Sunday, October 17, 2010

The Bloodlands

Timothy Snyder has written a book about the mass murder that happened in Eastern Europe before and during World War II, it is entitled "Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin." You can read a review of it by Matthew Kaminski that appeared in The Wall Street Journal.

In the West we hear a lot about the Holocaust and it is prominently featured here, as well as Stalin's purposeful starvation of millions of Ukrainians, his own kulaks, and the active murder of hundreds of thousands of Poles who lived in the Soviet Union. Then there was his murder of the entire officer corps of the Polish military, at Katyn.

Hitler and Stalin were ruthless autocrats whose response to the concept of "inconvenient people" was genocide. Pol Pot and Mao Zedong also grasped this awful idea. More recently the idea has resurfaced in Rwanda and the Sudan. It seems to be an idea that won't go away.