Posts Tagged ‘World War II’
“It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives”*…
As the U.S. curdles and Ukraine twists in the wind, a look back.
In the summer of 1941, World War II has been raging for almost two years; still, of course, the U.S.– while it had emerged as the “armory” of the Allies– was a non-combatant. A majority of Americans favored continuing to “to help Britain, even at the risk of getting into the war.” But stoked by isolationists and Nazi sympathizers (like Henry Ford and Father Coughlin), a third of Americans were opposed.
Into this gamy situation, Dorothy Thompson, the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany, back in 1934, released a powerful– and ultimately very influential– essay in Harpers…
It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.
It is preposterous to think that they are divided by any racial characteristics. Germans may be more susceptible to Nazism than most people, but I doubt it. Jews are barred out, but it is an arbitrary ruling. I know lots of Jews who are born Nazis and many others who would heil Hitler tomorrow morning if given a chance. There are Jews who have repudiated their own ancestors in order to become “Honorary Aryans and Nazis”; there are full-blooded Jews who have enthusiastically entered Hitler’s secret service. Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind.
It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation—the generation which was either young or unborn at the end of the last war. This is as true of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans as of Germans. It is the disease of the so-called “lost generation.”
Sometimes I think there are direct biological factors at work—a type of education, feeding, and physical training which has produced a new kind of human being with an imbalance in his nature. He has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline. He has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions. His body is vigorous. His mind is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected.
At any rate, let us look round the room…
[And so, in a way both enlightening and entertaining, she does, concluding…]
It’s fun—a macabre sort of fun—this parlor game of “Who Goes Nazi?” And it simplifies things—asking the question in regard to specific personalities.
Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes—you’ll never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis.
Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them.
Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi. It’s an amusing game. Try it at the next big party you go to.
Eminently worth reading in full: “Who Goes Nazi?” from @harpers.bsky.social.
(And in a very effective testament to Thompson’s technique, Rusty Foster– who anchored a recent (R)D— asks “Who Goes AI?“)
See also: “The MAGA Theory of Art,” from Art in America, which reviews the roles that arts and design played in Nazi Germany, then compares them to what’s transpiring today. Also eminently worth reading in full; a sample:
There is a fable that persists in even themost respectable quarters, perhaps because it has retained its power to shock for more than half a century. Get any card-carrying liberal into a sufficiently confessional mood and she will tell you, sotto voce, that there was one domain in which the Nazis were perversely and chillingly formidable: the domain of the aesthetic…
… It is tempting, then, to take one look at the shambolic flailing of the Trump administration—the ham-handed takeover of the Kennedy Center, the tawdry gilding of the Oval Office, the AI slop, the women with too much filler, the men on too many steroids who boast about eating too much meat, the tweets with their erratic capitalization, the general air of carnival grotesquerie—and conclude, as Karl Marx did, that history repeats itself “first as tragedy, then as farce.”
Of course, there are obvious continuities between MAGA and its antecedent on the Rhine. “Fascism is theater,” Jean Genet wrote of the Nazis, and it is hard to think of a politician with more theatrical flair than Trump, who adores Andrew Lloyd Webber and once harbored ambitions of becoming a Broadway producer. If Hitler fostered “the modern era’s first full-blown media culture,” as the film scholar Eric Rentschler claims, then Trump is surely responsible for the postmodern era’s first full-blown social media bonanza. He has the Führer’s instinct for pageantry, the Führer’s gift for glister and grandiosity.
Trump’s resentments, too, recall those of his forbears. In his study of Nazi art policy, the historian Jonathan Petropoulos writes that art collecting was important to top brass in the party because it served “as a means of assimilation into the traditional elite.” Much to their chagrin, their political ascendency had failed to confer the cultural capital they craved; now they had to seize prestige by other means. The MAGA gentry is more resigned; Trump and his lackeys more or less accept their status as philistines and content themselves with exacting revenge on the gatekeepers, yet their air of wounded arrivism is all too familiar.
Here it may seem that the similarities come to an end… While Trump has hosted motley rallies, and even made one deflating attempt at a military parade, he has yet to produce any of the disciplined displays that so effectively reduced the bodies of their participants to raw geometries.
