Paul Crosby

Similar to The Storm of War, by Robert Andrews

Revisado: 08-02-20

If you know a lot about the 3rd Reich and Hitler, most of this book won’t be new to you. Still, the distillation of Hitler’s mishaps is a fascinating topic. If, say, I was explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect, I could use half a dozen examples from this book as illustration. Hitler’s gargantuan megalomania is the source of all his fatal strategic flaws. One could argue, I suppose, that Hitler lost the war in 1889 on the day he was born.

The thesis of this book is very similar to Andrew Robert’s “The Storm of War,” which doesn’t provide an exact moment in time when Hitler lost the war, but rather that Nazi ideology itself is so out of step with the nature of reality (i.e. assuming the Soviets, those unter Menschen, would capitulate to Hitler’s Aryan über Menschen). They had to learn the hard way in Stalingrad, though I doubt Hitler’s fanaticism allowed him to learn much of anything.

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Good summary

Revisado: 07-28-20

As a foray into the life of George Washington, you could do a lot worse. I came away with a somewhat positive feeling for him, although his weakness on slavery - owning slaves while personally saying he was against slavery - struck me as weak. This just goes to show that more often than not, money is a greater motivator than principle.

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Little about Stalingrad

Revisado: 07-24-20

This audio program provides too much tangentially related background material and very little information on the Battle of Stalingrad itself. I had to go back and verify the title of my purchase — I thought I had accidentally purchased a summary of WW2 instead of the 1942-43 battle on the Eastern Front.

It listens like a college term paper written the night before the due date by a student who bones up on just enough information to fulfill the minimum page requirement, but only gives two paragraphs on the actual topic and regurgitates commonly known facts that he learned in class about WW2, Stalin, and Hitler.

Normally these hourly doses of history serve as a good foray into big topics. This, alas, was an exception.

I recommend listening to Anthony Beevor’s “Stalingrad” instead. Also, you may have more luck with the one by Charles City Editors, though I haven’t heard that one.

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A necessary counterbalance to revisionism

Revisado: 07-19-20

I decided to listen this book after seeing the PBS documentary on JRM, as well as listening to a more conservative attempt at the reconstruction of the late senator’s legacy. The evidence of McCarthy’s misconduct is so well documented that it’s hard to believe there are those who continually attempt to resuscitate his legacy. While it is certainly true that Joe did catch quite a few communists, it is truer still that their hides came at a steep price: a society driven by paranoia of the unseen enemy that continues to the present day.

Joe’s tactics remind me of the current President, Donald J. Trump, who, in a lot of ways, copied Joe’s playbook. A small, but telling example: Joe had little nicknames for the people he belittled. Instead of “sleepy joe” or “little Marco” it was “sanctimonious Stu.” Admittedly, joe had a much better vocabulary than the President, who surely doesn’t have “sanctimonious” in his lexicon.

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Solid

Revisado: 05-19-20

As a general rule, I try to take note of the general ideological persuasion of an author, especially when it conforms a little too neatly with my own biases. Truth be told, i don’t know much about Sebestyen, though the dedication to Robert Conquest at the very end, along with some level of association with the Hoover Institute, should be enough to prepare the reader for a biography that leans negative on the subject matter.

So yes, this is a biography critical of the man, and told from a western and anti-communist perspective. Nonetheless, the book reads like a factual account, and is very engaging. Bottom line: I learned a lot about Lenin, which was the point.

And he was a complicated man indeed. Undeniably intelligent, but inflexible. Power hungry, but idealistic. Driven by concern for his people, but totally lacking in empathy. On this point, I was reminded of a character quirk highlighted by Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov: the more a person is eaten up by love of mankind and revolutionary zeal, the more he intolerable he finds individual people. Perhaps Stalin was hinting at something similar deterioration of empathy when he said that the death of one is a tragedy and the death of millions is a statistic (if he even did say that). Lenin also had this trait in spades - his sister was apparently shocked at his indifference toward charitable work geared toward alleviating the suffering from a famine as pittance compared to revolution.

A particularly horrifying episode was the way in which Lenin dispensed with the Romanov’s, children and all. It just goes to show that those who do make history commit acts which, to the rest of us proletariats, are horrifying.

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