The Novel "Atlas Shrugged" By Ayn Rand/Dystopia And Objectivism

[AlbanyJet]

[Jungle Shift Jet]

Originally Posted by Jetworks

I named three classics, he's just baiting Fish for an argument.

Well, since he was so dismissive of such a well known archetypal classic-
most learned people have either read the book or seen the film-I wanted to hear his choices.

If I haven't read the works he preferred I would be interesting in doing so.

You gave 3 excellent European choices but I didn't ask you.

[HessStation]

Originally Posted by Jungle Shift Jet

Well, since he was so dismissive of such a well known archetypal classic-
most learned people have either read the book or seen the film-I wanted to hear his choices.

If I haven't read the works he preferred I would be interesting in doing so.

You gave 3 excellent European choices but I didn't ask you.

Do you like Dick? War's a big fan of Philip K.

[Warfish]

Originally Posted by Jetworks

I named three classics, he's just baiting Fish for an argument.

Of course he is.

Hess, I agree, The Windup Girl was one of the best in a very long time, an exceptional novel. Sadly, it seems Mr. Bacigalupi has decided to write Harry Potter-level tweenage Sci-Fi ever since. A big dissapointment, although for kiddie stuff it wasn't too horrible. I eagarly await his next serious adult novel, which I believe he is working on now.

I'll be honest, I'm reading alot less Sci Fi these days, and alot more history. Just finished this:



And in the last few days am 120 pages into this:



I've been enjoying short Sci-Fi, and finished this a few weeks ago:



This compendium is a must-buy for me every year.

[Jungle Shift Jet]

Originally Posted by Warfish

Of course he is.

Hess, I agree, The Windup Girl was one of the best in a very long time, an exceptional novel. Sadly, it seems Mr. Bacigalupi has decided to write Harry Potter-level tweenage Sci-Fi ever since. A big dissapointment, although for kiddie stuff it wasn't too horrible. I eagarly await his next serious adult novel, which I believe he is working on now.

I'll be honest, I'm reading alot less Sci Fi these days, and alot more history. Just finished this:



And in the last few days am 120 pages into this:



I've been enjoying short Sci-Fi, and finished this a few weeks ago:



This compendium is a must-buy for me every year.

Book 1 - Very good, accurate

Book 2 - Complete Crap / Revisionist History

Book 3 - Repititious annual compendium / Bible analog for atheists/fantasists
apparently compiled by T. Dium

[SONNY WERBLIN]

To the 99%'rs

"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Aconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor – your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?

"Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions – and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made – before it can be looted or mooched – made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.

"To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except by the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss – the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery – that you must offer them values, not wounds – that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best your money can find. And when men live by trade – with reason, not force, as their final arbiter – it is the best product that wins, the best performance, then man of best judgment and highest ability – and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?

"But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality – the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.

"Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants; money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth – the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve that mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Money is your means of survival. The verdict which you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is the loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money – and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.

"Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another – their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

"But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride, or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich – will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt – and of his life, as he deserves.

"Then you will see the rise of the double standard – the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money – the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law – men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims – then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion – when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing – when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors – when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it becomes, marked: 'Account overdrawn.'

"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world?' You are.

"You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while you're damning its life-blood – money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves – slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody's mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer. Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers – as industrialists.

"To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money – and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being – the self-made man – the American industrialist.

"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose – because it contains all the others – the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money'. No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity – to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted, or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.

"Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide – as, I think, he will.

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns – or dollars. Take your choice – there is no other – and your time is running out."

Part II, Section 2, pages 387-391 of the paperback edition of
"Atlas Shrugged" [1957 novel] by Ayn Rand

[PlumberKhan]

Originally Posted by SONNY WERBLIN

Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil.

[Jungle Shift Jet]

Originally Posted by PlumberKhan

That must be Jesus Cruz from your day labor work crew who obviously wants a raise

He never said "money was evil" though.

[PlumberKhan]

Originally Posted by Jungle Shift Jet

That must be Jesus Cruz from your day labor work crew who obviously wants a raise

He never said "money was evil" though.

