Smokey History

excerpt from chapter 9 of my 2011 novel, Smoke When the Bolsheviks tore down the Russian Czar's gilt empire, they immediately began exporting their revolution to the world. That's the way Marx had conceived their grand plan, and so that's the way they intended to liberate the working world from the rapacity of capitalistic exploitation. They stubbornly undertook their project in spite of severe infighting and confused disorganization. So in spite of themselves, the Reds were able to intimidate their moneyed nemeses in the West. Fearfully anticipating an onslaught of Communism from the East, the European houses of wealth and power were scrambling for defenses.  Thus did they mistakenly identify, in the late 1930's, the German reich, newly constructed under Hitler's forcefully vicious methodology, as a wishful bastion of European order and capitalistic vigor. Weren't the Germans the proud forgers of finely-tuned industry and disciplined authority?  The leader of the western world were slowly deluding themselves into a tragically misguided assessment of Hitler. Too many of them saw his rise as a potential defense of European order, and the wealth that sustained it.  This confrontation of semi-biblical proportions would hold as captors . . . The lessons of history are veiled in time, memory, and sometimes. . .

Smoke