By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 18 July 2023
Jewish Memory and Loss
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Category Archives: Book Review
Russian Influence on the Nazis
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 10 December 2021
Michael Kellogg’s 2005 book, The Russian Roots of Nazism, argues that Russian “White émigrés” exerted financial, political-military, and ideological influences that “contributed extensively to the making of German National Socialism”. As such, argues Kellogg, Nazism “did not develop merely as a peculiarly German phenomenon”, but within an “international radical right milieu”. The book is interesting but deeply flawed, overstating its case by failing to set the facts it gathers in a proper context and for similar reasons misunderstanding where some of the Russian elements under discussion fit within the politics of the revolutionary upheaval after 1917, both within the borders of Russia and in exile in Europe. Continue reading
Dating the Gospels
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 19 June 2021
The dates that the four canonical Gospels of the New Testament were composed has a great impact for Christians, of course, but also for historians, particularly on the matter of whether Jesus ever existed, and really for everybody living in the civilisation this religion has built. Continue reading
The History of “Central Europe”
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 7 June 2021
The Idea of Central Europe: Geopolitics, Culture and Regional Identity (2018), by Otilia Dhand, is an engaging and rather ambitious book, a work of intellectual history. Dhand’s core argument is that from the introduction of the term “Central Europe” in the nineteenth century, it did not describe a set geographical zone and the definition was always contested since the term was an attempt to construct local identities, a self separate from some other, as an instrument in the pursuit of geopolitical interests, always revisionist: these were attempts to will something into existence by influencing political behaviour. Continue reading
Who Are The Victims of “Radicalisation”?
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 20 April 2021
The rise of far-Right extremism in the West, in the United States in particular, has been one of the major media stories since at least 2016. Think tanks have gotten in on the action, and in due course official institutions followed the lead. There has been a significant element of moral panic about this, a result of a search for explanation by liberal ruling classes hit with disorientating political developments, above all in the Anglo-American world, with Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as President. Christian Picciolini’s book, Breaking Hate: Confronting the New Culture of Extremism (2020), is very much a product of this mood of doom among Western liberals. Continue reading
Qassem Sulaymani: Life and Ambition
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 2 March 2021
A year ago, U.S. President Donald Trump gave the order to kill Qassem Soleimani, the de facto deputy leader of Iran. Arash Azizi’s The Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the U.S., and Iran’s Global Ambitions is an effort to explain who Soleimani was, how he rose to controlling the lives of millions of people well outside the borders of Iran, and how in the end he was brought down. Continue reading
The Jihad Factor in Bosnia
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 20 January 2021
Last week, as one of his last acts in office, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave a speech about Iran’s collaboration with Al-Qaeda. It was unfortunate that Pompeo did this at this time and in this way, with such blatant political intent, because the factual content of Pompeo’s speech was unassailable: the Islamic Republic’s long relationship with Al-Qaeda does stretch back about three decades, the killing of Al-Qaeda’s deputy Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah (Abu Muhammad al-Masri) in Tehran in August 2020 is demonstrative of a shift in the strategic positioning of the organisation away from Pakistan to Iran, and even the part of Pompeo’s speech that got the most pushback—about Tehran’s contact with the 9/11 killers—is not controversial and is not new.
Unmentioned in Pompeo’s speech was one of the crucibles that forged this relationship, and forged Al-Qaeda into something more than a regional menace, namely the Bosnian war of 1992-5. Continue reading
Authoritarian Durability in China
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 13 January 2021
Kellee Tsai’s Capitalism without Democracy: The Private Sector in Contemporary China (2007) is essentially an economic history of China since the Communist takeover. It is rich in sociological and every other kind of data, all very accessibly presented. A broader takeaway from the book, however, is that a transition to democracy, especially liberal democracy, is unlikely in China on a timescale that is relevant to most of us. Continue reading
Women and Terrorism: The Case of the May 19th Communist Organization
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 8 January 2021
This article was originally published at European Eye on Radicalization
The world has been captivated this week by the scenes of an insurrectionary mob overrunning the United States Capitol at the behest of President Donald Trump. It is unlikely that many people remember or even know that nearly forty years ago, this building—the meeting place of the U.S. Congress, the place where laws are made—was bombed by a Communist terrorist group, a group remarkable for its all-female membership. A new book, Tonight We Bombed the Capitol: The Explosive Story of M19, America’s First Female Terrorist Group, by William Rosenau, a senior policy historian at CNA and a fellow in the International Security program at New America, examines this forgotten episode. Continue reading
Tunisia and Jihadism
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 26 May 2020
Early in his new book, Your Sons Are At Your Service: Tunisia’s Missionaries of Jihad, The Washington Institute’s Aaron Zelin quotes a pair of sociologists who note that ‘where theories are plentiful … ideas are vacuous’. The book is in many ways the antithesis of this approach. It is not without theoretical content; where social movement theory arises as a means of understanding jihadism, say, the author gives an overview of the literature to contextualise it for the reader. But the general approach is historical, empirical, and detail-rich, so that by the time Zelin summarises his findings in the various sections there can be no doubt about the evidentiary basis. Continue reading
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