He threw out the money changers because their pockets were full of honor.

Too much honor.

[AlbanyJet]

Originally Posted by PlumberKhan

He threw out the money changers because their pockets were full of honor. Too much honor.

"Don't give me that do goody-good bulls**t!"

Roger Waters/Pink Floyd

[SONNY WERBLIN]

Originally Posted by PlumberKhan

He threw out the money changers because their pockets were full of honor.

Too much honor.

Do you even know what the money changers were?

When Jews came to Jerusalem they had to pay a Temple tax, but they could only pay it with a special coin, the half-shekel, which was a half-ounce of pure silver, about the size of a quarter. It was the only coin at that time which was a precious metal and of a reliable weight which did not have the image of a pagan Emperor, and therefore to the Jews it was the only coin acceptable to God.

These coins, however, were not plentiful, the money changers had cornered the market on them, and raised the price of them well beyond the actual value of the silver. They used the monopoly they had on these coins in combination with the mandatory Temple Tax to force the Jews to pay whatever randomly high price they set.

So, your attempted analogy is mis-cast. In an Atlas Shrugged world, the money changers would be "looters".

"Then you will see the rise of the double standard – the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money – the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law – men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims – then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter

.

[PlumberKhan]

Ayn Rand fans are almost as bad as Twilight fans.


Sent from my 8.6 acre property with 4 bedroom house with waterfront views and low utility costs because of the gas well on my property using fireworks...

[SONNY WERBLIN]

Originally Posted by PlumberKhan

Ayn Rand fans are almost as bad as Twilight fans.


Sent from my 8.6 acre property with 4 bedroom house with waterfront views and low utility costs because of the gas well on my property using fireworks...

I never considered myself an Ayn Rand "fan", but I do believe her ideas on productivity being linked to financial incentives as well as the government's penchant for screwing things up by attempting to legislate "fairness" which rewards crony capitalist and/or an able-bodied non-productive constituency merit discussion.

IMO, the problem with today's mainstream liberal is the inability to come to terms with conflict of interest in their desire cultivate diversity while legislating equality. And the problem with the mainstream conservative is they tend to consider their own "values" priceless and the values of others worthless.

If we work together to protect Everyone's Liberty while recognizing the value in our own diversity, we'll be as "equal" as possible considering all of our inherent unequalness.

[Warfish]

Originally Posted by Jungle Shift Jet

Book 2 - Complete Crap / Revisionist History

Really? Crap, eh?

Bloodlands:

Books of the Year and Press Distinctions: The Independent, The Financial Times; The Economist, The Telegraph, The New Statesman, The Atlantic, BBC History Magazine, The Seattle Times, History Today, The Jewish Forward, Reason Magazine. Editor's Pick, New York Times Book Review; Die Welt, Book of the Week; NRC Handelsblad, Book of the Week, El País, Book of the Week; NDR Sachbuch des Monats; New York Times non-fiction bestseller, Der Spiegel non-fiction bestseller (Germany); Gazeta Wyborcza non-fiction bestseller (Poland); Dziennik Polski bestseller (Poland), Wall Street Journal #1 hardback history bestseller.

Prizes: Literature Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters; Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding; Phi Beta Kappa Emerson Book Award; Gustav Ranis International History Prize; Prakhina Foundation International Book Prize; Jean-Charles Velge Prize, Tadeusz Walendowski Book Prize, Cundill Prize Recognition of Excellence, shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize, shortlisted for the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize (ASEEES), shortlisted for the Austrian Scholarly Book of the Year. Jury commendation, Bristol Festival of Ideas.


