As a child, I was guided into “the tubes” underground by my grandfather, an air raid warden, he would pass out gas’s masks lined up on his arm, while holding my hand as down we went until the “all clear” sounded. The Russian invasion war footage of Ukraine bombings brings it all back at 82! War is Hell for little children! I was terrified to walk under the Chicago ‘viaducts’ when trains went over because it sounded like the Nazi bombing.
That was the beginning of my “war stories”!
Then there was the Korean War, the Viet Ñam (American) War, The Iraq War,
The War in Afghanistan, The Russian Invasion war of Ukraine, The Israel Gaza War …
There is evidence in the archaeological record, according to Graeber and Wengrow (The Dawn of Everything, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2021), war has been absent for long stretches of time in human prehistory. War is by no means an inevitable behavior. I would say there is a chance we are living on the verge of a time when our species either realizes that war accomplishes nothing and must be abolished or will go extinct. I am hopeful. At 61, if I do live to see it, I shall have to play some role in making it happen. I guess we all must rise up and recognize we are actors, not merely spectators, to history. I thank you for your shared personal experiences here. Paradoxically, they give me hope.
It seems to me that the Bloated Yam and Putin must be closely related as they both are experts in making up stories for their own benefit. This is what dictators do so well: lie after lie.
The end of this article is perfect…if we take Putin literally, and knowing history, all of European Russia would go back to the Swedes and Finns. Or Poland/Lithuania after that. Tell the bloated orange one that and his head would explode!
Thank you, Professor Snyder, for deconstructing Putin the Pervert's legend. Having taken your wonderful course, The Making of Modern Ukraine, much of it was a (needed) review for me. Now, as at the time I took the course, there is the strong impression that non-historians tend to accept the Russia legend because the actual story has so many twists and turns - not that it's a valid excuse.
It also strikes me that the algorithm being used by Putin has also been employed by a long chain of Zionists, leading up to Netanyahu in the modern era. Except that in place of the Vikings, it was god. And of course other foundational details need to be substituted. But in any event, the theme is the same: This land is ours, and always was, and therefore we are entitled to deport or murder any interlopers, who by the way are untermenschen.
PS - As you know, the invitation ruse was also used by Hitler to invade the Sudetenland. Birds of a feather, flock together.
Thanks for this explainer, Dr. Snyder. It would seem that Ukraine could be a late claim to buy IKEA, or Minnesota’s football team, by Putin‘s tortured logic.
Yet a cursory online dictionary search just now shows how easily the myth gets perpetuated:
“What is the meaning of Rus in English?
Definitions of Rus. noun. the medieval Russian state established by Scandinavian traders in the 9th century; the capital was first in Novgorod and then in Kiev.”
Yet beneath the layer of mythic falsehood lies some epic graft. I’m reading Anne Applebaum’s excellent “Autocracy, Inc.” She lays out how Putin and some KGB buddies in Dresden in 1988 were already already making plans to take advantage of the dissolution of Russia in order to skim money from export contracts. He was doing it on a small scale as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg in the early 90s, and then proceeded to the fuller shakedown of oligarchs in the late 90s. “I’ll make you rich, or I’ll put you in prison”. He’s a world-historical gangster.
Yesterday, I celebrated 33 years of Ukraine’s Independence in West Palm Beach, Florida. UAFlorida.org did a wonderful job with Ukrainian music, folk dances, information, food and merchandise vendors, and we all had a good time. Among other things, I learned that both Steven Spielberg and Leo DiCaprio have Ukrainian family roots and Ukrainian ice cream is delicious!
I think Professor Snyder recommended this book: “Ukraine-The Forging of a Nation” by Yaroslav Hrytsak.
In any case, I just finished reading it, and found it has helped me understand the nature of Russia’s invasion, especially when considered with Putin’s use of mythology to anesthetize his subjects.
The current insurrectionists in the US are using the same technique here as Professor Snyder has made clear in other books and articles.💙
i wonder why the so-called peace activists and folks like Democracy Now are so easily taken in by putin. they see putin as the victim of the US not Ukraine as the victim of Russia. no matter how much damage putin causes in ukraine he is still the victim in this story and the US the villain. ukrainians of course are just pawns.
