Jean Manco. Ancestral Journeys.

Jean Manco. Ancestral Journeys. The Peopling of Europe from the First Venturers to the Vikings.

        Now, with the emergence of paleogenetics, all of prehistory can be re-calibrated. One can use DNA analysis of ancient burials and animal skeletons, together with existing radiocarbon dating, new comparative linguistics studies (including historical toponimics, glottochronology, etc.) as well as the new archaeological data abetted by ground-search radars to provide a more complete picture of prehistory like a jigsaw puzzle. While I cannot pronounce any expert opinion on the conclusions of J. Manco, a breadth of the study leaves me in awe. In particular, modern DNA testing available for ancient remains, largely confirms hypotheses of Cavalli-Sforza that technical progress in prehistory spread with spread of the populations rather than through cultural contact. Historians are a rancorous bunch and I doubt that her conclusions will abscond criticism but I am sure that all future studies will make use of the same remarkable array of methods provided by modern science.

Christopher Clark. The sleepwalkers. How Europeans went to war in 1914. Gordon Martel. The month that changed the world. July 1914.

Christopher Clark, the author of laudatory Prussian history, "Iron Kingdom" recycles lies of contemporary and post-War German propaganda absolving the Kaiser and his generals of starting the  WWI. In that he twists and bends history right and left.

The first declaration of war between major parties was Germany declaring war on Russia on behalf of the "offended party", the Austro-Hungary, and then invading... Belgium. Austro-Hungary vacillated whole five days (during which France and England declared war on Germany) to respond to "Russian provocations." While all governments were blind to the impending threat of the world conflict, Germany's Wilhelm pursued the cause of war with the single-mindedness, which completely contradicts the traditional (and correct) accounts of the war guilt.

In goose-step with Kaiser's propaganda Clark stoops to obvious lies. There was no symmetry in Russian and German "mobilizations" because in the German military lexicon this word meant "war" (p. 535), i.e. the set of actions to be undertaken on declaration of hostilities. In Russian military statutes this word meant recall of reservists, cancellation of officers' vacations and other internal and purely military contingencies not necessarily involving crossing borders or any other hostile action. This fact is well known to historians but not, obviously, to Clark.

Gordon Martel's book is not ideologically motivated as the opus of Clark. This is re-chewing of well-known facts--some with new archival sources--but without any major insights until nothing is left even to regurgitate.

Peter Weibel, Liljana Fruk, Molecular aesthetics

Absolutely useless but very cool book mixing up molecular structure and dynamics with that of painting and sculpture.

David Deutsch. The Fabric of Reality.

David Deutsch is not Max Tegmark. His book, though full of metaphysical hoey now embellishing any treatise of well-known quantum physicist, does not lose connection with physical facts. But his "multiverse" exercises are poorly compiled.

For instance, he suggests that a quantum computer can perform computations unfeasible to the Turing machine (currently an unproven fact, by the mathematicians) because in alternative universes, other signs can occupy the same physical place on paper and interact with each other. This has nothing to do with paradigmatic quantum mechanics. Paradigmatic quantum mechanics in this instance, simply states that sign is described by the wave function (or density matrix), which contains maximum information we can obtain about a letter sign.

Similarly, he perverts message of mathematical intuitionism. Not being an intuitionist and not understanding enough mathematics to judge one way or the other, I must mention that intuitionism does not claim that natural numbers are finite.

All it claims (contrary to p. 232 of Deutsch's) that there is algorithm allowing to add 1 to any natural number (e.g. 9+1=10) and this algorithm is what we mean by the "natural numbers." Equally, the real number Pi means that we have an algorithm (countable filter by the parlance of the set theory), which allows to compute arbitrary decimal of Pi. Yes, for the Pi+horse such algorithm may not exists and this expression is thus not a real number.

Daniel Shulman. Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty.

I safely can report that I did not read the book. The NPR interview with Daniel Shulman was enough.

Koch brothers can buy everything, especially Utne Reader poor journalist. Similarly to the recent bio of Rupert Murdoch, this opus portrays them simultaneously as

• More powerful than anyone can imagine and
• More benign than everyone thinks of them.

The hack writer gives credence, in particular, to the sincere libertarianism of the Koch brothers. Paraphrasing Schopenhauer, completely consistent libertarian can be found only in a mental asylum (he spoke of solipsism). Indeed, one only has to buy ticket to Somalia or Northern Waziristan to enjoy libertarian utopia.

