Timothy Snyder: contemporary liberalism’s Elmer Gantry

Abstract

Critique of Timothy Snyder - historian and prominent public intellectual in US and Europe- in particular works Bloodlands Europe Between Hitler and Stalin 2010 & The Road to Unfreedom 2018 & journal articles - despite quality of research Snyder employs selective use of historical facts analogous to religious fundamentalists selective Biblical literalism -presents a Manichean theory of history – reminiscent of Cold War -democracy versus authoritarianism –a revised Whig theory of liberal progress but amounts to a political/intellectual closure – refer to Sheldon Wolin's theory of inverted totalitarianism and Cold War school of Sovietology. In Bloodlands Snyder presents a picture of not only Nazi-Soviet equivalence but symbiosis- Nazism becomes a response to communism—a false dynamic of history - basis of fascist revivalism in Europe. The Road to Freedom claims Trump owes victory to Putin, but is preoccupied with history of Russian far-right ideologues and events in Ukraine – this is a narrative of Putin's plan to restore Empireconquer Ukraine- destroy European Union – This exercise ignores the complexities of competing notions of nationalism and identity in Ukrainian politics and omits facts which could support a counter-narrative which show an element of Russian response to the escalating expansion of NATO and the policies of the 2014 government of ‘national unity’, in Kyiv - some US foreign policy insiders had warned about this from the 1990s – such a counter-narrative does not necessarily exculpate Putin. Recent research in the US has demolished that claims that Trump was a Russian agent, and that Russian bots and social media postings had any significant reach or effect on the 2016 election result.