Cav > Books: history‎ (403)

"...They’re coming from scholars, policy research institutes, journalists, and commentators, and they stem from two convictions: One is that the present world order, led by the United States and the West, has by and large been a good thing, preventing major wars and allowing for international trade, economic growth, and a remarkably stable and prosperous international system. Two is that the rise of the non-Western nations and the emergence of an alternative to the familiar American-led world order will be frightening, unpredictable, and almost surely a change for the worse. For the West at least, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was a stark warning about the dangers of the breakdown of the American-led world order and its replacement with a kind of Putinesque law of the jungle, a breakdown aided and abetted by an ever more powerful China."

"Would the end of US and Western dominance really be so bad?
In this book, I argue, contrary to much elite opinion, that it need not be, especially over the long run. This is not because the West’s fears about the rise of non-Western powers, including China and Russia, are always exaggerated, although sometimes they are, due to the loss of power and prestige. But it is because Western supremacy has itself contributed to plenty of instability, injustice, and disorder that might be eased by its decline. More importantly, centuries of dominance have led the West to a kind of arrogance and ignorance about the rest of the world, overlooking the ideas and contributions of other civilizations to stability and progress throughout history. We have forgotten that world order—the political architecture enabling cooperation and peace among nations—existed long before the rise of the West, and that many of the ideas we assume are Western inventions actually originated in other civilizations. Mechanisms and values that are central to world order—such as diplomacy, economic interdependence, freedom of seas, principles for the protection of people in war and peace, preservation of the environment, and cooperation among major powers, to name a few—emerged over millennia across the globe."

"This book is an effort to answer those questions and more. It charts the rise of Prigozhin and the Wagner Group, tracing their origins from Russia’s reentry into the global economy after the Soviet Union’s collapse to the group’s implosion in 2023. Along the way, the narrative touches on the lives of the intrepid journalists, activists, information brokers, dissidents, and detectives who sought to expose the hidden tentacles of Russia’s unconventional warfare tactics and in so doing exposed the Wagner Group enterprise.
The chronicle that follows is an attempt to contextualize and explain how the merger of interests among Kremlin-connected power brokers, the castoffs of Russia’s war machine, and the foot soldiers of the country’s shadow economy forged a private army into a global juggernaut that for a moment in the summer of 2023 brought Putin’s tyrannical regime to a standstill. Putin’s reinvention of Russian power and his push for a new balance where multiple nations, including Russia, could pursue their interests unchecked by the constraints of international law was more than just a strategic pivot; it was a theatrical production with Prigozhin as its unsmiling stage manager. Or, at least, that is how Prigozhin seemed to imagine himself."

"...Instead, destiny pointed him in a different direction, first to a prison cell as a petty criminal, then hustling in the emerging capitalist markets of Russia, then into the ranks of Russia’s ultrarich, and ultimately to serve at the elbow of the country’s most powerful man. The code for deciphering his ascent to the inner circle of Russian power lies in the epochal whirl that gripped his hometown before it fully reclaimed its imperial moniker, St. Petersburg, and after the Soviet Union collapsed into memory in 1991."

"...I was searching for the tools to develop an inner life—an inner fortitude that would serve me until the end. This wisdom would guide my intuition, how I treated people, how I navigated the world and how I coped with it all: disappointment and loss, joy and abundance. But it would work inwards too—creating meaning and a map, orienting a moral compass, and creating the ability to be calm and courageous during times of global chaos and in a chaotic personal life.
By happenstance (more of that later) I found the wisdom I’d been searching for, deep in the past, in the ancient Greco-Roman philosophy of Stoicism.
The Stoics, always useful, seemed even more necessary in March 2020. They whispered from the past: ‘We’re here, we’re here . . . we’ve always been here.’
And so into the past I went. I found a time not unlike our own— full of chaos, war, plagues, pestilence, treachery, corruption, anxiety, overindulgence and fear of a climate apocalypse. Those times were populated by people questing for the answers that we crave today. In ancient Stoicism I found people, just like us, longing to find meaning and connection, to feel whole and tranquil, to love and be loved, to have a harmonious family life, fulfilling and meaningful work, intimate and nourishing friendships, a sense of contributing to your community, belonging to something greater than yourself, a wonder at the natural world, flashes of deep awe, a head full of questions
about how it all came to be, and, finally, coming to terms with letting it all go—at some point, not of your choosing."

