GROVER FURR III

I think I know who Mister Furr is, but I didn’t know that he had written a response to Bloodlands. Mister Furr is not really a scholar in the field; rather he is someone with firm political (pro-Stalinist) commitments.

    - Dr. Snyder, to noted rHizzonE poster "swampman", in an email, 2016

Grover Furr's book "Blood Lies: The Evidence that Every Accusation Against Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union in Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands Is False" is the most correct book ever written.

If you happen to believe that Stalin and the USSR are guilty of some accusation or another, you might find that hard to swallow. But that's not the subject of "Blood Lies". This is the subject:

Timothy David Snyder (born 1969) is an American author and historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, and the Holocaust. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.

    - Wikipedia

Timothy Snyder, who holds a prestigious academic post, is famous for writing "Bloodlands". And as it turns out, "Bloodlands" is full of lies. Not just "lies" in an ideological sense - it's not an opinion that these are lies. Furr's book catches Snyder lying about what his sources say. It catches Snyder inventing sources. Snyder omits details from his sources that would contradict his point, he gets page numbers, figures and statistics wrong, and he even uses Nazis and Nazi collaborators as sources without identifying them as such.

Going meticulously through every citation, tracing each claim through Polish, Ukrainian and Russian sources to its faked origin, Furr has proven that one of America's most famous historians is a fraud. Snyder, who is considered an expert on the Stalin era, wrote a book about the crimes of Stalin, intent on equating Stalin with Hitler. But nearly every citation in his book is bogus. Each citation, noticed on its own in a History 101 term paper by a sharp TA, would get a freshman undergrad flunked, with an accompanying sobering lecture about whether they should be attending university at all. But Snyder sits happily in his tenured post at Yale. If you email him about "Blood Lies" he pretends not to have heard of it.

Setting aside the question of how Snyder is allowed to teach students, go on lecture tours and publish new material - we should ask, "Why would an expert on Stalin-era USSR, writing a book about the crimes of Stalin, not have any legitimate evidence to substantiate these crimes?"

We should ask, "If the leading expert on Stalin-era USSR does not have any evidence of Stalin's crimes, who does? Where is this evidence?"

We should ask, "If the person who is most qualified to tell us about Stalin's and the USSR's crimes has no evidence for any of his accusations - why do we believe any of Snyder's view of Soviet history?"

And last, because Snyder is a well-documented liar, yet sits undisturbed at one of the highest posts a working academic can occupy, we should ask, "Cui bono? Who benefits?" Most of all, it's the modern wave of fascists and Nazis in Ukraine and Poland, who are greatly inconvenienced by accurate histories of Eastern Europe. To make heroes out of their predecessors - Nazis and their collaborators, various fascist and anti-Semitic partisans, and Polish imperialists - they celebrate Snyder's fiction and its ultimate suggestion that undermining the USSR's war preparations and slaying Red Army soldiers were the most noble deeds of the WWII era.

America's waning strength precludes direct provocation against its competitors on the world stage. But it can still stir up dangerous chaos by arming regional fascists. Snyder's lies are weapons of propaganda, land mines planted to upend societies as they try to understand the past. What Grover Furr gives us in "Blood Lies" is a demonstration of what it takes to disarm these mines.

    --swampman, May 26th, 2018

Nov. 15th, 2018
UN General Assembly resolution on "combatting the glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism [...] contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance."