By Brian E. Frydenborg, December 26, 2021 (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981)

SILVER SPRING—As I write this on Christmas Day (and the day after), to any thoughtful Christians, on this particular occasion and as they read this particular piece, I will not wish them a “merry Christmas,” but forcefully implore that they think of certain others, if but for a moment (yet hopefully longer). 

Much as some (hardly all and I doubt most) African-Americans and many (very probably most) Native Americans look at the Fourth of July—Independence Day—in America differently than other Americans, let us spare some effort to consider the “pagans” of Late Antiquity, those who lived to see Christianity come to dominate the Roman Imperial government and those who came after to see their way of life virtually exterminated, save for some brave folks, mostly in the most rural of countrysides or remote mountains, farther from the reach of Roman Imperial authorities.

Those “others” I ask to be considered are those who would have been the vast majority of the people living in the Roman Empire at the time from the era of Emperor Constantine’s rise to power in 312 C.E. (Common Era, an improvement, in my view, over the sectarian A.D.), in part due to his then-partial, not-yet-total, embrace of Christianity; these “others” over time would be much of the population through the next few centuries but declining as a portion as Christianity was forced upon the entirety of the Roman Empire—nearly every corner and nearly every person, certainly on anyone within clerical or Roman Imperial reach who was considered “pagan” (all non-Christian Romans who were not Jewish).

“Pagan” itself emerged as a Christian pejorative term, one the diverse range of polytheists and non-Jewish, non-Christian monotheists of the Greco-Roman world would never, ever have used to refer to themselves, as Catherine Nixey, author of The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, is quick to point out in her brisk and energetic account of Christianity’s takeover of the Roman state, society, and culture.  In fact, in the Roman era before Christianity’s takeover of Rome, it was not at all common for people to define themselves primarily or in large part by their religion (Jews, of course, were a tiny exception during this period); the sharp delineation of people as being of one religion or another as a core part of or primary indicator of their identity was, in any widespread sense, an invention of the Christians of this era (and a rather regrettable one).  If you were a good citizen and obeyed the laws of Rome, before, Romans generally didn’t give a fig what gods you or anyone else worshipped.  You were free to ignore their gods just as much as you were free to adopt them or worship your own, and there was not a feeling that by believing in your gods that that meant you had to deny anyone else’s gods, let alone call them demons.  Apart from the sensitive situation with Jews and Judaism, identifying primarily by religion is essentially unheard of in this time outside Christianity.

But Nixey’s point is that it is essentially unheard of today because triumphalist Christian accounts have shaped our view of this distant era into, primarily, the following:

After centuries of fierce persecution at the hands of sadistic pagan Romans, Christians inevitably rose to dominate the Roman Imperial sate, destroy the false gods (actually demons serving the Devil) and old religions (cults celebrating evil and Satan) that had dominated the Roman world but never really captured the hearts and minds of the people, rose to free the people from evil and superstitious idolatry by benevolently bring the light of the One True Faith and One True God to them, and led mankind into a new era of truth, love, and kindness based on God’s Law and God’s Love.  And, all through the ages, the Church preserved the wisdom of the ancients by painstakingly copying their texts in monasteries that became centers of learning, scholarship, and wisdom.

The truth could not be further from this false account (apart from monasteries preserving some classical texts after Christians had destroyed nearly all the others), and Nixey is here to correct the record.

She quickly and skillfully dismisses any accounts of being biased for not focusing on the examples of kindness, compassion, and scholarship that Christianity has given to the world, as that story has been told by the Christian victors time and time again, ad nauseam and often greatly embellished, exaggerated, or omitting key context.  No need to tread well-trodden and built-up, tended ground; no, in her book, it is the suppressed, even obliterated, the voiceless and long forgotten, whose mantle she takes up to give voice to and whose feelings, thoughts, and very existence she is determined to present to us.

And she presents it well.  This is not a book of deep scholarship nor one that will meticulously trace the Christian revolution and the genocide (certainly by our modern legal definition) of “pagans” in its entirety, throughout the whole of the Empire, event by event, discussing the scholarly debates in detail about this and that motive or event.  Instead, she is keen to connect emotionally with her readers, recreating with literary dash what it might have been like to think, feel, and experience the times, places, events, and people about which she is writing, especially those perspectives long lost, suppressed, or ignored.  To this end, she selects a smattering of major events and narratives throughout the several centuries in question and throughout the empire, giving context and descriptive recreations for each, peppered with quotes from Christian and “pagan” alike.

