These are perilous times, with haunting parallels to the 1930's. I understand the trouble signs that we are seeing now. Putin's assault on Ukraine is eerily similar to Hitler's assault on Czechoslavakia in 1939.

About ten years ago, I came across a newspaper from 1937. After reading through it, I understood that the civil war in Spain at that time was a proxy war being backed up by other nations who would soon be warring themselves.

Franco's Spanish fascists were being supplied and reinforced by Mussolini and Hitler, while the socialists who were running the Spanish government in Madrid were being strongly influenced by the communists in Russia, who thought they knew so much because they had absconded Russia away from the czar.

Long story short, I wrote a 300-page novel about it. . . a story that depicts the conditions in Europe in 1937.

Smoke is a story about a young American businessman who is traveling through France to Belgium where his father, an American soldier, had been buried in a place called Flanders Field.

If this seems interesting to you, you may find excerpts from the novel, and from the other four novels I have written, at http://www.careyrowland.com

Thank you, Steve, for posting these thoughts and historical facts on Medium. Your warning is well-undestood and very timely, possibly even more dangerous now than in WWII because of Putin's nuclear weapons.

Keep the warnings coming. These are seriously perilous times.