I rarely criticize authors. I have my hands full--articulating and sharing my own ideas as well as identifying and publishing work by some of the most important authors in the world through the LSS Newsletter.

However, at times one has to clear the air. Professor Timothy Snyder has received a great deal of recognition recently. Yet many of his central ideas make no sense whatever. I'm drawing below from JEFFREY HERF'S REVIEW of  Snyder's Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning  (Herf is author of The Jewish Enemy). I've reproduced below passages from Herf's review.

Please scroll down and read these passages before you read my comments directly below.

OK, if you've read these passages, I think you'll agree with Herf's critique. Based on forty years of my own research, which began with Hitler's Ideology: A Study in Psychoanalytic Sociology ("The best critical analysis in English of Hitler’s thought"), I have to say--honestly--that I have no idea what Snyder is talking about. 

Herf would probably agree that the passages he cites below--CENTRAL TO SNYDER'S ARGUMENT--are bizarre. But there is a "politeness" among academics and Herf does not have the "space of freedom" to say, "What nonsense" (again please scroll down now, read the passages--and and judge for yourself).

One may pose the question: "How does nonsense become ensconced powerfully in the public domain?" This is a complex theoretical question. However, there is a case study opening a space to begin exploring this question: A recent political operative, whose specialty is nonsense, received seventy-million votes.

HOW DOES THE PUBLIC DOMAIN BECOME A SPACE OF NONSENSE?

Richard Koenigsberg

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Herf citing Snyder: “Hitler saw the species as divided into races, but denied that the Jews were one. Jews were not a lower or a higher race, but a nonrace, or a counterrace. Races followed nature and fought for land and food, whereas Jews followed the alien logic of ‘un-nature.’” (p. 5). Herf: "I could not find textual evidence to support this assertions."

Herf quotes Hitler: “On this first and greatest lie, that the Jews are not a race but a religion, more and more lies are based.”

HERF SAYS: "Because Hitler’s view that the Jews were indeed a race were repeated in speeches throughout his career, before and after he came to power in 1933, it is difficult to understand why a historian of Snyder’s caliber would make an error of fact about such an elementary issue. Snyder compounds his misinterpretation of Hitler with statements such as: “After murder, Hitler thought, the next human duty was sex and reproduction” (p. 4). I looked without success in both English-and German-language editions of Mein Kampf for Hitler’s assertion that murder was a human duty.'

Herf citing Snyder: “Hitler’s basic critique was not the usual one that human beings were good but had been corrupted by an overly Jewish civilization. It was rather that human beings were animals and that any exercise of ethical deliberation was in itself a sign of Jewish corruption” (p. 5). 

HERF RESPONDS: "Neither in Mein Kampf nor, as far as I know, in any of his many speeches while in power did Hitler say that human beings in general were animals. Rather, he repeatedly asserted that Germans or Aryans were superior human beings—and thus not animals. They were threatened by the less-than-human Jews, whom he associate with despised animals such as vermin."

HERF: "Snyder nods to the spirit of our times when he contends that for Hitler the struggle against the Jews was ecological since it concerned not a specific racial enemy or territory but "the conditions of life on earth.” Yet any examination of Hitler’s works confirms that the “struggle against the Jews” was very much one waged against “a specific racial enemy.” For Hitler, the war against what he called “international Jewry” had global dimensions, but it was not about “the conditions of life on earth”— whatever that might mean. 

HERF AGAIN: Snyder, without a careful exposition of Hitler’s own views, writes: “In Hitler’s ecology, the planet was despoiled by the presence of Jews, who defied the laws of nature by introducing corrupting ideas” (p. 28). Yet Hitler did not have an “ecology,” and he did not write about “the planet.” He wrote about the threats to Germany, Europe, and the “Aryan race” posed by a mythic subject called “international Jewry.” 

HERF CITING SNYDER: “Removal of millions of Jews from Europe was part of a vast project of ecological restoration, in which the elimination of Jews after a German victory would repair the planet” (p. 32). HERF SAYS: "Snyder offers no source to support the idea that Hitler’s crimes were part of a project of ecological restoration. His projection of today’s political language about climate change back into Hitler’s implementation of the Holocaust is unconvincing." 

Professor Jeffrey Herf, Journal of Cold War Studies.