximately 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were gassed in Auschwitz. 10/
Snyder writes: "The center of the Holocaust was east of Auschwitz, in the death facilities in occupied Poland and in the death pits of the occupied Soviet Union." But who decided to build the death camps, transport the Jews, and murder them? 11/
Snyder does not mention that the Nazi decision to exterminate the Jews was taken at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin in 1942. He also ignores the well-established fact that the Holocaust was inextricably linked to Hitler's "War of Extermination" against the USSR. 12/
He ignores pro-Nazi & anti-Semitic Ukrainian nationalism, thus making it impossible to explain the effectiveness of the Third Reich's genocidal campaign. There is not a single reference in the Afterword to Stepan Bandera and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). 13/
Snyder briefly notes the work of historian Saul Friedlander, but ignores what he has written about Ukrainian-Nazi collaboration in the extermination of the Jews. Friedlander cites grisly evidence of OUN participation in mass murder. 14/
The defining characteristics of Bandera's OUN, wrote Friedlander, were a "mixture of Christian beliefs, fascist policies, and savage murderousness." [The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945] 15/
Stepan Bandera is now glorified by the Ukrainian government as a national hero. Snyder once wrote at length about the crimes of the OUN. But that was before he abandoned the principles of genuine historical research and became a propagandist for US policy in Ukraine. 16/
There are many specialists in the field of #Holocaust studies who know that Snyder is covering up for the crimes of the Ukrainian nationalists. But they are intimidated by the anti-Russia campaign and dare not expose Snyder. Hopefully, some will soon decide to speak out. 17/17
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In a NY Times article titled, "After the fall of Mariupol, the fates of hundreds of fighters hangs in the balance," the following amazing sentence appears: 1/
"The Azov regiment has been given outsized coverage by the country’s [Russia's] state-run news media, and its connection with far-right movements gave a veneer of credibility to the Kremlin’s false claims that its forces were fighting Nazis in Ukraine." 2/
The #AzovBattalion does not merely have a "connection with far-right movements"; it is a large and powerful fascist force that has become a dominant element in Ukraine's military. 3/
The @nytimes is memorializing one million US #COVID19 deaths with a feature that combines excellent graphics with dishonest and cynical commentary. An opening section headline reads: "At the start of the pandemic, few understood how high the death toll might climb." False! 1/
Epidemiologists had been warning for years of the potentially devastating consequences of a pandemic. As early as January 2020, there was sufficient information available to know that the spread of #SARSCoV2 would exact a terrible human toll. 2/
On Jan 25, 2020, when only 2 cases had been reported in the US, the WSWS warned "that there are no coordinated global mechanisms in place to cope with a health crisis that could easily spiral out of the control of authorities, placing the lives of countless people in danger." 3/
Prime Minister #ScottMorrison has declared that the establishment of a Chinese naval base in the #SolomonIslands would be crossing a "red Line" for Australia. “We won’t be having Chinese military naval bases in our region on our doorstep.” 1/ thehill.com/policy/interna…
But how does Morrison's declaration, backed by the US, square with the US-NATO insistence that #Ukraine has an absolute and non-negotiable right to join its military alliance, regardless of Russia's objections? 2/
Morrison considers the Solomon Islands to be on the "doorstep" of Australia. Honiara, the capital of the Islands, is separated from Sydney by 2,858 kilometers of ocean water. That's a pretty big doorstep! 3/
This article, posted today on-line and printed in the NY Times Sunday Magazine, is yet another deplorable example of Professor Timothy Snyder's role as a historical falsifier and apologist for Ukrainian fascism. 1/
Snyder mockingly dismisses Russian references to Ukrainian nationalists' mass murder of Poles and Jews during World War II as "a past that never happened" and "nonsensical and necrophiliac accounts of history." 2/
But at an earlier stage of his career, Snyder wrote detailed accounts of the genocidal activities of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). His article, "The Causes of Ukrainian-Polish Ethnic Cleansing 1943," appeared in the May 2003 edition of Past and Present. 3/
The massive US-NATO arms shipments to #Ukraine️ are based on dangerous assumptions in Washington. The FT writes that the Biden administration's previous concerns about Russian retaliation "has been all but discarded." 1/ #UkraineRussiaWar
According to the FT: "There has also been a reassessment of the threat posed by Russia's nuclear arsenal, a sabre that Putin rattled early in the war but which analysts now believe he is unlikely to deploy." On what is this assumption based? What if they are wrong? 2/
Boasting publicly about the Javelin missiles and other advanced weaponry the US and NATO are pouring into Ukraine, Biden is either assuming that Russia won't attack the convoys or, more likely, is actually seeking to provoke an attack. In either case, he is acting recklessly. 3/
Within weeks of the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, it became clear that the claim that Saddam Hussein's had developed weapons of mass destruction -- the critical justification of the war -- was a lie that had been concocted by the Bush administration. 1/ #Propaganda
The #NYTimes, which had propagated the WMD lies, manufactured, ex post facto, another justification for the war. On April 25, 2003, it published a front page photo of a skull, which it claimed was of a political prisoner murdered by the Iraqi regime. 2/
Two days later, on April 27, Thomas L. Friedman wrote a column titled, "The Meaning of a Skull." He claimed that the discovery of the skull rendered the issue of WMDs irrelevant. 3/