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Sixty years ago one of the greatest monsters in history, a mass-murderer of tens of millions many times over, the yellow-eyed, “Kremlin mountaineer”  breathed his last.

We live, deaf to the land beneath us,
Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,
All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer,
The murderer and peasant-slayer.
His fingers are fat as grubs
And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,
His cockroach whiskers leer
And his boot tops gleam.
Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders –
fawning half-men for him to play with.
They whinny, purr or whine
As he prates and points a finger,
One by one forging his laws, to be flung
Like horseshoes at the head, to the eye or the groin.
And every killing is a treat
For the broad-chested Ossete.
– Osip Mandelstam

So great was the terror he had inflicted that many of his victims, dazed and bloodied by decades of fear, savage oppression and war, openly wept. The greatest fear of the late dictator’s closest henchmen and accomplices, who had more than likely escaped the conveyor belt of torture, gulag and execution only by their master’s death, was that the people would think that they had murdered their dear vozhd and would storm the Kremlin and tear them to pieces.

The former Georgian seminarian and bank robber Joseph Djugashvilli Stalin did more to shape Russia than any man in history except Peter the Great and Genghis Khan. Ivan the Terrible, the tsar whom Stalin much admired and imitated in killing off his own “boyars”, could not hold a candle to his Bolshevik successor in either cruelty or statesmanship. Stalin entered power as Lenin’s chief clerk in a failed state wracked by civil war and ended it as master of the Communist world, possessor of the atomic bomb and the implacable victor of Berlin.

Stalin sent thirty million of his countrymen to their deaths at the hands of buffoons, sexual sadists and deranged dwarfs, yet was a sensitive and gifted poet of no mean talent who could discuss Clausewitz, the intricacies of Marxist theory or the classics when he chose. Stalin was an avid writer of marginalia in books, making comments one scholar termed “insightful” as well brutal.

An artist of the vendetta, Stalin personally lingered over lengthy death lists, making annotations, sparing one here and drawing out the torment of others there. Some estimates are that he signed some thirty thousand such death lists of prominent Soviet and pre-Revolutionary figures, often consigning their families to arrest, torture and exile. Endless ordinary Soviets accused of “wrecking” or “trotskyite counter-revolutionary activity” or “espionage” went to the Gulag or the grave by quota. Not merely in the terrible year of 1937, but throughout Stalin’s long, grim reign; and after the war, it was the turn of the Eastern Europeans, especially suspected “cosmopolitan” Communists, like Ana Pauker and Rudolf Slansky and the usual litany of “class enemies” and “fascists”.

Stalin’s archenemy in both fact and fevered imagination, Leon Trotsky, received an icepick in his brain from Stalin’s messenger, Ramon Mercader. Then for good measure, Stalin killed Trotsky’s son.

The only man Stalin seemed to fear, was Hitler, near whom he had once briefly lived in 1913 in Vienna when Stalin was a young Bolshevik revolutionary and the future Fuhrer was a struggling “artist” living in a bum’s hostel. They both frequented the Schoenbrunn park and likely, the same cheap coffee hoses and cafes. Stalin’s efforts to appease Hitler the Warlord and mad visionary proved no more successful than had Neville Chamberlain’s; the USSR survived Operation Barbarossa in part because the tyrannical Stalin could force the Russian people to spill an ocean of blood in 1941 the way Tsar Nicholas II could not in 1914.

Twenty million, perhaps more, of the Red Army died on the road to Berlin and victory over Nazism, giving Stalin, who had curried favor with Hitler and allied himself with the Third Reich, mastery over half of Europe. His sycophants called him “Generalissimo” and tried to deify him on his 70th birthday and please him, assuring themselves of safety. It was no use; Stalin ostracized them or arrested their wives or toyed with them cruelly at late night drinking sessions as Stalin’s suspicious mind turned again toward the blackness as it had in the Thirties, when his closest collaborators became dead men talking, disappearing and then reappearing suddenly, gaunt and haunted, to grovel for death at show trials.

Roy Medvedev, Soviet era dissident and Marxist historian wrote of Stalin, “Let history judge“. The judgement it must be said, is in with Russia’s tragic post-Soviet decline. A degradation so severe that even the tough and crafty siloviki ,Vladimir Putin, has been unable to reverse it.

