Author Topic: Black Earth  (Read 1070 times)

hubag bohol

  • AMBASSADOR
  • THE SOURCE
  • *****
  • Posts: 89964
  • "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool...
    • View Profile
Black Earth
« on: September 09, 2015, 04:07:58 PM »
...than to speak out and remove all doubt." - Abraham Lincoln

Book your travel tickets anywhere in the world, go to www.12go.co

unionbank online loan application low interest, credit card, easy and fast approval

hubag bohol

  • AMBASSADOR
  • THE SOURCE
  • *****
  • Posts: 89964
  • "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool...
    • View Profile
Re: Black Earth
« Reply #1 on: September 09, 2015, 04:11:57 PM »
Timothy Snyder’s ‘Black Earth’ Puts Holocaust, and Himself, in Spotlight
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
http://www.nytimes.com/
SEPT. 7, 2015


NEW HAVEN — When Timothy Snyder’s book “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin” was published in 2010, it quickly established its author as one of the leading historians of his generation, a scholar who combined formidable linguistic skills — he reads or speaks 11 languages — with an elegant literary style, white-hot moral passion and a willingness to start arguments about some of the most fraught questions of the recent past.

It also established Mr. Snyder, 46, as a rising public intellectual unafraid to make bold connections between past and present, most notably in his full-throated defense of Ukraine in the face of what he has called Russian president Vladimir V. Putin’s “assault on European history.”

Those two sides of Mr. Snyder’s work are fused in his new book, “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning.” Here, Mr. Snyder aims to offer a radically new explanation of the Nazi genocide grounded in Hitler’s belief in a global ecological crisis caused by the Jews, while also sounding an alarm about how our own era of environmental disruption could lead to similar orgies of violence.

“Black Earth,” published on Tuesday by Tim Duggan Books, arrives at a moment when the images of desperate refugees crowding European train stations carry painful echoes of the World War II era. But the story he tells also cuts against some widely held beliefs about the Holocaust, and that’s Mr. Snyder’s intention, too.

“I worry that the history of the Holocaust, even as it’s become more widely acknowledged as important, has also lost some of its sharpness,” Mr. Snyder said during an interview in his office here at Yale, where he has taught since 2001.

“It’s become much less about causes, and much more about pictures and remembering and honoring,” he continued. “What honoring leads to is a lot of respectful silence. That has its place, but it doesn’t generate knowledge.”

Linkback: https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=80924.0
...than to speak out and remove all doubt." - Abraham Lincoln

Book your travel tickets anywhere in the world, go to www.12go.co

hubag bohol

  • AMBASSADOR
  • THE SOURCE
  • *****
  • Posts: 89964
  • "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool...
    • View Profile
Re: Black Earth
« Reply #2 on: September 09, 2015, 04:14:50 PM »
Mr. Snyder has already been credited with powerfully reframing the darkest chapter of the 20th century. “Bloodlands” situated the Holocaust in the context of the 14 million civilians, by Mr. Snyder’s count, who were murdered or deliberately starved in the contested territory between the Baltics and the Black Sea from 1933 to 1945, thus putting an event often sealed off in quasi-mystical uniqueness squarely in historical context. Translated into more than 25 languages, the book stirred multiple debates in multiple countries, perhaps most intensely in Eastern Europe, where it has figured in highly politicized arguments about collaboration, national suffering and how to weigh the crimes of Hitler against those of Stalin.

“Black Earth,” whose American edition arrives with ringing endorsements from Henry A. Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Leon Wieseltier, among others, seems poised to generate a fresh round of argument, in scholarly circles and beyond.

“I don’t agree with everything in ‘Black Earth,’ ” said Deborah Lipstadt, a historian of the Holocaust at Emory University who also wrote a blurb for Mr. Snyder’s book. “But he’s such a bold and serious and incisive thinker and writer, he makes me go back and reassess what I think I’m sure of.”

“Black Earth” presents a complicated braid of arguments, building on ideas already present in “Bloodlands.” Reviewers have already begun picking apart one of Mr. Snyder’s central, and most counterintuitive, claims: that the Holocaust depended crucially not on Hitler’s creation of an all-powerful German state but on his determination to create zones of statelessness in the territories he conquered, thus clearing the way for slaughter.

However, among Mr. Snyder’s English-language readers, perhaps no subject has been more fraught than his treatment of popular anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, which some scholars have said he plays down as a causal factor in the Holocaust.

Linkback: https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=80924.0
...than to speak out and remove all doubt." - Abraham Lincoln

Book your travel tickets anywhere in the world, go to www.12go.co

unionbank online loan application low interest, credit card, easy and fast approval

hubag bohol

  • AMBASSADOR
  • THE SOURCE
  • *****
  • Posts: 89964
  • "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool...
    • View Profile
Re: Black Earth
« Reply #3 on: September 09, 2015, 04:15:33 PM »
The historian Omer Bartov, reviewing “Bloodlands” in the journal Slavic Review, put it bluntly, saying the book was “permeated by a persistent pro-Polish bias,” and failed to account for “the willing collaboration of thousands of locals who proclaimed the cleansing of their land of Jews as a national duty.”

