My own book 'Massacre in Malaya' was reviewed by Neal Ascherson in the London Review of Books - and I had interviewed Mr Ascherson about his experience of national service in Malaya. But I had no idea he was going to review my book and I cannot claim any sort of friendship though I admire Mr Ascherson as a writer, historian and journalist.
Right wing historian Roger Moorhouse has recently published a book about the Nazi Soviet Pact with the crushingly unoriginal title of The Devil's Alliance. (By all means google it...)
This book has just been reviewed in glowing terms by fellow rightist Nigel Jones in the Telegraph. Jones and Moorhouse are chums - but more than that they jointly manage and/or work with a company called Historical Tours. Check out their web site. No free advertising here...
So some nice back scratching achieved. More significant even than that is the fact that Jones and Moorhouse share the current obsession with representing the Holocaust as morally equivalent to the crimes of Stalin. Richard Evans' review of the same book also made this point.
Shock revelation - Hitler was a nasty man and so was Stalin! Wow. Oh yes and let's bash the recently deceased Eric Hobsbawm while we're about it... He won't answer back!
This equivalence axiom is grossly ahistorical - and implicitly denies that the German plan to liquidate World Jewry was without parallel. This is a favourite idea of Eastern European political factions such as Jobbik in Hungary and the kind of people who come out of the woodwork to celebrate SS divisions recruited in Latvia, Ukraine etc.
Moorhouse presumably doesn't make common cause with these ideological reptiles. But I am sure his new book will be a big hit in Riga and Budapest.
No comments:
Post a Comment