And the picture she paints should give Christians and anyone not familiar with the truth pause, much in the way Americans who are not Native Americans might pause when thinking about Thanksgiving or Manifest Destiny, or, indeed, the very land on which they live.  This is because the ground on which Christians rose to control the Roman Empire and Western World was laid with a foundation of ash, rubble, and blood from the destruction of the existing world—ash, rubble, and blood that came from Christian violence, destruction, or murder of “pagan” books, temples, and worshippers.

A Record of Pious Sacrilege

Much like the later Crusaders, Nazis, Stalinists, Maoists, and ISIS, none of this is in doubt because these Christians gleefully recorded many of their atrocities and killings, immortalizing them in hymns, arts, and the texts of the early Church Fathers (indeed, they often sang joyously as they went about their destruction and murder).  Figures like Augustine and (even more so) John Chrysostom openly sermonized to their congregations to commit violence and murder against not just pagans who would not get with the program but any wayward or erring Christians, for doing so was not a net harm: it was out of love, since it was deemed better to harm the body in this life than to allow the soul to writhe in eternal hellfire in the next.  In the words of Augustine, “where there is terror, there is salvation… Oh, merciful savagery!” (240).  For Chrysostom, if a Christian heard a person blaspheme against the Christian god or Christian teachings, “go up to him and rebuke him; and should it be necessary to inflict blows, spare not to do so.  Smite him on the face; strike his mouth; sanctify thy hand with the blow” (234-235).  Similar sentiments would be proclaimed by many other bishops, priests, and monks.  For one eventual saint, the ends justified any means: “There is no crime for those who have Christ” (230).  It was clear that if any Christian zealotry broke Roman law or violated the legal rights of the target of their righteousness, such concerns were illegitimate when placed next to the laws of God.  In fact, if Christians were killed while attacking “pagan” temples, clergy, or worshippers, such “martyrs” would be richly rewarded in heaven and forever exalted among the faithful on earth.  Sound familiar?  It is Christian jihad in the ISIS sense.  And many of the men committing these crimes are saints even today in Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, or both (even other Christian sects, too).

How did this revolution take hold?  In the smashing of temples and statues to rubble, the mass burning of books and the barging into people’s homes if they were merely suspected of having “pagan” art or literature, a hating of sex and sexuality, theatre, music, dance, and festivals, all of which were seen as the work of demons and punishable by violence and torture.  Shaving, for many, was a sign of “pagan” inclinations (even, too, any kind of colorful fashion, showing of skin for women, or taking especial care with bathing and hygiene).  Science, math, objective history, philosophy were also “pagan” demonic works since they did not neatly line up with Christian teachings, and scientists, surgeons, teachers all saw works of theirs purged and burned, their places of operation shuttered or destroyed if they did not adopt Christian ways (and for many of them, this would have made their work impossible or compromised their values and beliefs to a level beyond that which they could bear).  The stubborn or those who spoke out against these restrictions were forbidden from continuing their trade, tortured, exiled, or murdered, their property seized and their works obliterated from the face of the earth.  The intellectual and the worldly is despised.  Misogyny is pervasive.  Homosexuals were newly tortured, their genitals often cut off, often leading to death.

This, too, was an era of thought crimes, and absolute destruction of free speech, inquiry, and debate enforced by murder and torture, often with the full backing of the state but also often by mobs of incited and dispatched-by-a-cleric Christian lay folk for whom there was little to no accountability.  In her account of the terrible murder—just for having respect and influence as a non-Christian and a woman—of Hypatia, a female philosopher based in Alexandria and renowned throughout the Empire in her day for her brilliance and wisdom, sought after by local rulers and the sons of elites from across the Mediterranean—Nixey notes that her close confidante, the local Roman in charge named Orestes, is helpless with his small retinue to stand up to the hundreds of militarized Christians known as parabalani—“the reckless ones,” a sort of YMCA cohort but with a distinctly terrorist bent (135)—who enforce the will of their extremist bishop (Hypatia and Orestes’s tale is wondrously depicted in Alejandro Amenábar’s 2009 film Agora­, the two characters poignantly portrayed by Rachel Weisz and Oscar Isaac).

Terrifying Modern Parallels and Digging into an Ancient Mentality of Hate

Reading these accounts, one cannot but help see the giant overlaps with ISIS; indeed, these Christians come off as the ISIS of Christianity, Rome under their rule resembling Baghdadi’s caliphate or Afghanistan under the 1990s Taliban (not today’s apparently—for now at least—relatively kinder, gentler version).  Even today, Christianity celebrates these terrorists and murderers from its infancy.  The harshness of their rule; their hatred of free inquiry, joy, merriment, and women’s autonomy; their self-adoption of the roles of judges, jury, and executioners; even their appearance—both ISIS and the early Christian enforcers were generally severe young men in dark clothing with unshaved beards—bear such a distinct resemblance to the worst of ISIS and Taliban rule, the worst of the terrorists of our own era, that it is hard to see the difference between them as you read Nixey, hard to not see them as one in the same, with the most extreme of religious terrorists in our modern era clear inheritors of a clear tradition that more or less begins with these Christian fanatics (“saints”).