In fact, Koch brothers continue the deed of their father. During 1940-50s when, because of changed economy and demographics, KKK became uninteresting for anyone but the Southern poor, racist tycoons had to invent other ideology attractive for the new professional middle and upper middle classes. It emerged in form of extreme anti-Communism (Red under the bed), equalizing all forms of social support with Marxism and Socialism and the John Birch society. 

When steam has gone from old-style conservatism (segregation under guise of states rights, anti-Soviet hysteria, etc.) of Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond, Koch brothers latched on to libertarianism as an ideology attractive to young and educated. In reality, as do many of the top 0.0001%, they subscribe to the idea of the rigid class society controlled by the compact of the ultra-rich, military and the clergy. To assess how well it works in the long run, one has to look at Latin America between 1800s and 1960s. This thinking was epitomized in Mitt Romney's candidacy--only Harvard, Yale and Princeton educated top bankers, industrialists and politicos are people--but he was not genuine enough to convince many people of the vitality of his agendas.

NATO. Mockli, Daniel. European Foreign Policy during the Cold War. Heath, Brandt, Pompidou and the Dream of Political Unity, I. B. Tavris, 2009.

The author misses the main point in NATO development. Despite the continuity of the founding documents and structures, politically it lived through three distinct phases. Yet, Mockli's book despite its conceptual flaws even within the smart limitations he himself posed on his master opus--he does not touch a very successful demonstration of unity in the end of the 70s--with respect to the deployment of the INF, is much deeper and better researched than the majority of NATO-related studies.

In the first phase (40s-first half of the 60s) it was a system of American military guarantees to the European countries in the case of Soviet invasion in exchange for the access to their strategic infrastructure: roads, ports, airports and such. The ending of this phase can be dated by 1966? when De Gaulle pulled France out of NATO and declared a strategy of "all-azimuth defense." Nobody seriously thought that France would fight on the Soviet side in the case of any conflict but, with respect to the NATO forces in Europe, French strategy perceived an eventuality in which Americans will unilaterally decide to use French territory and resources to fight wars having nothing to do with the French national interest.

The second phase (1960s-1990s), was characterized by NATO turning into a collective European Army. In fact, by the mid-1970s, not occasionally coinciding with the end of the Vietnam War, the main ground force in the Central Europe was represented by the German and British contingents. The US still provided both strategic and tactical nuclear umbrella for NATO forces in Europe and the naval protection of its flanks but it was clear that in the case of the major conflict, the bulk of the ground armies will be provided by the large NATO countries.

Finally, the third phase, in which we are now is NATO, turning after its enlargement into a Department of the US Colonial Affairs. Nobody in his or her right mind can perceive any security interests of Poland, or Romania sending its nationals to Iraq or Denmark and Norway supporting attack on Libya. These conflicts are a complete invention of the US (or British, in the case of Libya) policy establishments, in which the role of the other NATO members to provide condottieri or, if they would not, to give money either for the "humanitarian aid" or "reconstruction" of the countries ruined by the US invasion, or to support shambolic economies of their Eastern European and Southern allies at the time when they send their kids to fight.

There would be, half-seriously, the fourth phase when the interests of the Eastern Europeans will chain US and EU into futile "crush Russia, get hydrocarbons" policies on the periphery of the US interests. We already see that in senseless Georgian and Ukrainian projects. Neocons thinking that they are smarter than everyone else are for that the most gullible when it comes for substitution of the US national interest with petty conflicts framed by Polish propaganda and Saudi/Qatari money.

P.S. Mockli calls for the efficient EU defensive policy suggesting that without it there would be no independent EU foreign policy. Sounds reasonable, but for now, there is no chance whatsoever that EU is capable to develop independent foreign policy. Euro-Atlanticists (called neocons in the US) proceeded with enlargement in part to create a compact of minion states to contain (and in future, to be used as beachhead to attack) Russia. This sorry predicament does not leave much role for the Western Europe as to be, in the words of G. Orwell, US No.1 runway.