The wounds inflicted by Stalin run too deep.

The Heirs of Stalin

There is an understandable buzz when a historical event as well known and deeply investigated as  the Holocaust has suddenly been found to have been underestimated by an order of magnitude.

From The New York Times:

The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking 

….As early as 1933, at the start of Hitler’s reign, the Third Reich established about 110 camps specifically designed to imprison some 10,000 political opponents and others, the researchers found. As Germany invaded and began occupying European neighbors, the use of camps and ghettos was expanded to confine and sometimes kill not only Jews but also homosexuals, Gypsies, Poles, Russians and many other ethnic groups in Eastern Europe. The camps and ghettos varied enormously in their mission, organization and size, depending on the Nazis’ needs, the researchers have found.

The biggest site identified is the infamous Warsaw Ghetto, which held about 500,000 people at its height. But as few as a dozen prisoners worked at one of the smallest camps, the München-Schwabing site in Germany. Small groups of prisoners were sent there from the Dachau concentration camp under armed guard. They were reportedly whipped and ordered to do manual labor at the home of a fervent Nazi patron known as “Sister Pia,” cleaning her house, tending her garden and even building children’s toys for her.

When the research began in 2000, Dr. Megargee said he expected to find perhaps 7,000 Nazi camps and ghettos, based on postwar estimates. But the numbers kept climbing — first to 11,500, then 20,000, then 30,000, and now 42,500.

The numbers astound: 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettos; 980 concentration camps; 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps; 500 brothels filled with sex slaves; and thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm, performing forced abortions, “Germanizing” prisoners or transporting victims to killing centers.

In Berlin alone, researchers have documented some 3,000 camps and so-called Jew houses, while Hamburg held 1,300 sites.

….The lead editors on the project, Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean, estimate that 15 million to 20 million people died or were imprisoned in the sites that they have identified as part of a multivolume encyclopedia. 

Read the rest here.

Perhaps some of you will recall the controversy in the late 1990’s surrounding the release of Hitler’s Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen where Goldhagen argued that Nazi genocide was only possible with the widespread complicity and often enthusiastic participation of “ordinary Germans” who were not themselves Gestapo agents or Nazi fanatics.  One of the primary charges against Goldhagen by academic historians was his generalizing indictment of a generation of Germans for Nazi policy that was, for all intents and purposes, officially a state secret.  After all, the closest thing to a “public” discussion in the Third Reich of the Final Solution was a terrifying speech by SS-Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler at the Posen Conference to an assembly of Gauleiters  and Reichsleiters who constituted the aristocracy of the Nazi Party.

The sheer geographic density and social ubiquity of the Nazi machinery of repression and genocide documented by researchers severely undermines the critics of Goldhagen. While it is well documented that most Germans, unless they were political opponent or social misfits, did not personally feel the heavy hand of the Gestapo in the way Soviet citizens experienced the NKVD, Germans during the war years irrefutably lived cheek by jowl with the miserably wretched slaves of the Reich.

Some of the shock produced by this investigation is due to an artificial “parsing of genocide” by historians into distinct categories of death-dealing instead of looking at Nazi democide as a whole cloth or continuum.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, there was little interest beyond the Nuremberg  Tribunal in delving into the depths of Nazi crimes. Reconstruction of Europe and “getting on with life” or the exigencies of the Cold War and the ominous threat of the Soviets took far greater precedence. Even among Holocaust survivors themselves, there was initially an effort to “move on” from the unimaginable, or to make a anguished pretense of so doing, as expressed in the critically acclaimed Rod Steiger film, The Pawnbroker. When historians began more serious examinations of Nazi crimes in the 1960’s and 1970’s, there was a tendency to separate the Holocaust from related or similar atrocities due in part to the overriding ideological emphasis the most extreme Nazis placed upon the total and absolute elimination of all Jews – every last one – at all costs,. Even over and above winning the war.

