The candidacy approved by Reichsfuhrer of the SS...

In 1970s the Soviet TV pioneered the series "Seventeen Moments of Spring" with the Soviet mole working in the Nazi Germany under the cover of the high ranking officer of the SD (Sicherheitdienst). While the story was entirely fictional, the main character had several real-life prototypes. [1] The series showed Nazis, including historic characters, not as cartoon villains but as highly intelligent and dangerous enemies and acquired a cult status, not in the least because some features in the "official" characterizations of the Nazi bigwigs, in particular, their low level of real education despite ornate degrees, reminded them of the descriptions of Soviet nomenclatura. In particular, hilarious were excerpts of their family status: "Has no mercy to the enemies of the Reich. Was not involved in dangerous liaisons. The candidacy of the spouse was approved by Reichsfuhrer of the SS".  The series generated a steady stream of anecdotes and jokes. 

So I imagine that when the CIA bosses called on Anna Applebaum of "Washington Post" fame and advised her to marry heavily drinking and philandering Pole from an illustrious family, Radoslaw Sikorski, they promised her that she will soon become a Queen of Poland and, after the conquest, the Empress of Russia. Sikorski, indeed, became the Foreign Affairs Minister for the Polish Republic. But after a drunken obscenity-driven escapade in a posh restaurant filmed by Polish investigative journalists, he had to retire. To compensate for her disastrous married life, she became a fury, an embodiment of Polish nationalism so extreme that sometimes, in her zeal to chastise the Russians, she is oblivious that her Jeremiads acquire anti-Polish and anti-Semitic accents. 

I mention first her scurrilous book "Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine", heavy on plagiarism as most of her opuses and heftily reliant on sources provided by Nazi collaborators, who settled in Germany after the Second World War under the protection of Anglo-American allies--a favorite company of her main interlocutor, Serhii Plohii. [2] Let me be clear: nobody, except some crazy Stalinists denies the horrors, which befell USSR after the "collectivization" of the Soviet agriculture, which some call another serfdom for the peasants. [3] The first problem with the book, which obviously does not bother her, is that in 1933-1934, Ukraine was not a nation but an artificial construct cobbled by the Kremlin chiefs from Russian Malorossia, territory of the proto-fascist 1919 Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR), which never controlled but a sliver of the territory of modern Ukraine [4], largely Rusyn lands of Subcarpathian Rus and other disparate pieces. But the fact that Ukrainian nationalists of the time, largely operated on the territory of Poland and wanted to carve their nation-state out of the body of Poland, does not bother her in the least as a born-again adept of Polish nationalism. 

Their desire to carve mainly Poland rather than USSR was a consequence of an obvious reason that majority of the populace of the "Soviet Ukraine" did not support (or even understood) their agenda. Moreover, Ukrainian pre-war nationalists--many future accomplices of Adolf Hitler and enthusiastic murderers of Jews and Poles--were organizing terrorist acts in the territory of interwar Polish Republic and were persecuted for this by the secret police. But, maybe, she just internalized too deeply a perennial illusion of the Polish elites that if Ukrainians (Hungarians, Czechs, etc.) hate Russians, they must madly love (and, somehow, slavishly obey) Poles. 

Anna Appelbaum is completely impervious to the facts, quoted by her, which contradict her narrative, obviously thinking that nobody with elementary knowledge of Soviet history would read her book. For instance, in the beginning, she recognizes that the confiscatory policies imposed by the commissars on Ukraine were first tried and tested in Russia proper. She accuses Pyatakov, himself the victim of the Great Purges in exporting "collective farming" to the early Soviet Ukraine. Certainly, Pyatakov having his brother murdered by the Ukrainian "freedom fighters" and observing mass pogroms in the wake of their takeover, had very little sympathy to the peasantry. Another blooper is that she mentions that only one of the three top Ukrainian leaders: Petrovsky, the head of the UkrSSR Supreme Soviet, protested to Stalin about confiscation of grain and agricultural animals (see also my ref. [3]).  Yet, the other two, Kosior and Chubar' who complied with Stalin's policies were later shot, while Petrovsky not only survived but was buried at the Kremlin Wall, next to Stalin. This hardly testifies to the deliberate planning of the famine to kill Ukrainian peasants unless Stalin planned to kill Russians, Kazakhs and others, and for what? 