Other references:

D. S. Hamilton (ed.) Transatlantic transformations: equipping NATO for the 21st century, Center for Transatlantic Relationships.
Techno-bubble talk with little depth of inherent political and economic issues. Rob de Wijk's suggestions for armaments do not envision any conflict but the war with Russia.
Herd, G. and J. Kriendlender (eds.) Understanding NATO in the 21st century. Routledge.
Again, purely technocratic talk devoid of any political content and context.
Arne Hoffman. The emergence of detente in Europe: Brandt, Kennedy and the formation of Ostpolitik, 2007.
G. Schmidt (eds.) A history of NATO: the first fifty years, Vols. 1-3. 2001.
S. R. Sloan, NATO, the European Union and the Atlantic Communisty, Roman & Littlefield, 2005.
It offers quite sophisticated view of the trans-Atlantic relationship going far beyond the neocon one-liner of the "defense of democracies." Yet, it was written during the "mission accomplished" period of unabashed US triumphalism with respect to war in Iraq.
W. T. Thies. Why NATO endures.
Primitive neocon-themed piece of NATO propaganda. "Unlike autocracies, in which an entrenched leadership can make the same dumb mistakes more than once, there is a Darwinian quality to policy making in democracies." Ye, ye. Kosovo, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Ukraine...

Stephen Sestanovich. Maximalist.

Stephen Sestanovich was one of the architects of the NATO enlargement, which turned the US into a real Empire with a typical set of imperial obligations. As all neocons and euro-atlanticists (as if there is any other remaining political thought in the US), after the failure of Iraq adventure and in the absence of support to invasion of Iran, he advocates bullying Russia into submission or war (Third time the chance!).

In essence, this is a Cargo Cult thinking--the Cold War was, in neocon mythology, a resounding success, rather than expensive and tenuous balancing on the precipice--so that if neocons retrace the steps they will arrive at ultimate victory. Sestanovich advocates a return to the Cold War posture and Bush vintage "preventive wars", which were not, by the way, the part of the Cold War strategy. Yet, in 1945 US owned ~60% of world economy, were about two decades ahead of all world in high technology, etc. etc. Finally, during the Cold War most First World and Third World elites viewed Soviet-based Communism as the main enemy and US policy goals as beneficial. While, now in Western Europe there is still a generation of politicians (Merkel, etc.) with nostalgic Americanism, rational calculations of their elites involve following in America's path less and less.

To a pity, American policy makers if they read something read nothing else than neocon pamphlets.

Andrei Lankov. The Real North Korea. Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist State.

A. Lankov is a Russian-born professor at South Korea's Kookmin U. I cannot, obviously, judge how accurate his book is but it is a breath of fresh air among neocon-dominated country studies in the US. Current Anglo-American political scientists mostly carry a few pre-set theses on the situation in any country, which they support with cherry-picked "evidence." (E.g. see my review of Richard Sakwa's Putin--and this is not the worst example; on the contrary among the best). Furthermore, neocon-informed country studies take their anthropomorphism of international politics--as if countries were characters in the Greek tragedy with no domestic politics and immutable characters--to an unbearable degree. Measured and well-researched (again, unlike neocon "experts" he has a working knowledge of the language of country he writes about), his book is a welcome addition. In particular, he discusses, at length, why despite official slogans of Korea's unification both  North Korean and South Korean elites are comfortable with the situation as it is.

Eric Hosbawn. Fractional times: culture and society in the twentieth century.

Like myself, he is one of the last messengers from the dying world where stories could have moral ambivalence and writing folk were more concerned with their message rather than with who they are.

The Letters of Arthur J. Schlesinger. Random House.

I always thought that personal letters were too personal to provide a fair glimpse of time and, thus, uninteresting. But these are co-o-ol.

Anne Jacobsen. Operation Paperclip.

Poorly written book on a very important subject. The amount of hurdles on the way of her research should have been staggering.

                                                                   [To be continued]

Max Tegmark. Our Mathematical Universe.

Since the Princeton "gang of four" (Witten, Polyakov, etc.) imposed its string orthodoxy on the modern quantum theory of fields, the boundary between metaphysics (disquisitions without much empirical support, or no empirical support possible in principle) and physics (an experimental science, you know) has completely disappeared.

Max Tegmark's book represents extreme proliferation of metaphysical agenda in modern academia. There is no clear distinction anymore between such interpretation of science, religion or simply technical vocabulary mumbo-jumbo.

M. David-Fox, P. Holquist, A. Marth. The Holocaust in the East. Local perpetrators and Soviet response.

Nasty little book. Bland attempt at whitewashing atrocities committed by Eastern European Nazi allies. No mention of Holocaust in the Baltics (mostly organized by "occupied" peoples themselves) at all. Systemic attempts at impugning of the Soviet sources. Only one chapter out of nine (Romania) deals with actual perpetrators. There also suggestions that Soviet sources are inaccurate and sloppy with respect to the (stellar, obviously) records of Romanian Nazi police.

