I’m a Genius: I Fooled Timothy Snyder

14. 4. 2023 / Muriel Blaive

 

Vodrážka uses the same rhetorical device as a Stalinist propagandist. The principle is simple: use a basis of truth and thereby of credibility, then finish the sentence with your own twisted interpretation as if it were a logical outcome. Bohuslav Šnajder called this the “manipulation formula” (formulirovka) in his theoretical model of how the accused at the Slánský trial were made to “confess”:

“Let's say you told a foreign journalist while walking through Prague that Charles Bridge is the oldest bridge in Central Europe. The formula would look like this:

- Did you provide a foreign citizen with information about bridges?’
- Yes, but...
- Just answer yes or no. Are the bridges important for national defense?
- Yes.
- Would the enemy bomb the bridges in case of war?
- Yes.
- Is it probable that children in densely populated neighborhoods would be killed by such bombing?
- Yes.
- 'You are a traitor, then, and you have divulged information important to the defense of the state. In addition, you've ordered the deaths of our children. You are a murderer’, the newspapers would write.

(Bohuslav Šnajder, The Trial of Twelve Million People, Prague, Delta (Tvorba 3/90), p. 46)

I have refrained in the past ten years from answering  Vodrážka’s risible and repeated twisted “analyses” of my writings because, as opposed to what he seems to think, I have deep sympathy for what he went through under communism, and I respect and praise his sincere if amateurish wishes to be a social scientist. It’s surely not his fault that he was prevented from studying and he was sadly too old after 1989 to start from scratch. I also find his self-professed dual gender identity touching and he is, in my opinion, courageous to make a public statement of it.

But even my empathy has its limits. It is one thing to be ignorant, it is quite another to be pretentious. I have cringed long enough at his misappropriation of French social scientists and philosophers. I appreciate that he loves them, but he also completely misunderstands them. I defy anyone among his supporters, when he launches into one of his extemporaneous excursions, to find actionable meaning in his gibberish. Let us take an example of obscure statements in this “Open letter”:

"The French sociologist of memory Maurice Halbwachs or the German religious scholar Jan Assmann rightly point out that history cannot be reduced to 'social constructs.' Moreover, historiography as writing about the past is not the only kind of history. History must be not only a field of interdisciplinarity, but above all a respected sphere of the unalienated historical memory of people and places and of an unleveled ontology. Just as, according to the French historian Vidal-Naquet, the Shoah is not just a collection of narratives, so the historical truth about the communist regime cannot be just a 'social construct.'"

For someone who is unfamiliar with Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, social construction, or ontology, I suppose this paragraph looks erudite, if incomprehensible. Let us, however, deconstruct it sentence by sentence:

“The French sociologist of memory Maurice Halbwachs or the German religious scholar Jan Assmann rightly point out that history cannot be reduced to 'social constructs.'”

The opposite is true: Halbwachs argues that history is inherently a social construct, shaped and interpreted by social groups and their collective memories. As to Assmann, he argues that history is not simply a collection of factual events but a complex interplay between collective memory and cultural frameworks. Assmann posits that history is constructed through cultural processes.

Unperturbed by this major misinterpretation, Vodrážka continues:

“Moreover, historiography as writing about the past is not the only kind of history.”

Who has ever claimed it was? If it were, the millions of volumes on social history, political history, economic history, cultural history, intellectual history, etc., would have been written in vain.

“History must be not only a field of interdisciplinarity, but above all a respected sphere of the unalienated historical memory of people and places and of an unleveled ontology.”

Who could ever claim that history should not respect people’s memory? As to what Vodrážka means by history as a leveled ontology I am not entirely sure, but I think it is a particularly grandiose way of saying that history can be subdivided into periods (Middle-Age, modern, etc.), and by disciplines (political, social, economic, cultural, etc.) – which is, well, bloody obvious.

“Just as, according to the French historian Vidal-Naquet, the Shoah is not just a collection of narratives, so the historical truth about the communist regime cannot be just a 'social construct.’”