"...‘Memento mori,’ the slave whispered into the general’s ear: ‘Remember you will die.’
The idea is to habituate yourself to thoughts of your own mortality. You can’t begin to properly contemplate death if you live in constant terror of it. By reminding ourselves regularly that we will die, we sharply bring into focus the one thing that really matters: the present moment—the time that we have. When we realise that our moments are slipping away with unceasing constancy, we come to realise how short life actually is."

"...It is the story of a stubborn entrepreneur who pushed his radical vision for computing for thirty years, in the process becoming one of the wealthiest men alive. It is the story of a revolution in silicon and the small group of renegade engineers who defied Wall Street to make it happen. And it is the story of the birth of an awesome and terrifying new category of artificial intelligence, whose long-term implications for the human species cannot be known.
At the center of this story is a propulsive, mercurial, brilliant, and extraordinarily dedicated man. His name is Jensen Huang, and his thirty-two-year tenure is the longest of any technology CEO in the S&P 500.
Huang is a visionary inventor whose familiarity with the inner workings of electronic circuitry approaches a kind of intimacy. He reasons from first principles about what microchips can do today, then gambles with great conviction on what they will do tomorrow. He does not always win, but when he does, he wins big: his early, all-in bet on AI was one of the best investments in Silicon Valley history. Huang’s company, Nvidia, is today worth more than $3 trillion, rivaling both Apple and Microsoft in value."

"I found Huang to be an elusive subject, in some ways the most difficult I’ve ever reported on. He hates talking about himself and once responded to one of my questions by physically running away. Before this book was commissioned, I had written a magazine profile of Huang for The New Yorker. Huang told me he hadn’t read it, and had no intention of ever doing so. Informed that I was writing a biography of him, he responded, “I hope I die before it comes out.”

"...The morning of October 7, 2023, was just such a moment. That morning air-raid sirens went off all across Israel. This was no unusual thing in itself.
Certainly not in the south of the country that had for seventeen years been within rocket range of Hamas. Nor in the north of the country into which Hezbollah had fired rockets since the 1980s. But in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem the sirens sounded too. People woke up that Saturday morning to the realization that something very unusual was happening."

"By late in the day on October 7, it was already clear that these acts included burning people alive, shooting innocent people, cutting off people’s heads, and raping men and women. Sometimes before killing them. Sometimes after.
Israel is a country with a population of just 9 million people. America is a country of some 333 million people. To put it in perspective, the death toll on October 7 was the equivalent of some 44,400 Americans being killed by terrorists on a single day. Or around fifteen 9/11s. The kidnap toll if it had happened by ratio in the US would have been almost 10,000 Americans taken from their homes as hostages. It would be the equivalent of some 5,000 Canadians being killed in a single day and a thousand taken hostage.
Or 8,400 French or British people being slaughtered in a single day and another 1,750 taken hostage..."

"Intifada is not a neutral term, any more than “Sieg heil” is a phrase that simply means “Hail victory.” Since the 1980s, Palestinian leaders and clerics have twice called for an “intifada” against the Jewish state. The First Intifada (1987–93) and the Second Intifada (2000–2005) were among the bloodiest periods in Israel’s history. During those periods Israelis could not board a bus without wondering whether a Palestinian terrorist was going to detonate a suicide vest and turn the vehicle into a charnel house. Terrorist attacks against innocent civilians happened on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis for years. They often targeted people of the same age as those who spent the aftermath of October 7 calling for just such a thing."

