Reading Wednesday - More blood
Jan. 19th, 2023 12:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
frandroidWhat are you currently reading?
Continuing to read Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands.
I read two chapters today, since I had to ride the subway to a committee meeting in North York. That was a bit much. I've gone through the Terror, the partition of Poland, and now Operation Barbarossa. This book is a colossal achievement in documentation, in structuring and details the phenomenal amounts of death these non-combattants suffered from. Snyder is a good writer, going from the general, to the more specific, and then to the gut-wrenching anecdotal. Sometimes he finds a curious happening, a fluke; sometimes a uniquely horrible facet; and at other times he finds poetic moments that illustrate the barbarity. It can feel pornographic here and there, obscene. There's a kind of voyeuristic quality to his writing that makes it feel icky to read. Nonetheless I think it's a good approach as the facts cannot simply be numerical, and the atrocities so immense that what I'm reading about here is just a dust particle on a sliver of what happened. Just what some of the few survivors and witnesses were able to report back.
One thing that I have found Snyder is good at, through his course last fall and in this book (and he should be good at it because he is a history professor), is linking events in time, either illustrating continuity, or pointing out massive reversals in thinking, in goals, in strategy. Stalin fearing a Polish invasion, then Poland signing a neutrality deal with Stalin (and also Hitler), trying to keep neighbours at bay. The NKVD successfully eliminating and pushing back Polish spies, then claiming that all (imagined) opposition is currently due to remaining Polish spies, and just engaging in mass murder of Poles. Stalin, twice in his reign, instilling a reign of terror, and then also instilling his own counter reaction, eliminating the faithful lieutenants who had gone along with first wave of killings. "It wasn't me, they went too far!" Just plain evil stuff. And of course, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, to be undone later on. Anyway, Snyder is good is weaving a web to keep the reader strung along amongst the details.
I just deleted a paragraph about how Snyder maybe manages to slip in a kind of comedic sketch about the coming Holocaust. I deleted it because maybe I'm the sick one, and there's no clear indicator that joking was his intent, though from his class I know he's a jokester, and he makes subtle jokes at that.
Anyway. The Nazis starve so many millions of Soviet citizens. That really gets lost in WWII history. The kicker is that it was planned to be so much worse. That really boggles the mind.
Continuing to read Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands.
I read two chapters today, since I had to ride the subway to a committee meeting in North York. That was a bit much. I've gone through the Terror, the partition of Poland, and now Operation Barbarossa. This book is a colossal achievement in documentation, in structuring and details the phenomenal amounts of death these non-combattants suffered from. Snyder is a good writer, going from the general, to the more specific, and then to the gut-wrenching anecdotal. Sometimes he finds a curious happening, a fluke; sometimes a uniquely horrible facet; and at other times he finds poetic moments that illustrate the barbarity. It can feel pornographic here and there, obscene. There's a kind of voyeuristic quality to his writing that makes it feel icky to read. Nonetheless I think it's a good approach as the facts cannot simply be numerical, and the atrocities so immense that what I'm reading about here is just a dust particle on a sliver of what happened. Just what some of the few survivors and witnesses were able to report back.
One thing that I have found Snyder is good at, through his course last fall and in this book (and he should be good at it because he is a history professor), is linking events in time, either illustrating continuity, or pointing out massive reversals in thinking, in goals, in strategy. Stalin fearing a Polish invasion, then Poland signing a neutrality deal with Stalin (and also Hitler), trying to keep neighbours at bay. The NKVD successfully eliminating and pushing back Polish spies, then claiming that all (imagined) opposition is currently due to remaining Polish spies, and just engaging in mass murder of Poles. Stalin, twice in his reign, instilling a reign of terror, and then also instilling his own counter reaction, eliminating the faithful lieutenants who had gone along with first wave of killings. "It wasn't me, they went too far!" Just plain evil stuff. And of course, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, to be undone later on. Anyway, Snyder is good is weaving a web to keep the reader strung along amongst the details.
I just deleted a paragraph about how Snyder maybe manages to slip in a kind of comedic sketch about the coming Holocaust. I deleted it because maybe I'm the sick one, and there's no clear indicator that joking was his intent, though from his class I know he's a jokester, and he makes subtle jokes at that.
Anyway. The Nazis starve so many millions of Soviet citizens. That really gets lost in WWII history. The kicker is that it was planned to be so much worse. That really boggles the mind.
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Date: 2023-01-19 12:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-19 12:42 pm (UTC)If you try it, microdose only.
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Date: 2023-01-19 02:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-19 10:34 pm (UTC)