BOOKS

Book notice: Russia, Ukraine and Contemporary Imperialism

A new publication edited By Boris Kagarlitsky, Radhika Desai and Alan Freeman,

Published by Routledge, Feb 7, 2019:

This book edited by Boris Kagarlitsky, Radhika Desai and Alan Freeman, is a unique contribution to scholarship on the sources of the conflict in Ukraine. The volume brings together writers from Russia, Ukraine, Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia, many of whom attended a gathering of scholars and activists from all over Ukraine, held in Yalta, Crimea, just after the conflict in Eastern Ukraine erupted.

Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands

By Richard Sakwa; I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd, Dec. 2014,,220 pp; ISBN 9781784530648

Review by Jonathan Steele, in The Guardian, Feb. 19, 2015. Excerpt:

At last, a balanced assessment of the Ukrainian conflict – the problems go far beyond Vladimir Putin… Today, we have what Sakwa rightly calls a “fateful geographical paradox: that Nato exists to manage the risks created by its existence”...

Review by Peter Hitchens in the Daily Mail (UK), Feb. 21, 2015. Excerpt:

I have said elsewhere that I would myself be happier if the book were more hostile to my position on this conflict. Sometimes I feel that it is almost too good to be true, to have my own conclusions confirmed so powerfully, and I would certainly like to see the book reviewed by a knowledgeable proponent of the NATO neo-conservative position. Why hasn’t it been?…

I have tended to see the *basic* dispute in Ukraine as being yet another outbreak of the old German push into the east, carried out under the new, nice flag of the EU, a liberal, federative empire in which the vassal states are tactfully allowed limited sovereignty as long as they don’t challenge the fundamental politico-economic dominance of Germany. I still think this is a strong element in the EU’s thrust in this direction. But I have tended to neglect another feature of the new Europe, also set out in Adam Tooze’s brilliant ‘The Deluge’ – the firm determination of the USA to mould Europe in its own image.

A summary of the book is written in an essay by Thomas Riggins in the London Progressive Journal, March 24 and April 4, 2015, here.

Ukraine In The Crossfire

By Chris Kaspar de Ploeg; Clarity Press (April 2017), 353 pp; ISBN 978-0-9972870-8-0

From the synosis:
Ukraine in the Crossfire tackles the importance of ultranationalist violence during and after the EuroMaidan movement, and documents how many of these groups are heirs to former nazi-collaborators. It shows how the Ukrainian state has seized on the ultranationalist war-rhetoric to serve its own agenda, clamping down on civil liberties on a scale unprecedented since Ukrainian independence. De Ploeg argues that Kiev itself has been the biggest obstacle to peace in Donbass, with multiple leaks suggesting that U.S. officials are pushing for a pro-war line in Ukraine.

Read the full synopsis, table of contents and initial reviews of the book here.

The Plot To Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the deep state have conspired to vilify Putin

By Dan Kovalik, introduction by David Talbot; Skyhorse Publishing (June 2017), paperback, ISBN-139781510730328

By the publisher:
Since 1945, the U.S. has justified numerous wars, interventions, and military build-ups based on the pretext of the Russian Red Menace, even after the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991 and Russia stopped being Red. In fact, the two biggest post-war American conflicts, the Korean and Vietnam wars, were not, as has been frequently claimed, about stopping Soviet aggression or even influence, but about maintaining old colonial relationships. Similarly, many lesser interventions and conflicts, such as those in Latin America, were also based upon an alleged Soviet threat, which was greatly overblown or nonexistent. And now the specter of a Russian Menace has been raised again in the wake of Donald Trump’s election.

The Plot to Scapegoat Russia examines the recent proliferation of stories, usually sourced from American state actors, blaming and manipulating the threat of Russia, and the long history of which this episode is but the latest chapter. It will show readers two key things: (1) the ways in which the United States has needlessly provoked Russia, especially after the collapse of the USSR, thereby squandering hopes for peace and cooperation; and (2) how Americans have lost out from this missed opportunity, and from decades of conflicts based upon false premises. These revelations, amongst other, make The Plot to Scapegoat Russia one of the timeliest reads of 2017.