"...That early period of Western anti-Zionism is important for many reasons. One is the light it shines on what has happened in much of the West since October 7. But perhaps the best way to understand it is to go back to postwar Germany and the generation that grew up after 1945...
...the generation that grew up in Germany after World War II had pretty much only one guiding political principle by which to orient themselves. Essentially that was Don’t be Nazis. Don’t be like our parents’ generation...
...The German left that grew up in the 1950s and ’60s assumed that they were going to be able to hold fast to this principle. They were of the left, after all...
...the most interesting development was the movement’s adoption of the Palestinian cause. In the aftermath of the 1967 and 1973 wars in Israel, something crucial shifted in the international left’s attitudes toward the Jewish state. From 1948 until 1967, Israel had broad sympathy and support from the international left. In part this was because of the leftist origins of the state itself including the kibbutznik movement. Time spent working on a kibbutz in Israel was almost a rite of passage for leftists in those days...
...Leftists supported Israel for a number of reasons, but one that has often been a baseline of leftwing politics was support for the perceived underdog. From 1948 to 1967, Israel was the plucky underdog in the Middle East. Its neighbors had attempted to wipe it out but the Israelis had seen them off.
Then in 1967, and even more so in 1973, something changed. If Israel had been David up until this moment, a number of its supporters now saw it as having transformed into Goliath. The fact that Israel was still a tiny country with a tiny population in comparison with its neighbors was not the point. It now came to be seen by many as the overdog.
The change came about in part because Israel had won those two wars with relative ease...
...At the same time the idea grew that the Arabs who lived in Israel were not to be referred to as Arabs, like their brothers and sisters in Egypt, Jordan, or Iraq, but rather as “Palestinians” with a unique and long recognized identity of their own. With the turning of the Arabs into Palestinians it was now the Palestinians who were the beleaguered minority and the Israelis who were seen as the oppressive majority. So the Palestinians became the new Jews, with the Jews becoming the imperialist, brutish overlords..."

"Inside Gaza I visited the tunnels that Hamas had constructed during their eighteen years in power. One was a tunnel that had an opening within walking distance of the Erez crossing. It had been constructed by Sinwar’s brother and had become famous, in its own way, because of footage showing Sinwar himself traveling along the tunnel in a military vehicle.
When people think of a tunnel network many think of small scurry-holes. In fact, besides being longer than the entire London Underground, the network was also much more elaborate. In the 140 square miles of Gaza, Hamas spent its years in power constructing over 350 miles of tunnels, with around 6,000 different tunnel entrances. Many of these were hidden in civilian houses, mosques, hospitals, and other nonmilitary buildings. Like storing weapons in such places, this is a breach of the Geneva Conventions, which are meant to preclude an army hiding military infrastructure in civilian buildings. Doing such a thing obviously puts civilians at risk. But this was one of Hamas’s tools of war. Where most countries would seek to protect its civilians, Hamas always had a stated aim of using them as human shields. They knew that no country would be able to tolerate the buildup of rockets and other military infrastructure to be used against it, but they also knew that whenever Israel targeted a “civilian” facility in which Hamas had put its infrastructure, the world would condemn Israel."

"An American by birth, Major “Y” went to Israel immediately after the 7th to use his expertise. What he had seen in the months since the IDF went into Gaza had shocked even him. Stories that had already emerged in the international press about Hamas explosives being found smuggled inside children’s toys were just the start. By two months into the war his estimate was that somewhere between every two to every three civilian homes in Gaza had military weapons, including AK-47s, grenades, and rocket launchers, or tunnel entrances in them. From very early in the conflict he and his team had worked out where to search whenever they entered a civilian house. If they were looking for weapons, rockets, or tunnel entrances they no longer searched the main rooms, the kitchens, or the parents’ bedroom. They now went straight to the children’s bedrooms, since that was where tunnel entrances and weapons were generally located— including under kids’ cots. While Israeli families built safe rooms to protect their children from rockets, these Gazan families actually used their families to protect their rockets..."

