It is a misnomer to call this novel a spy story.  Though it chronicles the adventures and mishaps of a handful of spies, all looking for meaning in the world, it is more.  Above all it is a meditation on love, betrayal, duplicity, morality, the young, the old, Europe, America, the Soviet Union, terrorism and the Cold War. The book revolves around two characters from different ages and different worlds.  The first is the Cold War veteran, Anatoly Nikitin Schmidt, a man of mixed backgrounds and loyalties.  Whether he is a double or triple agent is difficult to tell.  He moves with ease between his Soviet handler, Borya and his American handler, Cliff, Sr.The novel's sometimes narrator, Karl Heinz, forms a second pole.  Pill and alcohol dependent, it is in this Italian-German we see the damage that has been done to the children of the Cold War warriors. "What worthwhile causes exists for my generation?" he laments. "The era of great ideologies is over.   For us, heroic causes are foreign ones." Betrayal and duplicity are two of the novel's major themes.  Nikitin wears a pair of cufflinks that display the ultimate symbol of duplicity, the Trojan Horse.  His handler Borya, fascinated with Greek mythology and especially, Helen of Troy, tells him: "For the Gods, the big betrayal is betrayal of what you love.  The greatest freedom is the freedom to betray." Borya sees in Helen a metaphor for the Cold War in which blood was spilt for an "impalpable ghost," namely the specter of Communist world domination.  No such conspiracy existed. Stalin followed the traditional Czarist foreign policy of maintaining a protective buffer zone around Russia. Like the Greeks storming the walls of Troy, the early Cold War warriors felt the existence of an evil enemy and considered themselves lucky to be in the forefront against it.But like all chimeras, the Cold War evaporated and its warriors were left with a void in their lives. Nikitin observes that the spy is the eternal child.  He lives his life as a fairy tale.  So when one fairy tale dies, another must be found if the spy is to feel whole.   For Nikitin, the replacement is the belief that victims and terrorists are locked in a symbiotic embrace. "When I stop and consider who benefits from terrorism, the list grows longer and longer. The police need terrorism to justify the government's hard line, the unending crisis, the wars, the special laws. In the name of the war on terrorism they can do anything they want."Nikitin goes in pursuit of the one individual or group he believes is the mastermind behind all terrorist activity. Nikitin wishes to impose a linear order on the sloppy mess that is terrorism with all of its unpredictability.  This struggle forces Nikitin into a gray world of amorality.  He acts as if nothing is absolutely good or absolutely evil. Morality slips away when it tries to impose a linear order on the chaotic fecundity of his life. The main drama of The Trojan Spy lies in the hopelessness of the struggle of the single man who hopes to strike at the heart of a bloodless system of power that in fact has no heart. The driving force of this novel is the conflict between what one thinks and what one does. Nikitin investigates the line of false flag operations, state terrorism, the colour alerts and warnings of imminent terrorist attacks. And suffers for daring the gods.