Above all, MAGA lacks the aesthetes who are dutifully trotted out as evidence of fascism’s scandalous refinement. Who is the MAGA Hugo Boss, the MAGA Leni Riefenstahl, the MAGA Knut Hamsun, the MAGA Gabriele D’Annunzio, the MAGA Ezra Pound? Mar-a-Lago has more in common with any suburban Cheesecake Factory than it does with the monumental austerities of Albert Speer…
(Image above: source)
* Dorothy Thompson
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As we cast our eyes around, we might recall that it was on this date in 1917 that the U.S. entered World War I, formally declaring war against Germany and entering the conflict in Europe, which had been raging since the summer of 1914. It ended in November of 1918– one of the deadliest conflicts in history, resulting in an estimated 15 to 22 million military and civilian casualties and genocide (and via the movement of large numbers of people, a major factor in the catastrophic Spanish flu pandemic that followed).
The Paris Peace Conference of 1919–1920 imposed settlements on the defeated powers. Under the Treaty of Versailles, Germany lost significant territories, was disarmed, and was required to pay large war reparations to the Allies. The dissolution of the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires led to new national boundaries and the creation of new independent states including Poland, Finland, the Baltic states, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia.
The League of Nations was established to maintain world peace, but failed to manage instability during the interwar period, contributing to the outbreak of World War II in 1939. Indeed, those unresolved tensions in the aftermath of World War I created the conditions for the rise of fascism in Europe (and militarism in Japan).
“Leadership of a world-economy is an experience of power which may blind the victor to the march of history”*…
Benjamin Braun and Cédric Durand on the citical tension between “factions of capital” in the second Trump administration…
Hegemonic decline, according to the historian Fernand Braudel [see here and here], has historically come with financialization. Amid declining profitability in production and trade, capital owners increasingly shift their assets into finance. This, according to Braudel, is a “sign of autumn,” when empires “transform into a society of rentier-investors on the look-out for anything that would guarantee a quiet and privileged life.”
This specter of Braudelian decline haunts key figures in the second Trump administration. “Tell me what all the former reserve currencies have in common,” Scott Bessent, now Treasury Secretary, mused during the campaign. “Portugal, Spain, Holland, France, UK … How did they lose reserve currency status?” The answer: “They got highly leveraged and could no longer support their military.” While Bessent, a former hedge fund manager, officially denies a program of dollar depreciation, speculators have been driving down the US exchange rate since Trump took office in January. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is the author of a 2019 report on “American investment in the 21st century,” in which he lambasts Wall Street for its shareholder value regime that “tilts business decision-making towards returning money quickly and predictably to investors rather than building long-term corporate capabilities.” His views on finance are shared by self-styled Republican “populists” such as Josh Hawley.
This residual hostility toward Wall Street has marked an ideological rupture in the first months of Trump’s second administration; on the one hand, the President’s “Liberation Day” tariffs have roiled financial markets; on the other, Wall Street has retaliated with financial panics, working to discipline the White House. Whether a coalition of self-styled MAGA populists and Trump’s electoral base—which expects rising living standards and secure jobs delivered via a tariff-led revival of US manufacturing and a deportation-led tightening of the labor market—is sustainable remains a central question of the second Trump administration. Fossil fuel firms and defense-oriented tech companies such as Palantir and Anduril find much to like in militarized nativism. But Trump’s trade policy clearly harms private finance and big tech, two sectors that have consistently supported Trump and expect to be rewarded. Attacking those sectors threatens to alienate the very factions of US capital that have heaved him back into office.
For these capital factions, US decline is relative and can—cue Japan—be managed in a gracious manner. As Giovanni Arrighi observed in 1994, finance has always intermediated, and thus benefited from, hegemonic transitions. Today, asset management titans profit both from re-balancing US portfolios away from the declining hegemon and from offering fast-growing capital pools from China and other rising Asian economies access to US assets. Big tech, meanwhile, aims at general control over knowledge and economic coordination. It has much to lose from geoeconomic fragmentation that could cut it off from access to data, reduce its network effects, increase the cost of its material infrastructure, and push non-aligned polities to pursue digital sovereignty.
In its efforts to revive the American Empire, the Trump administration will thus have to delicately balance the interests of both manufacturing-oriented nativists and capital factions whose interests span the globe. Navigating these competing agendas will pose an enormous challenge to the longevity of the Trumpian coalition—and the stability of the global financial system as a whole…
Eminently worth reading in full: “America’s Braudelian Autumn,” from @phenomenalworld.bsky.social.
* Fernand Braudel
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As we debate development, we might recall that it was on this day in 1940 that Government of Vichy France, the collaborationist ruling regime/government in Nazi-occupied France during World War II, was established.
Of contested legitimacy, it took shape in Bordeaux under Marshal Philippe Pétain as the successor to the French Third Republic and was finally settled in the town of Vichy. The government remained in Vichy for four years, but was escorted to Germany in September, 1944 after the Allied invasion of France. I t then operated as a government-in-exile until April 1945, when the Sigmaringen enclave was taken by Free French forces. Pétain was permitted to travel back to France (through Switzerland), by then under control of the Provisional French Republic, and subsequently put on trial for treason.
