Good Fences, Bad Neighbor

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In the aftermath of Russia’s takeover of Crimea, there were widespread fears that the Baltic states, notwithstanding their membership in NATO, might be next. As Aliide Naylor relates in The Shadow in the East, those fears have since eased, but extreme vulnerability (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia could be overrun in days) and constant low- and not-so-low-level Russian aggression against the Baltic trio continue to keep nerves on edge.

Russia’s assault on Ukraine has forced NATO to relearn the power of symbolism. Several thousand troops from other NATO allies are now present in the Baltic states at any time, a reminder that the guarantee contained in Article 5 of the NATO treaty (an attack on one NATO country is to be treated as an attack on all) also extends to the alliance’s northeastern marches. Their numbers are tiny: no more, Naylor explains, than “a tripwire, unable to resist Russia’s military might in the event of a full-scale invasion — but thus far they have served as an effective deterrent.”

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Something woke this way comes

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Man’s refusal to accept reality can take entertainingly paradoxical form. One of the more enjoyable is the New Atheists’ crusade (I use the term advisedly) against God — a battle with human nature which, like most battles with human nature, can never be won. God may never have appeared in a burning bush, but, he, she or they came to life in the brains of some ancient hominids, probably as a bug in a new pattern-recognition app. It was a bug with benefits, and as evolution is an opportunist, God has never gone away since.

Tara Isabella Burton, who has a doctorate in theology, does not deal with the sources of religious belief in Strange Rites, Instead, she focuses ‘primarily on what a religion does’. She defines religion as satisfying ‘four elements of human need… meaning, purpose, community and ritual’, then explores how these needs might be met in our era of ‘spiritual, but not religious’. Her underlying assumption, familiar from sermons down the ages, is that we are all on a ‘quest for knowing, and for meaning: the pilgrimage none of us can get out of’, a long walk that, mercifully, I dodged. And so the jump in the number of Nones, the ‘religiously unaffiliated’, represents a recasting of the American religious landscape, not its decay.

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Three on the Third Reich: High-Speed History

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On Dec. 14, 1932,Germany’s head of state, President Paul von Hindenburg, a former general, a Prussian’s Prussian, hosted a party in honor of Ernst Lubitsch, a German Jew who had emerged as one of Hollywood’s finest directors. As two German writers, Rüdiger Barth and Hauke Friederichs, relate in “The Last Winter of the Weimar Republic,” another guest asked Lubitsch why he no longer worked in Germany. “That’s finished,” he replied, “nothing good is going to happen here for a long time.” Less than two months later, von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler Germany’s chancellor.

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Crawling Between the Giants’ Toes

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Speaking in the U.K. in late 2019, Guy Verhofstadt, former Belgian prime minister and one of the most prominent members of the European Union’s parliament, had this to say to his audience: “The world of tomorrow is not a world order based on nation states or countries. It is a world order that is based on empires. China is not a nation, it’s a civilization. India is not a nation. The U.S. is also an empire, more than a nation. . . . The world of tomorrow is a world of empires in which we Europeans, and you British, can only defend your interests, your way of life, by doing it together, in a European framework and in the European Union.”

In “Too Small to Fail,” Swiss writer and investor R. James Breiding takes a different tack, arguing that if “size has become unmoored from power,” if “greater social cohesion results in more easily governable and economic[ally] efficient societies,” if “technology is causing the speed of change to accelerate at an unprecedented rate, then the future will favour smaller, nimbler and more cohesive societies.” The corollary of that logic is that the behemoths should shrink. “Why shouldn’t Californians seek independence?” he writes at one point. And Mr. Breiding is not entirely optimistic about the future of the EU.

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Myself, Ourselves, Others

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When the French writer Thomas Clerc’s Interior (Intérieur, 2013) was released in Jeffrey Zuckerman’s English translation in 2018 (the paperback appeared last year), the headline writer for its New York Times review asked whether “a list of someone’s stuff [could] double as literature?”1 Well, yes. An accurate accumulation of, to philistines, superfluous detail is something I have always relished in a book, whether fictional, factual, or in the case of Interior, a blend of both. If the detail concerns “stuff” (I prefer “possessions,” although Clerc lets slip a handful of “stuffs” himself), so much the better: I was thrilled to read about his “superb” keychain. Perhaps I should disclose that I was a stamp collector. For decades.

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‘Pravda Ha Ha’ Review: Requiem for a Dream

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There are, remarkably, people who still believe that history has a “right side”—and Britain-based travel writer Rory MacLean, with his “firm and unwavering belief in the promise of the future,” is one of them. Intriguing, informative and infuriating, Mr. MacLean’s latest work, “Pravda Ha Ha: True Travels to the End of Europe,” is something of a return, literally and figuratively, to the ground covered in his beautifully written first book, “Stalin’s Nose” (1992), an account of a trip around Eastern Europe during that exhilarating interlude between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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Hitler Revisited

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Adolf? Not again. My first reaction on learning that not one, but two, substantial new Hitler biographies were up for review was not one of unreserved joy. How much more is there to say? After all, Ian Kershaw’s two volumes from the turn of the century have stood the test of time very well. Nevertheless, as Brendan Simms, a professor in the history of international relations at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, demonstrates in the introduction to his Hitler: A Global Biography, the research grinds on. In his case, he has used a basic cradle-to-ashes format (Simms does not pretend to depict “the ‘whole’ Hitler”) as a frame on which to hang an intriguing — if not always convincing — reexamination of Hitler’s thinking.

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“Horizon” Horizontales

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A book’s index can entertain as well as inform, and in D. J. Taylor’s Lost Girls, a lively, perceptive, and gossip-strewn inquiry into an overlooked aspect of an influential corner of London’s literary life in, mainly, the 1940s, the index does not disappoint. Turning from “Horizon, ‘bugger incident,’ ” to the entries for that storied magazine’s creator and presiding genius, “Connolly, Cyril,” we find, among other accolades, “capriciousness,” “dilettante quality,” “double standards and hypocrisy,” “mother-fixation,” “self-absorption,” “self-destructiveness,” “self-propagating mystique,” “sulkiness,” “tactlessness,” and, in a final jab of the indexer’s finger, “vacillation and procrastination.”

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Feeding The Enemy

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The American troops who landed in Russia to help reverse the Bolshevik coup of 1917 did little to change history, but cast as imperialist villains, they were useful to Soviet propagandists charged with rewriting it. In “The Russian Job: The Forgotten Story of How America Saved the Soviet Union From Ruin,” Douglas Smith tells the remarkable tale of a different, largely forgotten yet infinitely more effective intervention.

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The importance of being Ernst

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The more you study history, the less you know. Straight paths turn into labyrinths. So it is that, in the Paris journals of Ernst Jünger (now translated into English by Thomas and Abby Hansen as A German Officer in Occupied Paris), we learn that in July 1942 Jünger, who had previously swapped books with a fellow author by the name of Hitler, dropped in on a future Stalin Prize winner, one Pablo Picasso. The artist was an exile, Jünger a captain in the Wehrmacht, an occupier. The meeting passed off agreeably. Picasso declared that the two of them “would be able to negotiate peace over the course of [that] afternoon.”

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