| | | Doctor Skinowski,
Discourse on contentious issues is easy with you. Rare! You write lucidly. Rare also.
But there are gaps in your historical knowledge - endemic in America 2022 - but this you can fix.
DAVID GOLDMAN ("Spengler") & CARDINAL RICHELIEU
I am a big fan of Goldman, but you take too seriously his joke about seances with the "Red Cardinal."
IMO, Richelieu is accurately portrayed in Dumas' "Three Musketeer" series as the evil villain. The third son of a powerful nobleman, the family had to find a position for him, so they made him a bishop at 21. Intelligent and crafty, and very much in opposition to the Queen Mother, he came to dominate a weak Louis XIII ....and French domestic and foreign policy. He was instrumental in putting down protestant Huguenot, denying them liberty earlier promised them, and driving some 150,000 of these highly dynamic people away, a permanent loss to France. In foreign policy, it was not the "rising power of Germany" that he opposed, but the already dominant power of the multi-ethnic empire of the Habsburgs, with Spanish gold, that his armies fought (yes on the Protestant side) in the middle of Germany during the terrible "Thirty Years War" during which often unpaid mercenary soldiers turned "Germany into a charnel house. (Frederick the Great turned Prussia into a second-rate power a generation later.) He raised taxes on the peasantry dramatically which resulted in two major peasant revolts ...which he put down brutally. He burned at the stake many of his religious and political enemies, including many nobles. And yes, he helped transformed a feudal society of powerful & jealous nobles into a centralized state.
Cardinal Richelieu - Wikipedia
<<<..."if one thinks of the Russians as real people, living in a real country- many things fall into place.">>>
Perhaps you do it unconsciously, but your writing seems Hegelian, i.e., that the POV of leaders must align with "the People". E.g., Hegel's Napoleon, not a man but a "world spirit ".....somewhat similar to Obama's "arc of history." If this is your POV, it does not entirely lack merit, but the "Great Men" school of historiography is more to my taste. Read for example McMeekin's new book "Stalin's War" and it will be hard not to conclude that the decisions of individual leaders like Hitler, Mussolini, FDR, Hirohito, and especially Stalin, had monumental effects on the world quite apart from the wishes of their peoples. |
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