However, that genocidal crusade by the SS against the Jews also facilitated the deaths of millions of others – including the Gypsies (marked for nearly complete extermination), the “useless eaters“, some 700,000 Serbs to please the Ustase puppet regime, political opponents who disappeared into the Night and Fog, and a vast democide of Slavic peoples to feed the Third Reich’s inexhaustible need for slave labor. Albert Speer wrote that Himmler coldly planned a further massive reduction of the Russian and Ukranian populations west of the Urals to build a post-war Nazi racial empire in vanquished Russia.

The scale of murder by totalitarian governments in the 20th century approaches the mythic, a phenomena for which the Holocaust has become a totem.

Recently, I finished two books on the iconic ancient Athenian philosopher Socrates, both of which pointed me to a third. The books were of a very different character and quality, yet together raised an important dichotomy about a man who lived 2400 years ago, whose intellectual legacy contributed to the shaping of Western civilization. The Stoics and Cynics looked back to Socrates as their forerunner; Socrates’ greatest student Plato became the most influential philosopher of the written word of all time, rivaled only by his own protege, Aristotle. So definitive was the influence of Socrates and his inexhaustible store of questions that all the Greek philosophers who came before him are reckoned “the pre-Socratics“. Yet he was put to death by the Democracy that had proudly boasted of being the “the school of Hellas“.

Who then, was the historical Socrates?

Socrates shares, to a lesser degree, the enigmatic quality of Buddha, Jesus and his own near contemporary, Confucius; we know more about Socrates than we do the others, but as with the others, it is all secondhand. Having written nothing himself, we must rely on the apologia of his disciples, the barbs of his critics, some statuary relics and the commentary of philosophers and historians from later in antiquity who had access to sources now lost to tell us of Socrates.

Here are the books:

The Trial of Socrates by I.F. Stone

Socrates: A Man for Our Times by Paul Johnson  

Both authors were splendid prose writers, otherwise they are a study in contrasts. The late I.F. Stone was a famous radical, an antifascist, an investigative, “muckraking” journalist of the mid twentieth century and, for a time,  a Soviet agent during the “Red decade” of the Thirties. Stone, who was noted for his diligence with using government documents as a reporter, unearthing scoops everyone else had missed, became, in his retirement, a scholar of antiquity who read deeply in the classics in the original ancient Greek.

Paul Johnson began his career as a prolific writer and popular historian on the British Left with The New Statesman and over time shifted rightward to become a leading Anglo-Catholic conservative public intellectual, an adviser to Margaret Thatcher and an author of 40 books. Johnson is most known for his best-sellers that tackled panoramic and encompassing subjects – The Birth of the Modern, Intellectuals and The History of the Jews, often written from a highly idiosyncratic, as well as a conservative, perspective.

Of the two books, Stone’s  The Trial of Socrates is by far the most substantive. Stone relies heavily, though not exclusively, upon primary sources in the original Greek to build his argument, which is that Socrates was executed because of his militant, arch-reactionary, “antipolitical” opposition to self-government, especially in the form of the Democracy; and further, that Socrates’ actions at his trial were perversely designed to inflame the jury which might easily have acquitted him.  Socrates:A Man for our Times by Johnson is based on English translations of primary sources and secondary sources, is lighter in tone and much closer to being an essay. Johnson is evaluating the importance of Socrates in a broad, civilizational, context while Stone trying to tell what really happened while simultaneously judging Socrates culpability.

One point on which both authors have agreement is the mendacity and artistry with which Plato has made this task more difficult. I.F. Stone generally sees a “sneering” antidemocratic political continuity between Socrates and all of his disciples Plato, Xenophon, Charmides, Critias, Antisthenes and Alcibiades but even Stone cannot stomach Plato’s casual misuse (or abuse) of Socrates in his later dialogues to vent petty gripes and snobbish airs. Writing of an insulting passage in The Republic:

….Plato put this into the mouth of Socrates many years after the latter’s death. There is no evidence that the historical Socrates ever spoke so unkindly or pretentiously. Otherwise Socrates could not have had the lifelong affection of his oldest disciple, the “low-born” Antisthenes; his mother was a Thracian, hence he was twitted for not being of pure Attic blood (Diogenes Laertes, 6.1). Several scholars believe this was Plato’s slur against his fourth century rival – and Socrates’ old friend – Isocrates.[255]