Ukraine: Zbig’s Grand Chessboard and How the West Was Checkmated

By Natylie Baldwin and Kermit Heartsong; Tayen Lane Publishing (2015), 388 pages; ISBN-10 0996174079, ISBN-13: 978-0996174077

Review by David Swanson: published in Dissident Voice, June 15, 2015

Western Mainstream Media and the Ukraine Crisis: A Study in Conflict Propaganda

By Oliver Boyd-Barrett (Bowling Green University, Kentucky), Routledge, 2016, 209 pp ISBN-13 978-1138677197.

Here is the publisher’s book synopsis:
This book explores contemporary propaganda and mainstream Western news media, with reference to the Ukraine crisis. It examines Western media narratives of the immediate causes of the crisis, the respective roles of those who participated in or otherwise supported the demonstrations of 2013-2014 – including US-backed NGOs and rightist militia – and the legitimacy, or otherwise, of the destabilization of the democratically elected Yanukovych government. It considers how the crisis was contextualized with reference to broader themes of competition for power over Eurasia and the Washington Consensus. It assesses accounts of the role of Russia and of ethnic Russian Ukrainians in Crimea, Odessa and the Donbass and traces how Western mainstream media went out of their way to demonize Vladimir Putin. The book deconstructs prevailing Western narratives as to the reasons for the shooting down of Malaysian Airways flight MH17 in July 2014, and counters Western media concentration on the issue of culpability for the attack with an alternative narrative of egregious failure to close down civilian air space over war zones. From analysis of these discourses, the book identifies principles of post-2001 Western conflict propaganda as these appeared to play out in Ukraine. This book will be of much interest to students of propaganda, media and communication studies, Russian and Eastern European politics, security studies and IR.

NeoNazis & Euromaidan

By Stanislav Byshok and Alexey Kochetkov, kmbook.ru, third edition 2014, 254 pp, ISBN 978-5-8041-0734-6

From the book cover:
This book describes the development of Ukraine’s nationalist groups since 1991 until the present day. It focuses on the history of the parliamenty, right-wing radical Svoboda Party and the non-parliamentary Right Sector movement. The authors study the ideology, psychology and methods of political struggle of these structures. They seek to answer the question: how did the radical, neo-Nazi groups manage to become the key driving force behind the Ukrainian revolution?

Second edition available online here. Background article: Is the U.S. backing neo-Nazis in Ukraine?, by Max Blumenthal, Alternet, Feb. 24, 2014

Putin in his own words: Russia’s president speaks his mind on international relations, politics, society, business and leadership

Edited by Daniel Sochor; CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, November 2016, paperback 334 pages, ISBN-10 1539736067, ISBN-13 978-1539736066

The Putin Interviews: Oliver Stone Interviews Vladimir Putin

Skyhorse Publishing, 2017, 277 pp, ISBN 9781510733428

This is the expanded transcript of the four-hour documentary film of the same title that was first aired on Showtime network in June 2017.

Does Russia Have A Future?

By Gilbert Doctorow; CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, August 2015, 352 pp, ISBN-10 1514665336, ISBN-13 978-1514665336

Review by James Carden, published on Russia Insider, Aug. 12, 2015 Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, a Brussels-based commentator on European and Russia affairs and the European Coordinator for the newly established American Committee for East-West Accord, has written a timely, eloquent, and, what is more, thought-provoking corrective to the reigning neoconservative and neoliberal pieties that so distort and undermine understanding between the former Cold war rivals…

The Killing of William Browder

By Alex Krainer, published by Equilibirum (Monaco), 2017, ISBN 978-2-9556923-2-5. The book has been banned for sale on Amazon. It can be read here:
https://archive.org/details/TheKillingOfWilliamBrowderPrintLayout6x91

From the book promotion:
Bill Browder, the false crusader for justice and human rights and the self-styled No. 1 enemy of Vladimir Putin has perpetrated a brazen and dangerous deception upon the Western world. This book traces the anatomy of this deception, unmasking the powerful forces that are pushing the Western world toward yet another great war with Russia.