If you doubt this, consider that, after a statue of Athena in Palmyra at the ends of the Syrian desert was desecrated and mutilated by Christians in the 380s, the very same statue, partially restored and on display in the second decade of the twenty-first century, was similarly desecrated and mutilated when ISIS took over the city in 2015 (xxxi, 114).  Just like their Christian and Jewish religious forebears, they were simply carrying out God’s explicit, clear command to destroy “idols,” as had the Taliban in 2001 with two massive Buddhist statues.

But to truly understand the mentality of these hostile faithful from Rome’s era of religious tumult, we need look to nothing other than the Ten Commandments.  Depending on your religious sect or faith, the following either comprises the first two or first three of the Ten Commandments:

I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

You shall not have other gods beside me.

You shall not make for yourself an idol or a likeness of anything in the heavens above or on the earth below or in the waters beneath the earth;

you shall not bow down before them or serve them. For I, the LORD, your God, am a jealous God, inflicting punishment for their ancestors’ wickedness on the children of those who hate me, down to the third and fourth generation;

but showing love down to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.

You shall not invoke the name of the LORD, your God, in vain. For the LORD will not leave unpunished anyone who invokes his name in vain. —Ex: 20:2-7

Badmouthing or criticizing God?  The same punishment:

A man born of an Israelite mother and an Egyptian father went out among the Israelites, and in the camp a fight broke out between the son of the Israelite woman and an Israelite man.

The son of the Israelite woman uttered the LORD’s name in a curse and blasphemed. So he was brought to Moses—now his mother’s name was Shelomith, daughter of Dibri, of the tribe of Dan—

and he was kept in custody till a decision from the LORD should settle the case for them.

The LORD then said to Moses:

Take the blasphemer outside the camp, and when all who heard him have laid their hands* on his head, let the whole community stone him.

Tell the Israelites: Anyone who blasphemes God shall bear the penalty;

whoever utters the name of the LORD in a curse shall be put to death. The whole community shall stone that person; alien and native-born alike must be put to death for uttering the LORD’s name in a curse…

You shall have but one rule, for alien and native-born alike. I, the LORD, am your God.

When Moses told this to the Israelites, they took the blasphemer outside the camp and stoned him; they did just as the LORD commanded Moses. —Lev. 24:10-16, 22-23

You read Leviticus and Chrysostom correctly: the punishment applies even to those who aren’t Christian.

As an adult, I am struck by how these first commandments (including the Third or Fourth, depending, again, on the faith/sect, to keep the Sabbath holy)—three out of ten or four out of ten, no small portion—have absolutely nothing to do with morality, with right or wrong, but are about a jealous—even petty—God who will brook no competition or criticism, and, indeed, has ample punishments and miseries in store for those worshipping other gods or criticizing him in both Jewish and Christian (and Muslim) scripture (perhaps there is room for much improvement?).  Pagan idolaters are to be killed, their shrines and statues destroyed, murder and destruction ordered directly by God himself.  Just one example here:

If your brother, your father’s child or your mother’s child, your son or daughter, your beloved spouse, or your intimate friend entices you secretly, saying, “Come, let us serve other gods,” whom you and your ancestors have not known,

any of the gods of the surrounding peoples, near to you or far away, from one end of the earth to the other:

do not yield or listen to any such person; show no pity or compassion and do not shield such a one,

but kill that person. Your hand shall be the first raised to put such a one to death; the hand of all the people shall follow.

You shall stone that person to death, for seeking to lead you astray from the LORD, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

And all Israel shall hear of it and fear, and never again do such evil as this in your midst.

If you hear it said concerning one of the cities which the LORD, your God, gives you to dwell in,

that certain scoundrels have sprung up in your midst and have led astray the inhabitants of their city, saying, “Come, let us serve other gods,” whom you have not known,

you must inquire carefully into the matter and investigate it thoroughly. If you find that it is true and an established fact that this abomination has been committed in your midst,

you shall put the inhabitants of that city to the sword, placing the city and all that is in it, even its livestock, under the ban.

Having heaped up all its spoils in the middle of its square, you shall burn the city with all its spoils as a whole burnt offering to the LORD, your God. Let it be a heap of ruins forever, never to be rebuilt. —Deut. 13:7-17

As a child growing up in America, these first few of the Ten Commandments always struck me as odd: everyone where I was (and, indeed, virtually all of America in the 1980s) was either Christian or Jewish, worshipping the same God if differently.  But back when Constantine began to favor Christianity in the early fourth century C.E., Christians were a small minority, surrounded generally not by other monotheists (the most notable exception being Jews concentrated in a few areas, though a considerable number of “pagans” practiced different monotheisms) but by polytheist worshippers of Greco-Roman gods or their Celtic, Germanic, North African, Egyptian, or Eastern equivalents.  The presence of competing “false” gods—Paul clearly states they are not just false, but actual evil demons—would have been overwhelming to a Christian.

