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[mark safranski / “zen“]

The Hoover Institution interviews historian Stephen Kotkin about Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Kotkin, a professor of Russian Studies at Princeton University,  is 2/3 of the way through writing his three volume biography of the life and times of Stalin. The first two volumes are each groundbreaking and monumental and if the third is their equal then Kotkin will have written the definitive work in the field.
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Part I.
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Part II.
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Stalin’s only true peers are Hitler and Mao. Kotkin’s second volume – subtitled Waiting For Hitler – does not seek to reprise Alan Bullock’s work or those of Richard Overy or Robert Gellately – Hitler is important not as a direct comparison to the Soviet dictator but as a geopolitical and military threat posed by Nazi Germany with which Stalin was forced to account even as he pursued his internal purges or faced military provocations by Imperial Japan. Stalin feared Hitler and admired him in a backhanded way without really understanding the Fuhrer. In Hitler’s shoes, Stalin never would have gambled so recklessly and most of his brutal policies were bent toward increasing Soviet security as he saw it, even devastatingly counterproductive ones like the purges or the Winter War.

Hat tip to Scott Shipman

[ by Charles Cameron — from all of us at Zenpundit ]
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From President Woodrow Wilson‘s Independence Day speech, July 4th, 1914:

Mr. Chairman and Fellow-Citizens:

We are assembled to celebrate the one hundred and thirty-eighth anniversary of the birth of the United States. I suppose that we can more vividly realize the circumstances of that birth standing on this historic spot than it would be possible to realize them anywhere else. The Declaration of Independence was written in Philadelphia; it was adopted in this historic building by which we stand. I have just had the privilege of sitting in the chair of the great man who presided over the deliberations of those who gave the declaration to the world. My hand rests at this moment upon the table upon which the declaration was signed. We can feel that we are almost in the visible and tangible presence of a great historic transaction.

Have you ever read the Declaration of Independence or attended with close comprehension to the real character of it when you have heard it read? If you have, you will know that it is not a Fourth of July oration. The Declaration of Independence was a document preliminary to war. It was a vital piece of practical business, not a piece of rhetoric; and if you will pass beyond those preliminary passages which we are accustomed to quote about the rights of men and read into the heart of the document you will see that it is very express and detailed, that it consists of a series of definite specifications concerning actual public business of the day. Not the business of our day, for the matter with which it deals is past, but the business of that first revolution by which the Nation was set up, the business of 1776. Its general statements, its general declarations cannot mean anything to us unless we append to it a similar specific body of particulars as to what we consider the essential business of our own day.

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If you’re a strategist or historian, these sentences may be of particular interest:

Have you ever read the Declaration of Independence or attended with close comprehension to the real character of it when you have heard it read? If you have, you will know that it is not a Fourth of July oration. The Declaration of Independence was a document preliminary to war.

Ahem, and if you’ll permit me my own reading, the key sentence here for my purposes is:

We can feel that we are almost in the visible and tangible presence of a great historic transaction.

WHile for factual purposes, 1776 and 1914 are separated by the intervening history, for the purposes of myth, dream, and psychological impact, that “almost” evaporates and the two moments merge, synchronous in a diachronic world.

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Take whichever meaning you will, and accept it with our best wishes here at Zenpundit for a fireworked and festive Fourth!

h/t War on the Rocks.

[ by Charles Cameron — Imagination, Joan of Arc, and Coronation ]
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Oh, the other day was a great day, bringing me three terrific books:

Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi: Alone with the Alone

Marina Warner, Joan of Arc: the Image of Female Heroism

Matthias Range, Music and Ceremonial at British Coronations: From James I to Elizabeth II

The Corbin is simply the most dedicated book on spirituality I would take with me if I could, and which I’d dearly love to crack. Marina Warner was a stellar presence in the cafe I frequented in Little Clarendon Street in Oxford, and hijacked me once to help paint her new digs. And the Range? It’s a book I’ve long wished to read and finally, here it is.

Quite a trio!

[ by Charles Cameron — a wobbly, entirely speculative history would suggest a source in Johann Georg Gichtel transmitted to our President via Anabaptist, Rosicrucian and allied Hermetic strands ]
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It would be easy to DoubleQuote President Donald Trump‘s shit-awful remark today in terms of his base appreciatiing it:

I’d like to go for broke and show you something far more intriguing: to wit, the earliest western expression of the “shithole” concept, drawn from Johann Georg Gichtel‘s Theosophia Practica (1701):

Note the clear indication of the anal region seen from behind as Satan’s Hell.

This image, with its corresponding face-forward companion, present what is widely acknowledged as the first western equivalent of the eastern chackra system of spiritual presences arranged in a progressive, ascending alignment up the spine:

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I imagine Trump derives his association of “shithole” with that which he despises via the Anabaptist, Rosicrucian, and early upper New York State hermetic strands so ably reported by John L. Brooke in his Bancroft Prize-winning The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844.

Not entirely kidding.

[ by Charles Cameron — DoubleTweet — the self-reference and enantiodromia of the hunt ]
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When the Hunter Becomes the Prey
Hyderabad, c1750
Douce Album
Now in the Bodleian pic.twitter.com/UAGRBlRwtS

— William Dalrymple (@DalrympleWill) July 30, 2017

This clever illustration of the hunter(s) hunted.. reminded me inevitably of the hunter Actaeon, who saw the goddess Artemis / Diana naked, bathing in a pool. She turned him into a stag, and his own hounds then tore him to pieces..

Diana did not find Acteon particularly endearing. #mythology #medievaltwitter Le Romant des Fables Ovide le Grant, c.1325 pic.twitter.com/8AZEevv1IE

— Emily Steiner (@PiersatPenn) July 31, 2017

These two tweets, one following fairly closely on the other though from different sources, just about made my day!