"WHILE IT WAS Gary Webb who pulled the trigger, the bullet that ended his life was a mere afterthought to the tragic unraveling of one of the most controversial and misunderstood journalists in recent American history. A college dropout with twenty years of reporting experience and a Pulitzer Prize on his resume, Webb broke the biggest story of his career in August 1996, when he published “Dark Alliance,” a three-part series for the San Jose Mercury News that linked the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to America’s crack-cocaine explosion.
Webb spent more than a year uncovering the shady connection between the CIA and drug trafficking through the agency’s relationship with the Nicaraguan contras, a right-wing army that aimed to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government during the 1980s. The Sandinistas were Marxist rebels who came to power in 1979 after the collapse of decades of U.S.- backed dictatorship at the hands of the Somoza family. President Reagan called the contras “freedom fighters” and compared them to America’s founding fathers. Even as Reagan uttered those words, the CIA was aware that the many of the contras’ supporters were deeply involved in cocaine smuggling, and were using the money to fund their army, or, as more often proved the case, to line their own pockets."

"...As this book will show, the controversy over “Dark Alliance” was the central event in Webb’s life, and the critical element in his eventual depression and suicide. His big story, despite major flaws of hyperbole abetted and even encouraged by his editors, remains one of the most important works of investigative journalism in recent American history. The connection Webb uncovered between the CIA, the contras and L.A.’s crack trade was real—and radioactive. Webb was hardly the first American journalist to lose his job after taking on the country’s most secretive government agency in print. Every serious reporter or politician that tried to unravel the connection between the CIA, the Nicaraguan contras and cocaine, had lived to regret it."

"Webb’s original draft highlighted the CIA’s involvement in the drug ring, but didn’t assert that the agency had conspired with Blandon or Meneses, but rather that it knew about their activities. In his 1998 book, Webb wrote that he “never believed, and never wrote, that there was a grand CIA conspiracy behind the crack plague. Indeed the more I learned about the agency, the more certain of that I became. The CIA couldn’t even mine a harbor without getting its trench coat stuck in its fly.”
Rather than a CIA conspiracy to flood the streets of South Central Los Angeles with crack, Webb stated in his book Dark Alliance that what transpired was “a horrible accident of history” abetted by bad timing. “The contras just happened to pick the worst possible time ever to begin peddling cheap cocaine in black neighborhoods—unbridled criminal stupidity, cloaked in a blanket of national security,” he wrote."

"...How do you find your way around without GPS, Sat Nav or even signposts? Where can you get a decent meal; what will be served and how will it taste? What should you do if you meet royalty? If you’re not well, who should you see about it? Where can you stay? What should you wear for a night on the town? How do you contact a friend or relative1 without social media or skype and no wi-fi to look up information? (For looking stuff up, I’m afraid this book is all that will be available.) And most importantly, how do you get money to spend when there are no credit/ debit cards or cash points, or even banks?"

"Even when sex is permitted only the missionary position, with the man on top, has Church approval and it must be done after dark, without candlelight, and eyes closed so you can’t see your partner naked. And on no account must you enjoy yourself. It’s a wonder we’re not extinct..."

"...Although this guidebook is concerned with medieval England, you may wish to travel overseas during your visit. Therefore, it is as well to be aware of some oddities concerning crime and punishment in France. These cases are difficult to take seriously in the twenty-first century, but they were of great concern at the time. The French seem to be even more especially keen to prosecute animals than the English. Pigs are given a particularly hard time, but lesser creatures are not let off lightly either, as in these three cases.
In 1386, in Falaise in Normandy, a pig was accused of murdering an infant. She was tried and convicted by a court and hanged at the gallows by the village hangman. Her six piglets were charged with being accessories to the crime but were acquitted ‘on account of their youth and their mother’s bad example’.
The Grand Vicar of Valence, who must surely have been quite mad, brought a case against some caterpillars. They were accused of wilfully destroying his crops and summoned to appear in court. When the malefactors didn’t appear to defend themselves, a lawyer was appointed for them. However, he failed to make an adequate case for the caterpillars and the court found them guilty as charged and banished them from the diocese. No doubt they complied, eventually, turning into innocent butterflies and flying away from that mad place.
Finally, the rats of Autun in France had a gifted lawyer to defend them. The rats were accused by the local barley growers of thieving their grain. The lawyer, Chassenee, claimed that the case could only proceed if every rat in the diocese was summoned to court so that those that were guilty – if any were – could be divided from the innocent rodents. So all rats were duly ordered to appear. Non-appearance was usually taken as an admission of guilt but when the rats didn’t come to court, clever Chassenee argued that every felon was deserving of safe conduct to and from the trial. Since the rats couldn’t be certain of not being eaten by the local cats on their journey, they were too afraid to appear. The rats were therefore acquitted in their absence and Chassenee became the lawyer of choice for all local felons, two-legged, four-legged or winged."

