In 2003, on the eve of the Iraq War, when America felt like it was going mad, I succumbed to a madness of my own: I moved to Sweden. In those grim days before one could stuff a thousand books onto a Kindle, I stuffed two books into a carry-on bag: one stumping for war against Saddam, the other on the European obsession with anti-Americanism. I was, it seems, determined to make no new European friends. A few months later, bored with reading about anti-Americanism when experiencing it was so much more invigorating, I was doing my regular rounds of Stockholm's bookstores, scouring the shelves for affordable English-language books that weren't written (or blurbed) by Noam Chomsky. Desperate to escape the terrible present for the horrible past, I spent $25 on a copy of Simon Sebag Montefiore's Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, a deliciously salacious, surprisingly pacy (and slyly academic) biography of the Georgian mass murderer's reign over the Soviet Union and his despoiling of its population.
The Observer, in a generally positive notice, warned that Soviet nostalgics might "regard the slightly forced brio as evidence that Sebag Montefiore is incurably biased against communism in theory and practice. … For he writes about the excesses of Stalin's regime with uninhibited relish." A slightly incoherent criticism (Does he really relish the excesses? Should he write about them with a touch more inhibition?), but coherent enough to tell me that, as a reader incurably biased against both homicidal dictators and The Observer, I was going to devour Sebag Montefiore's book.
And so I did. And so I have with his subsequent books: Young Stalin; Jerusalem: The Biography; The World: A Family History of Humanity. Every one a bestseller, all worth your time. Sebag Montefiore is back with The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East, a wonderfully economical retelling of the region’s modern history (a hundred-plus years in 500-odd pages) that will doubtless reach a broad audience but would especially benefit those young activists mewling about the river and the sea yet unsure why either body of water matters.
He joined me in our Soho studio to discuss “settler colonialism,” “genocide,” Zionism, imperialism, the Iranian Revolution, the West’s role in the whole mess, and how Israel won the ground war in Gaza but lost the information war abroad.
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