Not all peace activists and/or leftists are taken in by Putin. In the past two years, there have been major divisions and debates within some peace or left groups about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Russia apologists are generally of the opinion that the US (with Europe as junior partners) is the only imperialist force, while the others reject imperialism and oppression regardless of who's doing it. I'm aware of this split existing within the Democratic Socialists of America, Veterans for Peace, and some local groups in the area where I live. One pro-Ukraine group of leftists who organized in late 2022 is the Ukraine Solidarity Network (https://www.ukrainesolidaritynetwork.us/about-us/). Their list of articles on the war is at https://www.ukrainesolidaritynetwork.us/recommended-resources/
The left is irrelevant to America's division over the Ukraine war. It's American rightists who side with Putin because he's a right-winger who owns America's wannabe rightist dictator who's again seeking to be placed in the White House.
had an "epiphany" yesterday. could they be stuck in the Viet Nam era? then the US had invaded a small country and was destroying this small country. and the US has remained the automatic villain in every scenario since. they cannot see that the obvious analogy to the US in viet nam is russia in ukraine.
Each of us has a obligation to question the mythology that bolsters false claims and assertions in our lives. Ultimately we must take personal responsibility for our actions and beliefs.
After the last of my own four children had gone off to college, l realized that it was time for me to challenge the assertions l had been fed in my own childhood. I signed up for classes at the school l had graduated from decades before and eventually found my way to YIVO, a repository of culture and documentation of Eastern European history.
Having been raised by the children of Polish Jewish immigrants, I began to deconstruct the assumptions that were passed on to me.
I traveled to Poland and Russia and Israel, determined to examine the evidence for myself and draw my own conclusions.
Having reached the status of high school teacher, parent and finally grandma, l understand the importance of differentiation between fact and fiction. For sure, l didn’t want to perpetuate stereotypes to my descendants and the next generation!
What made me suspicious of the legends l was taught? A healthy skepticism l developed when my own father died when l was ten years old, and my childhood was interrupted by taking on the responsibilities as the oldest child in my family! We were dependent on the kindness of our extended family and a mother who had to reinvent herself at the age of thirty-five.
If l was to have any credibility, l needed clarification that didn’t depend on vulnerable, busy grownups. Taking personal responsibility is the first step.
By the age of twenty-five, l was determined to succeed and find a life-partner.
Fortunately l married a man who respected my intelligence and was proud of my intellectual curiosity. And still does after decades of friendship and active participation in civic activities.
We protested together, studied together and assisted each others’ growth and development. But even this represention has the quality of myth, and requires unpacking!
My advice is to proceed with caution and choose wisely as you precede on your life journey, and question all assumptions. I found that Timothy Snyder’s scholarship an invaluable resource and have notes, essays and poems to prove it! Proof of the importance of personal integrity in finding your own place in history, a worthy and essential pursuit. It’s definitely worth the effort!
Challenging ''the assertions l had been fed in my own childhood'' puts me in mind of something that happened in late 2021. My friend Jadwiga, who was born in Soviet occupied Poland in 1958, was visiting me. She'd just returned from her annual visit to Poland, and we were chatting, when suddenly she said, ''I just now found out that the Red Army invaded Poland on Sept. 17, 1939.'' When I stared at her in disbelief, she said, ''Yes, I just learned that.'' And now I understand why she didn't know this: To admit that invasion happened would be to admit that there was a pact between Hitler and Stalin a few weeks before the Wehrmacht invaded Poland on 9/1, and the Soviets on 9/17/1939. ''It became official Russian policy, as it had been official Soviet policy, to recall the Second World War as having begun in 1941 rather than 1939''. Saying that the war started in 1941 also allowed the Soviets to airbrush Katyn from the picture (Timothy Snyder, ''The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, 2018, pp. 155-6).
The 1940 massacre of Polish officers, POW’s and political opponents was denied by the Soviet Union until 1990. The graves many thousands at Katyn Forest and other sites was memorialized in a Polish film made in 2008.
It’s important to understand that Stalin ordered this massacre by members of the Soviet Secret Police (NKVD), and Putin uses it as a political football to suit the current narrative he wants to project, at any given moment. Truth is subject to the whims of the almighty Leader!
