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Loading... Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (original 2010; edition 2012)by Timothy Snyder (Author)
Work InformationBloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder (2010)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. A must read! Much history has been uncovered since 1991 and this author has done his research. ( ) A reframing of the mass slaughter of WWII, from the popular image of nazi gas chambers, to vast killing fields and starvation camps employed by both the communist and nazi regimes concentrated in a swath of eastern Europe. Much in the same vein the popular image of the war needs to recalibrate to 3/4th of the dying happening on the much less covered eastern front, there's a blind spot and deliberate retelling of events that tries to tell a simple moralistic story about the war. This book presents the problem in a wider perspective and one that doesn't let mass murder and antisemitism be a unique property of the nazi regime. Aided and abetted by many others, and mirrored by the paranoid purges of the Soviet, the lessons of 'never again' need to have a wider scope - as modern day parallels in China and elsewhere also feature anonymous detention camps and mysteriously vanishing "problem" groups, the idea that it's not industralized genocide until gas chambers and ovens are involved miss the mark. By that time, as Snyder makes clear, the majority of the death toll was already accomplished. 1-2024 Cuando se habla de los muertos en la segunda guerra mundial, siempre pensamos en los campos de concentración alemanes. Siempre pensé que era donde más seres humanos habían muerto. Pero no, he estado equivocada durante años. Las "tierras de sangre" son todas aquellas zonas, países o parte de países, entre Alemania y la URSS, donde Stalin y Hitler decidieron que les sobraban gente. Regaron de sangre esas tierras, desde mucho antes de empezar la guerra y mucho después de terminar. Mucho antes de empezar la 2° guerra mundial, por 1931 Stalin empezó sus "matanzas". Su idea de modernizar el país pasaba por hacer desaparecer a los trabajadores del campo y en especial a los ucranianos. Pero no únicamente a ellos, polacos y rusos también cayeron con el hambre que provocó. Recogió las cosechas y el grano que se usaba para la siembra siguiente. Dejo que murieran de hambre sin ningún cargo de conciencia. Todo con vistas, o la escusa, de una industrialización del país. Y así empieza el libro, en ese año y contándote las políticas de ambos líderes políticos. Cuando más leo sobre este periodo de la historia, más me doy cuenta de lo que desconozco. Lo recomiendo a todo aquel que disfrute de este periodo de la historia y quiera conocer un poco más. Lo que hicieron con Polonia y con Ucrania me parece demencial. Y ya no solo por Stalin y Hitler, me refiero al resto del mundo, miro hacia otro lado y los dejaron hacer. Tan criminal fue la acción de asesinar a tantos seres humanos, como la inacción por parte del resto. Saber, más o menos, la cantidad de personas que murieron en esta zona, durante esos años (y después de 1945), que superan con mucho los asesinados en los campos de concentración, más los militares que murieron luchando de todos los países, indica que son cifras inimaginables. Tanto Hitler, como Stalin ñ, tenían fijación con eliminar a los judíos. Pero no asesinaron judíos. Estás tierras regadas con tanta sangre, eran de civiles masacrados por ambos bandos y en muchas ocasiones, ayudados por vecinos de las víctimas. Muy interesante, nada pesado. A surprisingly brutal history of what I already knew was a brutal history. The purposefulness is shocking. The amount of pain suffered in Poland is being all comprehension. The plan to starve the ENTIRE population of the Soviet Union by Germany is so fantastically heinous…. Wow. “The human capacity for subjective victimhood is apparently limitless, and people who believe that they are victims can be motivated to perform acts of great violence” pp399/400 the conclusion of this book is brilliant. The first 400 pages are so hard to read (took me a year!) but to get to the conclusion one must consider the mountains of the dead.
Snyder’s ambition is to persuade the West—and the rest of the world—to see the war in a broader perspective. He does so by disputing popular assumptions about victims, death tolls, and killing methods—of which more in a moment—but above all about dates and geography. The title of this book, Bloodlands, is not a metaphor. Snyder’s “bloodlands,” which others have called “borderlands,” run from Poznan in the West to Smolensk in the East, encompassing modern Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus, and the edge of western Russia (see map on page 10). This is the region that experienced not one but two—and sometimes three—wartime occupations. This is also the region that suffered the most casualties and endured the worst physical destruction. More to the point, this is the region that experienced the worst of both Stalin’s and Hitler’s ideological madness. Snyder claims that his purpose in describing 'all of the major killing policies in their common European historical setting' was 'to introduce to European history its central event'. But he has not described all the major killing policies and they did not all have a common setting. And to assert that they are the central event in the whole of European history is rhetorical overkill, to say the least. A number of other historians have written recently, and more perceptively, about this same topic, from Richard Overy in The Dictators to Robert Gellately in Lenin, Stalin and Hitler – some, like Norman Davies in Europe at War 1939-45, from a similar perspective to Snyder's own. Despite the widespread misapplication of Hitler's statement about the Armenians, few claims advanced in Snyder's book are less plausible nowadays than the assertion that 'beyond Poland, the extent of Polish suffering is underappreciated.' In fact, we know about the events Snyder describes already, despite his repeated assertions that we don't. What we need is not to be told yet again the facts about mass murder, but to understand why it took place and how people could carry it out, and in this task Snyder's book is of no use. Mr Snyder’s book is revisionist history of the best kind: in spare, closely argued prose, with meticulous use of statistics, he makes the reader rethink some of the best-known episodes in Europe’s modern history. AwardsNotable Lists
References to this work on external resources. Wikipedia in English (28)In this revelatory book, Timothy Snyder offers a groundbreaking investigation of Europe's killing fields and a sustained explanation of the motives and methods of both Hitler and Stalin. He anchors the history of Hitler's Holocaust and Stalin's Terror in their time and place and provides a fresh account of the relationship between the two regimes. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)940.54History & geography History of Europe History of Europe 1918- Military History Of World War IILC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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