Another opus, in recent "Atlantic" compares Republicans who support Trump despite all his real and imaginary failings, with 1) Vichy Nazi collaborators, 2) Russian soldiers raping German women (but not, for instance, Ukrainian or Polish who also came with the Soviet Army--no account of the WWII should be without it--obviously, in her view, American soldiers treated Japanese women in a chivalrous and gentlemanly way, and the revenge exacted by Poles on Germans being deported in the wake of war was legendary in its cruelty, and 3) East Germans informers of Stasi, who, according to her statistics were 99% of the total population. I wish Bundeskanzlerin Merkel corrects her with a heavy walking stick at some meeting.  

What is really surprising in all this drivel--is not her hatred of Russians--that is what she is paid for, though mad hatred rarely helps to understand even real and assumed enemies, but AA's reckless abandonment of both her Jewish heritage and her adopted religion of Polish nationalism. Now she joins the pack (parliament, murder) of the hate-filled harridans: Ann Coulter, Masha Gessen, Christiana Amanpour who are so much boiling with ill-will that like proverbial mad dogs they snap at everyone--friend and foe alike. 

[1]  Willy Lehmann, unemployed Weimar-era policeman recruited by the GPU, who became a mid-ranking but highly placed apparatchik of the SS economic division was the primary candidate but there were many others: Isai Borovoi, Alexander Korotkov, Norman Borodin, Yankel Chenyak, brothers Agayants etc. etc. For censorship reasons he was given an impeccably Russian pedigree. 

[2] Most of the correct facts in her book about Gulag were lifted from the book by O. V. Khlevnyuk, "The History of the Gulag" and she freely borrowed from Solzhenytsin's classic "Gulag Archipelago". And yet, she received Pulitzer for this work of rank plagiarism. 

[3] Applebaum's attempts to portray the Great Famine of 1933-1934 as an act of "ethnic cleansing" are highly counterfactual. Disastrous policy of "Collectivization" of Soviet Agriculture--the main cause of the famine--was spearheaded personally by Josef Stalin, a Georgian-Ossetian, sometimes over heavy objections by the Politburo. The largest proportional population losses were suffered by Kazakhstan. The chief of NKVD at the time was Menzhinsky, a Pole, with G. Yagoda, a Jew, as his acting deputy. People's Commissar for Agriculture, Yakovlev, was also Jewish. Local Ukrainian Soviet leadership was also heavily international: V. Kossior, head of the Party--a Pole, Vlas Chubar'--head of the Government, Ukrainian, head of Ukranian NKVD--Balitsky, Ukrainian, etc. etc. The only ethnic Russian in the first line of directors of collectivization was Politburo member Pavel Postyushev, later shot by Stalin, as were all of the above personalities except Menzhinsky who died from progressive paralysis in 1934. 

[4]  A term "proto-fascist" is somewhat misleading. The author would suggest the term "sado-terrorist" for the regimes, which do not have--in contrast to German Nazism and Soviet/Chinese Communism, or Pinochet in Chile, any positive development agenda besides terrorizing the population: Khmer Rouge, Idi Amin of Uganda, Bocassa of CAR, "Dirty War" regime in Argentina or von Ungern "Khanate" in Mongolia--but one can argue that some regimes (Franco, in Spain for instance) evolve into something more positive-minded, if not more humane. 

My gallery of American folk heroes

1. C'est ne pas une caricature

2. Prince Macaroon

3. Michael Bloomberg, conqueror of the world 

4. POTUS

5. Mitt Romney

6. No drama Obama.  

Michael Bloomberg, former and future Democratic/Republican/? candidate for President

Julia Lovell, Maoism: A Global History

An erudite but totally dissembled book. It mainly describes events peripheral to the emergence and development of Maoism, such as Maoist inspiration for the 1968 revolutionaries in France.

Why is that? Because Maoism was developed first as an ideological foundation of the Sino-Soviet conflict and only then Mao adapted it to serve other geopolitical and domestic purposes . In the current climate of neocon political correctness even a pretty grim description of the Soviet policies will be censured as long as it describes Soviet leaders as rational political actors with rational goals. 

We must begin with the fact that Mao, at first, did not purport to be anything but an orthodox follower of the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin bloodline. Only after the death of Stalin and the armistice on the Korean peninsula, which obviated the need for the military alliance with USSR, he decided that time has come for him to become the fifth founding member of this lineage. Obviously, he recognized that Khruschev's campaign against "The Cult of Personality" and the turnover of the Communist Eastern European leaders (Rakosi in Hungary, Bierut in Poland, Gheorgiu-Dej in Romania, etc.) threatened his own control of China. So, after XX Congress of CPSU (1956) Mao had to proclaim himself, rather than tactless and bothersome leaders in Moscow, the titular head of the world Communism.  