Yes. In an effort to keep the Warsaw Pact countries together, Gorbachev finally admitted the truth in 1990. I have ''Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment,'' edited by Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva, and Wojciech Materski (2008), which is a collection of transcribed documents that were released after the admission, along with photographs from 1943 (when the Wehrmacht discovered the pits and turned it all into a media circus), and 1991, along with commentary. Another book I bought last year is ''Children of the Katyn Massacre: Accounts of Life After the 1940 Soviet Murder of Polish POWs,'' by journalist Teresa Kaczorowska. The English translation is abridged and was published in 2006. She reports that one of the children told her that because for months after the documents were released he hadn't been able to find his father's name on any of the lists he'd seen, he thought that maybe he was still alive and just needed to be found, which I find heartbreaking. Because he was a child when it happened, he probably carried with him into adulthood the hopes of a child longing for his father--that there must have been some mistake. He eventually did find the list with his father's name.
My father was born in Boryslav Poland in 1914. Yes, the invasion started in 1939 but the Nazis were already there. My dad came to this country because he saw the writing on the wall, especially for Jews, in 1938.
My father-in-law, Oscar Ha Cohen from Nussdorf’s family fled Austria in the 1700’s. His ancestors settled in Poland, now Ukraine! Oscar left Lviv in 1923 for the very same reason as your father!
My father pronounced Lviv as “lvuv! And I wanted to say that his town of Boryslav is now in the Ukraine. It was a known for its oil wells, of which his grandfather had quite a few. Didn’t matter because the Bolsheviks took some of it, then the Russians, and then, of course, the Nazis. He always wanted my sister and I to reclaim the land but fat chance of that ever happening.
Whew! Thank you for this. I seldom print emails but this one I did to read over and study, underline, timeline with a map... Legends and history can indeed be strange bedfellows, with one usually hogging the sheets.
Ukrainian resistance to Russian domination is no basis to declare war and kill hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians. Or to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of Russian lives. No historical fantasy, true or not, can justify the deaths.
I feel like I should be sitting in Professor Snyder’s classroom to routinely absorb his teachings. But then realize I’d be 50 years older than the other students. Oh well.
Will continue to follow his expository writing instead.🙏
So it seems that every nation has its own brand of colonialism and every excuse for violating the rights of others.
Russia is particularly vulnerable to corruption as its covers so many time zones and so many diverse cultures and languages. The failed Soviet Union was an attempt to cobble together 15 separate republics under one flag.
Perhaps they were attempting a “United States”, without setting up a system of Checks and Balances and an independent mass media and a means of providing for dissent.
They are clueless when it comes to “sharing the wealth “, despite pretentious rhetoric to the contrary.
I am reminded of the scene in the 1939 film of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, when the gypsies are stopped at the gates of Paris and not allowed to enter:
Gypsy : [On being stopped from entering the city...] Why do you stop us?
Soldier at Festival of Fools : Because no gypsies can enter Paris any longer without a permit. It's the new law.
Gypsy : If the others are permitted to, why can't we?
Soldier at Festival of Fools : They're Frenchmen. You're gypsies. Foreigners.
Gypsy : Foreigners! You came yesterday. We come today.
(Source: IMDB)
The notion that claiming to be first, to be the genuine or real people in a place we see alive and well all around the world. It is the core of nationalist mythology. Where is it more absurd than anywhere but in our own land, America?
The descendants of those who historically took the land from others in their waves of Manifest Destiny and imperial expansion claim to be the real Americans. Which also reminds me of how Western culture used to claim for itself everything of value, and how we are expected to accept that even ignorant people with less melanin in their skin are somehow better than everyone else because Mozart looked vaguely like them.
Thanks, Timothy Snyder, for going through this tedious exercise of unpacking the lies! It is up to us to see the same tricks at work in the narratives all around us in the minds and mouths of often otherwise good persons, and with friendly ridicule and armed with the facts of history, and with our own humanity, help them remove the scales from their eyes that they may at last see how they are being deceived ultimately against their own interests.
We all must remember what happened to the ones who came before, so as not to repeat similar mistakes they made out of fear.
I was born into the Blitz of WWII London.
As a child, I was guided into “the tubes” underground by my grandfather, an air raid warden, he would pass out gas’s masks lined up on his arm, while holding my hand as down we went until the “all clear” sounded. The Russian invasion war footage of Ukraine bombings brings it all back at 82! War is Hell for little children! I was terrified to walk under the Chicago ‘viaducts’ when trains went over because it sounded like the Nazi bombing.
That was the beginning of my “war stories”!
Then there was the Korean War, the Viet Ñam (American) War, The Iraq War,
The War in Afghanistan, The Russian Invasion war of Ukraine, The Israel Gaza War …
My whole life is one war after another.
