The Triumph of Evil: The Reality of the Usa's Cold War Victory

by Austin Murphy

The Triumph of Evil

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, The United States Of America, American History, Germany, Economics

372 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2002

About the author

Austin Murphy received his Ph.D. in Finance from the University of Georgia in 1984. He has been a Professor of Finance at Oakland University for the last 16 years, teaching investments and international finance. He has authored over 50 academic journal articles and four books (and has also created very powerful software that performs complex, state-of-the-art investment analysis). Being fluent in German, he was serving as a visiting Fulbright scholar in Berlin, Germany in 1989-90 and was thereby able to experience and participate in the most incredible revolution of our time.

Reviews

[Jakob · Rating 3 out of 5]

What Austin Murphy does in showing us facts and arguments that directly contradict the official story of the Cold War, pointing to some basic facts that lead us to reassess the various failures and successes of the East Block. The research he's done is immense, even if I find he struggles to make some points clear. It does, however, have an unfortunate "Good vs. Evil" heroism that I find slightly problematic from a socialist viewpoint. Who were good? The leaders, or the people, or the various government systems? It needs to be viewed from a materialist perspective. The social forces of class society don't align themselves with such Good vs Evil moralistic sentiments, and it doesn't help the left understand what it should avoid when trying to do this. Nevertheless, read it just for the huge amount of useful and interesting information and argumentation. I enjoyed reading it.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whew, this book is kind of a mess. The author's heart is absolutely in the right place, but lacks the political theory to understand the politics attached to the economics he is covering. The chapters on the crimes of the US and the propaganda around communist states are well intentioned but rather poorly written.

Additionally he pairs accurate debunking of some of the most common myths and lies about the Soviet Union and China, with some unfortunate minimizing of the horrors committed by the non communist, hyper nationalist Pol Pot regime in Cambodia prior to its liberation by Vietnam. Since the author's expertise is economics and not history, he'd have been better off not getting quite into such detail on things like death counts and birth rate estimates, and instead simply providing the reader with the overview and letting them look into sources like Getty and Tottle if they really want the details.

The book is at its best when getting into its detailed economic comparison of capitalist West Germany and Socialist East Germany, demonstrating the superiority and efficiency of the Socialist system. He does an excellent job punching through myths of the East German economy as moribund and inefficient, and laying out the tragedy of the forced reunification. The author provides an alternative plan for opening the East German economy, but a lack of understanding of the mechanisms of Imperialism make many of his assertions and assumptions quite naive.

Full of interesting information but frustratingly amateurish. Recommended for chapters 3 and 4 on East Germany, but you can get a high level overview of that from the short book Stasi State or Socialist Paradise? For an overview of the crimes of the US, books like Killing Hope, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and Open Veins of Latin America are much more comprehensive and better written.

[Tommy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite a few absurd sources/claims in here going as far as including an apologia for the Khmer Rouge but it's legitimate to compare Eastern Europe to Latin America (e.g. consequences of the Monroe doctrine vs. Brezhnev doctrine). The author seems to know his shit on East Germany and claims its economy was more efficient in many ways than the Wests but was hampered by a bigger reparations burden, theft of educated workers and its access to smaller markets didn't help. Talks about the 1990s currency crises and such but the NWO has faced a lot worse since this was published.

[Chaya]

Very good resource on disproving myths about the GDR. I hope the author retracts the apologia for the Khmer Rouge though.

[Morven · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the book and got a lot from it, but it is not necessarily accurate or unbiased, not to mention the ostentatious title. I think it serves as a good source to get inspired on various topics or atrocities that were committed and to do your own research. However, the information here should not be taken at face value, like many historical works, you should consult the references. Yet, it might be that the reasoning is solid or the conclusion doesn't change much, only the numbers do.

The author is not a historian, rather he is an economist and so his most valued input is in the economic analysis chapters of East and West Germany, his economic plan, and his broader analysis of the effects of globalization and free market on lower-developed countries. It should be said that I could only glean information here and many of the numbers, formulas, and terms went over my head but it still gave me things to think about.

While his historical research was thorough, he isn't a historian and so as mentioned before his words should be taken more as observations or arguments rather than hard statistics. Nevertheless, I found it quite interesting because of all the things it made me aware about and consider for further research in more specific books. If I was more well-versed in the areas covered, such as reading background material on topics covered then perhaps my rating goes down to 2 or 3 stars.

[Ryan Quattro · Rating 1 out of 5]

The reality that this is one of the worst history books ever written. The catalogue of the USSR's crimes is incredible. From helping Germans develop their army in contravention of Versailles to signing a pact with Hitler to TWO Soviet-induced famines to the gigantic level of ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe to support of genocidal and/or tyrannical regimes to wars of expansion the 70 years of the USSR were filled with oceans of blood and misery.

All of the above is well-established historical fact. I can't for the life of me understand why people write apologia for Nazis, Communists, the Confederacy, etc. Yet they do.

[Charles Sansone · Rating 4 out of 5]

The economic comparisons between the GDR and West Germany were very enlightening, would recommend those sections highly and that earns the 4 stars. The other chapters are not as strong, and as other reviewers mention there are holes in the research in those other sections.

[Conor Fitzpatrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of good info but idk was written very oddly

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting read, concentrating on East Germany in comparison to the West. A bit heavy on bias, but still good.

[Lasu · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is truly an Triumph of Evil.
It's core numbers are based upon a research that was already flawed for 10 years before this book has been written. A little research might have brought up this study for example: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science...

It concludes:

New demographic evidence and NKVD criminal homicide data (TsGAOR) confirm that at least 5.2 million people classifiable as excess deaths perished during the thirties. This validates the reliability of excess deaths as a homicide estimator contrary to Anderson’s and Silver’s assertions, and strongly indicates that 4.2 million other computable excess deaths were victims of Stalinism. Higher homicide tolls in the vicinity of 13.5-14.3 million calculated by Conquest are also demographically possible, given remaining uncertainties about unregistered births during the famine years and the censuses of 1937 and 1939. These findings are consistent with the research of Nove, Ellman, Maksudov, Wheatcroft and Davies based on the new demographic evidence, but disconfirm the NKVD TsGAOR criminal data which Getty, Rittersporn and Zemskov contend do not permit estimates of custodial and exile deaths above 2 million.

This "Getty, Rittersporn and Zemskov" data is what Austin Murphys book is based upon.

In my opinion, the author should have stayed with writing about sports as this equivalent of holocaust denial he put together here is a disgrace.

[noob2121 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good detailed case study of the DDR. Very moralistic framing which i dont disagree with but can be off-putting to some, unnecessary Pol Pot apologia that no one asked for.