So while we today shrug at passages about idols and pagans, in the context of early Christianity, nothing was more important than placing the Jesus/God before the myriad of other gods and God’s words were clear in this most important, most emphasized of Christian teachings: idolators and competing gods were not to be tolerated but utterly destroyed, their worshippers forced into submission and conversion or killed.  Thus, the most important part of being a good Christian was not loving your neighbor with kindness, but accepting the One True God in a way that demanded non-acceptance, confrontation, and violence with neighbors if they did not accept Christianity. 

We must go back in time to realize that, in daily life, it was almost impossible to escape the presence of these “demons”: giant, exquisite statues regularly lavished with public sacrifice and worship in the most prominent places of any village, town, or city.  For early Christians, they were living in a time of never-ending holy war, an age of terror in which, as laid out by scripture and endlessly repeated by Christian clergy, the evil demonic gods that surrounded them wished them harm, sought to steal and condemn their souls through temptation, and were challenging their own God for supremacy.

In this mindset, every painting in a bathhouse or a private home with naked people, every bit of incense, every statue, every book of “pagan” filth, was part of this never-ending campaign against Christianity and must be destroyed.  Even if the masses were not zealous enough, over the centuries after traditional Greco-Roman religion and philosophy were nearly wiped out, the stones of the remnants of the last “pagan” temples and marble of the remaining “pagan” statues would be broken up to build churches or repair houses or other infrastructure; Plato or Cicero would be erased and replaced or written over with Paul or the texts of the early Church Fathers.  So, to a large extent, these people and their culture were destroyed, often utterly.  That is why so few works of the art and literature from this era remains–less than ten percent of classical literature survives today, including only one percent of Latin literature [177])—that is why nearly every statue from the period shows hacked-off noses, gouged-out eyes, chipped-away nipples, or some other deliberate mutilation.

I am always amused when people claim Christianity (or Judaism, or Islam, the latter’s texts and traditions containing similar injunctions, even with the behavior of Prophet Muhammad himself) is a religion of peace.  Christians will often say that “Jesus came to change the ‘bad’ stuff in the Old Testament (Jewish Torah), making Christianity all about love,” having obviously not studied their New Testament well at all, where Jesus clearly and repeatedly affirms the Old Testament laws (and while there are some New Testament examples apparently changing some Old Testament rules, they are not as forceful, clear, or as far-reaching).  And let us not forget that all those who do not accept Jesus as their God, Lord, and Savior are doomed for an eternity of fire and torture in Hell.  It is not a “misreading” or “taking out of context,” as these verses in favor of preserving the laws of the Old Testament are not parables, but crystal-clear affirmations.  After all, Christianity bases its entire legitimacy on fulfilling the prophecies of Jewish scripture and on the God of the Jews.

The Buried Ugly Truth of Early Christianity and Its Lessons for Today

It was the Christians who persecuted en masse, not the other way around; despite the popular image of Roman persecutions of Christians and feeding helpless mothers and children to the lions in the Colosseum, Nixey takes pains to point out that Roman persecutions of Christians were mostly few and far between, half-hearted and not widespread or intense, as low as “hundreds, not thousands” in their total victims, certainly far fewer than tradition has made it seem.  If Romans had really wanted to wipe out Christianity, it would not have been hard: the Bible would have been incredibly difficult and time-consuming to produce in those days, and a concerted effort to burn all the Bibles and silence the clergy would almost certainly have succeeded (indeed, later Christians would succeed in wiping out numerous other cults), and such success would have been an enormous obstacle for a religion based on the Word of God.

Yet for Christians then and too many of them now, like ISIS or even Trump’s Capitol insurrectionists, it is they themselves who feel they are and must be the victims and it is their victimhood that justifies their own extremism violent atrocities against innocents.  Whether it is Christian terrorists in America or Muslim or Jewish ones in the Middle East, the culture of victimhood elevates them and their narratives, to the exclusion of those they target.  In the end, the mentality of those who feel they must kill and destroy to preserve God’s will (really their own interests) reveals a pitifully weak “God” and a resentful, inferiority-complex-ridden class of warriors, traits consistent from the fourth century into the twenty-first.

It is for us, then, to remember these truths, even on a day like Christmas.  As perfectly articulated by the late and singular Christopher Hitchens:

Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.