With time, he developed his own alliances--with Tito in Yugoslavia, Enver Hoxcha in Albania, Ceausescu in Romania, Pol Pot in Cambodia--to further his own political goals. But the above list demonstrates that his primary goal was rivalry with the Soviet Union rather than designing an alternative model for the revolution in the Third World. Certainly, the Chinese Government was involved in affairs of Southeast Asia and Africa--war in Vietnam, independently, but together with the USSR and a botched attempt at a military coup in Indonesia--and had to adapt to realities and aspirations of these countries and their leaders. So, "proletarian revolution" and the "dictatorship of the proletariat" had to be de-emphasized (rather than ditched) and his own neo-Confucian elevation of the peasantry to be proclaimed. 

As did the Soviets before him, he had to realize that regimes he supported, economically and militarily, sometimes imitate his style and appropriate his synthesis of Stalinism, Legalism and neo-Confucianism  (Kim Il Song in Korea, Ho Chi Ming in Vietnam, Pol Pot in Cambodia) rather than become his political allies. Vice versa, these regimes built their own version of economic autarky and xenophobic nationalism as he did to oppose the Soviet Union. 

With this conceptual framework, one can turn to Lovell's book and read historical anecdotes, which I am unable to supply. 

Jared Diamond. Upheaval. Turning Points for Nations in Crisis.

      Instrument of Finnish liberal democracy according to  Jared. 

Jared Diamond's trajectory reminds me of Simon Shama--after a single really great book--Landscape and Memory, he became so full of himself that the rest of his production could never match its quality or lucidity but his public pronouncements became more and more haughty. Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" was not as marvelously innovative and strange as "Landscape and Memory" but became much more influential.

The author, as the most sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists in the US, is a left-leaning neocon--left-leaning means that supply-side economics and climate change denial are not a part of inviolable symbol of faith. [1] In his old age, he inherited dogma of liberal neocons but also their pitiful disdain of careful research in favor of grand concepts.

For instance, he writes, countering contemporary Soviet Union during the Winter War of 1930-1940 "...Finland, a liberal capitalist democracy" (p. 66), while acknowledging 8,000 Red Finns shot and 20,000 perished in concentration camps (p.66) out of 3 million-strong population after the Finnish Civil War. Concentration camps in a liberal democracy? Interesting. [2]

He, obviously, did not brush up his history of the Second World War since the middle school. "When I was growing up in the US during World War II, I just thought of Finland as the fourth axis power, along with Germany, Italy and Japan".  (p. 80) What about Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria as well as Slovakia, Estonia and Croatia, the latter bunch being carved out from Nazi-occupied states but reconstituted back into their prewar shapes?

"Among his [Kaiser's] many policies that resulted in Germany's entering World War one under unfavorable circumstances leading to defeat was his non-renewal of Bismark's treaty between Germany and Russia..." (p. 248) A simple internet check establishes that Dreikaiserbund --a mutual treaty between German, Austrian and Russian Empires was dissolved by Bismark himself in 1887--three years before the end of his Chancellorship, probably, because he thought that after unification of Germany, the utility of tripartite relationship was nil. In fact, this was Kaiser Wilhelm II who tried to achieve some form of new monarchical rapprochement with Russia in the form of infamous Bjorko Treaty (1905).

Even more numerous are Diamond's instances of extremely questionable judgement. Trying to whitewash the terror of right-wing regimes in Chile and Indonesia, he writes:

"Yet Chilean military crimes can't be blamed on Pinochet alone, because no one has suggested that he personally shot or tortured anyone..." So far, the same exact argument did not win many supporters when Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin were concerned.

"The tortures, killings, grinding poverty and insane policies associated with Communist dictatorships in Cambodia, North Korea and other countries warn us that a Communist alternative to Suharto could have been worse for Indonesia that was Suharto". This paean was repeated many times by dozens of dictators in Latin America and elsewhere. The most obvious problem with this, is that by Diamond's own admission, the 1965 Communist plot had little chances of success and could have been just a pretext for the Indonesian Army to launch a massive campaign of extermination.

"Annexation by Russia had motivated emigration by thousands of well-educated white people... Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians who immigrated after World War Two... didn't share the strong racist prejudices" (pp. 278-280). First, nobody was allowed out after the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states in 1939-1940. The exodus coincided with the withdrawal of the German troops in the end of the Second World II. To find out in which subjects these refugees were "well-educated" and how little racial prejudices they held, he must consult the history of Shoah in the Baltics. In fact, Estonia was the first and only country declared Judenfrei at Wannsee conference (1942). [3]

With respect to Australia of 1950s he also confidently proclaims "...the development of an independent foreign policy, instead of leaving Australia's foreign policy to Britain". Does he know where the British nuclear tests were conducted? Or he dismisses connection between defense and foreign policy altogether?

