Here’s a strange one. The publishers of Yale professor Timothy Snyder are claiming that Russian hackers are behind a series of strange attacks on Amazon for Snyder’s new book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. According to Snyder and his publishers, his book was a target as it focuses on tyranny and fascism and the book has shot up the Amazon charts as a manual “for resisting US president Donald Trump.”
Images of Snyder’s On Tyranny were replaced on Amazon.co.uk with those for a non-existent colouring book by “Timothy Strauss”. The blurb for Strauss’s book said it contained “lessons to Make World Great Again” [sic] – a slogan used on pro-Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin posters that have appeared across the Russian Federation.
The Yale professor, who specialises in European history and the Holocaust, said: “The idea of making the world great again, the slogan left by the hacker, appears, to my knowledge, only in Russian on pro-Trump posters in the Russian Federation.” He added: “The hack basically confirms several of the lessons in On Tyranny, such as [No] 14, on the importance of digital privacy.”
Is this some Putin-driven cyber attack? Who is to say. Professor Snyder says that the popularity of his book this week, as the Trump administration continues to drown in its own ideological crapulence, may have prompted a Russian supporter of our orange snowflake-in-chief to try to do their part. But Snyder also says that he has been targeted by Russia before and so he is clearly known by some people of note in Russia’s political system.
Snyder claimed there had been a pattern of Russian action to undermine his previous books – Bloodlands and Black Earth – both of which tackled Hitler and Stalin. “The Russian foreign ministry, in an annual list, claimed that the existence of Bloodlands somehow constituted a human rights violation – odd for a book … whose subject was the violation of human rights,” he said.
The page has been fixed but it is an interesting and strange occurrence from a country that has a long and storied history of avant-garde propaganda.