The End of WW2 in Germany

Nazi Germany expert Ian Kershaw wrote about the last months of the war in Germany. So much suffering and needless loss.

The Guardian reviewed this book here:
"...if German society remained basically Nazified, was there so little resistance to foreign occupation after "liberation"? These two riddles continue to preoccupy historians, and now Ian Kershaw, the doyen of English scholars of the Third Reich, seeks the answers."

Here is the NY Times review.

THE END

The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944-45

By Ian Kershaw. Illustrated. 564 pp. The Penguin Press. $35.

A-Bombs

The book The Bomb: A New History, by Stephen M. Younger, this link  is now out in paperback.    

One Effect of World War I

The New York Times today reviewed Alan Kramer's "Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War." Montefiore, the Times reviewer, called it an "important" book and a "stimulating, scholarly and shrewd book." Pretty high praise. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/books/review/Sebag-Montefiore-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin (signin may be required) http://tcdlocalportal.tcd.ie/pls/public/staff.detail?p_unit=histories_humanities&p_name=alkramer

http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/HistoryOther/MilitaryHistory/WWI/?view=usa&ci=9780192803429

http://www.tcd.ie/history/euroseminar.php. Here's what the web site says: Professor Kramer scarcely needs any introduction. Co-author, with John Horne, of the award-winning German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (2001) and author of The West German Economy 1945-1955 (1991) along with many, many articles, Professor Kramer’s latest book, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War has just been published by Oxford University Press.

Montefiore, the Times reviewer, has a Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Sebag_Montefiore

Jeane Kirkpatrick & the Neocons

Making War to Keep Peace, by Jeane Kirkpatrick, HC/HarperCollins

Even if forcibly spreading democracy were feasible, is it actually desirable, the NYT Reviewer , Geoffrey Wheatcroft, asked. "...almost everywhere there are free elections, the American-backed side tends to lose."

We're backing the wrong side, what d'ya think.

The WSJ said this: "Her blunt style and strong defense of liberty will be missed. "
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009365

Here's apparently the text of Kirkpatrick's speech to the 1984 Republican convention:
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1996/conventions/san.diego/facts/GOP.speeches.past/84.kirkpatrick.shtml

Hubris, deception, and death - David Halberstam

The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, By David Halberstam

On September 26, 2007, it's #25 on the Amazon best seller list.

Here's a comment by Glenn Greenwald on Salon about Halberstam's findings:
http://nx5.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/04/24/halberstam_patriotism/index.html

Amazon quotes Publishers Weekly this way:

At the heart of David Halberstam's massive and powerful new history of the Korean War is a bloody, losing battle fought in November 1950 in the snow-covered mountains of North Korea by outnumbered American GIs and Marines against the Chinese Communist Army.Halberstam's villain is not North Korea's Kim Il Sung or China's Chairman Mao or even the Soviet Union's Josef Stalin, who pulled the strings. It's the legendary general Douglas MacArthur, the aging, arrogant, politically ambitious architect of what the author calls the single greatest American military miscalculation of the war, MacArthur's decision to go all the way to the Yalu [River] because he was sure the Chinese would not come in.Much of the story is familiar. What distinguishes this version by Halberstam (who died this year in a California auto crash) is his reportorial skill, honed in Vietnam in Pulitzer-winning dispatches to the New York Times. His pounding narrative, in which GIs and generals describe their coldest winter, whisks the reader along, even though we know the ending.Most Korean War scholars agree that MacArthur's sprint to the border of great China with a Siberian winter coming on resulted in a lethal nightmare. Though focused on that mountain battle, Halberstam's book covers the entire war, from the sudden dawn attack by Kim Il Sung's Soviet-backed North Koreans against the U.S.-trained South, on June 25, 1950, to its uneasy truce in 1953. It was a smallish war but a big Cold War story: Harry Truman, Stalin and Mao, Joe McCarthy and Eisenhower, George C. Marshall and Omar Bradley, among others, stride through it. A few quibbles: there were no B-17 bombers destroyed on Wake Island the day after Pearl Harbor, as Halberstam asserts, and Halberstam gives his minor characters too much attention.At first MacArthur did well, toughing out those early months when the first GIs sent in from cushy billets in occupied Japan were overwhelmed by Kim's rugged little peasant army. MacArthur's greatest gamble led to a marvelous turning point: the invasion at Inchon in September, when he outflanked the stunned Reds. After Inchon, the general headed north and his luck ran out. His sycophants, intelligence chief Willoughby and field commander Ned Almond, refused to believe battlefield evidence indicating the Chinese Communists had quietly infiltrated North Korea and were lying in wait. The Marines fought their way out as other units disintegrated. In the end, far too late, Truman sacked MacArthur. Alive with the voices of the men who fought, Halberstam's telling is a virtuoso work of history.

http://www.amazon.com/Coldest-Winter-America-Korean-War/dp/1401300529/ref=pd_sim_b_3/103-9830571-0401420

Here's a link to David Halberstam's thoughtful words on uses and misuses of history:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/08/halberstam200708?currentPage=2.