Let us close on that note, remembering how many Roman “pagans” were made offers they could not refuse.  While it is undoubtedly true many people did convert to Christianity willingly and with a true heart, many others converted “willingly” from a threat of loss of status or their livelihood; many others from threat of torture, murder, or execution.  Many were tortured and executed, many did lose their jobs.  Many, under such conditions, would succumb and convert outwardly, if not in their hearts; many others who loved their children would have raised them as Christians so as to spare them constant harassment and violent threats.  Some would have simply done publicly the bare minimum to avoid legal trouble, others publicly genuinely worship Jesus as another god and privately still worship their own gods.

Still, so it is that in a few generations, most Romans were “Christians” in a place where being a pagan had literally become a death sentence.  Under such conditions, it is doubtful a majority of converts over time were genuine or truly willing, but many of their lives were snuffed out, their voices obliterated to history.  As John Chrysostom joyfully noted in somewhat exaggerated fashion in one sermon, the written works “of the Greeks have all perished and are obliterated;” in another, “Where is Plato?  Nowhere!  Where Paul?  In the mouths of all!”

More than we would have thought in remote parts of the now officially Christian Roman Empire, some “pagans” would have persisted in their traditional beliefs, quietly and illiterately.  But their world was dying out, their heyday long gone, they were the exception, not the norm, and they leave virtually no record.  The few words from “pagans” in their twilight are wholly depressing, often learned scholars living to see their teachings banned, their books burned, ignorance and credulity reign, knowing they are part of a world where the inmates have taken over the asylum.  For one Palladas, it is a time he and his kind were “men reduced to ashes… for today everything is turned upside down,” and he asks:

Is it not true that we are dead and only seem to live, we [who worship the old gods]… Or are we alive and is life dead? (xxvi).

At least in Nixey’s if not Christianity’s account, they live on and their voices are heard and remembered.

Whatever the properly understood teachings of Christianity or any religion, let us hope that all faiths and faith leaders can one day insist on changing these rules to allow for complete tolerance and non-violence towards all other faiths and people of no faith such that no people today suffer the treatment of Nixey’s “pagans;” for even in recent years, Yazidis have suffered like this under ISIS, such that one Yazidi survivor turned Nobel laureate, Nadia Murad, wrote a memoir called The Last Girl, as in she hopes she is one of the last girls to go through such an attempted religious genocide.  In the same vein as Paul and the early Christians, ISIS saw Murad’s Yazidis as “pagans” and therefore Devil-worshippers; Christians of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries would have been proud of ISIS for assaulting the “pagan” Yazidis (indeed, Islam has borrowed much from Christianity it would have been better off not). 

Perhaps Nixey’s narrative can remind us no faith or people is exempt from the possibility of such horrid conduct meted either by or against them, and can add to the possibility that Murad’s earnest, deeply necessary plea is heard.

© 2021 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) July 31, 2021; see related June 7, 2021, article: Already in a Cyberwar with Russia, NATO Must Expand Article 5 to Include Cyberwarfare, cited by NATO LibGuide on Cyber Defence; condensed rewrite for Small Wars Journal September 24 also cited by NATO LibGuide on Cyber Defence and featured by Real Clear Defense.

SILVER SPRING/WASHINGTON—New York Times cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth’s groundbreaking This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends is one of the most important books I have ever read.  Truck bombs and missiles and massacres are hard to shut out and miss (though Americans were famously and shamefully able to shrug off and ignore death and destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan even while American troops were fighting and dying there), but Perlroth’s book tries to shock Americans into caring deeply about an invisible war in an invisible battlespace that American citizens and policymakers have been all too content to ignore, but one which Perlroth makes clear is more of a clear and present danger to us than conventional or even nuclear weapons.  Such an undertaking is undeniably a tall order, but she is more than up to the challenge.

Invisible Weapons, Invisible Threats, Invisible Vulnerabilities

The main focus of this book is the black market for cyberweapons: how that fits into the history of cyberwarfare, the U.S. government’s role in fostering that black market, and how the proverbial cat is very much out of the bag as far as our rivals, adversaries, and a host of other bad actors are concerned.  Perlroth did not have a background in cybersecurity before joining The New York Times (she did have some Silicon Valley beat reporting) but quickly teamed up with the recently-retired-from-the-Times Scott Shane—then still with the Times and one of the top national security reporters in the country—and, among covering other major national cybersecurity stories, they were the Times’s pointwoman and pointman on the Snowden/NSA saga.

Rather counterintuitively, this makes her ideal for this book, as the relevant topics are very poorly understood by the public and politicians alike and she is better able to communicate as something of a non-expert recently turned expert to other non-experts—you and me, the lay-folk—which is exactly what this pressing topic requires.

