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Post by dodger on Aug 23, 2013 9:15:23 GMT
Anti-Semitic propaganda, October 9, 2012
This William Podmore review is from: Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Paperback)
Grover Furr writes about Snyder, "in Bloodlands and recent articles Prof. Snyder propounds the anti-Semitic historical misrepresentation of today's Polish, Baltic and Ukrainian nationalist regimes. ... virtually everything Snyder has to say about Soviet history of this period is false.
Dovid Katz, expert on the Holocaust in the Balkans, has written that Snyder's work echoes Baltic historical revisionism by `almost' equating liberators - the Soviet Union - with the Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust while persecuting former Jewish partisans who fought Baltic fascists in Soviet partisan formations and praising the local fascists who murdered Jews and fought the Soviets. Concerning Poland, Snyder also repeats the historical lies of the anti-Semitic Home Army (Armia Krajowa) of the wartime `London' Polish regime - lies that are taught as `truth' in Poland today.
Today's Baltic, Ukrainian, and Polish elites apologize for their crimes by comparing the Nazis with Stalin's Soviet Union as `parallel' mass murderers. To do this they have to fabricate fraudulent tales of Soviet `atrocities' or recycle Nazi propaganda. Snyder repeats these falsehoods as fact.
My own concern is with Snyder's falsification of Soviet history. Virtually every `fact' Snyder cites is false and long since disproven. Here are just a few of them:
* Snyder repeats the `Holodomor' myth: that the Soviets `deliberately starved' to death more than 3 million Ukrainians. NO reputable scholar of the famine accepts this fable today. The `Holodomor' myth was invented by the Nazis and their Ukrainian Nationalist allies during the 1930s. Today it is the Ukrainian nationalists' `cover story' to justify their siding with the Nazis against the Soviets - and their participation in murdering millions of Ukrainian Jews.
* Snyder repeats Polish nationalist lies about the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939. He falsely claims the Nazis and Soviets were `military allies'; that German and Soviet troops `jointly' invaded Poland and held a `joint victory parade.' All false! Winston Churchill praised the Soviets for entering Eastern Poland thereby preventing the Nazi army from reaching the Soviet border. There was no `joint victory parade', as the memoirs of both the German and Soviet generals, Guderian and Krivoshein, attest. There was no `Soviet-German alliance.' Soviet neutrality was recognized by every Allied government. In addition, the only part of `Poland' occupied by the Red Army was Western Ukraine-Belorussia, had been taken by conquest from Russia in 1920.
* Official Polish anti-Semitism before, during, and after WW2 is actively denied by Polish nationalists today. Snyder aids them by scarcely mentioning it. Instead he attacks the Soviets. This is all wrong.
In his memoir Menachem Begin wrote: `the Soviet Government fought anti-Semitism with characteristic pertinacity... The truth is that the Soviet Government is anti-anti-Semitic.' (White Nights 1951) Dovid Katz writes:
... in 1944, the USSR did liberate these lands from Nazi dominion, and they did bring freedom to the tiny remaining remnant of the targeted-for-extinction races. From the day the Holocaust started here, in June 1941, the Soviets were often the only hope of escape for members of a doomed race, whether by fleeing eastward before Nazi control was firmly established in the first week after 22 June that year, or, by evading the ghettos to link up with the Soviet supported anti-Nazi partisans in the forests.
* Snyder falsely claims that the Soviets `tortured the Polish Home Army's best officers and hanged its last commander.' The facts are different. Okulicki, the last Home Army commander, admitted to setting up an armed anti-Soviet underground inside the USSR, and died in prison. Home Army terrorists went around killing people in Western Ukraine and Belorussia until 1963; the Soviets did torture some of them during interrogation.
* Snyder states: "When the Germans, like the Soviets, specifically targeted educated Poles in 1939-41, that was genocide." This is completely false - an example of the `redefinition of genocide' that Katz exposes and deplores. The Soviets never `targeted educated Poles.'