************************************************** **********************



“How Stalin and Hitler enabled each other’s crimes and killed 14m people between the Baltic and the Black Sea. A lifetime’s work by a Yale University historian who deserves to be read and reread.”
—The Economist, Books of the Year


“[An] important new history…. One of Snyder’s major achievements in Bloodlands is to preserve this sense of the singularity of Jewish experience, even while showing its complex relationship to the terrible experiences of the peoples among whom Jews lived.... The relationship between Jews and Communism is probably the most explosive of all the subjects Snyder addresses, and here he benefits most from the strengths he shows throughout the book—deep learning, wide compassion, and clear, careful moral judgment.... [A]nyone who wants to fully comprehend the Holocaust—at least, as far as it can be comprehended—should read Bloodlands, which shows how much evil had to be done in order to make the ultimate evil possible.”
—Adam Kirsch, Tablet

“Snyder’s revisionist history describes how about 14 million people died in the lands between Germany and the Soviet Union, giving a fresh take on the tragedies that occurred during World War II.”

—Roll Call

“This superb and harrowing history tells of 14m people murdered in the land between Berlin and Moscow between 1933 and 1945 – not only those who died in the Holocaust, but the 3.3m victims of Stalin’s starvation of the Soviet Ukraine, the many members of Poland’s elite who perished and the Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians starved by Hitler.”
—Financial Times, holiday round-up

“Timothy Snyder…compels us to look squarely at the full range of destruction committed first by Stalin’s regime and then by Hitler’s Reich. Each fashioned a terrifying orgy of deliberate mass killing…. Snyder punctuates his comprehensive and eloquent account with brief glimpses of individual victims, perpetrators and witnesses.”
—New York Times Book Review

“Snyder is perhaps the most talented younger historian of modern Europe working today. Astonishingly prolific, he grounds his work in authoritative mastery of the facts, mining tomes of information in multiple languages and brilliantly synthesizing his findings. At the very least, Bloodlands is valuable for its astounding narrative integration of a gruesome era of European history…. A preternaturally gifted prose stylist, [Snyder] strives for a moral urgency appropriate to his depressing topics, and he rarely succumbs to bathos…. [B]y any measure Bloodlands is a remarkable, even triumphant accomplishment.”
—Samuel Moyn, The Nation

“[A] genuinely shattering report on the ideology, the political strategy, and the daily horror of Soviet and Nazi rule in the region that Timothy Snyder calls the bloodlands…. Timothy Snyder did archival research in English, German, Yiddish, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Belorussian, Ukrainian, Russian, and French. His learning is extraordinary. His vivid imagination leads him to see combinations, similarities, and general trends where others would see only chaos and confusion…. This is an important book. I have never seen a book like it.”
—Istvan Deak, The New Republic

“Statistics are an important part of Mr. Snyder’s narrative, but he does not forget that every number was once a human being…. This book is a grim but important read.”
—Washington Times

“To us in the West, the horrors of World War II are associated with the names of Auschwitz, Iwo Jima and Hiroshima. Without denying the significance of these places, Snyder, an immensely talented historian at Yale University, radically alters our understanding of the mass murder that went on during these years by showing in convincing fashion where and how most victims met their end. Bloodlands overflows with startling facts and revelations…. In a conclusion that should be required reading for all, Snyder addresses the moral questions raised by this murderous history with insight and recognition of the shades of culpability that make it difficult at times to neatly separate victims from perpetrators. He also shines much-needed light on the dangers of ‘competitive martyrology’ of the recent past, as the nations of the bloodlands have tried to claim greatest victim status.”
—Seattle Times

“…Snyder presents material that is undeniably fresh – what’s more, it comes from sources in languages with which very few western academics are familiar. The success of Bloodlands really lies in its effective presentation of cold, hard scholarship, which is in abundance.”
—Financial Times