Her descriptions are methodical and in direct but riveting and colorful language (she compares bar crowds at hacker conventions to the patrons of the Star Wars Mos Eisley cantina), painstakingly going step-by-step in explaining everything from the concept of “zero-days” to the Stuxnet attack, often using colloquial analogies and the occasional well-placed expletive.

From the start, it is clear this book consumed years of her life and not always in healthy ways, that researching this topic was a massive undertaking because it has essentially not been covered before, certainly not like this or in this depth.  In fact, the zero-day/exploit market was still essentially secret when Perlroth began trying to uncover it, and it took her two years of poking, prodding, snooping, and being rebuffed at every turn before she really got anywhere in terms of solid information from an insider on the nature of the secret government market for zero-day bugs and their exploits, bugs that were defined by their being wholly unknown both by the companies that made the affected software and the customers who used and relied on it, bugs that allowed hackers to take total, undetected control of the entire software package and often many others tied to it (and, yes, if you want to know, the latest mass ransomware cyberattack from Russia’s at-the-very-least-tacit ally REvil utilized a zero-day).

That initial breakthrough source for Perlroth only involved a player long-retired from the scene, and it would take her another five years of intrepid research to answer many of the main questions she set out to answer when she first started covering the Snowden revelations fallout, when she saw sign after sign of some massive secret government market for hacking vulnerabilities but no details beyond these hints of its existence.

As you read her book, you get the sense that she is overwhelmed and not really sure how to feel about what she has been discovering, let alone know precisely how to solve these daunting problems.

But this is itself wisdom: Perlroth is trying to raise awareness about just how crazy and complicated all this is, to make the public and leaders unnerved, upset, prepared to engage far more on these issues, to demand answers to weighty questions.  And for anyone rational and reasonable reading this book, in this she succeeds wildly.

Even if Perlroth is one of the only people attempting to put all this together—her book is essentially a first draft of history—if the best companies in Silicon Valley, the best minds at the NSA, CIA, DoD, and White House (let’s not even include Congress) and those of our foreign allies and adversaries have no seriously good, deep answers for these issues, how can we expect Perlroth?  Of all the experts on this topic, she is probably the only person right now who could write a coherent narrative accessible to a wider audience and actually be allowed to publish it (the vast majority of the folks involved are off-radar or offer no comment, often tied by government non-disclosure agreements or in fear of worse, as Perlroth makes clear).

Her book is messy, all over the place, and overwhelming: which is precisely what it needs to be, precisely how to characterize these problems, and precisely the way in which they must be presented.  Anything less would sell these terrors short, giving the false impression that these threats can somehow be compartmentalized or isolated; the reality is that this really is a giant, all-encompassing asteroid hurtling at us incredibly fast, and trying to pretend it is not a mess will do a disservice to any serious attempt to defend against it.

For these reasons and Perlroth’s skill at storytelling, Perlroth’s messy narrative more than works and engages and accurately—more than anything else I have seen penetrate major news coverage—alerts us to the scope of the messy threat we face.  She chronicles how, for so long, we have been flying blind, willfully ignoring or downplaying these threats, whether in government or in business, and, even today, critical infrastructure like our power grid, dams, and nuclear reactors are running insanely outdated, highly vulnerable software.  As she puts it:

We were plugging anything we could into the internet, at a rate of 127 devices a second. We had bought into Silicon Valley’s promise of a frictionless society.  There wasn’t a single area of our lives that wasn’t touched by the web.  We could now control our entire lives, economy, and grid via a remote web control.  And we had never paused to think that, along the way, we were creating the world’s largest attack surface.

At the NSA—whose dual mission is gathering intelligence around the world and defending U.S. secrets—offense had eclipsed defense long ago. For every hundred cyberwarriors working on offense, there was only one lonely analyst playing defense…

The biggest secret in cyberwar—the one our adversaries now know all too well—is that the same nation that maintains the greatest offensive cyber advantage on earth is also among its most vulnerable.

As just one example, she notes how a bipartisan group of top former energy, intelligence, and national security officials were secretly warning Congress all the way back in 2010 that a major, successful attack on just the U.S. power grid “would result in widespread outages for at least months to two years or more, depending on the nature of the attack” (yes, that is years, plural).  Penning much of her book during the heights of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, Perlroth notes COVID-19 pushing us even more online as a society means that, now, “our attack surface, and the potential for sabotage, has never been greater.”

At no time does her narrative feel hyperbolic (if anything, the threat could be said to be so dire as to have language fail to do it justice, but Perlroth succeeds quite well in creating appropriate levels of tension of dread even in a non-fiction book; perhaps her deal with the FX television network to produce a TV series based on her book may succeed at further penetration through a different media platform that can reach an even wider audience).  Her readers will come away with the sense that there is a near-certainty that something terrible will happen soon enough—either intentionally or unintentionally—unless a drastic global effort is undertaken and a paradigm-shift occurs.

