AND
we are seeing the end of the era of the American empire with its key allies, such as Great Britain and Israel. Will it be true? My teachers vaccinated me once and for all against the temptation to predict, but when reading fashionable British historians, it happens to me like when in Mexico we see the sad spectacle of intellectuals whom we used to respect, joining in stridently, without the slightest criticism nor confrontation of sources, to any slander campaign against the current government or its representatives (or those who are supposed to be such). And the lack of professionalism saturates his work.
To assess a history book, its sources must be dismantled: is there a balance between them or does it use those of only one side? Are they confronted and critically analyzed or are they blindly believed? I have the example of Alan Knight, who to recount the battles of the Bajío cites the official sources of the victorious Carrancistas 43 times in a total of 45 references (none of them from the archives); and that to define Villismo, he makes blunders and omits everything that does not fit in his very witty explanation (I show it on pages 1337-1344 of https://bit.ly/3Crz7iw).
It’s today Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921, by Sir Antony Beevor, who used to give us gritty and terrible stories of the Second War. But this book is more like the most anticommunist pamphlets of the first postwar period (which fueled the rise of Nazism), although with some differences: the Bolsheviks are not the vanguard of the jewish conspiracy
but anti-Semites in disguise who encouraged the mobs
against the Jews (curious change).
The terror of the people appears everywhere. Thus, about the popular reaction in Petrograd against Kornilov’s putsch attempt (nonexistent attempt, according to Sir Antony), in two paragraphs he writes: brutalized crowd
that accompanied the atrocities with cheers and ferocious laughter
, their own bestiality shocked them
, frenzy of violence
(identical phrase used by Mexican counterfeiters to talk about the mobs
of the priest Hidalgo). And wait until the Soviet government appears or the civil war in Asia, to see how the adjectives run out!
Because, in addition to the terror of the people, racism, Russophobia, Asian
they pop up everywhere, wrapped in politically correct language and academic packaging. It sounds like an alarm call, the Russians are coming! Or worse, the Asians! By the way, Poles and Ukrainians, although brutal, are less so: as you travel from East to West, the barbarism and savagery of the mobs decrease (without disappearing).
There is no balance in font handling. He doesn’t even fake it. With few exceptions (and to reinforce the inhumanity of the Bolsheviks), the sources are anti-communist. With marked frequency, European diplomats (as in Alan Knight, the imperialist and racist consuls in Mexico seem his most pure
font). The seriousness with which he quotes the British ambassador who responds strongly
to a delegation of bankers who were naive to ask an ambassador to conspire against the government to which he is accredited
as if it were not the task of the imperial ambassadors!
Source selection reveals the English gentleman who is sir antony, like a young lady from Odessa whom he quotes frequently (here, during the elections to the Constituent Assembly, in November 1917): “There are many people, even among humble people, who are nostalgic for the tsar and for order… I I become more to the right every day. Perhaps it will not take long to be a monarchist. Right now I am a pure-bred Cadet, although very recently I was a Socialist Revolutionary. Our maid and our cook signed for the electoral list of the Cadets” (the party of the right).
I will not stop at the exhibitions of the fiendish evil of Lenin. A quote is enough to reveal the profession of historian
of sir antony (in April 1917, when Lenin returns to Russia): “In his determination to seize total power…Lenin did not make the mistake of revealing what communist society would be like…Peasants were encouraged to believe that the land would be their own … There was no warning… of the forced collectivization of farms”… something that happened 10 years after Lenin died, as a response to the crisis and the famine.
Do not think that the book is an ode to the White anticommunists (although it does suggest that, if instead of Tsar Nicholas, his energetic and perceptive brother Michael had reigned, another rooster crowed), who, especially in Siberia, exhibited unspeakable cruelty
. Though: Too often the Whites [rusos y asiáticos, al fin] They represented the worst examples of humanity. But when it comes to ruthless inhumanity, no one surpassed the Bolsheviks
.
The wolf is coming! But were there no alternatives? Ah, if the British and Americans had seriously intervened in 1919, how many tragedies would have been avoided! Yes, the book is an open call for intervention, today, before it’s too late again. That is why, published just a few months ago, it is selling like hot cakes and has been translated into NATO languages at breakneck speed. And no, it does not follow from this that I have the slightest sympathy for Putin.
