From Newsgroup: alt.buddha.short.fat.guy

My libel nightmare all started in a little Oslo bookshop rCo 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 rCyEpstein Island Guest List.rCO
I was horrified to see that one of my books was included. I have never
been to Jeffrey EpsteinrCOs island, never flown on his planes, never
visited any of his properties, and rCo most crucially rCo 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: rCyWe 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.rCO

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,
rCya lie travels round the world before the truth can even get its boots onrCO, 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 MaxwellrCOs
address book that she supposedly shared with Epstein. I knew her decades
ago rCo 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 rCo
as we now know rCo 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 StalinrCOs 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 rCythe preeminent mediocrity in the Communist
partyrCO, and others called him a rCygrey blurrCO, 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 StalinrCOs 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 rCytea-drinkersrCO (bloviators and intellectuals who sat in cafes and wrote articles) and rCypracticalsrCO (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: rCyHerCOs exactly the type we need.rCO 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 rCo one of which particularly attracted the attention of
Marxist internet trolls in around 2019rCa

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.

At some point in the next year, he seduced Lidia. We would regard this
as statuary rape. Whatever the circumstances of how this had begun, the
two started to live together. On one occasion it seems that StalinrCOs policeman caught them together, perhaps in flagrante. A furious Stalin
chased the policeman around the village; the policeman drew his sword.
There is some evidence that LidiarCOs brothers disapproved of this
behaviour, and no doubt so did Comrade SverdlovrCa Then Lidia, 14, fell pregnant. At this, the gendarme threatened to start criminal case
against Stalin for living with an underage girl, but the law in Siberia
was informal: 14 was the age of consent in European Russia, but it was
not specified in Siberia (nor enforced) and furthermore there was no
legal concept of statutory rape. Instead, there was the concept of a
crime rCyagainst female honourrCO in the sense of a violation of a fatherrCOs patriarchal family propriety. A promise to marry was regarded as the
required mitigation for this, so Stalin promised to marry Lidia and they became engaged.

Stalin came to enjoy living in Kureika. He became popular among its
peasants who nicknamed him Pockmarked Oska, and he talked all his life
about his hunting exploits and adventures. Sverdlov was moved to another village, and Stalin was joined by another comrade, Lev Kamenev, with
whom he was at the time very friendly (in 1936, he had Kamenev tried and executed). In December 1914, Lidia gave birth to a child who died, but
during 1916 she became pregnant again. Stalin prided himself on his many escapes rCo he called himself rCya doctor of escapologyrCO and once he even escaped in a sleigh pulled by reindeer. Now he managed to escape to
other villages, probably avoiding having to marry pregnant Lidia.

In February 1917, the tsar was overthrown and Stalin, along with
Kamenev, was liberated. The pair headed to Petrograd, where they were
soon to meet Lenin and seize power. Without ceremony, Stalin abandoned
the pregnant Lidia, now 16, who gave birth in April 1917 to a son
Alexander. She never told Stalin, who had vanished, and Stalin never
inquired, unfettered by either sentimentality or curiosity. (He did,
however, hear about the birth, and boasted to friends he had fathered a
son or two in exile. He had already fathered and abandoned another son
in another exile.) Lidia then married a peasant fisherman, Yakov
Davydov, who adopted Alexander. As Stalin rose to power, Lidia remained
in Siberia and became a hairdresser and had eight more children.
Alexander Davydov became a postman, and when he learned who his father
was, he was summoned by the NKVD (Soviet secret police) who made him
sign a promise of secrecy. He fought in the second world war and died in
1987. His son Yuri still lives in Siberia. Years late, in 2016, DNA
tests proved he was StalinrCOs grandson. That is the history.

The book appeared and I went on to write other things. Then, I think
around 2019, I was on Twitter after publishing my book The Romanovs, and
I posted about the murder of Nicholas II. To my amazement, this sparked
my first online lynching. It was a terrifying shock. A large number of
Twitter accounts, usually faceless with strange names that often
involved rCyBolshevikrCO or rCyCommunistrCO (they might have been something like
rCyBolshiebrorCO; they were overwhelmingly male) and had very few followers, suddenly accused me of supporting the mass-murderer Nicholas II. To my
even greater amazement, they suddenly all accused me of inventing the
lie that rCyStalin was a paedophilerCO, which in their telling was all the more appalling because they claimed I was myself a rCyfriend of the
paedophile EpsteinrCO, someone who I did not even know. The rCyevidencerCO for this was that I was apparently in his rCyaddress-bookrCO, which had been published somewhere. There are thousands of people in this supposed
address book, including presidents and grandees, but many of the names
like me had probably never met him. But that did not stop the malicious attacks. Each post featured a photocopy of my appearance in the address
book with my wife Santa rCo my name misspelt and my telephone number
wrong. Most likely, as stated above, it belonged to Ghislaine Maxwell.
Anyway, message after message accused me of accusing Stalin of being a paedophile because I was myself an associate of a paedophile.

