Adrian Goldsworthy. Philip and Alexander: Kings and Conquerors.

Horrific. I previously expressed opinion on the degradation of the British humanities and on Andy/Adie  Goldsworthy in particular. Has the depth of analysis deserving only six-to-eight grader school project. I checked it out in a vain hope that in a more than a pound book there is some information about 1) the structure of Macedonian society (very little), 2) Macedonian culture--if not an oxymoron--and its place in contemporaneous Greece, 3) contemporary geopolitics, 4) mutual penetration of the Greek and Indian cultures, and 5) some explanations why a tiny state on the border of Thracia and  Peloponnesus conquered much of Western Eurasia and Egypt and installed its generals as the heads of the local dynasties --almost none. All the book contains is a sophomoric description of battles, elephants and Alexander's drunken binges. The author can object that there is scarce information about most of these subject. But if you know next to nothing about the subject of your principal expertise--is not it the time to begin selling used cars? 

Gotz Aly. Europe against the Jews.

Usually, the books are being commended because of their visionary ideas. But, sometimes, there is a need to commend a book not for its prescience but for the courage of the author to enunciate the obvious. Gotz Aly succeeded in clearly representing two ideas: first, that the Shoah was not an aberration but an end to a relatively long tradition of Eastern European anti-Semitism and that the instant push to Shoah was the degeneration of Wilsonian idea of "self-determination" into an ethnocratic state--in most of the Eastern Europe, and, second that the dynamics of the Shoah was much less related to the race and religion, and that in many countries it was rather looting, rape, confiscation of the Jewish assets and real estate, which were the main drivers. 

For that, his book was chastised by Steven Zipperstein in the New York Times. He wanted the book to be faithful to Snyder's vicious assertion that the Russians are guilty of everything--and to relate the murderous streak in the European anti-Semitism exclusively to Russian pogroms, which were, in his opinion, whitewashed by Gotz Aly. But there is no lack of information, including statistical data, concerning pogroms beginning from 1882 to the Russian Civil War. Some of this information is garbled, surely, for instance peasant leader Makhno was no anti-Semite--he was surrounded by the Jews, including the head of his secret police Leva Zadov--so feared that long thereafter mothers scared unruly children by him. This was the inner dynamics of peasant guerilla armies that led to mass murder of the Jews in Ukraine by the anarchists. But his general narrative--for instance, that the Tsarist Government, surely no friend of the Jews, did not have any coherent policy of dealing with them--was ridiculed, rather than refuted by Zipperstein. Similarly, Aly mistakenly says that the Kishinev 1903 pogrom went without consequences. It shocked the whole world and resulted in overwhelming turning of the US public opinion in favor of Japan in the Russo-Japanese War. (see the contemporary gravure by E. M. Lilien, a Jewish-German painter). Not that the pogroms were unique for the Russian Empire--neighboring Romania was also engulfed by anti-Jewish violence before the Second World War. 

However, the strongest examples in the service of Aly's own theses were omitted in the book--namely, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and Holland. In all these nations, only a minuscule fraction of Jews survived, near-zero in the case of Estonia--it was attested by Heidrich at Wannsee Conference in 1942 as judenfrei as an example to other, more "backward" nations--and in none of these states history of the racial or religious persecution played any role. 

Two main ideas of Gotz Aly were earlier enunciated by this author--may be, not in such clear and well-documented form. But I am not upset, for it requires his stature and popularity to move the connection of the emergence of the ethnocratic government--newly reborn state of Estonia in 1990 proclaimed its goal to achieve "monoethnic Parliament" well before the term "ethnic cleansing" became popular in the Balkans--to genocidal policies against minorities.  

Muraresku, Brian. The Immortality Key: The Secret History of Religion with no Name.

     

Muraresku wrote a remarkable book, where decent exercise in amateur archeology and anthropology is mixed with a complete madness, to a strange result. It is quite probable that the antique cults of Demeter and Bacchus, especially in Early Antiquity, were accompanied by orgies, drug taking and human/animal sacrifices. It would be quite strange if it were otherwise. 

However, to suggest that there was a direct inheritance line between Late Bronze Age cults and esoteric teachings of the Early Modern Europe suppressed by the Inquisition  is madness. First, many tribal groups--predominantly Germanic, which dominated Europe after the Fall of the Roman Empire had neither genetic, nor cultural relationship to the civilizations of European Antiquity. It would be again strange, if these Germanic invaders were not taking "magic mushrooms" or some other form of hallucinogenic drug and did not participate in sacrificial rites, but this is not the same as the existence of a cultural continuity. 