Nearly 83 years.
When is it enough?
When will it end?
Why not?
There is evidence in the archaeological record, according to Graeber and Wengrow (The Dawn of Everything, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2021), war has been absent for long stretches of time in human prehistory. War is by no means an inevitable behavior. I would say there is a chance we are living on the verge of a time when our species either realizes that war accomplishes nothing and must be abolished or will go extinct. I am hopeful. At 61, if I do live to see it, I shall have to play some role in making it happen. I guess we all must rise up and recognize we are actors, not merely spectators, to history. I thank you for your shared personal experiences here. Paradoxically, they give me hope.
It seems to me that the Bloated Yam and Putin must be closely related as they both are experts in making up stories for their own benefit. This is what dictators do so well: lie after lie.
The end of this article is perfect…if we take Putin literally, and knowing history, all of European Russia would go back to the Swedes and Finns. Or Poland/Lithuania after that. Tell the bloated orange one that and his head would explode!
Had not heard that moniker before but instantly knew the reference. The power of words and round numbers indeed!
Thank you, Professor Snyder, for deconstructing Putin the Pervert's legend. Having taken your wonderful course, The Making of Modern Ukraine, much of it was a (needed) review for me. Now, as at the time I took the course, there is the strong impression that non-historians tend to accept the Russia legend because the actual story has so many twists and turns - not that it's a valid excuse.
It also strikes me that the algorithm being used by Putin has also been employed by a long chain of Zionists, leading up to Netanyahu in the modern era. Except that in place of the Vikings, it was god. And of course other foundational details need to be substituted. But in any event, the theme is the same: This land is ours, and always was, and therefore we are entitled to deport or murder any interlopers, who by the way are untermenschen.
PS - As you know, the invitation ruse was also used by Hitler to invade the Sudetenland. Birds of a feather, flock together.
Untermenschen is translated as "subhuman, "
OMG, back to the vikings, really?
Glad Zelenski is telling him: We are NOT going back!
Being a true Viking, I’m #NotGoingBack either 💃🏻
Thanks for this explainer, Dr. Snyder. It would seem that Ukraine could be a late claim to buy IKEA, or Minnesota’s football team, by Putin‘s tortured logic.
Yet a cursory online dictionary search just now shows how easily the myth gets perpetuated:
“What is the meaning of Rus in English?
Definitions of Rus. noun. the medieval Russian state established by Scandinavian traders in the 9th century; the capital was first in Novgorod and then in Kiev.”
Yet beneath the layer of mythic falsehood lies some epic graft. I’m reading Anne Applebaum’s excellent “Autocracy, Inc.” She lays out how Putin and some KGB buddies in Dresden in 1988 were already already making plans to take advantage of the dissolution of Russia in order to skim money from export contracts. He was doing it on a small scale as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg in the early 90s, and then proceeded to the fuller shakedown of oligarchs in the late 90s. “I’ll make you rich, or I’ll put you in prison”. He’s a world-historical gangster.
Yesterday, I celebrated 33 years of Ukraine’s Independence in West Palm Beach, Florida. UAFlorida.org did a wonderful job with Ukrainian music, folk dances, information, food and merchandise vendors, and we all had a good time. Among other things, I learned that both Steven Spielberg and Leo DiCaprio have Ukrainian family roots and Ukrainian ice cream is delicious!
🌻 #ProtectDemocracy!
I think Professor Snyder recommended this book: “Ukraine-The Forging of a Nation” by Yaroslav Hrytsak.
In any case, I just finished reading it, and found it has helped me understand the nature of Russia’s invasion, especially when considered with Putin’s use of mythology to anesthetize his subjects.
The current insurrectionists in the US are using the same technique here as Professor Snyder has made clear in other books and articles.💙
This war then, is (as well as everything else) a war for the truth, in which you are a bonny fighter, Professor Snyder! More power to the historians!
i wonder why the so-called peace activists and folks like Democracy Now are so easily taken in by putin. they see putin as the victim of the US not Ukraine as the victim of Russia. no matter how much damage putin causes in ukraine he is still the victim in this story and the US the villain. ukrainians of course are just pawns.
Paraphrasing Orwell, when confronted by fascism, those who preach pacifism, are siding with the fascists.