"...Many who voted for them in the 1920s and even some of those who joined their ranks and marched under their banners during these early days of ‘the struggle’, sincerely and naively believed that National Socialism offered the only credible opposition to Bolshevism."

"In the immediate aftermath of the country’s defeat of November 1918, the population was weary, dispirited and looking for a leader with ready answers – someone who could identify those who were to blame for their misfortunes. Families throughout the country were grieving for the incalculable loss of life, confounded by the sudden and unexpected capitulation of an army they had been assured was on the verge of victory, and embittered by the futility of the sacrifice they had made in vain for the Fatherland. This sense of despair was compounded by the abdication of the Kaiser and the new Weimar government’s willing compliance with the punitive terms and conditions imposed by the Versailles Treaty. It is therefore no wonder that this poisonous atmosphere gave rise to extreme nationalism and the belief that the army had been betrayed, or ‘stabbed in the back’, to borrow a phrase attributed to General Ludendorff.
This grievous wound might have healed over time had it not been aggravated by the rampant inflation of 1922–3, which saw savings wiped out and wages devalued to the point where workers were being paid twice a day so that they could buy food while it was still affordable. Even so, it was not uncommon to view customers paying for produce with what had once been a month’s wages, all of which emphasized the fragility of the economy and the ineffectiveness of the Weimar government. Within a year the average price of a loaf of bread had risen from 165 marks to one and a half million."

"...Although the killing was lowtech—performed largely by machete—it was carried out at dazzling speed: of an original population of about seven and a half million, at least eight hundred thousand people were killed in just a hundred days. Rwandans often speak of a million deaths, and they may be right. The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. It was the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

"Considering the enormity of the task, it is tempting to play with theories of collective madness, mob mania, a fever of hatred erupted into a mass crime of passion, and to imagine the blind orgy of the mob, with each member killing one or two people. But at Nyarubuye, and at thousands of other sites in this tiny country, on the same days of a few months in 1994, hundreds of thousands of Hutus had worked as killers in regular shifts. There was always the next victim, and the next. What sustained them, beyond the frenzy of the first attack, through the plain physical exhaustion and mess of it?"

"The killers killed all day at Nyarubuye. At night they cut the Achilles tendons of survivors and went off to feast behind the church, roasting cattle looted from their victims in big fires, and drinking beer. (Bottled beer, banana beer—Rwandans may not drink more beer than other Africans, but they drink prodigious quantities of it around the clock.) And, in the morning, still drunk after whatever sleep they could find beneath the cries of their prey, the killers at Nyarubuye went back and killed again. Day after day, minute to minute, Tutsi by Tutsi: all across Rwanda, they worked like that. “It was a process,” Sergeant Francis said. I can see that it happened, I can be told how, and after nearly three years of looking around Rwanda and listening to Rwandans, I can tell you how, and I will. But the horror of it—the idiocy, the waste, the sheer wrongness—remains uncircumscribable."

