Free Republic

"Why does the world need a Ukrainian victory? 1. To halt atrocity. Russia's occupation is genocidal. Wherever the Ukrainians recover territory, they save lives, and re-establish the principle that people have a right not to be tortured, deported, and murdered. 2. To preserve the international legal order. Its basis is that one country may not invade another and annex its territory, as Russia seeks to do. Russia's war of aggression is obviously illegal, but the legal order does not defend itself. 3. To end an era of empire. This could be the last war fought on the colonial logic that...

Russian President Vladimir Putin is planning to force the West to end its sanctions by causing a widespread famine, Yale historian Timothy Snyder argues. Snyder, a Levin professor of history at Yale University, pointed to Russia's ongoing blockade of Ukrainian grain, which shows no signs of stopping. Ukraine is a major global producer of grain, supplying mainly Middle Eastern and Asian countries. Snyder argues that Putin's plan is not only to destabilize Ukraine by cutting off exports but also destabilize the European Union by generating "refugees from North Africa and the Middle East, areas usually fed by Ukraine." "When the...

“If the Ukrainians hadn’t fought back, the world would’ve been a much darker place.” [In an interview with the Polish magazine Polityka, prominent American scholar of Central and Eastern Europe Professor Timothy Snyder explains Putin’s ultimate goal, why Russia’s war against Ukraine is akin to genocide, why Putin has a more radical perspective than Stalin and why only Hitler had a similar plan, and why the fact that Ukrainians are fighting is so important for the whole world.] Putin’s goals and philosophy Sławomir Sierakowski: What is Putin’s ultimate goal in this war? Timothy Snyder: That’s no big secret: to destroy...

A statue of Saint Junípero Serra must return to the Loyola Marymount University campus, an alumni group has said in a letter and petition to the president of the Los Angeles-area Catholic university. St. Junípero Serra “recently completed the lengthy and rigorous examination process involved in becoming a canonized saint,” Marcos Chavira, a Loyola Marymount University 1995 graduate, said in an open letter to university president Timothy Snyder, posted at the Renew LMU website. “Regardless of what any committee may recommend to you, we hope your decision about this statue does not further erode our Catholic identity,” Chavira said. He...

The resistance movement against President Donald Trump has one of the country's premier historians onboard — and his reasons for opposing Trump are pretty terrifying. Leading historian at Yale, Timothy Snyder, warns that Trump could try overthrowing democracy during his presidency. In fact, he predicts it's "inevitable." Snyder has spent his career working on Modern Eastern Europe, and as such he has plenty of knowledge on authoritarian leaders. Using his research, he wrote a book to help get America through the Trump presidency and it's called On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. The book is more of a...

In the opening chapters of “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning,” Yale professor Timothy Snyder forcefully acknowledged what he calls the “ecological” Anti-Semitism of the Fuhrer, “An instructive account of the mass murder of the Jews of Europe must be planetary, because Hitler’s thought was ecological, treating Jews as a wound of nature.” In spite of such an assertion, however, the great caveat of Snyder’s book is he inexplicably fails to discuss the Nazi ecological historical record that should have informed his thesis ...

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. By Timothy Snyder. Basic Books; 524 pages. IN THE middle of the 20th century Europe’s two totalitarian empires, Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, killed 14m non-combatants, in peacetime and in war. The who, why, when, where and how of these mass murders is the subject of a gripping and comprehensive new book by Timothy Snyder of Yale University. The term coined in the book’s title encapsulates the thesis. The “bloodlands” are the stretch of territory from the Baltic to the Black Sea where Europe’s most murderous regimes did their most murderous work. The...