In just one sentence, Vodrážka accomplishes the feat to combine another major misinterpretation with a shameless political appropriation. Pierre Vidal-Naquet never used the term of “historical truth”, in fact he protested against authorities who try to define what a fantasized “historical truth” should be. History is also for Vidal-Naquet, of course, a “social construct.” He even emphasized that historical sources are not neutral but are often biased and selective, reflecting the perspectives of those who produced them (hence the absurdity of attributing to him any belief in “historical truth.”) And finally, to introduce the Shoah here is to hint at a form of equality between Nazism and communism, of course also implying that my alleged denial of communist repression is equal to any infamous denial of the Holocaust – introducing in turn a normative dimension in place of an actual historical argument. Needless to say, I have denied neither the Holocaust nor communist repression. On the other hand, Vodrážka would greatly benefit from listening to Tim Snyder’s masterclass on Putin’s propaganda and historical denial, which he held recently in front of the UN Security Council.

To see more generally Vodrážka quote Pierre Nora, Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Lévinas and other left-wing intellectuals in support of his anticommunist theses, to see him worship right- or left-wing French critics of communism such as Stéphane Courtois or Claude Lefort without understanding the context, i.e. that they themselves were once communist believers and hence are primarily settling accounts with their French colleagues and friends and perhaps even with their younger selves, is to fundamentally misunderstand and misinterpret the context. French social sciences are primarily predicated on criticizing the injustice of Western societies. To pretend otherwise and to use them in support of anticommunist theses is as incongruous as if Vodrážka took random sentences out of Petr Uhl’s writings to illustrate the thoughts of Václav Klaus.

Mirek Vodrážka is not the only one to have bodily experiences

As empathetic as I might be to Vodrážka’s bodily experiences, provided it is true he was submitted to potentially fatal insulin shocks (I have no way of asserting if this anecdote is real, but it certainly is chilling), I have my own. I will touch upon them here, not because I confuse them with a historical argument (as opposed to him), but because Vodrážka’s taking circumstances out of context is particularly misleading in this case. I did write to my then bosses, Zdeněk Hazdra and Ondřej Matějka, a mail in February 2015 that became infamous after I sent it by accident to the whole institute (“reply all” instead of “reply”), recommending to fire Petr Blažek if he really was to criticize every single measure they took. He had indeed annoyed them yet again, at a time when they were trying to recruit a foreign historian to strengthen the international profile of the war studies department. He interfered, with his customary toxicity, by denigrating the achievements of the historian in question. I was rolling my eyes at his shenanigans – he already systematically sabotaged the methodological seminar I organized by seizing the microphone and embarking onto endless lectures after each presentation, of which it invariably came out that no matter the topic, he was a much better specialist of it than the invited guest. This usually caused consternation or at least embarrassment amongst these speakers, except for the regretted Michael Shafir from Radio Free Europe, who had experienced the Romanian communist dictatorship and who remained utterly impervious to such intimidation attempts. Shafir openly laughed that compared to Romania, communism in Czechoslovakia had been no more unpleasant than a bad marriage, to the indignation of many of my ÚSTR colleagues but also to the great amusement of my students, who happened to be visiting the institute that day. I should add that after my mail recommending the dismissal of Blažek went public, I received not little private support on the part of other ÚSTR colleagues, who confessed to me they found him unbearable, too, even though they didn’t dare to say it in public.

To come back to bodily experiences, the reason I made this confusion (“reply all” instead of “reply”) is because I was lying in hospital after my second eight-hour surgery in a month, one which took this time a big part of my liver, and I was heavily drugged. I had been recently diagnosed with stage four melanoma and was in a deep emotional and physical turmoil, fully expecting to die before summer, a perspective that I found difficult to reconcile with the fact that my children were still young. When I collected enough strength to go back to the Institute in April after months of convalescence, the first person I actually met in the lift was Petr Blažek, who looked down upon me and uttered these inimitable words: “So, you’re not dead yet?” I reassured him I would be soon, as even his two companions cringed with embarrassment. As for myself, I developed such a headache after this encounter that I had to go back to the emergency room the next day – it turned out I now had two brain tumors.

I tell this anecdote in order to replace Vodrážka’s mean implication that the methodological seminar I led at ÚSTR ended after four months due to its mediocrity in its proper context. First of all, this is factually wrong: it ended after the third semester; and second, it ended only because I was not in a physical state anymore to lead it and no one else at the institute should be expected to be on the receiving end of this type of abuse.

