Greetings during this traditional holiday season! 2222
The world seems to be celebrating war this season, and we must not forget those suffering. Both the Israeli-Hamas war and the Russian-Ukrainian war are devastating, causing death and suffering to tens of thousands of civilians and destruction of cities. I’d like to focus on the Ukrainian war for a moment, since it is related to what I have been writing about in my books.
The invasion of Ukraine is a revanchist movement by the old Soviet guard to regain the power and glory that it thinks Russia once had. But these old nostalgic dreamers have gone back not to the communist system, which Putin declared a “dead end,” but to previous Czarist regimes, with the oligarchs playing the roles of barons, dukes, and earls of the previous nobility. This backward-looking dream is not that different from other revanchist movements, such as Napoleon declaring himself emperor after the French Revolution did away with nobility, and with the ultra-conservative Muslim movement in the Middle East which dreams of returning the region to a Caliphate dating back centuries. Both movements should be viewed not as regional conflicts, having nothing to do with us, but as direct threats to our own democracy.
The good news is that revanchist movements eventually fail because history has moved on, but in the interim they cause untold suffering and deaths. The key is to know history and learn from it. That is the main reason I wrote both The Bucharest Dossier and The Bucharest Legacy, which deals with the waning days of the Cold War, a war that did not disappear, like some have said, but that only remained dormant.
I hope you find my novels not only thrilling but informative.