Introduction by Alex Krainer:
This book has been a path of discovery. Without a doubt, its most significant aspect is the smouldering but needless conflict between Russia and the Western world. It is my fondest hope with this book to contribute to a peaceful resolution to that conflict. Although 1 grew up in the “communist bloc,” in the former Yugoslavia, our cultural inclination was pro-Western and largely Russophobic. As a result, my views about Russia essentially matched the negative Western narrative. This all began to change in 2005 when I met Bill Browder, manager of the Moscow-based Hermitage Capital. He was the first person 1 ever heard speaking positively about President Putin. Because his account contrasted so sharply with the Western narrative, 1 started to pay attention. Since that time however, Browder has changed tack and became a hugely prolific anti-Russia activist…

The U.S. vs China: Asia’s new Cold War

By Jude Woodward, University of Manchester Press, 2017, 304 pp, ISBN: 978-1-7849-9342-9

From the publisher’s promotion:
This book addresses the most important question in geopolitics today – the future of relations between the US and China. Concerned that the rise of China will challenge the its hegemony in world affairs, the US has decided to reassert its influence in Asia to counteract any challenge. Examining and challenging the dominant causal explanations for and professed intentions of this shift in US policy, this book uncovers the real dynamics of contemporary Sino-American relations, surveying their complex interactions in the context of their post-war history, offering the reader an accessible and informative survey of the relations between China and the US in Asia, ranging from Russia’s turn to the east, the rise of Japanese nationalism, democracy in Myanmar, North Korea’s nuclear programme to disputes in the South China Sea. This book is an illuminating introduction to the defining issue shaping global politics for our time.

The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

By Daniel Ellsberg, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017, 432 pp, ISBN 9781608196708.

Publisher’s promotion:
From the legendary whistle-blower who revealed the Pentagon Papers, an eyewitness exposé of the dangers of America’s Top Secret, 70-year-long nuclear policy that continues to this day. Here, for the first time, former high-level defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg reveals his shocking firsthand account of America’s nuclear program in the 1960s. From the remotest air bases in the Pacific Command, where he discovered that the authority to initiate use of nuclear weapons was widely delegated, to the secret plans for general nuclear war under Eisenhower, which, if executed, would cause the near-extinction of humanity, Ellsberg shows that the legacy of this most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization–and its proposed renewal under the Trump administration–threatens our very survival. No other insider with high-level access has written so candidly of the nuclear strategy of the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy years, and nothing has fundamentally changed since that era.

Framed as a memoir–a chronicle of madness in which Ellsberg acknowledges participating–this gripping exposé reads like a thriller and offers feasible steps we can take to dismantle the existing “doomsday machine” and avoid nuclear catastrophe, returning Ellsberg to his role as whistle-blower. The Doomsday Machine is thus a real-life Dr. Strangelove story and an ultimately hopeful–and powerfully important–book about not just our country, but the future of the world.

Reviewed here in Slate.com.

Command And Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

By Eric Schlosser, hardcover by Penguin Press, Sept 2013 (first published Oct 2009, 656 pp, ISBN13: 978-1-594-20227-8)

Famed investigative journalist Eric Schlosser digs deep to uncover secrets about the management of America’s nuclear arsenal. A ground-breaking account of accidents, near-misses, extraordinary heroism, and technological breakthroughs, Command and Control explores the dilemma that has existed since the dawn of the nuclear age: how do you deploy weapons of mass destruction without being destroyed by them? That question has never been resolved–and Schlosser reveals how the combination of human fallibility and technological complexity still poses a grave risk to mankind…

Review by Nathan Whitlock, Toronto Star, Oct. 16, 2013

Command And Control was made into a documentary film in 2016, co-produced by Eric Schlosser. Review here.

Ukraine Crisis: What It Means For the West

By Andrew Wilson; Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London; Nov. 2014, paperback 236 pp, ISBN 978 0 300 21159 7

Reviewed by Volodymyr Ishchenko in New Left Review, May-June 2015. Excerpt:

His latest book, the ill-titled Ukraine Crisis, constitutes a sharp break from this earlier work in direction, tone and genre. This may in part be the product of the author’s transformation from historian to foreign-policy agitator: Wilson is now a Senior Fellow of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a lavishly funded think-tank modelled on its American homonym, which has grown since its birth in 2007 to become a large octopus in the EU aquarium…’

Readers should not expect to find in its pages a balanced assessment of contending arguments or a systematic analysis of the available sources, followed by well-grounded conclusions. For the most part, this is a one-sided, tendentious account of Ukraine’s Maidan protests of 2013–14, the Russian intervention and the civil war, heavily reliant on web-sourced information, anonymous interviews and hectic prose, pieced together to bolster a very specific political agenda. It is driven not by a desire to investigate what actually happened and why, but rather to rebut critics—from all sides—of a Western neoliberal line. The nature of Russian policy, the legitimacy of the Yanukovych government and the character of the Maidan protests are all grist to this mill.