I immediately consulted media lawyers, who said I had a perfect libel
case rCo if we could find the perpetrators. But none of the Bolshiebros
had real names or jobs or addresses. We could not find anyone to sue. I
was also astonished by the illiterate moronism of the entire accusation.
The accusers had clearly never even bothered to read my book. If they
had, they would have known that StalinrCOs relations with Lidia were not
the subject of prosecution, that he had become engaged to her, and that
the word rCypaedophiliarCO does not appear in the book. The informal rule of the land at that time was that such behaviour could be condoned if the
man married the girl. I did not say this was a good law or a bad law;
just that it was the practice in Siberia during the first world war.
Stalin kept his illegitimate children secret and never met them and the
story was only revealed in an investigation by the KGB Chairman General
Ivan Serov ordered after StalinrCOs death by the new leader Nikita
Khrushchev. Nor was this story exclusively mine rCo it appears in all the
post 1991 biographies of Stalin, and the DNA tests were in the
newspapers in 2016. The materials, of course, are also in the archives.

My lawyer was ready to sue, but we could not locate a single malignant.
The lawyer wisely advised me to block them but never to answer these
trolls because any attention would help them and taint me and expand the story. Sometimes they attacked me, but more often they just discussed
this imbecilic nonsense amongst themselves. The pile-on died down, years passed, but periodically it exploded again.

I once talked to a British intelligence office who believed some of
these accounts were never people at all. He thought they were bots
controlled by Russia, North Korea or Iran, created to sow hatred and insecurity and loathing. If so, that certainly worked with me. As the
Epstein scandal has intensified in. recent months, the defamations have resurged. After the 7 October Hamas attack, the address book was used
not just by Stalinist trolls but also by pro-Hamas extremists to libel
me more. That is why a bookshop assistant, who had clearly seen one of
these defamatory posts, decided to include my book in their ghoulish and frankly disgraceful shop display in Oslo last week. Not only was it in
bad taste and poisoned the serenity of a bookshop, it included other
people like me who had nothing to do with this case.

Even though in the nightmare of the last two days I have at times felt desperate, I feel liberated to be able to write this. After all these
years of malignant, hurtful and libellous posts by a swarm of vicious political extremists, I am able finally to confront an actual entity rCo
the bookshop rCo and they have apologised and admitted the libel. I can
now finally tell his bizarre tale.

I donrCOt for a minute compare this storm in a teacup to the suffering of
the actual victims and survivors in this case. Far from it. But it has
been a long, frightening Kafka-esque ordeal over five years. A certain
amount of damage is done even when things are taken down. It just shows
how easy it is for innocent people to have their names traduced. The
bookshop has asked many people to remove the libel, and some have done
so, but many have not because very few people bother to correct
falsehoods online. There is no practical remedy except the law.

I know many of the people who retweeted this defamation were not
malicious but carelessly callous. I not longer use the word rCyvirtualrCO
for what happens online: I prefer the word rCyvisceralrCO. It makes me realise that I myself rCo and all of us rCo need to be careful: this
visceral reality of the propagation of lies, contempt for truth and
human insensitivity is a real danger for individuals and societies. As
AI delivers better and more diabolical deepfakery, the peril is only
going to get worse. This nasty little tale of libel and history also illustrates that we live in an age of internet-stoked, mob-frenzied
public panics, self-righteous witch hunts and moral hysterias which, rightfully, expose the guilty but also the innocent.

A lesson I have drawn from this weekend is that I myself spend too much
time on social media. I should now just get back to what I love doing:
writing the books which I hope one day will appear on the shelves of a
certain Oslo bookshop.



Young Stalin, which won the Costa Biography Prize, the LA Times Book
Prize, the Kreisky Prize and the Grand Prix de Biographie Politique, is
now being made into a film. Simon Sebag MontefiorerCOs next book is The Cauldron: the Making of the Middle East.


Simon Sebag Montefiore
--- Synchronet 3.21b-Linux NewsLink 1.2