Edward Rothstein Reviews Timothy Snyder's Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

This is pretty fascinating, especially the conclusion at Rothstein's review, at the Wall Street Journal, "The Frying Pan and the Fire."

And here's Snyder's book, at Amazon, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning.

I'm not familiar with Snyder's work, oddly enough. He's got another important work on the Holocaust, with a comparative focus, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.

If I read both, I expect I'd start with the most recent volume first and work backwards. And I would do so with the requisite circumspection. Apparently, as Rothstein points out, the trend in recent historiography is to posit the Holocaust as just one more case of genocide, something not that particularly unique, but instead the starting point for a genre, a genre of promoting "tolerance" at that. And when you push tolerance as a stand-alone ideology, you're more likely to end up in an altogether different place. More like the gulags than modern enlightened democracy.

But then, that's up for the reader to decide. So, go for it. Click through at the links and have at it.