This originally appeared as comments under my last post titled "An
American 'Revisionist' Historian" by Dermokrat, who buttresses his
arguments with passages from Jacques Pauwel’s essential "Myth of
the Good War". Since it a major contribution to the discussion, I
wanted to make sure that it received the widest attention.
Hi Louis,
I actually posted Kotz’s article on my facebook a while back,
although not because of his refutation of Snyder, but because of
his worthy condemnation of fanatic, anti-Soviet Baltic
nationalism. Nevertheless, one of my friends took me to task over
Katz’s argument vis-a-vis Snyder. I didn’t actually read the
response by Snyder before I posted Katz’s commentary. My friend
quickly pointed out that Snyder notes in his rebuttal:
I didn’t and don’t equate Hitler and Stalin. Katz puts ‘somewhat
equal’ in quotations, but I never use any such phrase. Zuroff says
that I ‘posit’ that the Soviet Union was Nazi Germany; I most
certainly do no such thing. What I try to do, in the 28 September
article and generally, is understand what it means for a vast east
European territory and several east European peoples to have been
touched by both Nazi and Soviet power. Despite some critical
remarks of Bloodlands in an otherwise perceptive and generous
(London) Times review of 26 September, which perhaps Zuroff and
Katz read, I don’t equate Stalin with Hitler in that book either.
Instead, 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 that both Hitler and Stalin were in power.
He then pointed out that Katz undermines his own argument that
Snyder fails to distinguish between the two when he writes:
And finally, it is not possible to ignore Snyder’s certainty that
‘Jews could not help but see the return of Soviet power as a
liberation. Soviet policy was not especially friendly to Jews, but
it was obviously better than a Holocaust.’
Indeed, in his rejoinder, Snyder writes: “I am not saying that
[Soviet atrocities] were equivalent to the Holocaust. I am saying
that a number of German and Soviet policies meet the standard of
genocide.”
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/11/24/a-guest-post-on-timothy-snyder/
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