I haven't read it yet but it just reeks of #chutzpah by the intro
UKRAINE AND THE WORDS THAT LEAD TO MASS MURDER
First comes the dehumanization. Then comes the killing.
By Anne Applebaum
Within the ever-changing drama of anger and fear that unfolds every night on the Russian evening news, Ukraine has long played a special role. In Russian propaganda, Ukraine is a fake country, one without history or legitimacy, a place that is, in the words of Putin himself, nothing more than the “southwest” of Russia, an inalienable part of Russia’s “history, culture and spiritual space.”
Worse, Putin says, this fake state has been weaponized by the degenerate, dying Western powers into a hostile “anti-Russia.” The Russian president has described Ukraine as “fully controlled from the outside” and as “a colony with a puppet regime.” He invaded Ukraine, he has said, in order to defend Russia “from those who have taken Ukraine hostage and are trying to use it against our country and our people.”
famously radical, über-patriotic instead of what they are: from top-to-toe Hollywood neo-nazis
The Russian Defense Ministry actually accused the Azov battalion, a famously radical Ukrainian fighting force, of blowing up the Mariupol theater, where hundreds of families with children had been sheltering. Why would über-patriotic Ukrainian forces deliberately kill Ukrainian children?
This is humorous:
"In the terrible winter of 1932–33, brigades of Communist Party activists went house to house in the Ukrainian countryside, looking for food. The brigades were from Moscow, Kyiv, and Kharkiv, as well as villages down the road. They dug up gardens, broke open walls, and used long rods to poke up chimneys, searching for hidden grain. They watched for smoke coming from chimneys, because that might mean a family had hidden flour and was baking bread."
"They led away farm animals and confiscated tomato seedlings. After they left, Ukrainian peasants, deprived of food, ate rats, frogs, and boiled grass. They gnawed on tree bark and leather. Many resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. Some 4 million died of starvation.
At the time, the activists felt no guilt."
Activists? How are they mere activists if they actively contribute to the famine of millions of people? Some activism that... Whitewashing her compatriots, maybe.
As expected no mention of the Jewish role in Soviet communism, although she resorts to referencing two Jewish writers when describing the Holodomor.