Ethnicity and Territory in the Former Soviet Union

Edited by James Hughes and Gwendolyn Sasse; published by Routledge, 276 pp, ISBN paper 9780714682105; and by Frank Cass Publishers, London, Portland, 2002, 256 pp ISBN paper 0714682101

Essays on the developments in former republics of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, Crimea, Georgia, Moldova and states in central Asia. Including the excellent ‘The ‘New’ Ukraine: A State of Regions’ by Gwendolyn Sasse. Paperback sells online for $45 (used) to $55.

From the Routledge edition book cover:

The collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991 removed a decades-long system of successful control of potential ethnic and regional conflict . The result was the eruption of numerous conflicts over state-building, some of which degenerated into violence and some of which were resolved or prevented by strategies of accommodation. This volume explores the common trends and differences in the responses of the new post-Soviet states to the problems of state-building in ethnically and regionally divided societies, focusing on the impact of ethnic and regional conflicts on post-communist transition and institutional development. The book will be essential reading for specialists and students alike who are interested in conflict regulation and post-Soviet politics.

The Crimea Question: Identity, Transition and Conflict

By Gwendoyn Sasse, Harvard University Press, 2007 (published in paperback 2014)

By the publisher:

In the early to mid-1990s, the Western media, policymakers, and academics alike warned that Crimea was a potential center of unrest and instability in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s dissolution. However, large-scale conflict in Crimea did not materialize and Kyiv integrated the peninsula into the new Ukrainian polity. This book traces the imperial legacies, in particular identities and institutions of the Russian and Soviet period, and post-Soviet transition politics. Both frame Crimea’s potential for conflict and the dynamics of conflict prevention. As a critical case in which conflict did not erupt despite a structural predisposition to ethnic, regional, and even international enmity, the Crimea question is located in the larger context of conflict and conflict-prevention studies.

Ukrainian Nationalism in the 1990s

By Andrew Wilson; Cambridge University Press, 1997, 300 pp, ISBN 0521574579

From the book cover:

In his book, Andrew Wilson examines the phenomenon of Ukrainian nationalism and its influence on the politics of independent Ukraine, arguing that historical, ethnic and linguistic factors limit the appeal of narrow ethno-nationalism, even to many ethnic Ukrainians. Nevertheless, ethno-nationalism has a strong emotive appeal to a minority, who may thus undermine Ukraine’s attempts to construct an open civic state.

Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide, and Cult

By Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe; Ibidem Verlag, Stuttgart 2014, 654 pp, ISBN 978-3-8382-0604-2

The Conundrum of Russian Capitalism: The Post-Soviet Economy in the World System

By Ruslan Dzarasov; Pluto Press, Dec 2013, 320 pp, hardcover and paperback, ISBN 9780745332789

By the publisher:
The Conundrum of Russian Capitalism looks at the nature of Russian capitalism following the fall of the Soviet Union, showing how the system originated in the degenerated Soviet bureaucracy and the pressures of global capital. Ruslan Dzarasov provides a detailed analysis of Russian corporate governance, labour practices and investment strategies.

By comparing the practices of Russian companies to the typical models of corporate governance and investment behaviour of big firms in the West, Dzarasov sheds light on the relationship between the core and periphery of the capitalist world-system.

Ruslan Dzarasov is a senior research fellow at the Central Institute of Economics and Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He has written for the academic journals Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and the Cambridge Journal of Economics.

Managing Conflict in the Former Soviet Union: Russian and American Perspectives

Edited by Aleksei Georgievich Arbatov, published by MIT Press, 1997, 574 pp, ISBN 9780262510936. Contains an extensive chapter on the history of Crimea.

Contributors: Nadia Alexandrova-Arbatova, Alexei Arbatov, Vladimir Barsamov, Brian J. Boeck, Abram Chayes, Antonia Handler Chayes, Henry Hale, Michael Lysobey, Arthur G. Matirosyan, David Mendeloff, Laura Olson, Olga Osipova, Edward Ozhiganov, Tonya Putnam, George Raach, Brian D. Taylor, Alexander Yusupovsky

Ukraine and Russia: People, Politics, Propaganda and Perspectives

Edited by Agnieszka Pikulicka-Wilczewska and Richard Sakwa; E-International Relations Publishing, Bristol UK, 2015, 279 pp, ISBN 978-1-910814-00-0. Edited by Agnieszka Pikulicka-Wilczewska and Richard Sakwa.