“The story of World War II, like that of most wars, usually gets told by the victors. Diplomatic and military accounts are set largely in the West and star the morally upright Allies—the U.S., Britain and Soviet Union—in battles against fascism. The Holocaust gets its own separate history, as a case apart in its genocidal intent and human tragedy. Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin forces a dramatic shift in these perceptions…. Among his other goals in Bloodlands, Mr. Snyder attempts to put the Holocaust in context—to restore it, in a sense, to the history of the wider European conflict. This is a task that no historian can attempt without risking controversy. Yet far from minimizing Jewish suffering, Bloodlandsgives a fuller picture of the Nazi killing machine.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“[A] brave and original history of mass killing in the twentieth century…. Snyder’s original contribution is to treat all of these episodes—the Ukrainian famine, the Holocaust, Stalin’s mass executions, the planned starvation of Soviet POWs, postwar ethnic cleansing—as different facets of the same phenomenon. Instead of studying Nazi atrocities or Soviet atrocities separately, as many others have done, he looks at them together. Yet Snyder does not exactly compare the two systems either. His intention, rather, is to show that the two systems committed the same kinds of crimes at the same times and in the same places, that they aided and abetted one another, and above all that their interaction with one another led to more mass killing than either might have carried out alone.”
—Anne Applebaum, New York Review of Books

“[G]ripping and comprehensive…. Mr. Snyder’s book is revisionist history of the best kind: in spare, closely argued prose, with meticulous use of statistics, he makes the reader rethink some of the best-known episodes in Europe’s modern history…. Even those who pride themselves on knowing their history will find themselves repeatedly brought up short by his insights, contrasts and comparisons…. Mr. Snyder’s scrupulous and nuanced book steers clear of the sterile, sloganising exchanges about whether Stalin was as bad as Hitler, or whether Soviet mass murder in Ukraine or elsewhere is a moral equivalent of the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews. What it does do, admirably, is to explain and record. Both totalitarian empires turned human beings into statistics, and their deaths into a necessary step towards a better future. Mr. Snyder’s book explains, with sympathy, fairness and insight, how that happened, and to whom.”

—The Economist

“A chillingly systematic study of the mass murder mutually perpetrated by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany…. A significant work of staggering figures and scholarship.”

—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“[Bloodlands] modifies our view of this appalling period.... Snyder insists that the colossal atrocities in his ‘bloodlands’ have to be set inside a single historical frame. To look at them separately – for instance, to see Hitler’s crimes as ‘so great as to stand outside history’, or Stalin’s as a monstrous device to achieve modernisation – is to let the two dictators ‘define their own works for us’.... This book’s unforgettable account of the Ukraine famine shows conclusively that Stalin knew what was happening in the countryside and chose to let it run its course.... The figures are so huge and so awful that grief could grow numb. But Snyder, who is a noble writer as well as a great researcher, knows that. He asks us not to think in those round numbers.”

—Guardian (UK)

“This is a superb work of scholarship, full of revealing detail, cleverly compiled from a number of previously little-known sources, and in places beautifully written…. He searched hidden archives in five countries and judiciously mined unknown memoirs and diaries.... Snyder does justice to the horror of his subject through the power of his storytelling.”
—The Sunday Times (UK)

“Solid and judicious scholarship.” —Booklist

“A chillingly systematic study of the mass murder mutually perpetrated by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany…. A significant work of staggering figures and scholarship.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Timothy Snyder has written a nuanced, original and penetrating analysis of Europe’s twentieth century killing fields between Russia and Germany, drawing on many little-known sources. History of a high order, Bloodlands may also point us towards lessons for our own time.” —Timothy Garton Ash, Professor of European Studies, University of Oxford, and author of The File

“Nearly seventy years after VE-Day, World War Two continues to be perceived through a narrow Western perspective, and many basic problems about the war of 1939-45 remain unresolved. In Bloodlands – which refers to the huge belt of territory between Germany and Russia – Timothy Snyder examines the little known tract of the European continent that was scourged by Stalin as well as Hitler, and reaches some disturbing conclusions. Combining formidable linguistic and detective skills with a fine sense of impartiality, he tackles vital questions which have deterred less courageous historians: Where and when were the largest casualties inflicted? Who were the perpetrators, and which ethnic and national groups were victimized? How can one calculate and verify the numbers? This is a book which will force its readers to rethink history.” —Professor Norman Davies

