This work is divided into two autonomous books. The first book, The State, represents a radically new political system of society, one which is the most democratic system ever possible! This is a completely new society, a real civil society, which otherwise in the capitalist system is only a utopia. In this book, I scrutinize the principles of scientific socialism; i.e., all those principles of Marxism concerning the state that build socialism as a political system. The second book, The Economic Theory of Socialism, is a sequel, and as far as I know, the only sequel of the greatest work by Karl Marx – Capital. The economics of socialism makes Marx’s socialism already completely possible. In this book, I scrutinize the economic laws that build socialism as a more effective economic system than capitalism. These laws are extracted from Marx’s main work – Capital. From 1917 to 1991, the totalitarian system in USSR and East Europe was called socialism, and even by the scientific nonsense and absurd names of communism and communist system. In this system, the official ideology was allegedly Marxism, but really it could not endure any Marxist criticism. There was never any socialism anywhere! In the twentieth century, we passed through a system of utopian socialism as proof that this was not socialism that was not possible, but for the utopia of writers before and after Marx. We were visited by a utopian socialism, which at the contemporary stage is simply capitalism – state, monopolistic. There is no better application of Keynes’s doctrine than the “socialism” of the twentieth century. His “planned capitalism” is actually “planned socialism.”

In the modern Greek city of Thessaloniki, the ruins of a vast Jewish cemetery lie buried under the city’s university. Nearby is the site of the childhood home of one of the founders of the modern Turkish state. These are tantalizing reminders of what was once the bustling cosmopolitan city of Salonica, home not just to Greeks but to thousands of Sephardic Jews, Turks, Bulgarians, and Armenians living and working peacefully alongside one another. Thessaloniki is just one example among many of what used to be. Over the past two centuries, ethnic cleansing has remade the map of Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East, transforming vast empires that embraced many ethnic groups into nearly homogenous nations. Towns and cities from Germany to Turkey still show traces of the vanished and nearly forgotten ethnic and religious communities that once called these places home. In Terrible Fate, Benjamin Lieberman describes the violent transformations that occurred in Salonica and hundreds of other towns and cities as the Ottoman, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German empires collapsed, to be reborn as the modern nation-states we know today. His book is the first comprehensive history of this process that has involved the murder and forced migration of tens of millions of people. Drawing upon eyewitness accounts, contemporary journalism, and diplomatic records, Lieberman’s story sweeps across the continent, taking the reader from ethnic cleansing’s earliest beginnings in Bulgaria, Greece, and Russia in the nineteenth century, through the rise of nationalism, both world wars, the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and the rise and fall of the Soviet empire, up to the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Along the way he examines the decisive roles of political leaders—not only monarchs and dictators but also those who were democratically elected—as well as ordinary people who often required very little encouragement to rob and brutalize their neighbors, or who were simply caught up in the tide of history.