And similarly as I have noted when discussing a 2020 UK parliamentary report on Russian designs against the UK, with Russian (and other) cyberwarfare, so, too, both must American society within itself unite on these issues and America unite with its allies (through NATO, as I have argued).  Much like the COVID-19 pandemic response in the era of Trump, everyone and everything are pretty much on their own in fighting cyberwarfare; this cannot be the approach of free nations any longer.  Furthermore, these cyberweapons’ development and their sale and spread happen almost entirely in the shadows, those making the decisions facing little accountability, let alone any public scrutiny; while the cloak-and-dagger realm of spycraft, secret weapons, and cyberwarfare can hardly simply be made anywhere near fully transparent, this modus operandi, too, cannot continue as is.

No Easy Answers

Yet there are no easy solutions to these problems, and you would be right to distrust Perlroth if she claimed to have them (she wisely does not).  But her recommendations that we start coordinating among the different parts of our society—utilities, government, private sector, communities—start having serious public conversations, feel out some baseline international consensus, and that individuals in their personal and professional lives take basic cybersecurity steps (like two-step authentication) are as decent places to start as any.

So do not expect Perlroth to give detailed solutions; that is not her role.  But in raising crucial questions that are simply not properly being addressed in the public or private sectors, by leaders or by citizens, she may yet play the role of a Cassandra who, rather than be doomed to have her warnings ignored, instead helps frame a crucial long-overdue discussion at a time when there is little time to spare.

The questions are not just weighty and challenging policy-wise, but also philosophically.  How do we balance security and freedom, openness and security in the internet age?  How do we balance offensive and defensive cyber-capabilities?  To what degree and when can governments justify capabilities based on keeping vulnerabilities in widely-used, critical software secret from the software vendors and clients (including many major companies and institutions)?  How on earth can a measure of transparency, security, and trust be injected into the lucrative zero-day black market?  How can we punish cyber-transgressions even as we maintain the same or similar capabilities?  How can we deal with hackers operating in a grey zone of principles of freedom utilizing illegal intrusions?  How can we make sure cutting-edge cyberweapons we develop, use, and share with allies will not be used to oppress or even come to be used against us? 

No easy solutions, indeed.  But Perlroth repeatedly asks and muses on these questions and wants us all to do the same.

As you read the book, you will also appreciate how much Perlroth’s narrative is very much present with us day after day, week after week, month after month as the topics, events, and figures she covers demonstrate how their effects still reverberate today and keep popping up in unfolding events.  This has the effect of making her book concerned with and relevant to the past, present, and future, and her work and insight will stay with you long after you finish her book and keep forcing their ways back into the front-and-center of your brain (and should do the same for leaders and policymakers around the world).

Since her book’s publication, we have already seen the Colonial Pipeline, JBS, and Kaseya ransomware cyberattacks from Russian-based (and Russian-tolerated) hacking groups along with rampant coronavirus disinformation magnifying an already terrible pandemic and “killing people” (to quote President Biden); all these topics have been covered for the Times by Perlroth.  And Perlroth was all over the Israeli firm NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware being used for nefarious purposes long before the recent stories and a report from Amnesty International from just these past few weeks that have garnered a lot of attention with what are less-novel revelations and more confirmations of Perlroth’s fine investigative work on that topic for her book, with any reader of it hardly being surprised by any of the latest NSO information now being discussed.  And these bigger stories do not even touch upon many, many lesser-reported cyberattacks.

All in all, this is a groundbreaking book that not only towers above other cybersecurity works as the only current somewhat-full history of cyberwarfare and the cyberweapons black market mixed in with appropriate security policy concerns, it is a clarion call for the world that business as usual is taking us down something of a cyber-Guns of August path.  Whether nations and the world and, ultimately, the general public are up to the challenge in demanding a far less risky and far less dangerous cyber-domain, it will be to the degree that they understand the issues so excellently presented by Perlroth and prioritize them as she tells us we must.

Issues? (Or Why This Book Could Not Have Been Written by a Techie)

Some tech experts have brought attention to what they claim are technical inaccuracies with particular details in the book.  I am not qualified to weigh in on those, but of the few criticisms I have examined, with some, Perlroth has responded convincingly and seems to have successful challenged her critics’ framing of the issues or even their reading comprehension of her work (indeed, some seem to have easily fallen into their own errors of mansplaining—in spite of the general overuse of that term—which is not surprising given the notoriously male-dominated and toxic nature towards women of the tech, Silicon Valley, and cybersecurity worlds, as well as of social media.  While correcting reviewers’ misunderstandings in some cases, in others, Perlroth has taken some constructive criticism and worked to include corrections and even to give frustrated credit to some less-constructive criticism.

