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korrick 's review for:
Nicholas and Alexandra
by Robert K. Massie
It's hard to know what makes the typical 'American' patriot wetter these days: hating China, or loathing Russia. Folks tell me we've made some progress since 1967, but with Dick Cheney getting cheered on by the 'liberals', it's all bread and circuses to me until proven otherwise. What a mood, then, to be reading this book in. On the one hand, you have a great deal of history that I've managed to dance around through both the obstinate blinkers of my US education and my own pursuits of the feminist, the postcolonial, and namely any history that doesn't involve a bunch of cishet white dudes sitting around a drawing room, smoking cigars with one hand and vivisecting colonial territories with the other. As expected from my time with Massie's [b:Catherine the Great|10414941|Catherine the Great Portrait of a Woman|Robert K. Massie|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403395276l/10414941._SY75_.jpg|15319151], this went down relatively smoothly, and enough blank spaces were filled in and misconceptions untangled (leastwise the less pathologized ones) for me to make a note to myself that fleshing out my mainstream European historical tableau with a few rote yet critically aware types would be a good thing to do at some point. Not all of it is going to be as gloriously an observing train wreck to witness as were the last royal scions of the Romanov family, but it sure will connect certain dots and make sense of some of the 'common sense' I see get peddled by the kyriarchy these days.
However. However. The utter sanctimony that Massie was allowed to get away with in what he chose to talk about and his overall tone, gawking at jewels and blue-bloods parading around under middle-class habitus and then pooh-poohing millions of people who had the umbrage to decide for themselves that certain eulogized parental figures weren't worth the deaths of millions of their kindred: I've love for the New York Times to take this tone with Kim Jong Un or Vladimir Putin and see how far they get. What, that's not fair cause the Tsar was a (white) autocrat? Has the definition of that word changed in the last sixty years? Or is it the inability of the US to sink its disaster capitalism imperialism into those particular corners that's causing all the fuss, or fear of the all too recognizable chickens that may one day come home to roost after flying across the Atlantic. Sure, some kids got murdered in cold blood, but with students as young as 10 years-old being arrested across the US for "making threats" as of now, please tell me which ones are helpless babies and which ones are bad seeds just waiting to be culled. As such, I certainly learned quite a bit, but if you want a photograph of where the US went and is still going wrong, Massie's fawning (white) paternalism is certainly a good start.
However. However. The utter sanctimony that Massie was allowed to get away with in what he chose to talk about and his overall tone, gawking at jewels and blue-bloods parading around under middle-class habitus and then pooh-poohing millions of people who had the umbrage to decide for themselves that certain eulogized parental figures weren't worth the deaths of millions of their kindred: I've love for the New York Times to take this tone with Kim Jong Un or Vladimir Putin and see how far they get. What, that's not fair cause the Tsar was a (white) autocrat? Has the definition of that word changed in the last sixty years? Or is it the inability of the US to sink its disaster capitalism imperialism into those particular corners that's causing all the fuss, or fear of the all too recognizable chickens that may one day come home to roost after flying across the Atlantic. Sure, some kids got murdered in cold blood, but with students as young as 10 years-old being arrested across the US for "making threats" as of now, please tell me which ones are helpless babies and which ones are bad seeds just waiting to be culled. As such, I certainly learned quite a bit, but if you want a photograph of where the US went and is still going wrong, Massie's fawning (white) paternalism is certainly a good start.