Nick Lloyd. The Eastern Front: A History of the Great War 1914-1918.

    

        A top English war historian published a book, in which he "missed" nearly half of the theaters of the WWI on the Eastern Front. The Western Front had been the pre-eminent meat grinder and the source of the most exalted war literature on the both sides, but the war was won in the Alps and swamps of the Veneto, the fact that even the competent British historians: Liddell Hart and J. F. C. Fuller had to acknowledge. It were twelve battles of Isonzo and the Greek Front against Bulgaria mainly maintained by the French, which exhausted the manpower and destroyed the economy of the Austria-Hungary. Turkey could not come to the aid of the Central Powers in the Balkans because its army was already scattered at Kars and Sari Kamyush by the forces of the defeated Russian Empire. Lloyd mentions Isonzo Battles but without giving them recognition of their importance for the war effort. 

    Germany, which was quick to fill the Eastern gap after the Brusilov offensive of 1916, simply did not have sufficient strength to keep the borders of Austria safe from the imminent invasion from the South by the Allies. After capitulation of Turkey on October 30, 1918 and Austria's three days later, all the German victories on the Western and the Russian fronts became pointless because Vienna could not hold for long.  

"Victories" of the Austrian and Bulgarian Armies against the Serbs. Austrian postcard of 1914. 

Sven Beckert. Capitalism.

     

      The strongest point of his 1100 page book is his emphasize of "war capitalism" as the motor for the European expansion. Namely, for the first time in the human history, the conquerors instead of using loot for their prestigious consumption or, in the best case, taking artisans as captives, decided to invest surpluses in more production. This did not happen in Spain and Portugal proper for a number of reasons but in the Northern Europe (Low Countries) and parts of Italy -- both possessed at the time by Habsburg Empire(s). 

The rest 3/4 of the book more or less follow traditional neocon narrative because the alternatives were expelled from the Western universities. Marxism and socialism occupy about three paragraphs of Beckert's overstretched book. Yet, the spread of welfare state in Western Europe and North America and, consequently, the expansion of government powers was, to a large extent, the answer to the propagation of the socialist ideas. Welfare state in France had direct origins in Saint Simon and his circle, and Bismarck's "White Revolution" was an answer to the growing power of Social Democrats in Germany. Further on, UK elites decided on the welfare state course immediately after the First World War before the Great Depression being afraid that millions of unemployed soldiers would imitate the  Russian revolution. Only in the prosperous United States, the Great Depression, to which Beckert describes the birth of the Big Government, was the main driver of massive social programs. 

Equally, a de-colonization of Africa, South Asia and the Far East in the aftermath of the Second World War was imposed on the reluctant European powers and Japan by the United States as a policy paradigm for a fledgling Cold War. 

    This author views modern society as very distant from the capitalism a-la Adam Smith or Karl Marx dependent on one's preferences. In "old" capitalism, the capital appeared from profits on sales of something (cod, nails, so favored by Smith, or even books). In the "new" capitalism, the capital comes from investors: banks and private equity and debt funds, who suck money from pension and insurance funds, i.e. in the final reckoning, from the accumulation of workers' wages. This system has more in common with the Ancien Regimes in Europe where governments worked as giant monetary pumps from the Third Estate, including capitalists, into the first two. 

Tony Blair towering over Gaza (Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.).

 

Daisy Dunn. The missing thread.

         

                A totally misguided book by the beautiful lady Daisy Dunn. Greek and Roman women could not influence politics except as through their men. And the content of their pillow talks is forever lost. So Mrs. Dunn invents them as if she was present there. A few women (Empress Livia and Severan Syrian broads) influenced politics on their own but their influence was mostly destructive. 

    Whatever was the influence of the wives and lovers of the powerful Hellenistic and Roman politicians and generals, the influence of their catamites was much greater. Emperor Claudius was particularly derided by the contemporaries because he did not seem to express any noble interest to boys and men, preferring to them company of low-born women. 

Alexander Etkind. Nature's Evil.

     George Soros created a plethora of his NGOs to grow new neo-colonial elites of the post-Communist world. His strategy worked in some small, economically unviable countries: Armenia, Moldova, Balkan and Baltic states but failed miserably in Russia and China, which were the first targets of re-colonization. So, most graduates of Soros' "academies" had to enjoy teaching or journalistic jobs somewhere, mostly on the periphery of the Western world. One of these is Etkind.

    His book rechewes an old racial-colonialist discourse that the "backward nations" cannot put their natural resources to a good use and so have to be robbed from them. In a new packaging, this sounds as follows. The abundance of natural resources allows undemocratic elites to keep power by distributing goods to the populace in lieu of democratic rights. So they have to be despoiled of their natural wonders, which must be transferred to the efficient Western corporations.

      Why these "undemocratic elites" appear only in Venezuela, Iran and, first and foremost, Russia but not in Norway, Canada, Australia and, by the way, UK, which has no large scale real, non-financial, non-service economy barred the extraction of the North Sea oil, of course, is glossed upon. This screed belongs to a long tail of garbage neocon propaganda, which currently fills the bookstores and libraries, probably subsided by the invisible hand of non-market forces.