Starved of Truth: The Assonance of Atrocity in the Afghan War “Review”
History never repeats itself, of course. But human nature being what it is — and the tropes of power and dominance being what they are — there is a great deal of assonance in history: near-rhymes, recurring echoes in the present which do not chime exactly with the past but fall closely enough to resonate with meaning. Reading Timothy Synder’s account of the genocidal famine in Soviet Ukraine in the early 1930s (in his new book, Bloodlands), I ran across the following passage. In it, Snyder describes how Stalin sought to explain away the manifest, catastrophic failure of his policy