From: julianlzb87@gmail.com   
      
   My libel nightmare all started in a little Oslo bookshop – but amid the   
   whirlwind of horrible scandals and atrocious wars that is our world   
   today, this is a very small but troubling manifestation of our crazy   
   times. A day ago, my attention was drawn to a photograph posted on X   
   that showed a Norwegian bookstore of the Norli Bokhandel chain, where   
   the staff had organised a display entitled ‘Epstein Island Guest List.’   
   I was horrified to see that one of my books was included. I have never   
   been to Jeffrey Epstein’s island, never flown on his planes, never   
   visited any of his properties, and – most crucially – never even met him   
   or communicated with him. When alerted, the book chain immediately   
   removed my book before legal action was required and apologised in   
   person and online: ‘We realise this was defamatory and libellous. Simon   
   Montefiore never met and never communicated with Epstein, never flew in   
   his planes nor stayed in his houses. We apologise unreservedly.’   
      
   I would have never known about this if it had not been posted on social   
   media, but because we live in a lawless arena of  algorithmic   
   provocation, perpetual conflict, self-confirmation and moral hysteria   
   amid a wild and irresponsible digital vortex, the picture went viral and   
   had been seen by many people. As the great Mark Twain supposedly wrote,   
   ‘a lie travels round the world before the truth can even get its boots   
   on’, and these days, it seems that a lie can circumnavigate the planet   
   if not transcend the galaxy many times before we even know it, yet alone   
   stop it. For a terrifying moment I was lightly touched by the poisonous   
   tentacles of Epstein. For a second I sensed the flitting of that   
   sinister shadow.   
      
   The origin of the libel was that I was listed in Ghislaine Maxwell’s   
   address book that she supposedly shared with Epstein. I knew her decades   
   ago – though, as I say, I never met or communicated with Epstein. But   
   the story has a bizarre tale within it that is itself as preposterous,   
   unlikely and moronic, even farcical and clownish, as it is vicious and   
   malignant. It all started not in Oslo, not in a bookshop, and not in the   
   labyrinthine Epstein conspiracies of Manhattan plutocracy.   
      
   It started in the life of Josef Stalin.   
      
   It is, in its way, like the X postings of the bookshop display, a   
   manifestation of this age of self-righteous witch-hunts, online   
   bullying, digital illiteracy and historical ignorance, where intolerant   
   neo-Marxist ideologies are resurgent.   
      
   To explain, I need to go back a bit.   
      
   When I started writing history books, I first wrote about Catherine the   
   Great and Potemkin, the two titanic 18th century Russian leaders who   
   were lovers but also effective imperialist rulers. After it achieved   
   some success, Catherine and Potemkin temporarily won me the favour of   
   the new, supposedly reformist president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, who –   
   as we now know – had a special interest in how Catherine and Potemkin   
   conquered Crimea and Ukraine. I was offered the chance to be one of the   
   first to work on Stalin’s own papers, and I wrote Stalin: The Court of   
   the Red Tsar, an account of his tyrannical court during the height of   
   his dictatorship starting in 1929 and ending in his death. While I was   
   in the archives, I noticed that there was fascinating material on the   
   youth of Stalin that no one had shown much interest in. Trotsky had   
   famously called Stalin ‘the preeminent mediocrity in the Communist   
   party’, and others called him a ‘grey blur’, but now I realised that his   
   conspiratorial career in Georgia and afterwards in Russia itself was   
   anything but mediocre. I resolved to write Young Stalin, but Putin, who   
   had now emerged as an autocrat himself, hated my portrait of Stalin as a   
   murderous red tsar. Falling out of Kremlin favour after a very short   
   period, I lost my access to the Communist party archives. Fortunately, I   
   had collected most of the material, and I was able to add to it by   
   accessing the Georgian archives too.   
      
   Anyway, the result, Young Stalin, was published in 2007. It revealed   
   Stalin’s life as a fanatical Marxist and underground activist, based on   
   much new material that among other things showed his early ruthlessness   
   and acumen, selfishness and egotism, Marxist conversion and Leninist   
   devotion, his prolific love life and careless abandonment of family and   
   children and his role in the most famous bank robbery in pre-WW1 Europe:   
   the 1907 Tiflis heist that won Lenin massive funds but also killed over   
   40 passersby. (In fact, much went wrong. Such was the outcry that Stalin   
   had to leave Georgia forever. It also turned out half the banknotes were   
   marked, which led to many arrests.)   
      
   Lenin divided his Bolsheviks into ‘tea-drinkers’ (bloviators and   
   intellectuals who sat in cafes and wrote articles) and ‘practicals’ (who   
   could lead demonstrations and assassinate enemies). Stalin impressed him   
   because he was both. That was unusual. When Lenin was told that Stalin   
   used violence, he said: ‘He’s exactly the type we need.’ Born in 1878 as   
   Iosef Djugashviili in Gori, Georgia, Stalin was a brilliant organiser   
   and master of the clandestine life. He constantly changed his name and   
   location. Among all this fascinating material was the story of his many   
   exiles to Siberia, his escapes, feuds with comrades and his   
   relationships – one of which particularly attracted the attention of   
   Marxist internet trolls in around 2019…   
      
   In St Petersburg in February 1913, just before the first world war,   
   Stalin, 34, was on the run. He had escaped from Siberian exile and was   
   in disguise at a gala ball to raise money for the Bolsheviks given by   
   posh sympathisers. There, Okhrana agents arrested him. He was sent back   
   to Siberia, in particular to a tiny hamlet called Kureika, just south of   
   the Arctic Circle, where he would spend most of coming world war in   
   desperate obscurity and impecunious isolation amid bleak landbound   
   vastness. He was accompanied by another Bolshevik leader, Yakov   
   Sverdlov, who later became the first Soviet head of state, and their two   
   Gendarme (political police) guards. The village contained just 67   
   people: 38 men and 29 women packed into eight ramshackle izbas (wooden   
   peasant bungalows). They were members of three families, and among them   
   were the Pereprygin orphans: five brothers and two girls, the youngest   
   of whom, Lidia, was 13.  Stalin and Sverdlov hated each other and   
   feuded. In the village, where there was hard partying and heavy   
   drinking, Stalin boozed, danced, fished and hunted. He read Marxist   
   pamphlets and French novels, and fought with his assigned policeman,   
   whom he hated.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)