Manfred Rauchenmeister. Der Erste Weltkrieg und das Ende der Habsburghmonarchie 1914-1918. Bohlau, 2013.

1200 p. dreadnought of a book. All what you wanted to know on the First World War from the Austrian prospective and were afraid to ask is now in print.

Robert Gates. Duty: Memoirs of Secretary at War.

It is easy to name leaders who successfully covered up their true face and whose incompetence and/or viciousness were fully revealed only at the pinnacle of their career. The inverse: the development when a previously incompetent, debauched or vicious leader became elevated by the obligations of the high office is so rare that only two examples: Louis XI and Duke Wellington come to mind. Sheer antiquity of these examples testify to their rareness. Louis XI turned from debauched and treacherous youth into a frugal and conscientious king, the founder of a modern French state who engineered the rebirth of the country after Hundred Years War. The winner at Waterloo Arthur Wellesley, Duke Wellington was an indifferent cadet nearly cashiered from the military.

          Robert Gates belongs to this rare category. He was controversial (see Iran-Contra) Bush nominee to the directorship of CIA famous for his terrible errors of judgement. He refused to recognize ongoing collapse of USSR and gave advice not to deal with Yeltsin but also suggested to Mideastern leaders declaring "jihad" to edge Soviets from Afghanistan on the basis of "infidels occupying Moslem lands" not foreseeing that this formula can be equally applied against the USA.

           Yet, his tenure as the Secretary of Defense was an unqualified success. He did not only oversaw conclusion of Iraq War and wrapping up operations of Afghanistan but also was a sane voice on American intervention into Georgia (which he acknowledges as erstwhile attackers and blames Russians for invasion of Georgia on neighboring pages) and Syria.

            His memoirs accused of criticism of a sitting President whom he served are obviously a first volley in his fight for something big (Republican vice-presidential nomination or Secretary of State in the next administration). And, given the above, he might as well be successful in this new role.

Stuart Freedman. Strategy.

Typical English manuscript, which treats war as a sporting event (or high drama, see his Conclusions), in which one is settling scores. 700+ pages of erudite but very disjoint banter. How many pages one needs to ruminate on a correct (and rather trivial) idea that human behavior is too complex to mold it into a set of predetermined rules? There is a second idea, that action, in societal terms, is moot without proper organization on the basis of strategy. If there is something else, I have missed it.
        The author presents himself as well-intent, erudite and pious man but he is completely incapable to make his thought concise and precise. It is very ironic that a person who extols virtues of organization and discipline is incapable to exercise these himself.

Orlando Figes. Russian Revolution 1891-1991.

Researched on the level of 5th grade school report, all from downloads. Even proper names of political/government offices get garbled (O'K, this is pedantry for US professional historian). There is obviously secret subsidy paid (by USAID? EU?) for russophobe screeds because ALL of them get published instead of one in tenfold number of copies.

Craig Nelson. The Age of Prosperity. The Epicrise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era.

Rank (not so much incompetent, as secondary) compilation. Publishing industry becomes a feeding trough for upper-middle class New Yorkese and Angelenos who do not have enough criminal inclinations to make it in banking and/or electronic media.

Kevin Jackson. 1922. Constellation of genius.

Dissembled banter of an upper-class Englishman but not without its amusing qualities. Does not mention science much. Einstein appears as a guru on a par with Gurdjieff and Alistair Crowley. But his artistic tastes are generally sound.

Mary Beard, Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovation. Liveright, 2013.

In the beginning of D. Lieven's review, I said a few harsh words about the state of humanities in Britain. However, Mary Beard is a happy exception of the sorry state of humanities on the Isles. Even her extremes: the demand that archeological or paleographic data must come from exactly the same period as the period of study with no conjectures, look amusing. (If, e.g. we have clay tablets with cuneiform from one Babylonian dynasty and then, from the next to next, how probable that Babylonians communicated by the Internet in between? Can a historian definitely assume that Bismark never contemplated conversion to Islam, even that exact contents of his thought are lost forever?)

She goes so far as to propose that Alexander the Great is largely a Roman invention  to justify the politics of unlimited conquest. (were the Ptolemaic and Selevkid dynasties controlling gigantic territories also propagandist inventions?) Another fantastic assertion is that Caligula and Nero were normal because she can spot some underlying logic in their behavior (in fact, psychopaths and schizophrenics can be very logical).