“Good librarians are natural intelligence operatives”*…
The estimable Richard Ovenden (see here, here, here, and here) on Elyse Graham’s new Book and Dagger…
At dinner parties, it has always been a struggle to get random people to be interested in my work as a librarian. Indeed, throughout my career, I have battled with stereotypes of my profession. We are often pigeonholed as being nerdy, rules obsessed, tweed wearing, bespectacled, and, above all, “dusty.” At least “nerd” has been transformed from negative to positive since the rise of digital technologies over the past few decades. Sometimes, with strangers, I have used the term “archivist” to describe what I do, but that hasn’t helped much.
So my heart rate soared—as would that of any librarian like me—at the idea suggested by the mere title of Book and Dagger that librarians and archivists could be involved in secret and dangerous tasks in a war, risking their lives and taking an active role in fighting against an evil tyrannous oppressor. Perhaps those tweeds are just camouflage.
During World War II, as shown in Elyse Graham’s new book Book and Dagger, librarians, archivists, and scholars played an unexpected and important role in the intelligence services of the United States (and to a lesser extent, of Great Britain). She writes with verve and pace, making this book an easy and enjoyable one to read. Best of all, Graham argues that the humanities—and those librarians and scholars that came from within the discipline—brought special expertise, experience, and attributes that were critical to the direction of strategy, the ultimate victory of the war, and the defense of democracy in the face of tyranny…
[Ovenden unpacks the turf covered…]
… Graham’s study is certainly heartwarming for any librarian, archivist, or humanities scholar seeking confirmation that the skills necessary for their day jobs are directly transferrable to the defense of the realm and of democracy, gaining a utility beyond education, scholarship, and learning to that most visceral of tasks—the waging of war. Also heartwarming is the value which Graham’s account places on the infrastructure of the humanities—the libraries and archives themselves, and the sheer task of acquiring, managing, and preserving knowledge: buying books can keep us free!
Today, the humanities are in a funding crisis, and libraries and archives are being actively defunded by the state. Graham’s book is thus a timely reminder that the skills that are taught and honed in the humanities, in academic departments and in the libraries and archives that support humanistic study, are of vital importance not just to study the past. In fact, they are crucial to defend us in the present, so that we all might enjoy a secure and free future. That’s something I am willing to fight for…
The crucial roles played by unexpected combatants in World War II: “Secrets in the Stacks,” from @richove.bsky.social in @publicbooks.bsky.social.
(Image above: source)
* “Good librarians are natural intelligence operatives. They possess all of the skills and characteristics required for that work: curiosity, wide-ranging knowledge, good memories, organization and analytical aptitude, and discretion.” – Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All
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As we check it out, we might recall that it was on this date in 1953 that the first public television station in the U.S.– KUHT, operated in Houston, Texas by the University of Houston– began operation. It was first station to broadcast under an educational non-profit license in the United States, one of the earliest member stations of National Educational Television (which was succeeded by PBS) and offered the university’s first televised college credit classes. Running 13 to 15 hours weekly, these telecasts accounted for 38 percent of the program schedule, mostly airing at night so that students who worked during the day could watch them. By the mid-1960s, with about one-third of the station’s programming devoted to educational programming, more than 100,000 semester hours had been taught on KUHT.
“It may be doubted that there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world as have these lowly organized creatures”*…
Michael Adno on the third generation of a Florida family that coaxes earthworms from the forest floor…
A hint of blue on the horizon meant morning was coming. And as they have for the past fifty-four years, Audrey and Gary Revell stepped out their screen door, walked down a ramp, and climbed into their pickup truck. Passing a cup of coffee back and forth, they headed south into Tate’s Hell—one corner of a vast wilderness in Florida’s panhandle where the Apalachicola National Forest runs into the Gulf of Mexico. Soon, they turned off the road and onto a two-track that stretched into a silhouette of pine trees. Their brake lights disappeared into the forest, and after about thirty minutes, they parked the truck along the road just as daylight spilled through the trees. Gary took one last sip of coffee, grabbed a wooden stake and a heavy steel file, and walked off into the woods. Audrey slipped on a disposable glove, grabbed a bucket, and followed. Gary drove the wooden stake, known as a “stob,” into the ground and began grinding it with the steel file [each pass of which is a “roop”]. A guttural noise followed as the ground hummed. Pine needles shook, and the soil shivered. Soon, the ground glowed with pink earthworms. Audrey collected them one by one to sell as live bait to fishermen. What drew the worms to the surface seemed like sorcery. For decades, nobody could say exactly why they came up, even the Revells who’d become synonymous with the tradition here. They call it worm grunting.