"While convention holds that Hutus are a Bantu people who settled Rwanda first, coming from the south and west, and that Tutsis are a Nilotic people who migrated from the north and east, these theories draw more on legend than on documentable fact. With time, Hutus and Tutsis spoke the same language, followed the same religion, intermarried, and lived intermingled, without territorial distinctions, on the same hills, sharing the same social and political culture in small chiefdoms. The chiefs were called Mwamis, and some of them were Hutus, some Tutsis; Hutus and Tutsis fought together in the Mwamis’ armies; through marriage and clientage, Hutus could become hereditary Tutsis, and Tutsis could become hereditary Hutus. Because of all this mixing, ethnographers and historians have lately come to agree that Hutus and Tutsis cannot properly be called distinct ethnic groups."

"In discussions of us-against-them scenarios of popular violence, the fashion these days is to speak of mass hatred. But while hatred can be animating, it appeals to weakness. The “authors” of the genocide, as Rwandans call them, understood that in order to move a huge number of weak people to do wrong, it is necessary to appeal to their desire for strength—and the gray force that really drives people is power. Hatred and power are both, in their different ways, passions. The difference is that hatred is purely negative, while power is essentially positive: you surrender to hatred, but you aspire to power. In Rwanda, the orgy of misbegotten power that led to genocide was carried out in the name of Hutuness, and when Paul, a Hutu, set out to defy the killers, he did so by appealing to their passion for power: “they” were the ones who had chosen to take life away and he grasped that that meant they could also choose to extend the gift of retaining it."

"...For more than a year, Soviet leaders rejected pleas from the Afghan communist government to send troops to help put down rebellion by the rural population protesting the regime’s merciless modernization programs. After Moscow did invade, it found itself locked in conflict—essentially, a civil war—it could barely comprehend. While it cannot be said that Afghanistan triggered the Soviet collapse, it did project an image of a failing empire unable to deal with a handful of bedraggled partisans in a remote part of its southern frontier."

"The Brezhnev regime’s great gamble brought devastating consequences on an epic scale. While the official figure of Soviet war deaths is around 15,000, the real number is believed to be far higher, perhaps even as high as the 75,000 cited by many veterans. Conservative estimates put Afghan deaths at 1.25 million, or 9 percent of the population, with another three-quarters of a million wounded..."
"...Some 620,000 Soviets served in Afghanistan. Officially, 13,833 died—although that number is still the subject of debate between various Russian government agencies—plus some 650 from affiliated units. Another 469,685 were sick or wounded; 10,751 of them became invalids. But many who fought in Afghanistan believe the real number of those killed was closer to 75,000. Among the equipment lost were 118 jets, 333 helicopters, 147 tanks, 1,314 APCs, 433 artillery pieces and mortars, 1,138 communications vehicles, 510 engineering vehicles, and 11,369 trucks. Even the unofficial figures are tiny compared to the Afghan deaths the conflict caused, along with a society left in utter ruin by the decade of bloody warfare.
Few in Moscow truly believed Najibullah would be able to hang on without Soviet military support. It would be an irony of history, or another lesson about the unintended consequences of using force, that his regime would outlive the Soviet Union that was convinced it had a duty to teach the world how to think and live."

"...Instead of escorting captured mujahideen to military bases for interrogation and imprisonment, they often threw terrified captives out of the aircraft to their deaths. When he was flying a peasant loyal to the government to a mujahideen base in his northern village that he’d agreed to identify, the man admiringly pointed at his own house as the helicopter approached. Before the interpreter had a chance to translate, the chopper’s gunner destroyed the little structure with rocket fire. The Russian soldiers were amused as the Afghan clutched his head, then saved themselves the trouble of an explanation back at their base by shoving him out.
The mujahideen were no less cruel to their captives. One of their favorite tortures was skinning Soviet soldiers alive by slitting them around the waist, pulling their skin above their heads, and tying it there, leaving the doomed to suffer excruciating deaths."

