I have to get Timothy Snyder’s book Bloodlands. Snyder is an important thinker on Europe, in the pathways of the late great Judt, and his book got a spectacularly bad review in the LRB, one of those reviews that makes you take the victim’s side completely. And on that note, a quote from the book, passed along by a friend. A passage about Hitler’s response to any criticism of his regime:
“Hitler used unfavorable attention in the foreign press to build up a rationale for the more radical policies to come. The Nazis presented European and American newspapers as controlled by Jews and any foreign criticism as part of the international Jewish conspiracy against the German people. An important legacy of the March 1933 boycotts was thus rhetorical. Hitler introduced an argument that he would never cease to use even much later, when his armies had conquered much of Europe and his institutions were killing millions of Jews. No matter what Germany or Germans did, it was because they were defending themselves from international Jewry. The Jews were always the aggressors, the Germans always the victims.”
