All institutions are gradually corrupted and need to be reformed and returned to their foundations, or they will collapse under the weight of their corruption.
With that disclaimer out of the way, this is a great book, which simultaneously illuminates some very, very important phenomena, and is very well-written.
Nick Lloyd’s The Eastern Front covers the clashes between Imperial Germany and the Russian Empire as well as the Austro-Hungarians against the Italians and the Serbs. Whereas the western front was essentially static throughout the whole war, the east was characterized by the sort of maneuver warfare that most generals had expected to fight.
But they wouldn’t destroy the library because it was the giant brain from which the Assyrians ran a world empire, and it had all the knowledge in the world. They destroyed that? They spoke the same language, they had the same writing system. They’d have taken them all safely home, cart after cart after cart.
If you have a nation of 1 million people and you are ruling over hundreds of millions of people, hundreds of millions of people, China, Russia, the Middle East, you do not do that through warfare. You conquer them initially through warfare, but you do not rule them through warfare. You've got to be offering something that they want, something that they like.
And that the Mongol Empire was really the first modern empire in the way that I'm putting together that story. And Chinggis Khan was the genius behind that, who created this idea that there could be one world in which there would be one set of supreme law, but all people could follow their own law.
But this great system that united, it's called the Yam or Ortogh, that had united everything, people could move back and forth quickly that it could also take the plague out of Southern China into all parts of the world. And I do think that's what happened. And the plague destroyed the Mongol system.
They were not ruling justly. They were ruling by force. And that can only go on so long before revolution happens. The Inca Empire, I think that would’ve gone on forever.
The elites would be integrated, and the empire was based on the state loyalty and the state integration. But once you bring in the factor of nation and nationalism and language, then, once in a sudden, the whole model of the integration of the elites, irrespective of their language, religion, and culture, starts falling apart.
So the most important story for me, this is the story of the continuing collapse of the Russian Empire and the rise of not just local nationalism, but also rise of Russian nationalism that turned out to be as a destructive force for the imperial or multi-ethnic, multinational state, as was Ukrainian nationalism or Georgian or Estonian for that matter.
And the Soviet collapse is continuation of the disintegration of the Russian Empire that started back in 1917, that was arrested for some period of time by the Bolsheviks, by the Communist ideology, which was internationalist ideology. And then came back in full force in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
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