* Snyder: "In early 1940, the German leadership tried to persuade its Soviet ally to take two million Jews from Polish territory; Stalin refused." False! The documents in question state that the Nazis offered to forcibly send the Jews of Germany - there were, at most, only 214,000 left - to the USSR. None had volunteered to be shipped to the USSR. Meanwhile in 1939 the USA and Canada refused to accept 930 Jewish refugees from Germany on the infamous `Voyage of the Damned' (the SS St Louis). And, of course, the USSR was never an `ally' of Nazi Germany -- this is the Polish nationalist falsification again.
*Snyder repeats the Polish Nationalist - and Nazi - version of the `Katyn massacre' of Polish prisoners that the Nazis blamed on `Jewish Bolsheviks.' He fails to mention the important historical controversy over who killed these Poles. The American Historical Association states that to inform one's readers about such controversies is the duty of every historian. (For details see my Katyn web page at [...] )
* Snyder criticizes the Bielski Jewish partisan group for collaborating with Soviet partisans and the Red Army against the Polish Home Army. But Snyder's source Bernhard Chiari attests to the Home Army's murderous anti-Semitism.
* Snyder claims the Soviets `betrayed' the Polish Home Army `who were fighting, like themselves, against Nazi Germany.' In reality, the Home Army fought against the Red Army and attacked Jewish as well as Soviet partisans. Snyder's own source (Chiari) shows this, but Snyder never tells his readers.
*Snyder claims the Red Army refused to aid the Home Army when the latter started the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 and tries to blame the Soviets for the German murder of 100,000 Warsaw residents and the city's destruction. Polish Nationalists invented this lie to hide the fact that Home Army commanders knew they never had a chance but led the people of Warsaw to the slaughter anyway.
* Snyder writes: `As for the women who joined the partisans, perhaps it is enough to say that the standard form of address in the Soviet camps was `whore.'' This is a lie. Snyder's own source, German historian Bernhard Chiari, says that partisans generally, not Soviet partisans, `often' called women `whores.' Chiari also notes that (a) the Home Army often fought against Jewish partisans to the point of `complete annihilation', while Jewish men often fought in the ranks of Soviet partisans; (b) Soviet partisan leaders regarded anti-Semitism in their ranks as seriously as looting and rape. Not even Snyder can claim the Home Army fought anti-Semitism - the Home Army was anti-Semitic!
* Snyder claims that 70,000 Jews were deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia in 1940, of whom about 1/3 died. This is false. All of these 70,000 fugitives - we don't know how many were Jews -- were sent to work in cities and towns, or in the lumber industry. There is no evidence that `about 1/3 died'."
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Post by dodger on Aug 23, 2013 14:35:37 GMT
This piece by Seumas Milne was in the Guardian
"Fed by the revival of the nationalist right in eastern Europe and a creeping historical revisionism that tries to equate Nazism and communism, some western historians and commentators have seized on the 70th anniversary of Hitler's invasion of Poland this month to claim the Soviet Union was equally to blame for the outbreak of war. Stalin was "Hitler's accomplice", the Economist insisted, after Russian and Polish politicians traded accusations over the events of the late 1930s.
In his introduction to this week's Guardian history of the war, the neoconservative historian Niall Ferguson declared that Stalin was "as much an aggressor as Hitler". Last month, the ostensibly more liberal Orlando Figes went further, insisting the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact was "the licence for the Holocaust".
Given that the Soviet Union played the decisive military role in Hitler's defeat at the cost of 25 million dead, it's scarcely surprising that Russians are outraged by such accusations. When the Russian president Dmitry Medvedev last week denounced attempts to draw parallels between the role of the Nazis and the Soviet Union as a "cynical lie", he wasn't just speaking for his government, but the whole country – and a good deal of the rest of the world besides.