But the fact, that her book is mostly series of book reviews written not in a fawning or, conversely, derogatory-condescending style so typical for modern reviews and takes issues with modern portrayals of antiquity as well, definitely finds a sympathetic ear (?) with this author.

Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and its Rivals

For a long time I was pondering the following paradox: why the level of humanities in British Universities is so low, given their incredibly high reputation for "hard" sciences. The only idea, which came to my mind so far, was that the humanities in UK exist not for scholarship but to house scions of "good families" who are not ruthless enough for intelligence services or banking and not crooked enough for politics.

Certainly, Prince Dominic Lieven  is no historian. For the professional historian would need to sit several years each in archives of St. Petersburg, Istambul and Vienna, and to read XVII century Turkish handwriting to attempt coverage as broad as his. But he is a good political scientist--albeit relying mostly on the secondary sources--to paint the picture of decline and fall of Empires in as broad strokes as his. As usual with the non-professional history, especially coming from the UK universities, it combines many brilliant insights with off-hand remarks as well as plausible but unsupported and, frequently, unproven stories. And in the case of D. L., this is true to an excessive degree, reflecting his general brilliance and flamboyance but also playing fast and loose with facts.

Lieven stands head and shoulders above most Western Russia-studies academics and I do not want to malign him by this review. The weak points of his book are shared by most, if not all, contemporary UK and US studies of Russia and the region, while the strong points are his alone. One of the weaknesses common not only for the Russia studies but also for all contemporary political science is anachronistic myopia. That is, there is overriding assumption that the societies of Western Europe and Americas were always economically prosperous and democratic. Say it, for instance, about Spanish Empire between 1700 and 1976. Tellingly, Spanish Empire is almost absent from Lieven's narrative.

The truth is that before the Industrial Revolution (which was embraced by non-English societies only late in 1800s), China and India rivaled the most developed of the Western countries in terms of wealth and economic development. In 1900, in all probability, the majority of Chinese and Indians were worse off than in 1700. Similarly, in the era when the arable and pastures were the main source of wealth, subjects of the Russian Empire were very well-off. And few of 1900 observers would count Italy, not to speak of Spain, Greece or Portugal, as wealthier or more advanced technologically than Russia (as well as Argentina and Brazil). Only the autarkic experiments of the latter threw them back for a half-century.

Another tendency, common for Lieven and all contemporary political scientists writing about history, is to ignore inconvenient factual realities in favor of generalizing concepts. Lieven ignores Russian Zemski Sobor (proto-parliament encompassing all estates, even freeholder peasants) and Boyar Duma. When writing that Russian aristocracy did not have rights enshrined in law as the English Magna Charta, and therefore had more in common with contemporary Turkish warrior elites, he fails to recognize that Early Modern Italy, Spain, or Scandinavia had completely different models of interaction of the nobility with the sovereign. The concept of vassalage was totally alien in Prussia as well, where all nobles were connected directly to the sovereign (first the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, then the Grand Duke) without mediation by their local overlord, etc. etc.

But at least, before the World War I, he does not veer that much off course, or my knowledge of Ottoman (little) and Hapsburg Empires (significant) is insufficient to notice them. That is in his description of XX century events his anachronistic myopia (e.g. Europe was mostly democratic and prosperous in the interwar period), as well as the uglier staples of the British historiography, which get better of him. Among these are diminution of Armenian Genocide and the idea that the Jewish Shoah was an unfortunate product of one man's lunacy--in fact Antisemitism was the main selling point of the Nazi Party inside Germany--and its only selling point in Romania, Hungary, Ukraine and the Baltic States. Without its uncompromising 'Juden Raus' stance, Nazi would be a small sect among other parties opposing the Versailles settlement.

Lieven pronounces that the main reason for collapse of the USSR was its inability to provide living standards anywhere near contemporary developed Western nations and consequential diminution of Communist ideology he is widely off the mark. If this were so, USSR had to collapse in 1920-30s rather than in 1990s, and China, Cuba and North Korea (and also Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos) would not outlive it. While it is futile to ascribe complex historical phenomena to a particular reason, most of the ruling Communist Parties were able to adapt, or, in the case of North Korea, entrench. Why this did not (or could not) happen in the Soviet Union is a separate question partly covered by Lieven but left as muddled after his discussion as before it.