Some early reviews of “Black Earth” have lodged similar criticisms. Writing in The National Interest, the historian David A. Bell said that Mr. Snyder highlights efforts by non-Communist Poles to resist the Nazis and help Jews while arguing — with little empirical support, in Mr. Bell’s view — that those East Europeans who helped carry out the Holocaust were disproportionately former Communist collaborators looking to shift blame for their own behavior onto Jews.

The result, Mr. Bell said in an interview, is a “strange imbalance.”

“There’s a very strong focus again and again on former Communists and on the actions of the former Soviet Union, which were obviously absolutely horrific,” Mr. Bell said. “But what ultimately saved those Jews who survived was the Red Army.”

When asked about the role of popular anti-Semitism, Mr. Snyder, who is a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Committee on Conscience, reiterated his belief that animus toward Jews, while widespread in prewar Poland and elsewhere, simply does not explain how the Nazi genocide started, the forms it took or who participated.

“There are arguments in this book that are clearly not my effort to win a popularity contest,” he added dryly.

And he sharply challenged the charge of bias. If anything, he said, scholarship of the Holocaust has been too dominated by German-language sources and by an “ethnic shorthand,” itself traceable to the Nazis, that obscures more than it illuminates.

“Our shorthand for talking about this stuff has been Poles and Jews, Germans and Jews,” Mr. Snyder said. “I think it should be states, institutions, micro-level sociological explanations, economic behavior.”

Linkback: https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=80924.0
...than to speak out and remove all doubt." - Abraham Lincoln

Book your travel tickets anywhere in the world, go to www.12go.co

hubag bohol

  • AMBASSADOR
  • THE SOURCE
  • *****
  • Posts: 89964
  • "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool...
    • View Profile
Re: Black Earth
« Reply #4 on: September 09, 2015, 04:16:25 PM »
Paradoxically, he continued, while Germans were “the most responsible by far” for the Holocaust, Germany is generally viewed as having a complexity and variety not as readily granted to Eastern European nations.

“Everyone accepts that Germany is a real place with a real society and a real culture,” he said. “With Poland, with Lithuania, with Hungary, that’s much less true. Knowledge of those places is much less widespread.”

Mr. Snyder, who is married to Marci Shore, a fellow East European historian at Yale, dates his passion for the region to his undergraduate years at Brown University, when he watched the post-1989 revolutions with fascination. “I took what was going on totally literally and seriously and personally,” he said.

Colleagues credit Mr. Snyder with insistently bringing East European voices from the margins to the center of the broader academic and political conversation, a mission he shared with his mentor and friend Tony Judt, who died in 2010.

“The work he’s done to bring research from the region to English-speaking audiences has been tremendous,” said Paul Hanebrink, an associate professor at Rutgers University who is working on a book about anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe.

Linkback: https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=80924.0
...than to speak out and remove all doubt." - Abraham Lincoln

Book your travel tickets anywhere in the world, go to www.12go.co

hubag bohol

  • AMBASSADOR
  • THE SOURCE
  • *****
  • Posts: 89964
  • "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool...
    • View Profile
Re: Black Earth
« Reply #5 on: September 09, 2015, 04:16:48 PM »
That effort took on a more urgent dimension during the 2014 Ukraine crisis, when Mr. Snyder, a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, emerged as a leading interpreter and champion of the country’s pro-European revolution. His impassioned advocacy has made him a hero to many in Ukraine, where he and Mr. Wieseltier convened a conference of leading European and American intellectuals in May 2014, two months after the Russian annexation of Crimea, as a show of solidarity.

But Mr. Snyder is hardly universally celebrated in Eastern Europe. He has come under fire in a number of countries, including Ukraine, he notes, for challenging what he calls the “exaggerated” death tolls from Soviet crimes offered by some government-sanctioned scholars, among other challenges to nationalist history.

As for those on the American left who have accused him of glossing over far-right elements in the Ukrainian revolution, Mr. Snyder attributes the underlying claim to a Russian misinformation campaign that painted protesters on Maidan Square in Kiev as the heirs of National Socialism.

Too many Western intellectuals, Mr. Snyder said, “got pushed around by a really effective propaganda apparatus while a good deal of architecture of European peace and prosperity got taken down.”

In the conclusion of “Black Earth,” Mr. Snyder reiterates the central importance of Ukraine, arguing that Mr. Putin’s annexation of Crimea and depiction of Ukraine as “an artificial entity” backed by “Jews, gays, Europeans and Americans” carries dangerous echoes of Hitler in the late 1930s.

But Mr. Snyder also offers a wider-angled warning, arguing, in language verging on the prophetic, that political actors in any number of places — China, the Middle East, Africa — might blame very real environmental crises on imaginary global enemies, possibly setting the stage for another Holocaust. (He also has harsh words for those on the American right who “fantasize about destroying governments.”) To colleagues who might caution against speculating about the future when the past itself is hard enough to understand, Mr. Snyder offered a pre-emptive riposte.

“It’s easy for historians to say, ‘It’s not our job to write the future,’ ” he said. “Yes, right. But then whose job is it?”

Linkback: https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=80924.0
...than to speak out and remove all doubt." - Abraham Lincoln

Book your travel tickets anywhere in the world, go to www.12go.co

unionbank online loan application low interest, credit card, easy and fast approval

Tags: