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A review by desertjarhead505
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder
5.0
A magnificent work, one I recommend strongly, and one I will never read again. I have to echo some of the words of the reviewers quoted on the cover: Harrowing. Shattering. Horror. I would add, both absorbing and heartbreaking. I kept remembering a quote from Bertrand Russell: “The mark of a civilized human being is the capacity to read a column of numbers and weep.”
Snyder moves back and forth between the analytical and the personal, and does something I've seldom seen. He both makes the bloodcurdling tragedy real at a humble personal level and shows the big picture.
The last section, the conclusion, is the best, I think. He subtitled it "Humanity." Snyder again goes over the numbers; he compares and contrasts the Nazi and Stalinist systems in action; he sorts the differential impacts by the categories the killers divided people into. Then he examines the ways that people distance themselves from death and suffering, whether they're the perpetrators or are looking at it from a distance as students of history, and calls that distancing out as a kind of second killing, an erasing of each of the dead as a person with his or her own life, personality, thoughts and feelings. He tears down that abstraction effectively by repeating that the 5.7 million Jews killed in the Holocaust were actually 5.7 million times one - each a unique person. The 3.1 million Soviet POWs murdered by the Nazis were 3.1 million times one. The 3.3 million Ukrainians starved to death on Stalin's orders were 3.3 million times one.
I'm sitting here with tears in my eyes after finishing reading this. I can only imagine how many time Timothy Snyder wept while he wrote it. This must have been a terribly hard book to create. I've watched interviews of Timothy Snyder and been struck by how somber his resting demeanor is - as he has made the study of this part of history his specialty, it's easy to see why.
Every person who simplistically dismisses whole categories of other people as homogenous masses and objectifies them should have to read this book and talk it over with others, because that kind of distancing and objectification is the first step necessary for the infliction of mass evil.
Snyder moves back and forth between the analytical and the personal, and does something I've seldom seen. He both makes the bloodcurdling tragedy real at a humble personal level and shows the big picture.
The last section, the conclusion, is the best, I think. He subtitled it "Humanity." Snyder again goes over the numbers; he compares and contrasts the Nazi and Stalinist systems in action; he sorts the differential impacts by the categories the killers divided people into. Then he examines the ways that people distance themselves from death and suffering, whether they're the perpetrators or are looking at it from a distance as students of history, and calls that distancing out as a kind of second killing, an erasing of each of the dead as a person with his or her own life, personality, thoughts and feelings. He tears down that abstraction effectively by repeating that the 5.7 million Jews killed in the Holocaust were actually 5.7 million times one - each a unique person. The 3.1 million Soviet POWs murdered by the Nazis were 3.1 million times one. The 3.3 million Ukrainians starved to death on Stalin's orders were 3.3 million times one.
I'm sitting here with tears in my eyes after finishing reading this. I can only imagine how many time Timothy Snyder wept while he wrote it. This must have been a terribly hard book to create. I've watched interviews of Timothy Snyder and been struck by how somber his resting demeanor is - as he has made the study of this part of history his specialty, it's easy to see why.
Every person who simplistically dismisses whole categories of other people as homogenous masses and objectifies them should have to read this book and talk it over with others, because that kind of distancing and objectification is the first step necessary for the infliction of mass evil.