Sometimes, it seems that he only interviewed his own nationalist contacts in Finland and Chile, not even reading carefully the sources he quoted in his book. For instance, in Collier's history of Chile the Pinochet-era myth of Chile's economic revival is subjected to much more nuanced treatment. First, the years of Allende were not such uniform economic disaster as being claimed by contemporary US propaganda. Second, reforms by imported "Chicago boys" produced economic chaos and only after American advisers were replaced by equally pro-market but more pragmatic Swiss Hernan Buchi, Chile began to return to normalcy. Yet, it suffered a severe financial crisis. According to statistical data provided in Collier, one of his references, the Chilean economy by the end of Pinochet era grew little with respect to the end of Frei I era except for the retail and fisheries sector.

His nationalist lore-inspired history of the Winter War of 1939-1940 is not grotesquely counterfactual but for events further on, when Finland joined the Axis, comes straight from the Nazi propaganda. Finland, the most enthusiastic of the Nazi-allied powers, is even credited with "saving of Leningrad",  whose blockade ostensibly "saved" it from Nazi occupation. In fact, Germans never contemplated taking the city outright, fearing the protracted battles in the ruins of the large city--their fears were fully realized in Stalingrad--and Finnish-imposed blockade starved more than a million residents to death. The operations to cut Murmansk--a major supply port for American aid--from the mainland, tasked to Finland, ended up in miserable failure. Among detrimental consequences of the Soviet-friendly policies adopted by postwar Finnish Governments--"Finlandization", Diamond mentions Soviets forcing a nuclear power station on helpless Finns, which still supplies much of their electricity.

Remarkably, his study of countries in crisis omits the paramount survival story of the XX century, the State of Israel. This can be explained only by the fact, that in the climate of moral terror instilled by Derschowitz, Michael Oren and the like, any statement about Israel deviating from Netanyahu propaganda line even in the most respectful way, will likely be castigated and chastised.

Of course, no amount of indoctrination can lower Jared Diamond to the level of Francis Fukuyama or Neil Fergusson--that's why they taught in Harvard and he--in the "lowly" UCLA, so his book contains many useful and interesting observations and his final conclusions are surprisingly enlightened.

[1] Neocon dogma, in the approximate order of centrality:
1. Americans are the master race destined to rule the world by the "scientifically established" facts of geography and history (the concept of master race comes from Nazism, see below, and "scientifically established" predestination of human history--from Marxism).
2. The only perfect way to organize society is Anglo-Saxon financial markets-centered capitalism; all other models are "deviations" from this perfect model.
3. Russians are the vermin fouling everything they touch and ought to be enslaved or exterminated, the Jews of our age. (This, strangely central--given a comparatively small role Russian Federation plays in the current scheme of things---symbol of faith comes from the fact that, probably, many of the neocons performed as Nazi generals in middle school and tried to re-imagine World War II with them winning. Later, in their college age they were attracted to  Trotskyism--Russia must burn to stoke the flames of the world revolution.). Another explanation could be that they are heirs to Haushofer and Mackinder, et al. mystical garbage of the Heartland, Hyperborea and their militaristic occultism. 
4. Extremely anthropomorphic view of international relations.
5. There is a wall of separation between the world of "liberal democracies" (the countries with the US military bases or in the military alliances with the US; House of Islam of Islamic theology) and "evil dictatorships" (the ones without; the House of War) and any lasting peace between them is impossible. This, fifth point is a relative innovation coming from the ideology of Jihadis.
[2]  Operation of concentration camps seems to be a Finnish trademark. When, during 1941-1944, Finns (re-)occupied Korela, they put all of its Slavic population (40-45 thous.) in concentration camps. Death toll according to (supposedly democratic, scientifically minded) Finnish historians was 4,060 (such precision!), while according to the Russian (mendacious, propaganda-driven) was around eight thousand. Recently, about half of this discrepancy was explained--more than two thousand Jews and Communists were rendered to the German High Command for execution. I would not be surprised if the remaining 2,000 were young women  and girls forced into sex slavery in the German and Finnish Army barracks, most of whom were murdered either after contracting STDs or before their withdrawal. 
[3]  This demonstrates how quick is the path from subscription to the neocon dogma to something bordering on the Holocaust denial even for a prominent Jewish academic from Los Angeles.