Talk:Bloodlands/@comment-82.39.146.153-20150121152946

The distorted text (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/09/timothy-snyders-lies/) of Daniel Lazare about Snyder's book needs reply:

>>And so Snyder can have Hitler and Stalin collaborating in one another’s crimes at a time when they were at each other’s throat without pausing to explain how that could possibly be.<<

--- I understand, Daniel, that your agenda is to whiten Stalin. I hope you do not do that for supporting Israel cause you would a lot of harm to Jews doing this. Also I hope it is not pro-Stalin sentiment revived by Putin’s to support his neo-colonialism or fascism as you please.



>>If Poles, Balts, and Ukrainians engaged in massive anti-Jewish pogroms following the German invasion, in other words, it is not their fault but that of the Communists.<<

--- You diverted the facts. We do not know if the Second World War ever happened without cooperation of Soviets. We are talking here not about Communist activists here but the members of the Soviet machine run by Stalin. His first victims were in fact Communists all over the Europe.



>>‘he [Snyder] fails to mention Dmowski’s fierce anti-Semitism or note how far back it extended’<<

– We need not to exclude Dmowski from his context. He was a product of his mental dependence to Russia as ally and to idea of a kind of Slavic solidarity. His vision never prevailed in Polish society except during the dark age of communist era as communists served nationalist view of the country which we seen in 1968 events. On the other hand, Dmowski was a part of reacting to anti-Polsh attitude in big part of Jewish Diaspora (Jews were never anti-Polish?) and to German projects as those of territorially crippled post war (I World War) Poland as in the concept of Judeo-Polonia.

It is strange and nasty to excuse or justify actions of Stalin and Hitler with verbal anti-Semitism of Dmowski (which was nothing more than anti-Polonism expressed by many Jewish that time) and it is a decency of a historian, journalist and also a person that should stop the author to compare as you would not compare premeditated killer with a member of your family, not more troublesome than you.



>>Anti-Semitism was in fact far fiercer in Poland than in Germany from the early 1920s on and built steadily throughout the interwar period — before the non-aggression pact, in other words, rather than after. Where the Nazis were disappointed by the tepid public response to the Kristallnacht pogroms in November 1938, for instance, Poland saw major outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence in some ninety-seven towns and cities between 1935 and 1937 alone. Polish anti-Semitism clearly had a life of its own.<<

--- This is simply ridiculous to whiten Germans and their state. What was the scale of anti-Jewish incidents you should now as a historian; you should also know that many cities in Poland had majority of Jewish citizens, often there was a social conflict as its basis. In the same time similar anti-Semitism was not less popular in the UK and the USA and exactly like in Poland it was never stronger than in Germany and never represented and organized so much as by German sate. Again anti-Semitism was not there a part of organized mafia machine which prevailed. So do you think NAZI were Poles? Ignorance of your text is extreme and you really should not call it historical.



>>In fact, as the London-based government in exile well knew, the mood in wartime Poland was poisonous. In December 1939, an official with Poland’s underground Home Army informed London that “Jews are so horribly persecuting Poles and everything that is connected to Polishness under the Soviet partition. . . that at the first opportunity all the Poles here, from the elderly to the women and children, will take such a horrible revenge on the Jews, as no anti-Semite has ever imagined possible.”<<

--- You know exactly why this terrified report was done. If you listened to the witnesses: Jewish, who were exploited by Soviets as an active part of soviet occupation and guerrilla, how they perceived local population it would terrify you, knowing what deadly machine they were cooperating and fighting for. Retaliation could be imminent as the retaliation against NAZI after occupation of France.

<p class="MsoNormal">

<p class="MsoNormal">>>In the eastern forests and marshlands, members of the fascist Narodowe Siły Zbrojne (NSZ), or National Armed Forces, attacked Russians and Jews no less than Germans, while the Home Army, which absorbed the NSZ in 1943, declared war on “Jewish bands in the forests [that] were robbing and looting the peasants.” They were referring to Jewish escapees scrounging for food. In one incident, the Armia Krajowa (AK),as the Home Army was known in Polish, attacked a dozen members of the all-Jewish “Bielski partisans” returning from a foraging expedition, killing all but one.<<

<p class="MsoNormal">--- Foraging expedition? We are not always talking about heroes but often about organized Soviet system killers’ tools. Also Bielski family, even if having problems with Soviets themselves after the war, as other Soviet guerrilla members and supporters were accused of waging terror and murders.

<p class="MsoNormal">

<p class="MsoNormal">>>The Armia Krajowa also attacked Belarusians, killing some 1,200 in and around the city of Lida in late 1943, and engaged in a full-scale civil war with Lithuanian nationalist partisans in and around Vilnius and Navahrudak in 1943–4. None of this shows up in Bloodlands, which is only interested in the AK as victim of the Soviets.<<

<p class="MsoNormal">---There were single incidents of war crimes in the case of Home Army and not organized actions if you study documents, war crimes happened in American Army or other armies. This army was more local based, more of self-defence character and often in very difficult situation. Home army fight units of ‘nationalist’ Lithuanians and Belarusians who did not have to be partisan units as such nationalist units were used in mass killings of Poles and Jews on the territories of the Eastern Poland occupied by Germans. Killing some 1,200 of Belarusian nationalist partisans in 1943? It is significant that you do not support it with sources.

