Comment by ImPostingOnHN
5 months ago
Indeed, everybody except me is a propagandist with their ridiculous 'saying things I don't believe or want to agree with'.
I, on the other hand, am always right.
5 months ago
Indeed, everybody except me is a propagandist with their ridiculous 'saying things I don't believe or want to agree with'.
I, on the other hand, am always right.
There are many academics who disagree with his characterisation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_genocide_theory#Bloodla...
The point is, he's an ideologue (who may end up being right even if I think he's not) which makes it a bit ironic to mention in the context of talking about propaganda.
Indeed, everybody except me is a ideologue with whom at least 2 academics and a reddit poster disagree. I, on the other hand, am always right, of course!
Additionally, as a jew, I was raised on an ironclad ideological assertion that the holocaust was the worst thing people have ever done to each other, and no genocides have or will ever rival it. I'm keenly aware that there is a vested interest in maintaining that view [0], even if it is not true (many academics say that an equal, perhaps greater number died in The Holodomor, for example – not that that need be true for the two to be compared).
Take your own link, for example: it describes David Katz, a holocaust scholar, who commented, "Snyder flirts with the very wrong moral equivalence between Hitler and Stalin". This is just a dude saying his opinion, even though a moral equivalence between Hitler and Stalin is not, in fact, "very wrong".
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_uniqueness_debate
Stalin is very, very, very different from Hitler.
(Again I cannot reply to the comment below, but my point is not that I am not ideological; of course I am. But Snyder is also extremely ideological and uses his history to push a very particular kindideologues of politics, which is ironic given the context of the thread. )
(Adding another edit since I can't reply! But again, I don't understand why my interlocutor cannot understand that both sides can be ideological and that one needs to take that ideology into account when evaluating claims. Snyder is one such ideologue who consciously seeks to minimise Polish and Ukrainian collaboration with the Holocaust and claim that Jewish Soviet partisans fighting the Nazis were "criminals", see: [1] for examples (also an ideological source--of course--but some of the quotes from Snyder are really quite damning. ))
[1]: https://jacobin.com/2014/09/timothy-snyders-lies/
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