"This book’s chapters focus on the six presidencies (with a discussion of an “acting president” in 2014) since Ukraine’s independence.
There is one chapter for each president, with two devoted to Volodymyr Zelensky’s presidency—the first under hybrid, low-intensity Russian attack; the second during Russia’s full-scale war. An eighth chapter looks at the future of Ukraine. This organizing principle is well justified as Ukraine’s presidents have exerted deep influence over the state and often represented the social trends of their time.
Ukraine’s presidents have wielded significant influence through substantial constitutional powers and frequent success in shaping ruling majorities. In office, they have been a powerful—if not always dominant—force shaping domestic and foreign policy."

"...On my last visit to court, there was a big argument about the age of one of the Crocodile Gang members. My mother explained to me that if he was under eighteen then they couldn’t hang him, but if he was over eighteen, they could. Like most Africans he didn’t know his exact age, and he didn’t have a birth certificate..."

"Older Africans, whose parents couldn’t speak English, tended to have an arbitrary English word as a name. They believed that having a name in the white man’s language would attract the white man’s power. So they were called by any English word their parents had chanced across: words like Tickie, or Sixpence, Cigarette or Matches were commonly used as names. The next generation of Africans, who were the target of Christian missionaries, tended to have Old Testament names; Jeremiah and Ezekiel, Isaiah and Zephaniah. Baby girls were often called after the emotion felt by the mother at birth – Joy, Happiness, Delight. But, as far as I know, there were no girls called Disappointment, Pain or Exhaustion. Finally Africans began taking ordinary names popular with European settlers. Usually they would retain an African name as well, which only they knew, but after the civil war, the new chimurenga, it became fashionable to revert to their African names..."

"...At eighteen, he was diagnosed with osteosarcoma and learned that within days they would have to amputate his leg. He would then have to undergo harsh chemotherapy treatment for the next year and a half with only a thirty percent chance of surviving."

"The first experiences he shared were the ones he was having at the cancer clinic with his distress at what he was seeing. Not about himself — he rarely talked about his own reactions other than the loss of his hair — but he would talk about seeing people who were so sick. He’d see them the next time and they looked even worse, or he’d go the next time and they weren’t there at all. And that really, really upset him. That’s why his focus, I think, right from the beginning was “Why aren’t they making a difference? Why aren’t they researching this?” Because he could see that what people were doing was fundraising for comfort, fundraising for the equipment you might need, or fundraising for the services that you’re receiving in these specialized units, but they’re not going to prevent you from getting sick. And that became his real interest: research and getting rid of this in the first place, instead of having to deal with it afterwards."

"Everyone knows Adolf Hitler committed suicide by gunshot in his underground bunker on April 30, 1945.
As Russian troops neared the bunker’s location in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, fighting an urban battle street-by-street, Hitler preferred suicide to being captured and put on display as one of the most notorious mass murderers in history.
Everyone knows Hitler’s death involved a double-suicide, as Eva Braun, his mistress and long-time female companion, married Hitler in a simple ceremony in the bunker before she too took her life by biting down on a cyanide capsule.
Seated on a couch in Hitler’s private chambers in the underground bunker, Eva Braun died first, but she died as the bride of her beloved Führer.
Their bodies were taken, as Hitler had commanded, outside the bunker and doused with gasoline to be cremated in a shallow trench dug for that purpose in the garden of the Reich Chancellery, right outside the secret entrance to the bunker below.
The Russian army, in liberating Berlin, came across the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun; hurriedly, the Russian army buried the charred remains in a secret location in Berlin, keeping the bodies safe until the cessation of hostilities permitted their safe transport to Moscow.
Who would dare be silly enough to think Hitler escaped Berlin to run away to a safe haven such as Argentina?
Anyone who questions that Hitler died by suicide in his bunker in the closing hours of World War II in Europe is by definition considered a “conspiracy theorist”—a polite way of claiming the doubter is a proverbial nut-case.
But in recent years, the world has come to see that the scientific proof offered for decades by the Russians to back this politically correct version of Hitler’s demise is deeply flawed.
Moreover, the cover-up story, concocted and published in 1947 by Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, then a British 32-year-old history graduate student who had worked during World War II as a British military intelligence officer, turned out to be inconsistent in several major aspects of the story with other arguably authoritative accounts of Hitler’s demise."

