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Cake day: June 14th, 2023
  • MarxMadness@lemmygrad.mltoHistoryPorn@lemmy.world•Anti-communist fighter pursuing a suspected member of the 'Securitate' secret police, Bucharest, Romania, 1989English
    41·
    1 year ago

    Where to begin?

    First, for the sake of argument, let’s assume every word in that excerpt is uninpeachable historical fact. Taking it as fact, it is no worse than what the U.S. has done at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, that blacksite the Chicago PD used to disappear and torture people, etc., to say nothing of the horrors of the many dictatorships the U.S. installed and propped up throughout the Cold War. If you see this conduct as some moral event horizon you should want to burn the U.S. to the ground. This is not whataboutism, this is asking if you really give a shit about this stuff, or if it only offends your sensibilities when the Bad Countries do it.

    Dispensing with the assumption that the except is proven fact, let’s examine the reliability of the sources (I’ll spoiler this section to not clog up the thread, but suffice to say it doesn’t look great):

    spoiler
    • Lidia Golovkova: A search for “Lidia Golovkova historian cv” doesn’t turn up anything. Nor does the alternate spelling “Lydia.” Searching her on Google Scholar returns no articles she authored. She appears to be a real person – looks like she attended a conference organized by “The Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia” in 2002 – but I’ve found nothing that would speak directly to her credibility as a historian, or lack thereof. She appears to be cited fairly regularly (sometimes in academia, more often in articles like the one you quote from), but it also looks like she’s cited in the same breath as noted hack Robert Conquest (example). Generously, she might be associated with positions only a minority of historians hold. Less generously, it looks like she’s doing motivated reasoning and pop history, like Conquest.
    • Sukhanovskaya Prison: Special Facility 110: Found a few mentions of this book, but no English translations. Two mentions in particular (here and here) both cite Russian-language editions. It’s odd how many of the same English excerpts can be found with a “cursory” search, despite the book at minimum not being widely available in English. Looks more like quote mining/citation hunting than all of these authors actually assessing what they’re referencing. It would be difficult for English speakers to evaluate, for instance, whether this work is consistent with information from USSR archives that were released after the country fell (a major turning point in Sovietology which separated serious historians from propagandists; see Conquest).
    • Open Democracy: Funders include the Ford Foundation, which has a long tradition of funding anti-communist activity and a corresponding political motivation, to say nothing of its well-documented ties to covert U.S. anti-communist programs. Hell, one of the architects of the CIA served as chairman of the Foundation! Open Democracy is not some neutral organization; there’s a clear political bent.