• JoeySteel [comrade/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 years ago

    Anne Applebaum is a propagandist who wrote "Red Famine" - The Ukrainian nationalists/nazi collaborators attempt to turn the 1932 famine across Ukraine/Belarus and Russia into "Stalin was actually trying to murder Ukrainians to stop ukrainian nationalism"

    The Nazis would cite the "holodomor" as the 'human rights' pretext for the invasion of Soviet Union in 1941. The timing of the release of her anti-Soviet and anti-Russian books coincided with Nazis being installed in Kiev by the West

    Anyway, Mark Taugar (probably the most respected historian in famines and the Soviet famine in particular alongside Wheatcroft) dug through her footnotes and shows how she's a straight up liar that her footnotes don't say what she said they says, how they're either straight up falsifications or twisted

    It's a hilarious read but also a lesson in how bourgeois historians falsify history

    https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/169438

    • Spinoza [any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      also, she whines that half of her anti-communist friends at her resistance party in poland before the dissolution of the USSR ended up on the wrong side of the current polish political divides around lgbtq rights and abortion, or straight-up nazis. like, what did you expect?

      • Mardoniush [she/her]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Sowing: "We must join with the face-eating leopards to stop the leopard-hunter threat!"

        Reaping: "No! Guys, stop eating everyone's faces!"

      • JoeySteel [comrade/them]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Nice you got a link fam?

        Real

        https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/13/trump-presidency-hong-kong-pro-democracy-movement

        Energy

        • Spinoza [any]
          ·
          4 years ago

          actually i think it was this episode of cbc ideas, which is a damn shame, because ideas has actually gotten a lot better under the new host: i swear every other episode in 2019 was platforming marx. haven't listened in a while though

    • star_wraith [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      4 years ago

      IIRC Princeton professor and the person who wrote the definitive English-language biography on Stalin (Stephen Kotkin) also dunked on Applebaum as well.

    • rolly6cast [none/use name]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Wheatcroft also solidly criticizes Applebaum for moralism and no consideration of the context or conditions in her work.

      "are largely ignored or misunderstood by Appelbaum and by many of the current generation of specialists, who see no role for economic history. But the idea that it was someone’s mentality that caused the problem is not a new idea"

      ArbyMakesFries had a good take about how center left historians could openly denounce these positions for being wrong in the 1980s/1990s, as Historikerstreit,

      Hence why you can pretty easily find longer-established historians like Wheatcroft or Getty reacting to the new Snyder/Applebaum soft Holocaust revisionists as if they have tentacles growing out of their face, but at the same time not protesting too loudly, because they're fully well aware that Western historiography on the USSR has always been a deeply politicized and ideological enterprise, and anyone who's too stubborn to bend with the changing political winds is liable to get blown overboard.

    • CoralMarks [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      4 years ago

      I knew the name seemed familiar, thanks for refreshing my memory :fidel-salute: