Es geht los.
Picking up the pen again after an interminably long, entirely self-imposed hiatus. What to expect? A backlog of pieces about junk history, short epistles on whatever annoys me (basically everything), various unexpected and potentially unwanted recommendations (forgotten books, films, records), unpublished stuff from the archives (lost interviews and such), and bizarro magazine and newspaper articles from my swollen archive of bizarro magazines and newspapers.
This edition will be long, pedantic, and free. (Ed. note: I understand that the appeal of the last adjective is neutralized by the preceding two.)
So first up: something I wrote a few weeks back that was swallowed by the TMR show launch, but unfortunately has retained its relevance.
Triumph of the Swill
Is it a surprise that, in our wretched media age, where young people are taught history by Salisbury steak scions and lunkheaded Leninists, the number one book in Amazon’s history category last month was a self-published, semi-literate bit of Holocaust denial?
I hadn’t previously heard of The Nuremberg System or its author, an Illinois Nazi called Thomas Cyr. A cursory bit of Googling revealed little about Cyr, beyond a penchant for iron cross pins and swastika rings, a remarkable resemblance to Guns N’ Roses’s alcoholic former drummer, and a drunk live stream about how he most certainly isn’t an alcoholic.
His qualifications as a historian, though, remain elusive.
The Nuremberg System shot up the Amazon charts after it was boosted by fellow amateur historian Darryl Cooper, host of the podcast Martyr Made, who announced the book’s publication on Twitter and revealed that he had written a slobbering foreword to this “excellent primer.” It’s worth pointing out that Cooper, who has unconvincingly pushed back on charges that he too is a Nazi sympathizer, is acting as a PR agent for a self-avowed “National Socialist.”
It’s a “remarkable book,” Cooper says, that upends establishment narratives where “Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich have served as the chief devils of the new state religion.” (You might recall Tucker Carlson and Cooper agreeing that, in fact, the “chief villain” of World War II was Winston Churchill.)
After repeat appearances on Tucker Carlson, where he was anointed “the most important popular historian working in the United States today,” a determination presumably based on their overlapping obsession with all things Jewish, and a one-off chinwag with Joe Rogan, a Cooper endorsement sells books. And when his cadre of keyboard stormtroopers clicked over to Amazon, they gleefully pointed out that Cyr had overtaken Elie Wiesel on the bestseller list.
Initially, I found Cyr’s success, as modest as it is, a bit worrying. Then…I tried to read it.
It would require superhuman patience to properly review The Nuremberg System. Reading Cyr’s witless, disfigured prose is an unpleasant experience, despite Cooper assuring Carlson that while it might be the work of a Nazi-medal-bedecked autodidact, Cyr is a “good writer.”
I made it to The Nuremberg System’s second sentence before my brain shut off, my laptop angrily rebooted, and the ghost of Goebbels appeared before to disclaim any connection to his modern disciples:
The political map--in concrete and telluric terms as well as any conceptual paradigms relating to the nature of sovereign authority and potentialities therein, the essential aspects (at least superficially) of procedural and substantive due process, and of course --most profoundly--the theological basis of the modern state and the ordering principles therein--is the axiomatic dénouement of a dialectical paradigm that began in the Athenian city-state in the 5th Century B.C., and concluded in the ashes of Berlin in May of 1945; as the Soviet juggernaut halted, and its commanders met their American counterparts at the arbitrary line of demarcation.
This is more Oswald Bates than Oswald Mosley.
The clotted prose and “trust me, I’m a smart guy” language just gets worse, too. I counted 39 uses of the word “concomitant” and its derivatives; “aforementioned” is deployed 69 times; one name is spelled different ways in the same paragraph; and I encountered one sentence so long that I still haven’t found the time to finish it.1
According to Darryl Cooper, it isn’t Cyr’s incoherence that has previously prevented him from notoriety but a treacherous and subterranean blacklist by a certain enemy (can you guess which one?). It’s one of the most tedious clichés in our dimwit internet culture: bad ideas promoted by bad writers are censored by hidden hands, and it takes brave, if incoherent, truth tellers like Cyr to dislodge them. “The advent of the internet punched a hole in” that system of control, Cooper writes in his introduction, “exposing people to thinkers and ideas [like Cyr] proscribed during the reign of broadcast media and consolidated publishing.”
It’s a persuasive case for Luddism.
But the claim of anti-Nazi censorship isn’t exactly true.
Take the case of disgraced historian David Irving, a hero to people like Cooper and Cyr, and whose books on the Third Reich form the spine of all neo-revisionist writing. Mainstream scholars and publishers provided Irving a surprising amount of latitude over the years—and not entirely without reason. Irving’s dubious political sympathies proved useful in extracting information from dubious characters, who were clever enough to recognize that he would act more as defense counsel than prosecutor. And unlike the generation of barstool internet fascists he inspired, Irving was a menace to historical truth because he had a degree of talent: he speaks fluent German, is a competent writer, can navigate the relevant archives, and produced some genuinely useful stuff.2
But this was all before Irving dropped the mask—the one Cooper still insists on wearing—and let his swastika flag fly, becoming consumed by a deranging Judeophobia, which he regularly broadcast from his website. To be clear: while Irving extracted valuable information from various former Nazi officials and labored in overlooked archives, his interpretations of that material generally cannot be trusted.
His “classic” 1977 book Hitler’s War, in its first edition, was indeed untrustworthy; its premise—that the Führer wasn’t a details guy, and the mass killing of Jews was a mere detail of history—was both novel and wrong. Any historian paying attention could see the path Irving was traveling. But there’s a persuasive argument that it’s a bad book still worth reading.3
The second edition of Hitler’s War, released in 1991, is a different matter. Irving removed any reference to the Holocaust and gas chambers, and his argument went from flimsy (Hitler knew nothing about the Holocaust) to sinister (what Holocaust?).4 Despite his descent into open Nazi apologetics, despite saying that Hitler was “probably the biggest friend the Jews had in the Third Reich,” St. Martin’s Press signed a contract with Irving in 1995 for a Joseph Goebbels biography, only to later cancel it after an Anti-Defamation League-led public pressure campaign.5
So how concerned should we be with this new crop of Irving manqués? Sure, Twitter’s interest in such material is worrying, but the work itself is a powerful prophylactic against Holocaust revisionism. Unlike Irving, I don’t suspect Cyr will provoke debate amongst serious historians. But these days, can one be so sure? Perhaps not. If Cyr were clever, he’d dump the swastika ring and confederate flag bandana; get a smart new haircut; replace all venomous references to “Jews” with venomous references to “Zionists”; and, when possible, make his writing even less coherent.
Problem solved. You’re just another Judith Butler.
Amazon’s Conspiracy-Addled History Top 50
Shall I point out that the rest of the Amazon list, which I scanned in mid-August, was also rather depressing? Books making grand claims on scant evidence, countless exercises in conspiracy mongering and sensationalism, amateur authors promising the “real” story of X or Y event—all classified as “history.”
There’s Tom O’Neill’s bestselling Charles Manson conspiracy book Chaos, which suggests—without ever quite saying so—that the fileting of Sharon Tate by a lunatic band of drug-addled hippies just might have been a clumsy CIA experiment gone wrong.
A few slots above Chaos was that perennial they’ve-been-lying-to-you bestseller, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, a work so tendentious that the democratic socialist historian Michael Kazin, writing in the democratic socialist journal Dissent, said the book is “grounded in a premise better suited to a conspiracy-monger’s Web site than to a work of scholarship.” (They don’t make democratic socialists like they used to either.)6
It can’t be overemphasized just how many “normal” history books, by normal authors and published by normal imprints, are barely fact-checked and deformed by sloppy mistakes, apocryphal quotes, and junk history.
I was surprised to see the paint-by-numbers lefty book Separation of Church and Hate, by former Fifth Column guest John Fugelsang, squeaking into the top 50, many months after its initial publication.
Fugelsang is a quarrelsome type who, as far as I can make out, spends entirely too much time railing against the “fascists” in our midst—a definitional bar set deliberately low, and one uninterested in actual fascists like Cyr. These types of books apparently still sell well, but they’re nourished by hyperbole and loose language. It might be good for business, but it has the unpleasant side effect of forcing writers into an often incurable ideological derangement. (Example: I opened Fugelsang’s Twitter feed and immediately encountered a claim, made in 2026, that Donald Trump is a “foreign asset.”)
When leafing through the book, I noticed a quote Fugelsang attributes to Father Charles Coughlin, the anti-Semitic radio priest who polluted American airwaves in the 1930s, until Japanese imperialism made him irrelevant. Having spent far too much time wading through back issues of his newspaper Social Justice, one gets accustomed to the rhythm and cadence of Coughlin’s venom. And something was off with this:
“In December 1938, following the Kristallnacht pogrom in Nazi Germany, the celebrity priest declared that Jewish refugees should not be allowed to enter the US, saying in 1938, ‘When we get through with the Jews of America, they’ll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing.’”
Coughlin was an accomplished Jew-hater and Nazi apologist but…he never said this. Like Cooper and (early) Irving, Coughlin tried to straddle the respectability line, always denying charges of anti-Semitism, at a time when most pro-Hitler groups in America unashamedly embraced them.7
The attribution didn’t start with Fugelsang (an earlier iteration can be found on the PBS website), but need I point out that things found bouncing around the internet must always be checked? The promotion of a fake quote in a bestseller will travel from book to book, website to website, and harden into fact. Indeed, various AI chat bots have already told me that this is a “well-known” Coughlin quote. And a new book by Congressman Jared Huffman, which has likewise spent a few weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, repeats it again, with the same incorrect date and context.
So where does the quote come from? The most likely source is a 1939 House floor speech by Rep. Samuel Dickstein, who puts this sentence, verbatim, into the mouth of one George A. Van Nosdall, an antiquarian bookseller, notorious swindler, and member of a minor pro-Nazi group affiliated with the German-American Bund. It was repeated a few months later, with a few modifications but again attributed to Van Nosdall, in the communist magazine New Masses. (Maybe worth noting that both Congressman Dickstein and the author of the New Masses version, John Spivak, were later revealed to have worked for Soviet intelligence.)
I didn’t do a deep dive, but did come across a few other anomalies in Fugelsang’s book. He cites Pastor John Hagee, the Christian Zionist megachurch crank, who, Fugelsang claims, decreed to NPR that “it was the disobedience and rebellion of the Jews, God’s chosen people, that gave us the Holocaust.”
Not exactly. Here is what Hagee actually said:
“It was the disobedience and rebellion of the Jews, God’s chosen people, to their covenantal responsibility to serve only the one true God, Jehovah, that gave rise to the opposition and persecution that they experienced beginning in Canaan and continuing to this very day.”
Let’s do the tiresome throat-clearing: yes, it’s still stupid and gross, but changing a quote to make it more potent, punchier, and even more offensive is junk history and should be labeled as such.
Two pages later, another curious passage:
“Chip off the ol’ bigot Jerry Falwell Jr. asserted, ‘If more good people had concealed carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in.’”
Before they walked in where? The country? The mosque? Or is this, just perhaps, another quote bowdlerized to make a cleaner point?
If you guessed bowdlerized…
In the days following the 2015 terror attack on a community center in San Bernardino, California, which claimed 14 lives, making it the third deadliest terrorist event in the U.S. since 9/11, Falwell Jr. told an audience at Liberty University:
“It just blows my mind that the president of the United States [says] that the answer to circumstances like that is more gun control. If some of those people in that community center had what I have in my back pocket right now…Is it illegal to pull it out? I don’t know. I’ve always thought that if more good people had concealed-carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in...[inaudible] and killed them.”
Falwell clarified to the Washington Post what should have been obvious: that “those Muslims” were the perpetrators of the attack in San Bernardino (and Paris; the Bataclan mass murder happened a few weeks prior to the California attack). It’s “the only thing I would clarify,” Falwell told the paper. “If I had to say what I said again, I’d say exactly the same thing.”
You get the point. Perhaps I’m being old-fashioned in demanding accurate quotes, attributed to the correct person, that aren’t refashioned to make a tidy political argument.8 The lesson for TMR readers: it’s good practice when you see a quote or fantastical claim or suspicious anecdote, something that just doesn’t sound right, or sounds too perfect, to track it down. You’ll be shocked at how often journalists and historians (and ideologues pretending to be journalists and historians) cut corners, sanding down rough edges to make a cleaner point.
Next time, we’ll trace the journey of a fake quote that traveled from a Ken Burns documentary into various books, newspapers, and magazine articles…
Getting Everything Wrong, Always
Right before I was about to press send on this (inaugural!) newsletter, I came across a smart piece in the New York Times by left-wing writer and podcaster Sam Adler-Bell. It’s a review of 53 Days: How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy, historian Timothy Ryback’s latest Nazi-history-as-prologue book. I didn’t particularly like Ryback’s last Nazi-history-as-prologue book; nevertheless, 53 Days sits on my bedside table, groaning under a pile of unread review copies, waiting to be quibbled with. So while I can’t yet comment on the specifics of Ryback’s argument, Adler-Bell opens his review with this prescient Goebbels quote, pulled from 53 Days:
“The big joke on democracy,” the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in May 1928, “is that it provides its mortal enemies the means to its own destruction.”
This isn’t really Adler-Bell’s fault—he pulled it from an ambiguous passage in Ryback’s book—but this not something Joseph Goebbels wrote. It was likely written by Hans Schwarz van Berk, editor of Goebbels’s newspaper Der Angriff.9 In 1935, Schwarz van Berk wrote an introduction and a series of interstitial essays for a collection of Goebbels’s Angriff columns. One included the line quoted above.
The first tell, of course, is that it’s a backward-looking comment, a sneer at the failed Weimar experiment that midwifed National Socialism, not something written five years before the Nazi seizure of power.
You’re being pedantic, Moynihan. I am indeed. And sure, Goebbels did write a 1928 essay in which he claimed that election to parliament would allow the Nazis “to arm ourselves with weapons from democracy's own arsenal,” but deliberately stopped short of saying the goal was to destroy democracy. But my obsessive pedantry led me to Ryback quoting the Goebbels essay—and incorrectly translating it, while also committing a series of other small errors; some sloppy, some designed to strengthen a political argument:
“The then thirty-year-old Reichstag delegate expressed his astonishment that he was now positioned ‘to paralyze the Weimar process’ through the republic’s own legislative mechanisms.”
There is no “astonishment” evident in the essay, nor was Goebbels yet a “delegate” who was “now positioned” to take action. The elections were three weeks away and while the Nazis ended up with 12 seats, one of them assigned to Goebbels, they managed only 2.6% of the vote. Nor did he write that he wanted to “paralyze the Weimar process”—a translation that makes his point sharper—but instead that the goal was “to paralyze the Weimar mindset (die Weimarer Gesinnung...lahmzulegen).”10
I’ll make the point again: this type of small-scale factual flabbiness is, like in the case of Fugelsang, epidemic in ideologically tinged history. And as a result, newspapers, magazines, and books are littered with misattributed and phantom quotes, often because ideology keeps elbowing its way deeper into the profession; and the ideologue gets restless when in close proximity to the tedious complexities of historical fact. Adler-Bell is a sympathetic reader of Ryback, but even he found himself slightly exhausted by “the relentless fire hose of almost too-perfect analogies” to Trump in 53 Days.
If these quotes are attributed to their proper source and properly contextualized, the translations accurate, the analogies less perfect, it becomes less effective as polemic—and certainly doesn’t make it into the lede of a New York Times review.
Piker and the bin Laden/CIA Myth
A New York Post story says that in his disastrous interview with Axios’s Alex Thompson, dopey streamer Hasan Piker “noted that bin Laden was once a US ally when the US trained, funded and armed the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan War.”
No one has ever accused Piker of being an original thinker, or much of a thinker at all, but can we at least try to put this decades-old, high-school-level myth out of its misery? It’s the sort of thing your braindead friend says before laying out his case that 9/11 was either an inside job, proving the American government is the real terrorist, or an outside job by terrorists who have an understandable beef with the American government.
On The Fifth Column’s recent 9/11 episode, I briefly discussed the common argument that “we” trained bin Laden, therefore “we” created bin Laden, and therefore “we’re” partially responsible for the 3,000 people he murdered in 2001. I told viewers to check out Steve Coll’s terrific 2004 book Ghost Wars, which addresses and dismisses the CIA/bin Laden claim.
But I either hadn’t realized or had long ago forgotten that one could also cite bin Laden himself. When asked by a sympathetic Al Jazeera interviewer if he was in any sense an American creation, supplied and trained by the CIA, bin Laden was unequivocal:
“Every Muslim, from the moment they realise the distinction in their hearts, hates Americans, hates Jews, and hates Christians. This is a part of our belief and our religion. For as long as I can remember, I have felt tormented and at war, and have felt hatred and animosity for Americans. What they say happened did not in fact take place. And as for their claim that they supported the jihad and the struggle against the Soviets, well, this support came from Arab countries, especially from the Gulf.
[...]
The Americans are lying when they claim they helped us at any point, and we challenge them to present a single shred of evidence to prove it. In fact, they were a burden on us and the mujahidin in Afghanistan, and there was no agreement between us…”
Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? Perhaps. But nearly all serious historians of the period agree with bin Laden. Thomas Hegghammer, Senior Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and author of The Caravan: Abdallah Azzam and the Rise of Global Jihad, writes that “no proof exists of collaboration between the CIA and the Afghan Arabs,” and provides compelling evidence that it never happened. Peter Bergen’s 2021 book The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden says something similar:
It’s worth mentioning here that there is simply no evidence for the common myth that bin Laden and his Afghan Arabs were supported by the CIA financially. Nor is there any evidence that CIA officials at any level met with bin Laden or anyone in his circle. Yet the notion that bin Laden was a creation of the CIA is widespread.
Bergen and Hegghammer both point out that all American financial support to the mujahideen went through the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service, and was directed only to Afghan fighters. And as one former CIA officer told Bergen, the agency and its operatives “were totally banned” from entering Afghan territory. There was a well-founded fear, Bergen writes, “that it would hand the Soviets a great propaganda victory if a CIA officer was captured there.”
Alas, none of this matters. A depressing number of “politically engaged” people online, debasing themselves for clicks and clout, prefer simple moral inversion to the boring complications of history. Clever people know that the bad guys are actually the good guys; that al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, et al. aren’t religious fundamentalists with an expansionist and eliminationist streak, but just bearded and turbaned anti-imperialists; they are hurt people who are, predictably, hurting people.
Is Roxane Gay the Most Accomplished Bad Writer in America?
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I present one of the most ludicrous columns I have read this year, courtesy of New York Times columnist Roxane Gay, on the Ed Sheeran-Macklemore contretemps. The premise, as far as I can tell, runs something like this: celebrities should never remain silent about political issues, even if they aren’t well-informed about political issues. And if they disagree with Roxane Gay on this point, it’s probably because they don’t know anything about politics. A point proven when one disagrees with Roxane Gay.
Please trust that this confused précis is somehow less confusing than the actual column.
But Gay makes one thing crystal clear: Sheeran, the ginger genocidaire, must speak out about Gaza despite having “previously implied that he has a right to privacy when it comes to his political views and that, though he is one of the most famous and high-earning musicians in the world, he has no power in this situation.” A few paragraphs later, she writes that those demanding comment on au courant controversies “oftentimes...are merely wanting the celebrity to affirm their own stances. If the celebrity doesn’t, he or she is roundly criticized or, lately, canceled.”
Wait…what?
Why am I wasting your time with Roxane Gay? Fair question! Just so I can remind you that an extremely accomplished writer (winner of the 2025 National Book Foundation’s “lifetime achievement award!”) can be both a terrible writer and thinker. To wit:
Ed Sheeran is one of the most popular musicians in the world. He sells millions upon millions of albums, has among his peers some of the most streamed music, and makes reliable hits that appeal to almost everyone. Sonically, he often positions himself as a citizen of the world, a musical explorer. There are Persian influences in “Azizam,” which translates as “my beloved.” “Sapphire” features Punjabi beats and is included on his studio album “Play” that features several Indian musicians.
Ed Sheeran owes a cultural debt to the Palestinian people because he hired Indian session musicians and likes Iranian music? Well sure, says Gay, because he “appears to also want to blithely ignore most of the global conflicts that might be affecting his audience in spite of his eagerness to create a pastiche of global sound in his music.” I’m not exactly sure how this particular conflict affects, say, a middle-aged white rapper who dresses like a Der Stürmer cartoon, or if Gay thinks recording “Within You, Without You” required George Harrison to speak out about the 1968 constitutional crisis in Punjab, but...
