Whose empire?

Mark Mazower's book Hitler's Empire gets reviewed in the Washington Post. ("Axis of Incompetence") Sounds like a good book, but the review itself is noteworthy because of how popularity-seeking it is. Mazower gives it a snappy title, the Post puts a snappy headline, and the body reads like the Nazis wore blue suits and red ties.

The reason: Nazi articles of faith amounted to grotesque fantasies about how the New Order would function, and they couldn't possibly survive prolonged, or even relatively short, clashes with reality.

An interesting fixation on photography and humiliation, meant to evoke Abu Ghraib.

In the midst of a widening conflict, German officials methodically photographed and examined Polish families, discriminating in favor of those who appeared to have "the soundest German blood." All of which was guaranteed to stir resentment. Even Colonel-General Johannes von Blaskowitz, one of the German commanders in Poland, noted: "The idea that one can intimidate the Polish population by terrorism and rub their noses in the dirt will certainly prove false."

Will have to check out the incidents that the review describes. Have never really encountered foced pseudo-medical photography before (but of course it makes total sense if they did).

Possible assignment in combination with book-review paper, or for own paper about historicity.

Ollie North, "history guy"?

Jeebus help me.... C&L presents Ollie North defending the appeasement dustup. THIS IS THE LAST PERSON WHO SHOULD TALK ABOUT GIVING SHIT TO AMERICAN ENEMIES. Ahem. Sorry about the screaming. But the stupid, it burns. C&L comment:

For someone who was lucky not to have spent the better part of the last two decades making license plates, he’s got some nerve touching this topic. This is the guy who oversaw the arms for hostages deal with Iran in 1985 (among other crimes), right in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war in which the US was actively and openly arming and supporting Saddam Hussein. Ollie North didn’t just talk with Iran at a time they were our enemy in a proxy-war, he actually helped to arm them, bypassing Congress by violating the Boland Amendment to help fund an illegal war in Nicaragua.

Lacking even a shred of credibility, Fox News’ “history guy” is to the truth in the historical record what Dick Cheney is to gun safety. He shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the subject, and anyone who believes a word of what he says about it is a fool.

Word!

yelling "appeasement"

They always do it, and they're always wrong. Peter Scoblic in the LA Times:

if there is anything that has been discredited by history, it is the argument that every enemy is Hitler, that negotiations constitute appeasement, and that talking will automatically lead to a slaughter of Holocaust-like proportions. It is an argument that conservatives made throughout the Cold War, and, if the charge seemed overblown at the time, it seems positively ludicrous with the clarity of hindsight.

He goes through the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Carter, and Reagan administration examples. It's insane. These people are warmongering psychopaths at every turn. They do not change their tune. Our foreign policy successes have for 60 years come when they are ignored, either by Democrats or by their own party. Even in Bush II:

The Bush administration has been little different, refusing for years to talk to North Korea or Iran about their nuclear programs because it wanted to defeat evil, not talk to it. The result was that Pyongyang tested a nuclear weapon and Iran's uranium program continued unfettered. (By contrast, when the administration negotiated with Libya -- an act that its chief arms controller, John Bolton, had previously derided as, yes, "appeasement" -- it succeeded in eliminating Tripoli's nuclear program.)

But nooooo, can't talk to Iran. What ignorance.

more appeasement

Yglesias links a study from the Army War College - Jeffrey Record's "Appeasement Reconsidered." Very cool report on how the events of 1938 have been utilized in postwar America to justify aggressive reactions to possible foreign policy challenges.

From the conclusion:

The problem with seeing Hitler in Stalin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Saddam Hussein is that it reinforces the presidential tendency since 1945 to overstate threats for the purpose of rallying public and congressional opinion, and overstated threats in turn encourage resort to force in circumstances where deterrence, containment, even negotiation (from strength) might better serve long-term U.S. security interests. Threats that are, in fact, limited tend to be portrayed in Manichaean terms, thus skewing the policy choice toward military action, a policy choice hardly constrained by possession of global conventional military primacy and an inadequate understanding of the limits of that primacy.

If the 1930s reveal the danger of underestimating a security threat, the post-World War II decades contain examples of the danger of overestimating a security threat.

Assign this as an optional reading during Hitler week, to remind how history is used in public discourse.

note to self

In the context of this previously linked post on Pantload's souces, Dave includes a quote from Griffin's Nature of Fascism that I'll like to quote in my intro. It's on the point of not falling into the trap of taking their words at face value, and looking instead at their actions:

[A]pproaching fascism primarily in terms of political theory and the history of ideas is misleading because it detracts attention from concrete events which constitute the real 'nature of fascism' and moreover euphemizes the immense human suffering caused when nebulous fascist ideals and policies became translated into gruesome political realities.

Yep.

textual associations

AS presents a visual chart of textual links within the Bible. Works out to look like a pretty rainbow.

Would be useful to show students to remind them of the coherency of a work over time, consistency of themes, etc. And then to suggest to them that they can apply this as an analytical tool to any text we read: How internally consistent is it? What are the common themes?