How I got to know Tim Snyder

Neither Mirek Vodrážka nor many of his anticommunist colleagues who vegetate in a Czecho-Czech milieu apparently understand that “science” is not decided at the pub around a beer. Precisely because there is no such thing as “historical truth”, but social sciences are a constant debate evolving with new approaches and new sources, to be part of the international community of scientists is crucial to our work. In 2004 I received a Junior Fellowship on history and memory granted by the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. I was so excited by the intellectual atmosphere of the IWM community that I remained a frequent visitor in 2005 and made many new friends amongst an exceptional cohort of fellows. Among others, I met historian Astrid Swenson, who hosted me countless times in the following decades when I went on reading orgies at the British Library in London and who is now inviting me to a conference in Germany this June – this is how scientific bonds are created and kept up. I also met historian Benjamin Frommer and his wife Martina Kerlová, as well as historians Marci Shore and Timothy Snyder. We all have kept in touch and have joyfully followed the growth of our respective families, all the more so that the Snyders have made long and frequent stays in Vienna and have hosted countless lunches and dinners for friends, while my son has also stayed with them in the US.

But we also all regularly meet at international conferences, notably the Association for the Study of Nationalities in New York every spring, where I have organized again a panel this year with Marci Shore, and at the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies in the US every fall. It is insulting on the part of Vodrážka to imagine that Tim Snyder could have signed the petition on my behalf only on the basis of mis- or disinformation on behalf of someone he could not possibly know. But it is also, alas and mainly, a sign of Vodrážka’s parochialism. “Science” is the result of a collective effort, of debates, confrontations, and controversies. It requires participation, which in turn requires not only bona fide academic credentials and appropriate linguistic abilities, but the privilege of a professional position that allows one to travel. In other words, we cannot improvise ourselves social scientists without a considerable investment in scientific networking. National and international conferences, as well as research grants or teaching appointments abroad, are an integral part of historical work. Academic history, too, is, to some extent, a social negotiation amongst peers between what is convincing, what is acceptable, and what is new. This habitus distinguishes the likes of Michal Pullmann, Michal Kopeček or Matěj Spurný from Mirek Vodrážka, Ladislav Kudrna, and Petr Blažek with a much greater degree of certainty than any self-professed political or ideological affiliation ever would. History is a profession, not a religious faith or a hobby. When one, like director Kudrna, is not even present in the Web of Science database (the H-index that I described in a previous article), it is not an insignificant coincidence but the sure sign that he is not a recognized professional – which we already knew, insofar as he was designated a plagiarizer by the former Scientific Advisory Board.

A last salvo of hypocrisy

In a last manipulation feat, Vodrážka concludes his letter to Tim Snyder on a description of the current, sad state of ÚSTR’s original building: “Nothing can better tell the story of ÚSTR than the pictures presented here”, he writes, together with pictures of the building before reconstruction started vs. today. This is meant to “show the gradual physical destruction of the building in the period 2013-2021, when it was without institutional protection and when the previous management of ÚSTR brought it to a physically irreversible state of demolition, so that the destruction is being assessed by the financial authorities and the Police of the Czech Republic.”

What does this have to do with me, and especially with my being fired from ÚSTR in October 2022? I was involved in the institute’s research policy, not in any shape or form with the reconstruction of the building. As Vodrážka gloats at length, I was anyway brought down from the leadership of the institute in 2018. The previous management’s handling of the building is completely unrelated to current director Kudrna’s accusations according to which I am a supporter of Putin and a denier of communist repression. But there is worse: Vodrážka is outright lying. The reconstruction (not “destruction”) of the building wasn’t anymore investigated by the police at the time when he wrote his letter since the police closed its investigation of the reconstruction of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes’ seat already on 27 October 2022 on the conclusion that there had been no malfeasance on the part of the previous leadership. The “Open letter” to Tim was sent, we are informed, on 17 November 2022.

Vodrážka would have been better inspired to tell Tim Snyder instead what the history of this building was. Before 1989, it was the seat of the Institute of Prognostics that employed two communist regime employees who would become famous, then infamous, after 1989: prime ministers, then presidents Václav Klaus and Miloš Zeman. We could amuse ourselves at length on the symbolical value of “their” building crumbling down after a reconstruction that was made necessary by the poor quality of communist construction as an adequate representation of their presidencies or even of the whole communist and post-communist development. Or we could cut it short and restrict ourselves to Zeman’s famous quip according to which “A left-wing idiot is as dangerous as a right-wing idiot.”

And vice versa.

Many thanks to Martin D. Brown for his critical remarks on this text.