There's no doubt that the pact of August 1939 was a shocking act of realpolitik by the state that had led the campaign against fascism since before the Spanish civil war. You can argue about how Stalin used it to buy time, his delusions about delaying the Nazi onslaught, or whether the Soviet occupation of the mainly Ukrainian and Byelorussian parts of Poland was, as Churchill maintained at the time, "necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace".
But to claim that without the pact there would have been no war is simply absurd – and, in the words of the historian Mark Mazower, "too tainted by present day political concerns to be taken seriously". Hitler had given the order to attack and occupy Poland much earlier. As fellow historian Geoff Roberts puts it, the pact was an "instrument of defence, not aggression".
That was a good deal less true of the previous year's Munich agreement, in which British and French politicians dismembered Czechoslovakia at the Nazi dictator's pleasure. The one pact that could conceivably have prevented war, a collective security alliance with the Soviet Union, was in effect blocked by the appeaser Chamberlain and an authoritarian Polish government that refused to allow Soviet troops on Polish soil.
Poland had signed its own non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany and seized Czech territory, which puts last week's description by the Polish president Lech Kaczynski of a Soviet "stab in the back" in perspective. The case against the Anglo-French appeasers and the Polish colonels' regime over the failure to prevent war is a good deal stronger than against the Soviet Union, which perhaps helps to explain the enthusiasm for the new revisionism in both parts of the continent.
But across eastern Europe, the Baltic republics and the Ukraine, the drive to rewrite history is being used to relativise Nazi crimes and rehabilitate collaborators. At the official level, it has focused on a campaign to turn August 23 – the anniversary of the non-aggression pact – into a day of commemoration for the victims of communism and Nazism.
In July that was backed by the Organisation of Security and Cooperation in Europe, following a similar vote in the European parliament and a declaration signed by Vaclav Havel and others branding "communism and Nazism as a common legacy" of Europe that should be jointly commemorated because of "substantial similarities".
That east Europeans should want to remember the deportations and killings of "class enemies" by the Soviet Union during and after the war is entirely understandable. So is their pressure on Russia to account, say, for the killing of Polish officers at Katyn – even if Soviet and Russian acknowledgment of Stalin's crimes already goes far beyond, for example, any such apologies by Britain or France for the crimes of colonialism.
But the pretence that Soviet repression reached anything like the scale or depths of Nazi savagery – or that the postwar "enslavement" of eastern Europe can be equated with wartime Nazi genocide – is a mendacity that tips towards Holocaust denial. It is certainly not a mistake that could have been made by the Auschwitz survivors liberated by the Red Army in 1945.
The real meaning of the attempt to equate Nazi genocide with Soviet repression is clearest in the Baltic republics, where collaboration with SS death squads and direct participation in the mass murder of Jews was at its most extreme, and politicians are at pains to turn perpetrators into victims. Veterans of the Latvian Legion of the Waffen-SS now parade through Riga, Vilnius's Museum of Genocide Victims barely mentions the 200,000 Lithuanian Jews murdered in the Holocaust and Estonian parliamentarians honour those who served the Third Reich as "fighters for independence".
Most repulsively of all, while rehabilitating convicted Nazi war criminals, the state prosecutor in Lithuania – a member of the EU and Nato – last year opened a war crimes investigation into four Lithuanian Jewish resistance veterans who fought with Soviet partisans: a case only abandoned for lack of evidence. As Efraim Zuroff, veteran Nazi hunter and director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, puts it: "People need to wake up to what is going on. This attempt to create a false symmetry between communism and the Nazi genocide is aimed at covering up these countries' participation in mass murder."
As the political heirs of the Nazis' collaborators in eastern Europe gain strength on the back of growing unemployment and poverty, and anti-Semitism and racist violence against Roma grow across the region, the current indulgence of historical falsehoods about the second world war can only spread this poison."
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Post by dodger on Nov 6, 2013 8:19:57 GMT
Reviewed by Will Podmore
Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, by Timothy Snyder, hardback, 524 pages, ISBN 978-0-224-08141-2, The Bodley Head, 2010, £25.