<p class="MsoNormal">

<p class="MsoNormal">>>They knew that the Soviets, and thus the Polish communists, were urging the local population to take up arms immediately against the Germans.<<

<p class="MsoNormal">--- Isn’t it true, what you are citing here?

<p class="MsoNormal">

<p class="MsoNormal">>>The Soviets wanted to provoke partisan warfare in Poland in order to weaken the Germans — but also to hinder any future Polish resistance to their own rule when it came. The Red Army’s task would be easier if German troops were killed by partisan warfare as would the NKVD’s if Polish elites were killed for resisting Germans. The Jewish Combat Organization included the communists, who were following the Soviet line, and believed that Poland should be subordinated to the Soviet Union.<<

<p class="MsoNormal">--- Until this day, even Warsaw Uprising is criticized by Poles as useless. No word in this text is untrue. That was the Soviet government and propaganda policy that time. Most of the Jewish units subordinated to Soviets as a strong ally, majority of Jewish population was indifferent or against fight.

<p class="MsoNormal">

<p class="MsoNormal">>>Whether we like it or not, Communism is attacking us. The extermination of the Jews in Europe by the Germans, which will be the final result of the German-Jewish war, represents from our point of view an undoubtedly favorable development, for it will weaken the explosive power of Communism at the moment of the German collapse — or earlier. Let us have no illusions. The liquidation of the Jews is not tantamount to the liquidation of the Commune, behind which is the Comintern and through which the Jews want to take their revenge on us.<<

<p class="MsoNormal">--- Citing it out of the context of Soviet and Nazi terror is just an abuse and referring it as Home Army agenda while ignoring other documents, to excuse cooperation with Soviets is really strange.

<p class="MsoNormal">

<p class="MsoNormal">>>Under pressure from London, General Stefan Rowecki, commander of the Home Army, agreed to supply the Warsaw ghetto with a few pistols, as Snyder notes. But hostility was undiminished.<<

<p class="MsoNormal">--- It would not stop ‘hostility’ against Soviets as they were occupants. Alas these occupants were supported by majority of Jewish militants.

<p class="MsoNormal">

<p class="MsoNormal">>>Indeed, the only ally the leftists had outside the ghetto was the Polish Workers’ Party, the name the Communists took after Stalin allowed them to reconstitute themselves in 1942, which was itself pathetically short of arms but which went to heroic lengths to support the ghetto militants in whatever way it could.<<

<p class="MsoNormal">--- Polish Workers’ Party is not ‘the leftists’ organisations and Stalin did not allow ‘to reconstitute themselves’ as it was a group of the Stalinist agents, created on massive purges made by him all over the Europe; even old Communist Party of Poland, in her last version before its liquidation due to planned Stalin’s attack on Poland, was  already after the purges. Your ignorance is extreme not only in this case. Parachuted Polish Workers’ Party had nothing in common with the Left or especially Leftiests activism as these independent people were exterminated by Stalin’s NKWD.

<p class="MsoNormal">

<p class="MsoNormal">>>Snyder brings the same curious logic to bear on the Soviet partisans, whose war against the Wehrmacht was increasingly effective from 1942 on.<<

<p class="MsoNormal">--- You perfectly know that Soviet and their partisans were as much abusive and dangerous to local population as to Germans however in 1941, Nazi stopped to be their allies, the Soviet partisans units drew recruits from Jewish refugees which does not make them less harmful against other ethnicities or Jews of different identity.

<p class="MsoNormal">

<p class="MsoNormal">>>Thanks to the AK boycott<<

<p class="MsoNormal">--- So you say that Home Army did not support Jews in the Ghetto, they had enough arms to win Germans in 1942 and it was Home Army fault that Jews were transported to Treblinka. Good luck.

<p class="MsoNormal">

<p class="MsoNormal">>>“In order to justify the participation of Lithuanians in the mass murder of Jews,” he writes, “there was a perceived need to invent Jews who similarly killed Lithuanians.”<<

<p class="MsoNormal">--- The scale of cooperation with Germans by Lithuanians against Poles and Jews was high but... really there was no ‘red terror’? It is just ridiculous.

<p class="MsoNormal">

<p class="MsoNormal">>>But which good old days, exactly? The 1920s, years of inflation, economic instability, and white terror, particularly in Poland and Hungary?<<

<p class="MsoNormal">--- What do you mean about ‘white terror’ in Poland in 1920s? Are you hallucinating?

<p class="MsoNormal">

<p class="MsoNormal">>>America’s Drang Nach Osten<<

<p class="MsoNormal">--- This part cannot be commented by me. Stalin was trying to equal the West with Hitler and you apparently follow his path.