The limited hangout

Sean McMeekin is making waves, with his Stalin's War. Various reviewers are mooting what it's missing.

I'm interested in this because I first heard about the "Stalin's War" thesis when it was called the Suvorov Thesis... and only being touted by the Institute of Historical Review. "Suvorov" - Rezun, a Right-wing defector from the Soviets, in the Solzhenitsyn tradition - was writing in 1990 when the Soviets, nominally, were still in charge and few Westerners could verify sources. And Rezun made the autist's mistake of taking his findings to their logical conclusion, or at least to a reasonable one, here that Hitler had inflicted damage to the Red Army sufficient that the Iron Curtain ended up along the Hajnal Line and not at the Channel. So "Suvorov" got panned as a crank at best and as a Hitler apologist at... well, at middle.

I confess: when I read the IHR summary of Icebreaker, I thought this was neo-NSDAP crankery. Times change and it's looking like Suvorov is being rehabilitated.

Vox Day is wondering about the people involved in Roosevelt's circle; he's (rhetorically) cagey, in character. Guyénot at Unz re-raises Suvorov's politically-incorrect conclusion. (Vox Day retains an open mind whether Stalin was all that bad for the historical central-European nations. I do hope he is excepting the East German experience . . .)

If you get into Google for "Suvorov" and "Stalin's War", you'll see the "extremists" linked, in preference; the Vox Day sorts will wonder if Google is deliberately raising the cranks to the forefront, to bury McMeekin's allegations. So they link Counter Currents, Paul Craig Roberts, Guyénot - although, to their credit, they also had the Grauniad's review, which was not a takedown. DuckDuckGo got other minor blogs, because DDG tends less heavy-handed on curation than Google, better or worse.

Anyway I do agree McMeekin has such Opinions as he has not let into his book.

Suvorov appears in the index and he is mentioned in the text... once. It absolutely looks like McMeekin knows that his thesis is Suvorov's and that he's got to mention Suvorov somewhere. But he's done the utter minimum, in the main text (I suspect there's more in the endnotes). Left to his own devices, McMeekin is happy to credit Suvorov's work.

This is telling me that Western historians, who are nowhere near as brave as the midwits imagine they are, see that the truth is coming out, truth such as cannot be suppressed nor (as Suvorov) left to the fringes. I see this book as a Limited Hangout in the Nixon tradition; it's as much truth as McMeekin's publishers will allow for us right now. I don't even blame McMeekin.