Note by New Cold War.org editors: The two editors contribute an introduction and a conclusion, respectively. There are a total of 23 chapters and 25 contributors in the book. Most contributions are favourable to the argument of ‘Russian aggression’ against Ukraine as a major source of the political conflict and war in eastern Ukraine. The book is available for free download via a Creative Commons License here.

Geopolitical Economy After U.S. Hegemony, Globalization and Empire

By Radhika Desai, University of Manitoba, Fernwood Publishing, co-published with Pluto Press, 328 pp, ISBN 9781552665626

From the publisher’s website:
Geopolitical Economy radically reinterprets the historical evolution of the world order, as a multi-polar world emerges from the dust of the financial and economic crisis. Radhika Desai offers a radical critique of the theories of U.S. hegemony, globalisation and empire which dominate academic international political economy and international relations, revealing their ideological origins in successive failed U.S. attempts at world dominance through the dollar.

Desai revitalizes revolutionary intellectual traditions which combine class and national perspectives on ‘the relations of producing nations’. At a time of global upheavals and profound shifts in the distribution of world power, Geopolitical Economy forges a vivid and compelling account of the historical processes which are shaping the contemporary international order…

The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men

By Eric Lichtblau; Houghton Mifflin; 266 pp hardcover, ISBN 9780547669199

You can purchase the book here. Read an excerpt here. Listen to an interview on NPR Radio (Fresh Air) with author Eric Lichtblau (39 minutes) here: NPR Radio, Nov. 5, 2014. Also at that link is background information on the book and its subject matter. Author Eric Lichtblau is an investigative reporter for The New York Times. In 2006, he won a Pulitzer Prize with James Risen for their stories on the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance of American citizens.

Introduction by NPR to its interview with book author:
In the early ’70s, New York Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman received a confidential tip that American immigration authorities knew of dozens of former Nazis — some implicated in serious war crimes — who were living in the U.S. Holtzman looked into it and discovered that it was true, and that the formerly named Immigration and Naturalization Service wasn’t doing much about it. But that was just the tip of the iceberg, according to investigative reporter Eric Lichtblau.

In his new book, The Nazis Next Door, Lichtblau reports that thousands of Nazis managed to settle in the United States after World War II, often with the direct assistance of American intelligence officials who saw them as potential spies and informants in the Cold War against the Soviet Union.

Lichtblau says there were whole networks of spy groups around the world made up of Nazis — and they entered the U.S., one by one. “They had put in their service,” Lichtblau tells Fresh Air‘s Dave Davies. “This was their ‘reward’ … for their spy service … coming to the United States and being able to live out their lives basically with anonymity and no scrutiny.”
‘Most Americans knew little about the Nazis among them. And then in 1979, media reports and congressional interest finally spurred the creation of a Nazi-hunting unit with the Justice Department. That prompted the first wave of Nazi-hunting, Lichtblau says. “You had teams of lawyers and investigators and historians at the Justice Department who began … looking at hundreds and hundreds of names of suspected Nazis and Nazi collaborators who were living all around the country, in Queens, in Baltimore, in Florida and Chicago,” he says.

And, in some cases, the CIA had scrubbed the Nazis’ files, Lichtblau says. “They actively cleansed their records,” Lichtblau says. “They realized that guys who had been involved at senior levels of Nazi atrocities would not pass through immigration at the INS — and they basically removed a lot of the Nazi material from their files.”

Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U. S. Intelligence, and the Cold War

By Norman J.W. Goda and Richard Breitman; published by the National Archives of the United States, 2010, 110 pp

You can read and download a Pdf of the book here. Chapter five is titled, ‘Collaborators: Allied Intelligence and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists’.

From the preface:
In 1998, Congress passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act [P.L. 105-246] as part of a series of efforts to identify, declassify, and release federal records on the perpetration of Nazi war crimes and on Allied efforts to locate and punish war criminals. Under the direction of the National Archives the Interagency Working Group [IWG] opened to research over 8 million of pages of records – including recent 21 st century documentation. Of particular importance to this volume are many declassified intelligence records from the Central Intelligence Agency and the Army Intelligence Command, which were not fully processed and available at the time that the IWG issued its Final Report in 2007.