Paul Johnson goes much further; attributing much that scholars regard as negative in Socrates’ reputation to the machinations of Plato using his late master as “a ventriloquist’s dummy”, a caricature Johnson calls “PlatSoc” to add authority to his own views and theories in which Socrates never believed or more likely, never even had heard:

….As an intellectual he [Plato] began to formulate his own ideas. As an academic he quickly merged them into a system. As a teacher he used Socrates to spread and perpetuate it. In his earlier writings Plato presented Socrates as a living breathing, thinking person, a real man. but as Plato’s ideas took shape, demanding propagation, poor Socrates whose actual death Plato had so lamented, was killed a second time, so that he became a mere wooden man, a ventriloquist’s doll, to voice not his own philosophy but Plato’s.

….So the act of transforming a living, historical thinker into a mindless, speaking doll – the murder and quasi-diabolical possession of a famous brain – became in Plato’s eyes a positive virtue. That is the only charitable way of describing one of the most unscrupulous acts in intellectual history. Thus Plato, with no doubt the best of intentions, created like Frankenstein, an artificial monster-philosopher [11]

There are other sources of information regarding Socrates than Plato, of course.  Xenophon, also wrote an apologia; Aristophanes and other comic poets satirized Socrates in their plays, the philosopher being a “public figure” in Athens as much as was Pericles or Cleon (Socrates apparently could take a joke much better than the litigious and bloodthirsty demagogue Cleon); Aristotle had informed speculations regarding Socrates based on his long (and one suspects trying) tutelage under Plato and there are Roman writers such as Cicero who had access to sources now lost, but Plato remains the most prolific.

This is important, because the central thesis in The Trial of Socrates is that Socrates is not merely an “antidemocratic” gadfly in Athens, but an arch-reactionary teacher of “antipolitical” doctrines. That is to say that Stone argued that Socrates and his followers rejected the concept of the self-governing “polis” itself, oligarchy as much as democracy, that men were a “herd” fit only for a shepherd, an absolute Homeric ruler defined by Socrates as “the One who Knows”. Stone argues, with accuracy, that Socrates disciples, despite differences in personality and philosophy, shared a common disdain for democratic politics and furthermore, that Socrates teaching repeatedly led to cohorts of aristocratic, pro-Spartan,”Socratified youth” who twice supported the overthrow of the Democracy. In short that Socrates was tried because his activities, his “examinations”, were ultimately politically subversive to the state in a time of danger and instigated civil strife.

This means, to judge Stone’s argument requires that we discern Socrates from Plato that in turn requires some expertise on Plato. This need to sift Platonic dialogues explains why both Johnson and Stone, despite Stone’s ability to work with the primary texts in the original Greek, turned to the scholarship of Gregory Vlastos for guidance. Vlastos was a seminal figure in the field of Platonist philosophy whose work is described by other scholars as “transformative” and having “a vast influence” who best parsed Socrates from his artfully prolix disciple. Because of Stone and Johnson, I have picked up what is regarded by many as “the best book on Socrates” – Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher by Gregory Vlastos.

Vlastos, in this final book, ultimately came closer to Johnson’s position in the sense that some of what  moderns find disagreeable in Socrates and what Stone criticizes in particular – the harsh antidemocratic edge – is more a product of Plato’s literary handiwork than the philosophy of the historical Socrates. Vlastos writes:

I have been speaking of a “Socrates” in Plato. There are two of them. In different segments of Plato’s corpus two philosophers bear that name. The individual remains the same. But in different sets of dialogues he pursues philosophies so different that they could not have been depicted as cohabitating in the same brain throughout unless it had been the brain of a schizophrenic

The early Socrates of the Elenctic Dialogues is the most genuine in the view of Vlastos.

End Part I.

Someone for reasons unknown last week leaked the classified Department of Justice “White Paper” on targeting with drone attacks the numerically tiny number of US citizens overseas who have joined al Qaida or affiliated groups. The leak set off an outburst of public debate, much of it ill-informed by people who did not bother to read the white paper and some of it intentionally misleading by those who had and, frankly, know better.

