Bypass the (Historical) Breakers–Better, Remove Them Altogether

Over the last few days, I’ve finally had the opportunity to dive into historian Sean McMeekin’s voluminous treatment of World War II, Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II. What a treat it has been.

McMeekin, a professor at Bard College in upstate New York, is fluent in Turkic and Russian and even taught for several years in the old “sick man of Europe”, now the land of, oddly enough, Erdoğan and Hoppe. His previous works indicate a scholar who is altogether willing to dismantle tired, old, and erroneous canards. In so doing, he illuminates the mind of his readers and his investigations and analyses make sense of what had previously and invariably puzzled students of the establishment with their entrenched historical narratives; the accounts and explanations droned into our heads and collective consciousness in school. McMeekin is so erudite and successful in his scholarship that Paul Gottfried has referred to him as, perhaps, the last American public intellectual–with none of the deservedly negative and all of the possibly positive connotations attached to the designation.

It has been with a compounding sadness over the years that it must be admitted that our profession–that is, history–possesses a dearth of McMeekins and a plethora of Eric Foners, Doris Kearns Goodwins, and Jon Meachams. That is to say that it should come as no surprise that history is not exempt from the current, all-powerful tendency, one felt across disciplines by their respective practitioners, to not upset the proverbial apple cart, i.e. the status quo. And what an apple cart it is! As the Covid crisis and hysteria with its attendant assertions of authority have shown, to obtain tenure, to get funding, to get published, to find any means of sustenance and success in the historical profession, one is obligated to work and write and teach within the proscribed boundaries of the Faucis and Birxes and Collinses of the field–along with the agencies, often state-funded, over which they exercise such arbitrary control. Revisionist history is welcomed so long as it deconstructs a supposedly dominant white supremacist, male, Western, capitalistic and colonialist narrative or, better yet, strikes at that narrative while concurrently rendering history into a sort of antiquarian fascination. As a result, history departments the developed world over receive, with ceaseless regularity, dissertation proposals like “Subversion by Undergarment Design of the Burgundian Bourgeoisie by Rogue Lesbian Silk Weavers in Auxerre, 1657-1665”. Note: I made up that proposal title in my head. It is not a real proposal. Or, is it?…

McMeekin does what real historians ought to do; I dare say that he adheres to what I would like to coin as the Herodotan oath. I (STATE HISTORIAN’S NAME HERE) PROMISE TO INVESTIGATE THE PAST OF HUMAN HISTORY AND TO, WHATEVER THE HISTORICAL EVIDENCE LEADS ME TO CONCLUDE, TELL THE TRUTH, THE WHOLE TRUTH AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH. IN SO DOING, I WILL ALSO STRIVE TO NOT BORE NATURALLY CURIOUS PEOPLE TO TEARS OR DEATH. SO HELP ME GOD. Like the Hippocratic Oath, the Herodotan Oath is really not asking very much, nor is it prone to honest manipulation and obfuscation.

In Stalin’s War, McMeekin strikes at a core presumption which has been taken as an absolute given for decades; namely, that “[f]or Americans, Australians, Britons, Canadians, and Western Europeans, the global conflict of 1939-1945 has always been Hitler’s War.” (1) Never mind–the inquisitive student has been told–of the multitudinous ways in which Josef Stalin seems to have had his savage hands in every arena of the war prior to the prescribed years after Hitler’s fateful invasion of Poland; how at home and abroad, Stalin plotted with stunning acuity and prescience what was to be known as the Great Patriotic War. Never mind further, as I stress in my own book on American history (2), how the outcomes of the war all redounded to further cement Stalin’s omnipotence in the Soviet Union and her expansive influence abroad in Eastern Europe, China, the Korean Peninsula; hell, even as far as the Caribbean, Africa and South America. Stalin funded and supplied the Madrid government in the Spanish Civil War so artfully that he removed Soviet officers and support only when Franco gained ground. He pitted Mao versus Chiang Kai-Shek versus the Japanese so as to ensure that when, not if, war broke out between the Soviet Union and Japan, it would be the Chinese dying in Mongolia and Northern China–not Russians. Stalin embedded Soviet spies throughout regimes in the supposed democracies of the West. Those spies in Washington, Paris and London did quite the number on their respective administration assignments. Not only did Western officials furnish Stalin with highly sensitive and valuable information, but agents like Alger Hiss and Henry Ware had direct hands in forming domestic policy in the United States!

The degree to which the reader is convinced of McMeekin’s thesis on World War II, I will leave to the inquiring mind who I urge to read his book. Let McMeekin’s product do the speaking there. Rather, my goal here is to address the problem of what I call ‘historical circuit breakers’. Like the common devise used by actual electricians to interrupt electrical current when a surge exceeds design limitations, the circuit breaker prevents the excess supply of energy to the loads, and thus, the inevitable damage done to the circuit.

Nothing has contributed more to the deplorable ignorance of history than the persistence of historical circuit breakers wired into the minds of the young, old, and everyone in between. Said another way: Historians have dutifully done the bidding of the state and other institutions created and employed by government to ensure that the questions that might surge in the minds of freemen and strike at regimes’ legitimacy are never asked. And, if the bold and beautiful should persist in their questioning, well in come the condemnatory repudiations that nip the rebellious, alternative analysis right in the bud.

Let’s test this out: If the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1789, Ryan McMaken’s Breaking Away (3), Tom Woods’s National Divorce (4), and mere expressions of tepid federalism seem to make sense to you–well, historical circuit breaker time. Entertaining those dangerous thoughts any further might strike at the nationalist case, so even if you persist in your subversion of all that is good, know that you’re going to be labeled as an ardent supporter of African chattel slavery.

How about another? Reading Goldman, Bakhunin and Tucker is not a legitimate use of a real scholar’s time. To the left on the political spectrum, those people are the wrong kind of leftists. Wackos. To the center and right of the political spectrum, those people are violent anarchists who dared to not just question but repudiate the social contract. Why, reading them alone is perverse! Have you not read your Locke and Rousseau? My American Government teacher proved to all of us that democracy is king and that the social contract is as essential to humans as hemoglobin. And, if he was wrong, then I wasted $200,000 in college?! Perish the thought.

One last one: Arguing that a proper understanding of World War II naturally entails appreciating the immense role that the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin played in starting, prolonging, and concluding the war in the most advantageous fashion vis-à-vis the Kremlin does not transform you into a Holocaust-denying, neo-Nazi.

Good thing McMeekin has no time for historical circuit breakers and neither should we, at least to the degree that we fashion ourselves free. To borrow from Metallica–ride the lightening and blow the breakers! McMeekin sure does smash a whole lot of them in Stalin’s War. We should appreciate that and join him in his effort.

Ready the hammer and sickle–for the good this time.

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(1) Sean McMeekin, Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II. New York: Basic, 2022.

(2) Gary Richied, A Twisted History of the United States, 1450-1945. Chicago: Hot Water History Books, 2022.

(3) Ryan McMaken, Breaking Away: The Case for Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities. Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2022.

(4) Thomas Woods, The Peaceful Solution to Irreconcilable Differences. Independently Published, 2022.