PSEUDO-REVISIONIST IN THE MOST PEJORATIVE SENSE

A Professor Timothy Snyder has written a book, "Bloodlands", arguing the thesis that the two world wars in Eastern Europe, particularly the Second World War, made the area comprising Poland, the Baltic countries, Ukraine and Russia the genocide fields of the twentieth century. Although one can hardly argue the general thesis, the specifics of Professor Snyder's argument leave much to be desired. He is Jewish and thus endorses the Holocaust myth. However, it is obvious that Professor Snyder is acquainted with the "denial" literature. He asserts that the original Nazi plan was to deport Jews, first to Madagascar and later to Russia. Supposedly, the Nazis only turned to mass murdering Jews by the millions when the war started to go sour. No evidence is adduced for the claim. How the Germans could have murdered millions of Jews while simultaneously deploying limited forces against the overwhelming might of the Red Army is a logistical problem left unexplained. Professor Snyder is careful to say that the Jews were killed by "gas chambers" and bullets. This careful choice of words is no doubt a concession to unacknowledged research that has disproved the "gas chambers".

Snyder devotes a great deal of space in "Bloodlands" to the comparative kill totals of the Nazis and Soviets. In the process he demonstrates his servility to historical legend while trying to write "historical truth". Thus, he claims that the Nazis deliberately starved to death millions of Soviet POW's to death. He thus ignores the Soviet policy of scorched earth warfare, in which the retreating Red Army destroyed all food and grain stocks to hinder the advancing Germans. Thus, Professor Snyder blames the Germans for a crime committed by the Soviets against their own troops. Professor Snyder, in his eagerness to describe a German rampage in Russia, seems curiously unaware that more and more historians, including Russian ones, are documenting that Stalin was planning his own attack before Hitler struck first. Timothy Snyder waxes very poetic over the fate of Poland. This follows a well-established apologetic of both left and right wing writers of portraying the Poles as innocent victims. This historical mythology ignores the merciless persecution by the Poles of all the ethnic minorities within their territories, not just the Germans, as well as their rejection of the pre-war peace offers by Hitler and the Poles own well-documented belligerence.

"Bloodlands" is not totally without merit. Snyder acknowledges Stalin's mass murders but employs the standard ivory tower tactic of trying to minimize them. Thus, the great Ukrainian famine is downsized from the more probable seven to ten million victims to an alleged three million. The Jewish involvement in Communism is acknowledged but passed off as a reaction to "anti-Semitism". The Balts are blamed for liquidating Jews as soon as the Germans invaded but at least the massacres of the retreating Jewish NKVD commissars are mentioned too. Timothy Snyder honestly acknowledges the great liars on behalf of Communism like the journalists Walter Duranty and Louis Fischer. Still, he seems to feel that somehow the Jews were the main victims of the "bloodlands" of Eastern Europe. Perhaps this is implicit, unconscious racism which holds that Jewish suffering is worse than anybody else's suffering; perhaps it is a reluctance to delve more deeply into the behavior of the Jewish commissars. In short, Timothy Snyder has done a half-way job with the facts. He cannot be accused of whitewashing the facts completely but as a genuine attempt to get behind the real issues of Eastern Europe between two world wars, his work is pseudo-revisionist in the most pejorative sense.

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