Also: I’ve just discovered that Gay is an “artist-in-residence” at…Harvard Medical School. An artist (?). In residence. At Harvard Medical School. Add it to the New York Times column. And her own publishing imprint at Grove-Atlantic, modestly titled Roxane Gay Books. And the visiting professorship at Yale. And the PEN Center Award. And…
The following is a single sentence from The Nuremberg System, clocking in at 145 words: “This bizarre tendency of military officialdom to subtly acknowledge the nature of hostilities in the Republic of Vietnam and the reality of Free Fire Zones and the Strategic Hamlet concept, while at the same time insisting that the full implementation of what amount to doctrinal counter-insurgency measures were discreet [sic] and isolated criminal acts, owed in no small measure to the absence of any such clumsy obfuscation by non-American, Allied commanders in theatre as well as the steady stream of men who had served in country, had witnessed (and participated) in these anti-partisan actions, such as the massacre at My Lai, and returned home and proffered their testimony, and the military establishment's (and the Deep State's) inability to come to terms with and manage relations therein vis-à-vis the nascent, broadcast television media apparatus that had eclipsed all other media platforms in scope, scale, credibility and significance.”
The endnotes of historian Volker Ullrich’s recent two-volume Hitler biography, for instance, are full of references to Irving books (I counted 23, including to the German edition of Hitler’s War) and interviews, many of which are housed at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, München.
Hugh Trevor-Roper’s review of Hitler’s War in the Sunday Times was both critical and obscenely generous: “No praise can be too high for Irving’s indefatigable scholarly industry...I have enjoyed reading his long work from beginning to end.”
For irrefutable evidence of Irving’s serial academic fraud, see historian Richard Evans’s terrific book Lying About Hitler.
St. Martin’s decision to scrap the book was widely criticized, including by former Nation editor D.D. Guttenplan, historians Raul Hilberg and Gordon Craig, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, and Christopher Hitchens.
When Zinn died in 2010, I wrote about his legacy for Reason and catalogued some of the more egregious mistakes in A People’s History. Credit to Stanford University’s Sam Wineburg for noticing that, in making his unconvincing argument that the Japanese were ready to surrender before the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Zinn cited a Japanese government cable that…doesn’t exist.
By 1938, his veil would drop fully, most notably when Social Justice serialized the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Coughlin acknowledged that the document might be fake, but argued that it nevertheless had proved prophetic. And even here, he offered a meek not-all-Jews defense: “Although the Protocols are supposed to represent an account of a meeting held by certain so-called Jewish leaders, it is fair to the Jewish people to say that the vast masses of Jewry know little or nothing about them. It is likewise fair to assert that the vast mass of Jews entertain no organized hostile thought against either gentiles or Christians… Repeating that SOCIAL JUSTICE holds no emnity [sic] for the Jew but desires to extend a hand of assistance to every Son of that race, we call upon the righteous Jewish leaders to campaign openly, in season and out of season, against these communistic attempts to over-turn a civilization.”
The problem with these tossed-off political books is that they often indulge the very rhetorical instincts they denounce. From the same page: “After 9/11, frenzied Christians openly demonized every Muslim who had ever drawn breath.” It’s a cliché counter, perhaps, but let’s rearrange the direction of that sentence and see how it lands: “After a Danish newspaper published illustrations of Mohammed, frenzied Muslims openly demonized every Jew or Christian who had ever drawn breath.”
Ryback writes: “As observed in the introduction to Goebbels’s collected essays, ‘The big joke on democracy is that it provides its mortal enemies the means to its own destruction.’” Observed by whom? This implies Goebbels’s authorship. Adler-Bell’s error can be fairly attributed to Ryback’s vagueness.
On the same page, the only one I scanned, Ryback also incorrectly claims that Hans Frank entered the Reichstag alongside Goebbels in 1928. He would win his seat in the October 1930 elections.
If this is going to be a regular column, I might have to cash in my airline miles for a luxury seat. Great stuff.
Stirring the pot here a bit:
While I certainly wouldn’t put him in the same zip code as Cyr and Cooper, Sean McMeekin gets awfully close to saying “we fought the wrong enemy” in his book “Stalin’s War.”