chapotraphouse

He’s a pure neoliberal in progressive clothing, a very thin veneer of progressivism at that, like he just uses some of the language then pivots to pushing narratives supporting imperialism and US hegemony.

I follow his blog and I’ve read everything he’s written and it’s so clear he views his role as “historian” to create narratives that justify a neoliberal world order.

When it comes to Poland and Ukraine, he pushes a nationalist narrative and thoroughly pursues the double genocide theory, which is a cousin of Holocaust denial.

He constructs his histories with the clear intent of drawing an equivalence between Nazism and communism, painting both as equally dark religions of the east that threaten the bright west.

Nationalism and nationalist victimhood is something he celebrates in Eastern Europe because that nationalism is useful to the neoliberal imperial project, but when it comes to Western Europe and the USA he starkly changes his tune and here nationalism is recognized as a malevolent evil since in the western heartland nationalism threatens to harm the neoliberal imperial project with its opposition to US-led internationalism and its tendency to isolationism.

Whatever the topic is, his view is that “history teaches us that anything other the the US-led ‘international rules based order’ is bad and evil and will lead to another Holocaust.”

He’s an Atlanticist neoliberal and he will weaponize any theme in history to advance that project. He weaponizes the Holocaust to push double genocide theory when it suits his narrative. He weaponizes progressive politics to demonize the enemies of neoliberal imperialism, and often in really tortured ways. The west is a beacon of hope and peace, a haven for the oppressed that reacts to world events rather than driving them.

Bloodlands is probably his most important work, for being influential, and reading it with a critical lens is revealing. Like, he simply tells the story of Nazi and Polish ethnic policies alongside the rise of communism, points out that all this vaguely happens in “Eastern Europe”, vaguely happens within the same 50 year time span, and that’s about the extent of his argument for why these topics should be considered unified by a single theme. He uses the language of colonialism here. For some reason the British policies in India or French policies in Africa or even Italian fascism in Albania don’t factor into this timeline, because that’s the west, and his basic thesis is that evil happens in the east.