"That Snyder is tactful where he should be daring is proof that diplomacy has its limits."

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/107382/diplomat-of-shoah-history?all=1

The Diplomat of Shoah History

Does Yale historian Timothy Snyder absolve Eastern Europe of special complicity in the Holocaust?

By David Mikics|July 26, 2012

"Often in Bloodlands, Snyder presents deeply moving vignettes of Hitler’s and Stalin’s victims; he quotes their words when, about to die, they tried to sum up their lives. The reader is grateful that Snyder has so lovingly—there is no other word for it—given us the memory of these people. Yet the spectrum of characters in Bloodlands is oddly curtailed; all of the book’s capsule portraits are of victims. For all Snyder’s insistence that he is interested in the role of the perpetrator and the bystander, he finally, like most of us, prefers to commemorate the murdered innocents than to reach “into that darkness” (to quote Gitta Sereny’s title for her book on the Commandant of Treblinka, Franz Stangl), the place where the murders are planned and carried out and observed with a poisonous mixture of feelings. That Snyder is tactful where he should be daring is proof that diplomacy has its limits."