Generally, I’m a harsh critic of the Holder DOJ, but their white paper, though not without some minor flaws of reasoning and one point of policy, is – unlike some of the critics – solidly in compliance with the laws of war, broader questions of international law and the major SCOTUS decisions on war powers. It was a political error to classify this document in the first place rather than properly share it with the relevant Congressional committees conducting oversight

Here it is and I encourage you to read it for yourself:

Lawfulness of Lethal Operation Directed Against a US Citizen Who is a Senior Operational Leader of al-Qa’ida

Much of this white paper debate has been over a legitimate policy dispute (“Is it a good idea if we use drones to kill AQ terrorists, including American ones?”) intentionally being mischaracterized by opponents of the policy (or the war) as a legal or constitutional question. It is not. The law is fairly settled as is the question if the conflict with AQ rises to a state of armed conflict, which SCOTUS dealt with as recently as Hamdi and for which there are ample precedents from previous wars and prior SCOTUS decisions to build upon. At best, framed as a legal dispute, the opponents of the drone policy would have a very long uphill climb with the Supreme Court. So why do it?

The reason, as I discern it, is substituting a legalistic argument and judicial process (“FISA court to decide drone killings”) to conceal what is really a debate over American war policy   and the President’s war powers in order to accrue domestic political advantage or at least avoid paying the costs of advocating a potentially unpopular position. Otherwise, opponents have to argue on the merits that the US should not as a matter of policy kill al Qaida terrorists sheltered by Pakistan or beyond the reach of government control in Yemen. Or that we are not “really” at war or that Federal judges are better suited for picking bombing targets than Air Force and CIA analysts and that “due process” should apply to enemy combatants on the battlefield. Many of these arguments are valid ones to raise and debate but are unlikely to be persuasive to the public or Congress; if they were, they would have prevailed in 2010 (drones) or 2001 (“are we at war?).

King Richard III 

The bones of Richard III, Shakespeare’s greatest villain and the last King of England to be killed in battle have been discovered and identified by DNA testing:

….There were cheers when Richard Buckley, lead archaeologist on the hunt for the king’s body, finally announced that the university team was convinced “beyond reasonable doubt” that it had found the last Plantagenet king, bent by scoliosis of the spine, and twisted further to fit into a hastily dug hole in Grey Friars church, which was slightly too small to hold his body.

But by then it was clear the evidence was overwhelming, as the scientists who carried out the DNA tests, those who created the computer-imaging technology to peer on to and into the bones in raking detail, the genealogists who found a distant descendant with matching DNA, and the academics who scoured contemporary texts for accounts of the king’s death and burial, outlined their findings.

….Richard died at Bosworth on 22 August 1485, the last English king to fall in battle, and the researchers revealed how for the first time. There was an audible intake of breath as a slide came up showing the base of his skull sliced off by one terrible blow, believed to be from a halberd, a fearsome medieval battle weapon with a razor-sharp iron axe blade weighing about two kilos, mounted on a wooden pole, which was swung at Richard at very close range. The blade probably penetrated several centimetres into his brain and, said the human bones expert Jo Appleby, he would have been unconscious at once and dead almost as soon.

Injuries to the skeleton appear to confirm contemporary accounts that the king died in battle. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

The injury appears to confirm contemporary accounts that he died in close combat in the thick of the battle and unhorsed – as in the great despairing cry Shakespeare gives him: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” 

Richard III, usurper and probable regicide of his nephew the boy King, was the last truly medieval King of England. Had Richard lived to rule, his reign would have been characterized by the same bloody uprisings and civil strife that marked the War of the Roses. England was fortunate in his successor who had bested him in battle, Henry Tudor who became King Henry VII was an energetic and far seeing monarch who restored a war-wracked and bankrupt England to peace and fiscal health and set the foundations of the modern United Kingdom and the future world-spanning British Empire. It was Henry who started the Royal Navy and curtailed the ability of the nobility to wage war as they pleased with large private armies, by taxing them for each man at arms, thus ending bastard feudalism ; recalcitrant rebels were executed and justices of the peace established in every shire to enforce the law of the realm rather than the corrupt whims of manorial courts.

Richard III has his devoted fans as well his detractors. Except for his impatient ruthlessness, Richard probably was little worse, morally speaking, than his fellow medieval monarchs in an age when brutality and the rule of the strong was the norm.  However, unlike the brilliant Henry, Richard would have done little to improve the situation and might have made life in England more savagely violent.