Sean MacMeekin. Stalin's War.

 

There were times in 1950-1970s when the majority of the SS and Wehrmacht veterans were still young and sprightly, and threw lavish parties in which they boasted about their "victories". (The subject of the US-French 1967 movie "Night of the Generals"). To an occasional sympathetic British journalist they told that they were defending Europe and European culture from the plague of Bolshevism. And yet, they were provoked by the Russians. Holocaust? Ya, Jews were an obsession of a single deranged man whose supposedly incompetent meddling in the military decisions had cost them that wonderful war. [1] But its victims were much fewer than it is told by the "Jewish propaganda" machine and many were communist fellow travelers and partisans, anyway. Serial ascription of the victims of Nazi terror to the Russians and Stalin had to come much later. 

Meekin laments that turncoat Romania--it switched the sides when its defeat was imminent--was punished "for defending its territory", i.e. the territory grabbed from the decaying Russian Empire in the aftermath of the First World War. Forgotten are about 200 thousand Jews and many others exterminated by the Romanian Army in the Odessa Oblast' alone, not counting the Crimea and other territories, which were "blessed" by the Romanian occupation. 

But the Western allies are treated as shabbily by von Meekin. In his book, Roosevelt and, especially, Churchill were naïve dupes that were enchanted by Stalin to help USSR/Russia instead of accepting "reasonable" German piece overtures, of which little evidence except the neo-Nazi propaganda can be found. First, Churchill already had a taste of Hitler's sincerity and trustworthiness. Second, Churchill obviously, and cynically, preferred a million Germans fighting over Kharkov, or Stalingrad rather than El Alamein where slightly more than 100,000 British troops, many little more than colonial militias, were facing slightly less that number of troops of the Afrika Corps with uncertain results [2]. 

Books following this narrative periodically appeared but they were usually limited to provincial publishing houses in the countries--Canada, Australia--where the post-war British Empire shoveled war criminals too obvious to keep home. Now it penetrated the most prestigious American editorial empires--Basic Books--and the university campuses. Bard College hired a Nazi! 

[1] What about Soviet POWs (the second largest group subjected to mass extermination), Roma/Cinti, homosexual, communists, mentally ill and other human beings Nazi considered subhuman?  Meekin even has a nerve to present a piece of Nazi War propaganda describing a POW admiring food, by which his captors fed him and regretting his wife cannot share it with him. About 2/3 of the Soviet POWs perished in German (Finnish, Hungarian, etc.) captivity and the rest--mostly from the borderline areas--either switched allegiance to the Germans, or were liberated quickly after their captivity because of the shifting front lines. Almost nobody survived the war in the Stalag.  

[2] In the key battle of Alam Halfa, about 12 brigades of the German Army faced two British divisions. 

W. M. Arkin and E. D. Cauchy. The Generals Have no Clothes. The Untold Story of Endless Wars.

The book is schizophrenic. It competently discusses reasons, why the latest military conflicts started by the United States--no other country since 2006 ever began an interstate military conflict--though there were border clashes and interferences in already ongoing civil wars--never end. The main are the following. Systematic exclusion by the Washington foreign policy blob all outside experts on military matters, and limited information provided outside their closed circle--this was not the case during the Cold War, dominance of the hawkish civil servants and Congressional staffers with limited, if any, conventional military experience in the field (i.e. the neocons) in the decision making and waning of the civic military culture because of the professionalization of the army after the Vietnam War. 

Yet, while Arkin is competent in discussing why foreign policy of the United States degenerated into military adventurism, he is stalwart in his conviction that the US Armed Forces, which could not defeat rag-tag Taliban militias must maintain extremely aggressive posture against Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, in about that order. I.e. the smaller the country and the fewer nuclear weapons it has, the more apprehensive Arkin becomes with respect to the military solution of all foreign policy problems. In full compliance with the neocon doctrine, he suggests that they cannot modernize their armed forces because they supposedly lack a "democratic culture". Besides a magic thinking relating any particular social structure with the military prowess--how democratic was Genghis Khan--he also does not notice a pitiful state of most European militaries despite their professed (but not always upheld) democratic values.