Timothy Snyder's 'The Next Genocide' is Crackpot Leftist Hysteria That's Better Off Ignored

I posted last week, "Edward Rothstein Reviews Timothy Snyder's Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning."

The review is here, via Google, "The Frying Pan and the Fire."

Rothstein says Snyder's work was basically magisterial, but then wrote this about the author's final chapter:

The Holocaust, like no other act or example of human evil, has inspired legions of lessons and “warnings,” as if they were required to justify the attention. The enshrinement of “tolerance” is only the most egregious example, but the Holocaust didn’t take place because of intolerance, and it would not have been prevented by tolerance. Why the compulsion to make comparisons with other atrocities? It would be like concluding a history of World War II by emphasizing that there were other deadly wars too, and we should all learn to be peaceful creatures. Somehow, in the case of the Holocaust, this approach has become conventional. Why the persistent straining at homily? Is there an element of shame involved? And why is the Holocaust so relentlessly invoked in irrelevant situations? Is that, too, some form of self-exoneration or alibi?

I wondered about some of this when encountering Mr. Snyder’s last chapter, “Our World.” He writes: “The planet is changing in ways that might make Hitlerian descriptions of life, space and time more plausible.” He suggests that now, as then, there is a sense of imminent apocalypse. Just as the Jew disrupted the global ecology for Hitler, something has now “diverted nature from its proper course.” And it may well cause a similar series of events. What is the contemporary threat? Climate change. And the irony, Mr. Snyder suggests, is that it could again place Jews in a precarious position. Mr. Snyder points out that the Holocaust proved the need for a strong nation-states, and Israel’s existence is essential for Jewish survival. But, he argues, “the continuing desertification of the Middle East might generate both regional conflict and the demand for scapegoats” (the Jews of Israel, of course). And the irony is that “some of Israel’s American political allies”—the Christian Right, if I understand correctly—“tend to deny the reality of climate change,” which, along with many other peculiarities, makes apocalypse more likely.

After reading this chapter and seeing its ritualistic homilies and sweeping comparisons, I became concerned that somehow I had been wrong about the intelligence, vision and insight that had characterized the rest of the book. But no, I am not wrong. Just skip the warning.

In other words, just skip the hysterical warning about the coming climate change apocalypse. It's truly bizarre, and Snyder's seriously mucking up his scholarly reputation.

I mean, he's really invested in this. See his op-ed at the New York Times, "The Next Genocide."

The guy's nuts.

More from William Teach, at Right Wing News, "NY Times: Climate Deniers Have “an intellectual stance that is uncomfortably close to Hitler’s”."