…was, of course, the so-called “Battle of the Bulge .” In 2003 four American veterans of that last great assault share their vivid memories of how the Wehrmacht advanced with massive force and was after a dreadful month of unrelenting combat, routed by the American and British armies led respectively by Patton and Montgomery.

Bernard Lewis has been the single most influential, academically-based scholar of the history, religion, politics and present disorder of the Arab world. Now in his nineties and still productive, he has propounded a general interpretation of “What Went Wrong,” the title of one of his most important books, with the once-flourishing and now-disordered Islamic civilization. Here in 2004 he discusses with us – and in his words – “the roots of Arab rage.”

What’s Putin doing in the title? That’s to remind ourselves that if the first two items don’t totally exhaust our correlated capacities for worry, pessimism and despair, there’s always the reactivated cadaver of the Soviet Union to keep us in persisting dysphoria. There are Russianists and Russianists and lots of them still linger in Fukayamish optimism that at least the “cold war” ended years ago. A few of the best students of the present Russian reality think otherwise and have good and easily demonstrable reasons. One is David Satter who has appeared here on two of our earlier podcasts. Another is Gary Saul Morson of Northwestern University who recorded this conversation with us just before the emergence of the ISIS and Ebola nightmares.

Here then is his properly pessimistic reading of Putin and the anti-democratic culture from which he comes and by which he and his happy army of kleptocrats are sustained. In other words, when the Ebola scourge has passed and Islamic Jihadism has finally been brought down to a manageable level, the Russian threat to eastern European societies will still be there and may have done them a good deal more damage than Ukraine has already sustained.

That burden was nothing less than mental disease which kept Sherwin Nuland in a mental hospital for over a year. A distinguished Professor Of Surgery at Yale, he is also the celebrated author of many finely-wrought books drawn from medical science and culture, among them “How We Die” and “The Wisdom of the Body.” Though I had known him for years, I was stunned by what he revealed in this conversation in 2003 and in his then-new book “Lost in America.”

Those 40 years in the 19th century ended at Wounded Knee with the final defeat of Indian counter forces. A great figure in this extended war was Crazy Horse, who is memorialized in a fine and vivid biography by Joseph Marshall,  himself a member of the Lakota Sioux tribe. He is joined in this 2004 discussion by Brian Hosner, an historian of this epic struggle.