Timothy Snyder is Professor of History at Yale University. This is a hugely biased book, in which he tries to equate fascism and anti-fascism, Nazism and communism, the attacker and the attacked.
His first lie occurs just five lines in - “Stalin was deliberately starving Soviet Ukraine.”Next he lies that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were ‘allies’.Then he lies that “Stalin allowed Hitler to begin a war.” And then he lies about the ‘joint German-Soviet invasion of Poland’.
But gradually during the book some truth creeps in. His first true statement is, “Ninety per cent of those who entered the Gulag left it alive.” And on the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland, he writes, “Usually the Red Army behaved well …” He writes of “Soviet deportations, which, deadly as they were, preserved Polish Jews from German bullets.” And he remarks, “unlike Hitler, Stalin did not understand ‘resettlement’ as a euphemism for mass killing.”
Snyder notes the extent of Eastern European collaboration with the Nazi invaders. Leading Ukrainian nationalists gathered intelligence for the SS intelligence service. He observes, “In the Baltics, Ukraine and Poland, some partisans were openly anti-Semitic, and continued to use the Nazi tactic of associating Soviet power with Jewry.” In July 1941, Lithuanians killed 2,500 Jews. But helping Hitler did not save them: by December, 133,346 Lithuanians had been killed, including 114,856 Jews.
In Latvia, 69,750 Jews were killed. The Arajs Commando burned Jews alive in the Riga synagogue.
“Estonians from the Self-Defence Commando killed all 963 Estonian Jews who could be found, at German orders.” 5,000 Estonianswere killed for supposedly collaborating with the Soviet Union.
In east Poland, in June 1941, local militias killed 19,655 Jews.Snyder notes that in 1943, “units of the Home Army sometimes shot armed Jews in the countryside as bandits. In a few cases, Home Army soldiers killed Jews in order to steal their property.” Romania killed 300,000 Jews.
He comments of the Red Army’s behaviour in Germany in 1945, “The behavior of many Soviet soldiers was certainly tolerated by the high command and expected by Stalin; the Red Army would not have been in Germany, however, had the Wehrmacht not invaded the Soviet Union.”
And he generously writes that Communists “could rightly say that few people in the West appreciated the role of the Red Army in the defeat of the Wehrmacht, and the suffering that the peoples of eastern Europe endured under German occupation.”
He writes, rather naively, “People who called others subhuman were themselves subhuman …”
He makes some good points about reactionary historians’ inflating numbers killed, writing, “Even so, the independent Ukrainian state has sometimes displayed the politics of exaggeration. In Ukraine, which was a major site of both Stalin’s famine of 1932-1933 and the Holocaust in 1941-1944, the number of Ukrainians killed in the former has been exaggerated to exceed the total number of Jews killed in the latter. Between 2005 and 2009, Ukrainian historians connected to state institutions repeated the figure of ten million deaths in the famine, without any attempt at demonstration.”
He observes, “German journalists and (some) historians, however, have exaggerated the number of Germans killed during wartime and postwar evacuation, flight, or deportation since the end of the Second World War. Figures of one or even two million deaths are still cited, with no demonstration.
As long ago as 1974, a report of West German archives placed the number of deaths of Germans who fled or were deported from Poland at about four hundred thousand; it was suppressed because the numbers were too low to serve the political purpose of documenting victimhood. This report also estimated deaths of Germans from Czechoslovakia at two hundred thousand. According to a joint report of Czech and German historians, this second figure is exaggerated by a factor of about ten. So the figure of four hundred thousand Germans killed leaving Poland … is perhaps better regarded as a maximum than a minimum.”
And he points out, “The experience of the fleeing, evacuated, and deported Germans was not, however, comparable to that of the ten million Polish, Soviet, Lithuanian, and Latvian citizens, Jews and others, who were subject to deliberate German policies of mass murder. Ethnic cleansing and mass killing, though related in a number of ways, are not the same thing. Even at their worst, the horrors visited on Germans in flight or during deportation were not mass killing policies …”
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