I even found one example of an individual—cybersecurity researcher Kevin Finisterre—who was mad that he was not included or credited in her narrative when he feels he should be, but no narrative ever includes everyone and in this case Perlroth retorted that one of her sources apparently left out Finisterre for, perhaps, self-serving purposes, and in a secretive, reclusive world with all kinds of bruised egos like the one Perlroth is covering, some omissions are going to be inevitable (in this case she has apologized and pledged to include the Finisterre in the next edition).  The fact of the matter is that no history book ever includes all relevant names and when sifting through research, data, and information, there must always be material, people, and events that are sifted out of inclusion to make books manageable.  Especially with first drafts of history, completeness is hard to come by, but a work can still be definitive if it is practically the only game in town and still makes a solid effort to be thorough, well-researched, and coherent, and, even allowing for some errors, Perlroth excels in all three areas.

In such narratives of living history, the individuals presented often do not like how they are portrayed or lower- and mid-tier folks balk at not being included or included more, many in these categories often choking on their egos and unable to see their blind spots, but that is why a journalist and storyteller is there: not to portray the individual as he wants to be portrayed but to put him in the wider context and show how his self-perception lines up with the bigger picture.  That hardly means Perlroth’s choices are above criticism or that Finisterre specifically is unreasonable at feeling left out (I am unable to conclusively judge either way), but to characterize her errors as particularly egregious or the book in total as sloppy just seems unfair and inaccurate.  Given the high quality of her overall narrative and the dizzying array of events, characters, and locations involved, I am willing to give her the benefit of the doubt in most of these contested cases as a rule of thumb.

Not so others: things got so toxic for Perlroth on social media that she felt compelled to quit Twitter not long after her book came out, but thankfully she eventually returned.  Her book’s harshest non-social-media reviews seem to come from obscure techie blogs almost no one outside of the tech field would know (and many within would not) and Perlroth seems to have credibly pushed back against a good number of these worst detractors.  Adding credence to her defense is that most major new outlets that have reviewed her or mentioned her book have done so quite favorably, even if a few of these had their qualms and quibbles, which begs the question: if the obscure techies are right, why aren’t some of the biggest outlets in the news business echoing these framings and criticisms when they clearly have access to experts with similar pedigrees?  Never known collectively for their wonderful people skills or temperaments, the angry hardcore techies and their takes on Perlroth’s book serves as a reminder as to why it took a non-techie like Perlroth to produce this narrative that her antagonists never were able to before her book was published (skills like gaining access to important and secretive folk and making them like and trust you are crucial).

Regardless, neither individually nor collectively do any of these alleged and/or admitted errors take away from the most important thrusts, revelations, themes, or messages of the book and none reduce its singularity, urgency, or overall considerable strength.  Most readers will not know or understand these technical aspects (and most of the time Perlroth is dumbing down extremely complex phenomena with fun analogies because that is the only way the vast majority of us could even approach a worthwhile understanding), but they will still get the same overall big-picture sense of how government, business, society collectively, and individuals individually are all caught up in this and how urgent these problems are with or without adjustments related to these possible or actual technical errors.

Conclusion: Putting the Must in “Must-Read”

These seemingly minor admitted and potential technical issues, some distracting typos, and a perplexing decision (and confounding for policy wonks and researchers like myself) to have a sources/notes section at the end presented in narrative form—as opposed to footnotes where it is easy to tie a factoid to a source or note—aside, this book is a monumental achievement, one that both should change, further spark, and guide a debate that should be front and center in our present national agendas.

Perlroth has indeed presented a remarkable first draft of a living and unfolding history, the questions now are “Do we learn from it and heed its warnings?” and “What do we do armed with this indispensable knowledge?”  Trying to figure out the answers to those questions makes the technical spats discussed above seem like schoolyard squabbles, and how we rise—or fall—to the key challenges posed by Perlroth are likely to define much of our world for the rest of this century and beyond.

© 2021 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my related article on the UK Parliament’s singularly excellent Russia report, my proposal to reform NATO’s Article 5 to explicitly include cyberwarfare, and my discussion as a member of a panel with author and Senior International Correspondent for The Guardian, Luke Harding, on Russia’s bad behavior

Also see see related June 7, 2021, article: Already in a Cyberwar with Russia, NATO Must Expand Article 5 to Include Cyberwarfare, cited by NATO LibGuide on Cyber Defence; condensed rewrite for Small Wars Journal September 24 also cited by NATO LibGuide on Cyber Defence and featured by Real Clear Defense and my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!