Not all peace activists and/or leftists are taken in by Putin. In the past two years, there have been major divisions and debates within some peace or left groups about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Russia apologists are generally of the opinion that the US (with Europe as junior partners) is the only imperialist force, while the others reject imperialism and oppression regardless of who's doing it. I'm aware of this split existing within the Democratic Socialists of America, Veterans for Peace, and some local groups in the area where I live. One pro-Ukraine group of leftists who organized in late 2022 is the Ukraine Solidarity Network (https://www.ukrainesolidaritynetwork.us/about-us/). Their list of articles on the war is at https://www.ukrainesolidaritynetwork.us/recommended-resources/
The left is irrelevant to America's division over the Ukraine war. It's American rightists who side with Putin because he's a right-winger who owns America's wannabe rightist dictator who's again seeking to be placed in the White House.
i am familiar with this wonderful group. unfortunately had to miss their presentation today.
had an "epiphany" yesterday. could they be stuck in the Viet Nam era? then the US had invaded a small country and was destroying this small country. and the US has remained the automatic villain in every scenario since. they cannot see that the obvious analogy to the US in viet nam is russia in ukraine.
Each of us has a obligation to question the mythology that bolsters false claims and assertions in our lives. Ultimately we must take personal responsibility for our actions and beliefs.
After the last of my own four children had gone off to college, l realized that it was time for me to challenge the assertions l had been fed in my own childhood. I signed up for classes at the school l had graduated from decades before and eventually found my way to YIVO, a repository of culture and documentation of Eastern European history.
Having been raised by the children of Polish Jewish immigrants, I began to deconstruct the assumptions that were passed on to me.
I traveled to Poland and Russia and Israel, determined to examine the evidence for myself and draw my own conclusions.
Having reached the status of high school teacher, parent and finally grandma, l understand the importance of differentiation between fact and fiction. For sure, l didn’t want to perpetuate stereotypes to my descendants and the next generation!
What made me suspicious of the legends l was taught? A healthy skepticism l developed when my own father died when l was ten years old, and my childhood was interrupted by taking on the responsibilities as the oldest child in my family! We were dependent on the kindness of our extended family and a mother who had to reinvent herself at the age of thirty-five.
If l was to have any credibility, l needed clarification that didn’t depend on vulnerable, busy grownups. Taking personal responsibility is the first step.
By the age of twenty-five, l was determined to succeed and find a life-partner.
Fortunately l married a man who respected my intelligence and was proud of my intellectual curiosity. And still does after decades of friendship and active participation in civic activities.
We protested together, studied together and assisted each others’ growth and development. But even this represention has the quality of myth, and requires unpacking!
My advice is to proceed with caution and choose wisely as you precede on your life journey, and question all assumptions. I found that Timothy Snyder’s scholarship an invaluable resource and have notes, essays and poems to prove it! Proof of the importance of personal integrity in finding your own place in history, a worthy and essential pursuit. It’s definitely worth the effort!
Challenging ''the assertions l had been fed in my own childhood'' puts me in mind of something that happened in late 2021. My friend Jadwiga, who was born in Soviet occupied Poland in 1958, was visiting me. She'd just returned from her annual visit to Poland, and we were chatting, when suddenly she said, ''I just now found out that the Red Army invaded Poland on Sept. 17, 1939.'' When I stared at her in disbelief, she said, ''Yes, I just learned that.'' And now I understand why she didn't know this: To admit that invasion happened would be to admit that there was a pact between Hitler and Stalin a few weeks before the Wehrmacht invaded Poland on 9/1, and the Soviets on 9/17/1939. ''It became official Russian policy, as it had been official Soviet policy, to recall the Second World War as having begun in 1941 rather than 1939''. Saying that the war started in 1941 also allowed the Soviets to airbrush Katyn from the picture (Timothy Snyder, ''The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, 2018, pp. 155-6).
The 1940 massacre of Polish officers, POW’s and political opponents was denied by the Soviet Union until 1990. The graves many thousands at Katyn Forest and other sites was memorialized in a Polish film made in 2008.
It’s important to understand that Stalin ordered this massacre by members of the Soviet Secret Police (NKVD), and Putin uses it as a political football to suit the current narrative he wants to project, at any given moment. Truth is subject to the whims of the almighty Leader!
