Class forced to move elsewhere after several minutes
About a dozen protesters from the Revolutionary Communist Party barged in on Yale University Professor Timothy Snyder’s “Hitler, Stalin, and Us” class last Thursday, yelling at him and holding up anti-Israel placards.
The protest was led by Raymond Lotta (pictured), who according to Insight Press “has written and lectured extensively on the ‘first wave’ of socialist revolutions” (Russia and China).
Lotta’s also led the “Set the Record Straight” project, which allegedly “refutes the slanders and harmful mispresentations [sic]” about those respective revolutions.
According to the Yale Daily News, Lotta, who is not affiliated with the university, had given Snyder an invitation to debate back in November which, apparently, the professor did not accept.
“No class as usual today,” Lotta yells to Snyder’s class, as shown in the video below. “There is a state of emergency. A state of emergency caused by this capitalist-imperialist system. Genocide — in Gaza! Women, stripped of the right to abortion! Climate catastrophe!”
Lotta tells the class the only way to change all this is a “liberating communist revolution,” and he charges Snyder with “locking [students] into this oppressive system.”
“He is brainwashing you with lies and slander about communism!” Lotta shouts. Snyder eventually approaches Lotta and appears to ask him to leave, but Lotta refuses.
According to Revolution, the “voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA,” Lotta and his followers targeted Snyder because he’s a “high-profile anti-communist ideologue who traffics in lies and slanders about communism.”
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“Because by slandering communism and prettifying U.S. imperialism, Snyder is locking people into this system of capitalism-imperialism,” Revolution stated. “It is a system in which America is #1—with its supply chains of misery and exploitation and history’s most monstrous military machine of death and destruction.
“What country has carried out more invasions and coups, is the only one to drop nuclear bombs, and has plundered our planet’s resources more than any other? The U.S.!”
Examples of Professor Snyder’s “lies,” according to the article, include noting the governments of both Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin were “totalitarian” and that the Ukraine famine of 1932-33 was orchestrated by the latter.
The Daily News notes Snyder is a “historian specializing in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and the Holocaust,” and is an “outspoken supporter” of Ukraine.
Signs held by Lotta’s underlings read “Where’s Snyder’s moral outrage over US backed genocide in GAZA?” and “Hitler killed 6 million Jews and Stalin saved 1.6 million Jews.”
After five minutes of shouting, students and Snyder began filing out of the classroom. Shortly after, Lotta and his group were escorted out of the building by Yale security.
Speaking to the News afterward, Lotta called the demonstration a “success.”
“This was meant to be a jolt,” Lotta said. “We wanted to be dramatic and stir students up. This is a challenge for Snyder to debate me on the past and future of the Communist revolution.”
According to Lotta, Yale security informed his group that they were trespassing and not permitted to return to Yale campus without authorization. They did not elaborate on what the consequences would be for a future infraction, Lotta said.
A University spokesperson wrote to the News on Thursday night that “the situation is still being investigated and reviewed.”
As noted by The Fix in 2020, Snyder apparently has such an intense dislike of Donald Trump that he’s turned off peers and progressives alike. The Nation referred to his book “The Road to Unfreedom” as the “apotheosis of a certain paranoid style that has emerged among liberals in Trump’s wake,” while Princeton’s David Bell said of Snyder that “there’s a certain danger in politics in crying wolf too many times. You start to alienate the people you’re trying to persuade.”
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IMAGE: RevolutionBooksNYC/YouTube
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