@DanM:
I forwarded the theory

If you mean the video with the ex-KGB agent, I hope you aren’t apologizing for it.

I find that series to be embarrassing to myself, but the gentleman is very credible, say I, if only because I expended many, many brain cells reading decent histories and also leftist gobbledygook and it rings true with Everything Else.

He lacks Le Carrée’s lefty-literate, global-wide, über-evil stylisms, another good reason to give him serious consideration.

His talk is more than faintly embarrassing to American academic leftists for many reasons, including:
1) the believe-it bad rep of the KGB,
2) stereotypes of fat Russian women and the apparatchiki,
3) Anglo-Saxon superiority complexes, and
4) just plain generic academic poseur customs.

None of us likes to see what he says we should see. We want to dismiss it as some childish or paranoid fantasy that belongs to the dark ages before the End of History.

Oooopsie! We’re still in the dark ages before the End of Histrionics, er, History, ain’t we?