“Historians of Nazi Germany have analyzed Hitler’s war of destruction in the East, Final Solution, and vast racial revolution and colonization project outlined in the Generalplan Ost. Historians of the Soviet Union have analyzed Stalin’s collectivization, Great Terror, Gulag archipelago, deportation and exile of mistrusted minorities, and rapid sovietization of newly-annexed territories on the western border. In both cases the focus has been more often on the politics and decision-making of the dictatorships than on the fate of their victims. The stunning contribution of Tim Snyder’s book is to present a synthetic account by an East European historian in which the focus is on the geographic zone where the lethal policies of Hitler and Stalin interacted, overlapped, and mutually escalated one another. As Snyder vividly demonstrates, their combined impact on the people living in the ‘bloodlands’ was quite simply the greatest man-made demographic catastrophe and human tragedy in European history.” —Christopher R. Browning, Frank Porter Graham Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

“For over a decade in the middle of twentieth century, the lands between Russia and Germany were the killing fields of Europe. Tens of millions of civilians from Poland to Ukraine, Lithuania to Belarus were starved, beaten, shot and gassed to death by the authorities and armies of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. We think we know this story and we assign it shorthand labels: Auschwitz, the Gulag. In his path-breaking and often courageous study of Europe’s ‘bloodlands,’ Timothy Snyder shows how very much more complicated the story was. His account of the methods and motives of murderous regimes, both at home and in foreign war, will radically revise our appreciation of the implications of mass extermination in the recent past. Bloodlands – impeccably researched and appropriately sensitive to its volatile material – is the most important book to appear on this subject for decades and will surely become the reference in its field.” —Tony Judt, author of Postwar and Ill Fares the Land

Book 3 - Repititious annual compendium / Bible analog for atheists/fantasists apparently compiled by T. Dium

Originally Posted by Jetworks

he's just baiting Fish for an argument.

[AlbanyJet]

http://bejohngalt.com/

“He was guilty of nothing, except that he earned his own fortune and never forgot that it was his.”

-Atlas Shrugged

[Jetworks]

"When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute." - Walter Lippmann.

More relevant than ever in the partisan, 24 hour news-cycle age.

[Jungle Shift Jet]

Originally Posted by Warfish

Really? Crap, eh?

Yes. Crap. As the quotes amply note Revisionist History.

Lauded by Left Wing Critics should tell you something and everything.

As part Polish-American via the Russian Zone, I know a thing or 2 about the real tumult of that era - my Paternal Grandfather was part of the Romanov staff at the Winter Palace before he emigrated. (Pro-Czar then ultimately part of Polish revolt after serving in Russo-Japanese War, Anti-Red/White Russian) As a rule Jews in Russia and Poland were victimized and were in no way a protected class in the era of that book that is why so many emigrated to the West especially from Russia.

Sci-Fi: Pseudo-Religion for Nerds. Every story is either creating a life form of some kind (Man as God) or being enslaved/destroyed by a supernatural or extra-terrestrial one.

[Warfish]

Originally Posted by Jungle Shift Jet

Yes. Crap. As the quotes amply note Revisionist History.

Lauded by Left Wing Critics should tell you something and everything.

Left wing critics like the Economist. The Wall Street Journal. And Norman Davies.

As part Polish-American via the Russian Zone, I know a thing or 2 about the real tumult of that era

Yes, I'm sure you know far more than any Historian.

As a rule Jews in Russia and Poland were victimized and were in no way a protected class in the era of that book that is why so many emigrated to the West especially from Russia.

Which has what to do with the book? The book is about how Stalin and Hitler both engaged in mass murder.

As I expected, you've never read a word of it.

Silly me, consider me duly baited. I should have known better. Won't happen again.

Sci-Fi: Pseudo-Religion for Nerds. Every story is either creating a life form of some kind (Man as God) or being enslaved/destroyed by a supernatural or extra-terrestrial one.

[FF2®]

Originally Posted by Warfish

Really? Crap, eh?

Cats got rave reviews too.

[SONNY WERBLIN]

Originally Posted by FF2®

Cats got rave reviews too.

LOL!! Brought my kids to see Cats off-broadway (a long time ago). I was not prepared for how truly awesomely bad it was.... Springtime for Hitler would seem to be a more serious attempt at musical theater than Cats. I'm convinced the playwrite was simply re-living an acid trip.