As a consequence, Congress [in HR 110-920] charged the National Archives in 2009 to prepare an additional historical volume as a companion piece to its 2005 volume U. S. Intelligence and the Nazis. Professors Richard Breitman and Norman J. W. Goda note in Hitler’s Shadow that these CIA & Army records produced new “evidence of war crimes and about wartime activities of war criminals; postwar documents on the search for war criminals; documents about the escape of war criminals; documents about the Allied protection or use of war criminals; and documents about the postwar activities of war criminals”.

This volume of essays points to the significant impact that flowed from Congress and the Executive Branch agencies in adopting a broader and fuller release of previously security classified war crimes documentation. Details about records processed by the IWG and released by the National Archives are more fully described on our website [email protected].

– William Cunliffe, Office of Records Services, National Archives and Records Administration

Seven Decades of Nazi Collaboration: America’s Dirty Little Ukraine Secret

Published in 1991

Interview with author Russ Bellant, by Paul H. Rosenberg, published in The Nation, March 28, 2014 and in Foreign Policy In Focus.

Introduction to the interview by Paul H. Rosenberg:
As the Ukrainian crisis has unfolded over the past few weeks, it’s hard for Americans not to see Vladimir Putin as the big villain. But the history of the region is a history of competing villains vying against one another; and one school of villains—the Nazis—have a long history of engagement with the United States, mostly below the radar, but occasionally exposed, as they were by Russ Bellant in his book Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party (South End Press, 1991). Bellant’s exposure of émigré Nazi leaders from Germany’s World War II allies in the 1988 Bush presidential campaign was the driving force in the announced resignation of nine individuals, two of them from Ukraine, which is why he was the logical choice to illuminate the scattered mentions of Nazi and fascist elements among the Ukrainian nationalists, which somehow never seems to warrant further comment or explanation. Of course most Ukrainians aren’t Nazis or fascists—all the more reason to illuminate those who would hide their true natures in the shadows…or even behind the momentary glare of the spotlight.

Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law

By James Q. Whitman, Princeton University Press, 224 pp hardcover, ISBN 9780691172422. Publisher’s information here.

By the publisher:
Nazism triumphed in Germany during the high era of Jim Crow laws in the United States. Did the American regime of racial oppression in any way inspire the Nazis? The unsettling answer is yes. In Hitler’s American Model, James Whitman presents a detailed investigation of the American impact on the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi regime. Contrary to those who have insisted that there was no meaningful connection between American and German racial repression, Whitman demonstrates that the Nazis took a real, sustained, significant, and revealing interest in American race policies.

As Whitman shows, the Nuremberg Laws were crafted in an atmosphere of considerable attention to the precedents American race laws had to offer. German praise for American practices, already found in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, was continuous throughout the early 1930s, and the most radical Nazi lawyers were eager advocates of the use of American models. But while Jim Crow segregation was one aspect of American law that appealed to Nazi radicals, it was not the most consequential one. Rather, both American citizenship and antimiscegenation laws proved directly relevant to the two principal Nuremberg Laws—the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Whitman looks at the ultimate, ugly irony that when Nazis rejected American practices, it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened, but too harsh.

Indelibly linking American race laws to the shaping of Nazi policies in Germany, Hitler’s American Model upends understandings of America’s influence on racist practices in the wider world.

James Q. Whitman is the Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School. His books include Harsh Justice, The Origins of Reasonable Doubt, and The Verdict of Battle. He lives in New York City.

None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933-1948

By Irving Abella and Harold Troper; University of Toronto Press, new paperback edition published in 2012, 384 pp, ISBN 9781442614079

Wikipedia:
First published in 1983 by Lester & Orpen Dennys, this book documents the history of the Canadian response to Jewish refugees from 1933, with the rise of the Nazi government in Germany, until 1948. The authors argue that while many nations were complicit in the Holocaust for their refusal to admit Jewish refugees during the Nazi era, the Canadian government did less than other Western countries to help Jewish refugees between 1933 and 1948. The most infamous example of Canada’s immigration policy was the refusal in June 1939 to admit passengers aboard the MS St. Louis, a German ocean liner carrying refugees. Only 5,000 Jewish refugees entered Canada from 1933 until 1945, which the book argues was the worst of any refugee receiving nation in the world.