"The research and analysis presented here will make a scientific case that no proof exists or has ever existed that Hitler died in Berlin as recounted in Trevor-Roper’s official version of events.
Examining the now-declassified FBI and US military intelligence files, a compelling case can be made that US investigators suspected from the beginning that Hitler had escaped, but were willing to go along with the Trevor-Roper story for political reasons.
The point of this book is that hunting Hitler must continue until the weight of scientific evidence proves one way or the other whether Hitler died by suicide in the bunker on April 30, 1945, or if he escaped, to die elsewhere.
Hunting Hitler, the world’s most notorious mass murderer, an international criminal whose crimes against humanity and the law of nations have never been adjudicated, must continue until we know the truth.
History should not rest until the Hitler chapter is closed, not with politically convenient lies, but with the truth.
With the truth in hand, steps can be taken to adjudicate blame, not just for the unspeakably horrendous crimes Hitler committed, but also for the inexcusable crimes committed by those who helped Hitler escape..."

"How were Hitler and Eva’s bodies discovered? Did eyewitnesses in the bunker immediately carry the bodies outside to be cremated, or did eyewitnesses in the bunker hold some sort of viewing or service for the newly wed and even more newly deceased Führer and his bride?
As we shall see, the truth is that we have no authoritative account of the discovery and disposal of the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun after committing suicide, as the several available accounts conflict on many important details...
...As this book will demonstrate, the truth is that when the Russians entered Hitler’s underground bunker in Berlin, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun were gone. Neither were ever captured, and their bodies were never found.
When the Russians burst into the bunker, Hitler and Eva Braun were simply missing..."

"...In a discussion with Stalin in Moscow, Hopkins commented that he hoped Hitler’s body, which had not yet been recovered, would be found by the Russians. Stalin replied that Soviet doctors thought they had identified the body of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda; and of Erich Kempka, Hitler’s chauffeur; but that he personally doubted that Goebbels was dead. He said the whole matter was strange, and that the various talks of funerals and burials struck him as being very dubious. He further explained that he thought Hitler, Goebbels, and General Hans Krebs, the chief of staff of the German army, along with Hitler’s secretary Martin Bormann, had all escaped and were in hiding. Hopkins commented that the Nazis had several large submarines, and he was aware no trace of Hitler had yet been discovered. Stalin responded that the Germans were using those submarines to transport gold and negotiable assets to Japan, with the connivance of Switzerland. He further mentioned that his intelligence service was investigating these Nazi submarines, but Russia had also failed to find any trace of Hitler. In concluding the discussion, Stalin speculated that Hitler and the other top Nazis he mentioned may have fled to Japan."

"On Monday, October 8, 1945, the US military newspaper The Stars and Stripes published a shocking statement by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, then the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces. The short piece, published in a separate box buried in the middle of a report on pending war
crime charges to be brought against Nazi Rudolph Hess and baseball scores from the United States, ran with a headline, “Ike Believes Hitler Lives.”
The short piece was datelined from London on October 7, 1945. It read: “There is ‘reason to believe’ that Hitler may still be alive, according to a remark made by Gen. Eisenhower to Dutch newspapermen. The general’s statement reversed his previous opinion that Hitler was dead.”

"It is far from certain that the United States and Western Europe would have had the economic strength to withstand an expanding Soviet Union throughout the Cold War years had Bormann not invested the ill-gotten Nazi capital—including the wealth stolen from the Jews about to be murdered—in the Western economies in order to establish viable escape routes for himself, Hitler, other top Nazis such as Heinrich Müller, and tens of thousands of other Nazi war criminals. Without Dulles’s complicity, it is much less likely that Hitler or any of the other Nazi henchmen like Eichmann and Mengele would ever have escaped. Without Bormann’s funding, it is much less certain that Ronald Reagan would have had the economic base from which to challenge Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall..."