[Peace-discuss] Timothy Snyder-Yale historian as neocon

[David Green]

 ... the Cassandra’s warning Snyder launches simply reiterates the commonplaces of neoconservatism — the future will be a clash of civilizations and the West has to get ready for a new Crusade.According to Snyder:
Africa demonstrates the risk of local shortages, China suggests the problems of global power and national anxiety, and Russia shows how practices of the 1930s can come to seem like positive examples. Thanks in large measure to Moscow, state destruction and the construction of planetary enemies have returned to vogue in Europe. In the Middle East, states tend to be weak, and Islamic fundamentalists have long presented Jews, Americans, and Europeans as planetary enemies.
Russia, whose leader has taken “the head of populist, fascist, and neo-Nazi forces in Europe,” has invented a new scapegoat, the homosexuals, but the Jews themselves could become the victims of a second Holocaust, Snyder argues.Finally, Snyder brings his misguided political argument to a close by transforming his territorial history of statelessness into a spirited defense of Israel.“Zionists of all orientations were correct to believe that statehood was crucial to future national existence,” Snyder writes — but he fails to mention that this conclusion would seem to legitimate a demand for Palestinian statehood.For Snyder, this observation rather proves that Israelis are right to control water supplies in the West Bank, and Palestinians echo Nazis in their complaints: “Muslims might blame Jews for both local problems and the general ecological crisis; that was, after all, Hitler’s approach.”In Black Earth’s conclusion, Snyder turns into an admirer — equal parts naïve and dogmatic — of Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, and Benjamin Netanyahu — Israeli leaders he considers to be noble descendants of their ancestors, the heroic Polish nationalists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.The author of Bloodlands may have made important contributions to Holocaust historiography. But five years later, the prophet of Black Earth preaches Zionist and neoconservative platitudes, and obscures more history than he uncovers.
Warping History
  
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Warping History
 Timothy Snyder's Black Earth misuses the horrors of the Holocaust in the service of Zionist and neoconservat...  |  |

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