He won battles on a scale no one else even dreamed of: He developed all the tactics of urban combat war from scratch. He destroyed the most invincible fighting force the human race had seen in 700 years since the days of Genghis Khan and his Mongol hoards. He saved the world from the monstrous…
The relatively smooth waters of cooperation between FDR, Churchill, and Stalin at Yalta concealed roiling cross currents beneath the glistening surface which some historians like to emphasise. These rip tides were quick to erupt in the last weeks of the war. Much has been written over the years about the wartime Yalta conference, and more…
The sleep of reason brings forth monsters. El sueño de la razon produce monstruos. …Francisco José de Goya Afghanistan is in dire straits due to the United Kingdom’s ‘divide & rule’ colonial legacy and an unholy alliance with the United States circa Charlie Wilson’s endless War, which mutated from carefully inflamed anti-Soviet insurgency into…
History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind– Edward Gibbon Counterfactual history is generally a waste of time because, in the end, it’s just speculation. But it’s fun and it can sometimes illuminate factual history. For example, take the aborted Soviet-French-British alliance to stop Hitler. It came…
President Putin recently stirred up a hornets nest by reminding the western nations of their own complicity in supporting the rise of Nazism long before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed on August 23, 1939. What was this hornets’ nest exactly? Between December 19 and 24, Putin responded on several occasions to the dangerous revival of…
“That the Russian armies should stand on this line was clearly necessary for the safety of Russia” On the eve of the Second World War, 21 August 1939, Soviet–Anglo–Franco negotiations in Moscow on a military convention were cut short due to the unwillingness of London (then Paris, following in its wake) “to enter into any…