Yes. In an effort to keep the Warsaw Pact countries together, Gorbachev finally admitted the truth in 1990. I have ''Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment,'' edited by Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva, and Wojciech Materski (2008), which is a collection of transcribed documents that were released after the admission, along with photographs from 1943 (when the Wehrmacht discovered the pits and turned it all into a media circus), and 1991, along with commentary. Another book I bought last year is ''Children of the Katyn Massacre: Accounts of Life After the 1940 Soviet Murder of Polish POWs,'' by journalist Teresa Kaczorowska. The English translation is abridged and was published in 2006. She reports that one of the children told her that because for months after the documents were released he hadn't been able to find his father's name on any of the lists he'd seen, he thought that maybe he was still alive and just needed to be found, which I find heartbreaking. Because he was a child when it happened, he probably carried with him into adulthood the hopes of a child longing for his father--that there must have been some mistake. He eventually did find the list with his father's name.
My father was born in Boryslav Poland in 1914. Yes, the invasion started in 1939 but the Nazis were already there. My dad came to this country because he saw the writing on the wall, especially for Jews, in 1938.
My father-in-law, Oscar Ha Cohen from Nussdorf’s family fled Austria in the 1700’s. His ancestors settled in Poland, now Ukraine! Oscar left Lviv in 1923 for the very same reason as your father!
My father pronounced Lviv as “lvuv! And I wanted to say that his town of Boryslav is now in the Ukraine. It was a known for its oil wells, of which his grandfather had quite a few. Didn’t matter because the Bolsheviks took some of it, then the Russians, and then, of course, the Nazis. He always wanted my sister and I to reclaim the land but fat chance of that ever happening.
Whew! Thank you for this. I seldom print emails but this one I did to read over and study, underline, timeline with a map... Legends and history can indeed be strange bedfellows, with one usually hogging the sheets.
Ukrainian resistance to Russian domination is no basis to declare war and kill hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians. Or to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of Russian lives. No historical fantasy, true or not, can justify the deaths.
of course many of the sacrificed russians agreed with putin that the russian empire has the right to destroy ukraine
And the Native Americans would rule the present United States. (Not a bad thought, but surely not worth the carnage!)
Thanks for the history lesson.
I feel like I should be sitting in Professor Snyder’s classroom to routinely absorb his teachings. But then realize I’d be 50 years older than the other students. Oh well.
Will continue to follow his expository writing instead.🙏
That's no reason! There may be many actual reasons not to be in that particular classroom but age is not one of them.
Somehow, it puts me in the mind of the idea "Manifest Destiny."
So it seems that every nation has its own brand of colonialism and every excuse for violating the rights of others.
Russia is particularly vulnerable to corruption as its covers so many time zones and so many diverse cultures and languages. The failed Soviet Union was an attempt to cobble together 15 separate republics under one flag.
Perhaps they were attempting a “United States”, without setting up a system of Checks and Balances and an independent mass media and a means of providing for dissent.
They are clueless when it comes to “sharing the wealth “, despite pretentious rhetoric to the contrary.
I am reminded of the scene in the 1939 film of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, when the gypsies are stopped at the gates of Paris and not allowed to enter:
Gypsy : [On being stopped from entering the city...] Why do you stop us?
Soldier at Festival of Fools : Because no gypsies can enter Paris any longer without a permit. It's the new law.
Gypsy : If the others are permitted to, why can't we?
Soldier at Festival of Fools : They're Frenchmen. You're gypsies. Foreigners.
Gypsy : Foreigners! You came yesterday. We come today.
(Source: IMDB)
The notion that claiming to be first, to be the genuine or real people in a place we see alive and well all around the world. It is the core of nationalist mythology. Where is it more absurd than anywhere but in our own land, America?
The descendants of those who historically took the land from others in their waves of Manifest Destiny and imperial expansion claim to be the real Americans. Which also reminds me of how Western culture used to claim for itself everything of value, and how we are expected to accept that even ignorant people with less melanin in their skin are somehow better than everyone else because Mozart looked vaguely like them.
Thanks, Timothy Snyder, for going through this tedious exercise of unpacking the lies! It is up to us to see the same tricks at work in the narratives all around us in the minds and mouths of often otherwise good persons, and with friendly ridicule and armed with the facts of history, and with our own humanity, help them remove the scales from their eyes that they may at last see how they are being deceived ultimately against their own interests.
We all must remember what happened to the ones who came before, so as not to repeat similar mistakes they made out of fear.