Halberstam reports that MacArthur did not spend the night in Korea after reviewing the troops; in fact, he did not spend the night there during the entire time he commanded. That's hubris.

Plutonium

Plutonium: A History of the World's Most Dangerous Element, By Jeremy Bernstein

This is a bibliography of Bernstein work; he has been active in NY Review of Books:
http://www.nybooks.com/authors/110
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/bernstein.html



Publishers Weekly - as quoted on Amazon

Physicist and former New Yorker staff writer Bernstein presents a scientifically rigorous (equations and all) but clearly written explanation of the recondite reasons why plutonium is supremely suited for bomb-making material—and little else. From the discovery of uranium in 1789 to the Manhattan Project, Nazi attempts at a nuclear bomb and the post-WWII efforts of the U.S.S.R. to become a nuclear power, Bernstein reviews the element's storied past. Although the discovery of the atom's structure has been covered before, Bernstein spins an accessible, insightful description of how the great scientists Curie, Bohr, Rutherford and Fermi, among others, deconstructed the atom through a combination of individual brilliance, a spirit of collaboration and serendipity. He also brings his acquaintance with several Los Alamos scientists (he interned at the laboratory in 1957) to the less canonical subject of the scientific and engineering problems inherent to building a working nuclear bomb.

http://www.amazon.com/Plutonium-History-Worlds-Dangerous-Element/dp/0309102960/ref=pd_sim_b_2/103-9830571-0401420

The Arms Race

Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race, By Richard Rhodes

Here's what it says at Amazon:
"Rhodes reveals the early influence of neoconservatives and right-wing figures such as Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz. We see how Perle in particular sabotaged the Reykjavik meeting by convincing Reagan that mutual nuclear disarmament meant giving up his cherished dream of strategic defense (the Star Wars system). Rhodes’s detailed exploration of these and other events constitutes a prehistory of the neoconservatives, demonstrating that the manipulation of government and public opinion with fake intelligence and threat inflation that the administration of George W. Bush has used to justify the current “war on terror” and the disastrous invasion of Iraq were developed and applied in the Reagan era and even before."

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375414134/ref=pe_pe_5050_6735740_pe_snp_134

Chalmers Johnson

The trilogy by Chalmers Johnson

• Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire - http://books.google.com/books?id=tSrKgv8UIBsC&pg=PP1&dq=inauthor:Chalmers+inauthor:Johnson&sig=yBjR-MHnYh1pnLo3clwMyIwMHJg#PPA5,M1
  
• The Sorrows of Empire - http://books.google.com/books?id=WqwPZGBnf3IC&dq=inauthor:Chalmers+inauthor:Johnson
  
• Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic - http://www.radioopensource.org/chalmers-johnson-and-his-nemesis/
  

The publisher is Metropolitan

Johnson said about his book The Sorrows of Empire:
"I suggested the sorrows already invading our lives, which were likely to be our fate for years to come: perpetual war, a collapse of constitutional government, endemic official lying and disinformation, and finally bankruptcy. At book’s end, I advocated reforms intended to head off these outcomes but warned that ‘failing such a reform, Nemesis, the goddess of retribution and vengeance, the punisher of pride and hubris, waits impatiently for her meeting with us.’ … "

http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people4/CJohnson/cjohnson-con0.html

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0115-08.htm - Johnson has the courage to say that America dominates the world by the use of our military.

See www.jpri.org:
CHALMERS JOHNSON is president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, a non-profit research and public affairs organization devoted to public education concerning Japan and international relations in the Pacific. He taught for thirty years, 1962-1992, at the Berkeley and San Diego campuses of the University of California and held endowed chairs in Asian politics at both of them. At Berkeley he served as chairman of the Center for Chinese Studies and as chairman of the Department of Political Science. His B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in economics and political science are all from the University of California, Berkeley.

Cold War Biographer

George Kennan: A Study of Character, by John Lukacs, Yale

We could learn from Kennan, as we embark on a new Cold War with Iran.

Peter Irons

I like Peter Irons' thinking.

War Powers: How the Imperial Presidency Hijacked the Constitution, by Peter Irons, Metropolitan Books