Stanford’s Professor Michael McFaul is a fool [has since apologized and backpedaled on his original comment]

Stanford’s Professor Michael McFaul is a fool [has since apologized and backpedaled on his original comment]

A highly credentialed “expert” says Hitler never purposely killed ethnic Germans (refining that to “in the countries he invaded”, to attempt to wordsmith his way out of this hole). MSNBC ran with that story too.

Read the whole thing: Former US Amb. to Russia Michael McFaul’s MSNBC take about Hitler & Putin was so bad Maddow Blog deleted it (and they’re backpedaling) – twitchy.com

Here is his direct quote:

“One of the Russian journalists said you know there’s one difference between Hitler when he was coming in and Putin. Hitler didn’t kill ethnic Germans. He didn’t kill German-speaking people. I think people need to remember when we are talking about cities like Kharkiv and Mariupol and Kyiv, there are large populations there up to a third and sometimes much to a half that are Russian speakers and ethnic speakers. And yet Putin doesn’t seem to care about that. He slaughters the very people he’s come to liberate,”

After questioned about this, he then refined what he said to say that he meant “didn’t kill ethnic Germans” in countries invaded by Nazis” (which is not true either).

This is a mindboggling thing to say in an attempt, apparently, at comparing Putin with Hiter and suggesting Hitler was a better person. What and why? Read what the Germans did in Poland – mind blowing.

He didn’t know, he now says.

Update: He has now backed out of his original statement, completely. Still confused as to why he ever said it in the first place.

Michael McFaul on Twitter: “I was, of course, mistaken when I said that Hitler did not kill ethnic Germans. German Jews were a vibrant part of the German population and so many of them were brutally murdered by the Nazi regime.” / Twitter

His credentials:

Michael McFaul is Director at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in the Department of Political Science, and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1995.

Dr. McFaul also is as an International Affairs Analyst for NBC News and a columnist for The Washington Post. He served for five years in the Obama administration, first as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House (2009-2012), and then as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation (2012-2014).

He has authored several books, most recently the New York Times bestseller From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia. Earlier books include Advancing Democracy Abroad: Why We Should, How We Can; Transitions To Democracy: A Comparative Perspective (eds. with Kathryn Stoner); Power and Purpose: American Policy toward Russia after the Cold War (with James Goldgeier); and Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin.

His current research interests include American foreign policy, great power relations, and the relationship between democracy and development. Dr. McFaul was born and raised in Montana. He received his B.A. in International Relations and Slavic Languages and his M.A. in Soviet and East European Studies from Stanford University in 1986. As a Rhodes Scholar, he completed his D. Phil. in International Relations at Oxford University in 1991.

Here’s an easily accessible list of people targeted by Hitler, certainly within Germany and we know that many were targeted elsewhere. Jews were murdered by the million in Poland, for example.

These are the people who set our government policies on international topics. He has been all over the news regarding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

After the last two years, I associate “expert” with “idiot”. The suicide of expertise has occurred.

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