The Trojan Spy

Literature & Fiction

Stewart, Gaither

Genre Fiction

Punto Press, LLC

<p>China Rising: Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations CHINA RISING, the latest book by the author of 44 Days Backpacking in China: The Middle Kingdom in the 21st Century, with the United States, Europe and the Fate of the World in Its Looking Glass, one of the most engaging political travelogues in recent memory, is a comprehensive, absorbing, eye-opening guide to China in the 21st century, a volume which in 700 pp packs it all: history, personal memory, sociology, political analysis. and above all a fair dose of invaluable first-hand information designed to detoxify the Western reader's mind from the constant lies served by the Western media in support of Washington's global imperial agenda. The result is a thorough rectification, a "deprogramming" of just about everything we, as Westerners, have been "taught" to believe about China, allowing us to see the Chinese people and their leaders as they really are—ordinary human beings just like us with dreams, foibles, defects and a proud history extending millennia, a people that in a century have overcome just about every scourge known to man: famines, massive drug addiction, civil wars, invasions, grinding poverty and humiliation, to become one of the great powers of this century, perhaps the greatest, and which today, much as a result of its success, is facing the undying hostility of the world's hegemon, the United States, itching for a confrontation to reassert imperial control. It is thus indispensable for Westerners and Asians to know the truth of the situation, what their governments are doing (led by the USA) behind their backs, if the planet is to be spared a nuclear conflict of incalculable horror.. For, as Brown indicates, China will not back down this time, and neither will Russia, her strategic ally, who faces the same type of constant harassment and bullying by the West, also for having the audacity to defend her sovereignty and set her own foreign policy course. The truth therefore must come out about key events, from the so-called "Tiananmen Massacre", organized by the CIA, to who Mao Zedong really was and did, a role for which he earned the love of his countrymen to this day. It's a big job, but the author, an American fluent in Chinese, a teacher by profession, and with 15 years residence in the Middle Kingdom, and a cosmopolitan background, is eminently qualified to meet the task. Andre Vltchek, himself a truth-teller of distinction, and a man who, like Jeff Brown knows China well, has endorsed CHINA RISING as a unique instrument of mind liberation. Vltchek words are worth heeding: "The Western public should learn and remember one essential thing about China: no matter what European and North American propaganda barks about the People’s Republic, China is much more “democratic” than the West. It is democratic in its own way. For thousands of years, it developed its own political system. Its rulers, no matter who they are, are given a conditional right to govern by the people. In the past, but even now it is called a “Heavenly Mandate”. If the rulers fail to respect the will of the people, they get deposed. And the Communist Party of China is greatly respectful of the desires of the majority of the Chinese people. When they want liberal reforms, they are delivered. When they want more Communism and an epic fight against corruption, like now, China’s government immediately reacts. It is powerful and democratic, although it is a very specific and complex arrangement. And now, the Chinese people are outraged and they are sending clear signals to Beijing: “do not succumb to the West.” “If you do, our nation will suffer immensely, and the rest of the world will turn to ashes.” The fate of the world hangs in the balance and only truth can prevent a global catastrophe.</p>

China Rising: Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations

History

Brown, Jeff J.

Asia

<p>Ron Ridenour’s book, The Russian Peace Threat: Pentagon on Alert, a true historical page-turner, is destined to endure and inform future readers, writers and researchers about both what has been reported—mainly malicious propaganda—and what truly took place in the one hundred years from the 1917 Russian Revolution until the eruption of the distinct harbingers of the collapse of the US empire in the early twenty-first century. Events often just seem to happen, caught up in the swirl of history. But still, we try to interpret them and to understand. And then, in many cases, take a stand for or against. Understanding is like discovering a new world, like converting to a new faith. Revolt invades your life and everything is different from what it once was. Ridenour’s book helps us along the way to first remembering the historical facts so that we can then understand. His new work documents clearly facts about the early years of the Soviet Union’s relations with the West, its difficult steps toward socio-political maturity and Communism, and its enormous sacrifices along the way: its defeat of Western intervention during the revolutionary and civil war period; its regulation of state economic planning and the reforms required for the industrialization of the nation; its defeat of the German Nazi military juggernaut at the gates of Russia’s major cities and the coup de grace in the ferocious battle in Stalingrad, defeating German invaders and crushing Nazi Germany before the USA even entered the war; and finally the arduous salvation of Russia after the collapse of the USSR under US post-WWII economic firepower and the most treacherous anti-Russian policies since the early 1900s. Those Western policies continue to determine US-Russian relations today. Throughout this long work Ridenour recalls and clarifies diverse significant historical details, obscured by time and by Western propaganda, facts that are so easily forgotten or that were never learned: such ignored truths as the importance of the USSR in the defeat of Japan in WWII and the timing of the US use of the atomic bomb in Japan. Not many people are aware of the extent of the destruction of many Japanese cities which the author details here. He points out that the Soviet Union kept its word to help the United States by its intervention against Japan, the decisive reason why Japan was defeated even before the atomic bombs fell. A stunning but little known fact is that in response to the Russians' sacrifice the Anglo-American leaders—first Churchill and later Truman— were hatching Operation Unthinkable and Operation Pincher to launch a surprise war against Soviet forces in Europe. These military plots included the potential use of nuclear bombs. This is a book that no well-informed Western reader should be without, especially those inhabiting the homeland of the new empire, the dangerously brainwashed United States.</p>

The Russian Peace Threat: Pentagon on Alert

Ridenour, Ron

Europe

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