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

By Jane Mayer; Doubleday, 2016; 449 pp hardcover; ISBN 978-0-385-53559-5

If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbrück, Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women

Review by Yvonne Roberts, published in The Guardian, Jan. 18, 2015. Also, read an excerpt from the book as published in the Toronto Star, March 15, 2015, here.

David Stahel’s ‘Kiev 1941’ and ‘Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East’

Note by New Cold War.org website editors, March 1, 2014:
One of historian David Stahel’s monumental works is his history of the Battle of Kiev, in 1941. Kiev 1941 was published in January 2012. It is the history of one of World War Two’s largest battles, in which the German army captured Kiev and the surrounding region in four weeks of fighting.

The decisions of Joseph Stalin and the political and military chiefs assembled around him by the time of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 included a failure to undertake a strategic retreat from Kiev that could have saved several Soviet armies from destruction. This course was urged by key military leaders of the Soviet army. The losses incurred in the Battle of Kiev led to a shakeup in the military leadership of the Soviet armed forces. Further below is a synopsis of David Stahel’s book, Kiev 1941.

Stahel’s Kiev 1941 and the companion Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s defeat in the East (published in October 2009) are vital books for dispelling the myths of Germany’s military invincibility during WW2 and for affirming the political resiliency of the national defense undertaken by the Soviet army and people. Stahel argues that Germany’s defeat in the East was sealed by the autumn of 1941, well before the titanic Battle of Stalingrad from August 1942 to February 1943.

Stahel writes in Operation Barbarossa: “Operation Barbarossa’s much lauded success began as just another episode of Nazi propaganda, yet this has been given amazing longevity, and even a guise of historical truth… In spite of some severe early blows to the Red Army, the German army never really came close to their goal of conquering the Soviet Union.”

Stahel quotes a report by German General Hermann Hoth: “The Russian soldier fights not out of fear, rather for an idea. He does not want to return to the Tsarist time.” (p 246)

Stahel writes on the same page: “Given the ruthlessly despotic rule the Germans were bringing to the east and their genocidal practices, the worst fears of the Soviet people were soon confirmed, which greatly helped solidify their support for Stalin’s cause.”

Here is a synopsis of David Stahel’s Kiev 1941:

In just four weeks in the summer of 1941, the German Wehrmacht wrought unprecedented destruction on four Soviet armies, conquering central Ukraine and killing or capturing three quarters of a million men. This was the Battle of Kiev – one of the largest and most decisive battles of World War II and, for Hitler and Stalin, a battle of crucial importance. For the first time, David Stahel charts the battle’s dramatic course and aftermath, uncovering the irreplaceable losses suffered by Germany’s ‘panzer groups’ despite their battlefield gains, and the implications of these losses for the German war effort. He illuminates the inner workings of the German army as well as the experiences of ordinary soldiers, showing that with the Russian winter looming and Soviet resistance still unbroken, victory came at huge cost and confirmed the turning point in Germany’s war in the East.

David Stahel was born in New Zealand and is a lecturer in European history at the University of New South Wales in Canberra , Australia. You can watch a one-hour lecture by David Stahel about Operation Barbarossa–Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. The lecture was delivered on Feb. 3, 2014 and can be viewed here; it begins at the 25′ mark.

A related, important book on the subject of Germany’s invasion in 1941 is June 22, 1941: Soviet Historians and the German Invasion. The book consists largely of a manuscript published in the Soviet Union by Aleksandr Nekrich in 1965 that analyzed the military preparations and reactions of the leaders of the Soviet Union at the outbreak of the German invasion. The book was edited by Vladimir Petrov and published in English in 1968.

The Korean War

By Bruce Cumings; Modern Library, July 2010; 288 pp; ISBN: 978-0-679-64357-9

From a review in Kirkus:
… American conservatives regularly denounce Cumings for favoring North Korea, but he is widely honored in South Korea, whose researchers have turned up many of the long-suppressed atrocities he reveals.

Few conservatives will change their minds, but Cumings makes a convincing case that Korea, not Vietnam, was the first modern war America entered abysmally ignorant of what it was getting into.