Audrey and Gary Revell took to each other in high school. In 1970 when Gary graduated, he asked Audrey to be his wife, and they married at his grandfather’s place down in Panacea, about thirty miles south of Tallahassee. For his entire life, he’d lived on an acre six miles west of Sopchoppy, Florida, in an area known as Sanborn. The place is set deep in the heart of the Apalachicola National Forest, a vast expanse of flatwoods and swamp that covers over half a million acres struck through with rivers. It’s where he and his siblings grew up in an old church building, where his great-grandfather had settled after finding his way up Syfrett Creek into the wilderness. It’s where Audrey and Gary settled after their wedding. “I was only sixteen, so I feel like I grew up here,” Audrey told me. Soon after, they started looking for ways to make ends meet, and Gary suggested, “We might ought to look into that worm thing.”
His family was already deep into worm grunting. Three generations preceded him, and by 1970, his uncles Nolan, Clarence, and Willie weren’t only harvesting the worms to sell as bait but were working as brokers with their own shops that distributed the critters throughout the South. It didn’t hurt that Audrey fell in love with it immediately. The work was seasonal, busiest in spring. During other parts of the year, their family trapped for a living, dug oysters, logged, raised livestock, and set the table with what they grew in their yard or caught in the water or in the forest. “That’s how we learned the woods,” Gary said. “We went in every creek, water hole, pig trail. You name it.”
By the 1970s, the cottage industry had reached its peak. Then Charles Kurault arrived in 1972 to film a segment for his eponymous CBS show, On the Road with Charles Kurault. The attention led the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to start regulating the harvest of worms, investigating unreported income, and implementing permit requirements. Back then, the sound produced by grunters in the first hours of daylight was as common as birdsong in this forest, and hundreds of thousands of worms were carried out in cans. Folks who once turned to grunting to make ends meet seasonally were soon in the woods year-round during that decade, competing to summon the bait to the surface and sell to brokers among the counties set between the capital city and the Apalachicola River. Millions of worms left those counties bound for fishing hooks across America. Money followed the pink fever, but as with any rush, the demand eventually dimmed as commercial worm farms caught on and soft, plastic lures became popular.
By that point, Audrey and Gary had decided to shape their own outfit. His uncles had told them, You ought to just think about keeping all that money to yourself. The couple had grown tired of depending on others for work. So, they set up their own shop full time, cultivated clients as far away as Savannah, and delivered bait all over the South, driving it themselves, or sending it north in sixteen-ounce, baby blue containers via Greyhound buses. “All the money was coming our way, what little we made,” said Gary. “We struggled with it for a long time, because when you get off the grid like that and try to do it for yourself and you’re young, it’s hard.”
I wanted to know what spending their life in the woods hunting for worms meant, but I also wanted to know where this mysterious, artful tradition came from. In the UK, there are a handful of worm-charming competitions and festivals in Devon, Cornwall, and Willaston that began in the 1980s and another in Canada that started in 2012. I’d heard of similar events in east Texas, of people using pitchforks and spades as well as burying one stick in the ground and rubbing it with another to coax worms up to the surface. Later, I even found a newspaper clipping from 1970 reporting on the first International Worm Fiddling Championship, in Florida. I searched for a deep well of literature on the practice but found nothing. Certainly, worm grunting predated the Revells. But why did rubbing a stick stuck in the ground with a metal file conjure earthworms? The only way to understand was to follow the Revells into the woods…
A fascinating profile: “The Worm Charmers,” from @michaeladno in @oxfordamerican.
(In his childhood in a different part of Florida, your correspondent employed a variation on the techniques described and can testify that they do, in fact, work.)
* Charles Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms
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As we grunt, we might recall that it was on this date in 1939, at Hyde Park, that President Franklin D. Roosevelt hosted a luncheon for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of England. Despite his mother’s horror, FDR wanted to show the King and Queen an old-fashioned, American style picnic– featuring hot dogs. In the U.S. to raise support U.S. for Britain’s cause in World War II, the royal couple at least appeared to enjoy the meal.
“The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many people”*…
Bret Devereaux makes the case that fascists and fascist governments, despite their positioning, are generally bad at war…
I am using fascist fairly narrowly – I generally follow Umberto Eco’s definition (from “Ur Fascism” (1995)). Consequently, not all authoritarian or even right-authoritarian governments are fascist (but many are). Fascist has to mean something more specific than ‘people I disagree with’ to be a useful term (mostly, of course, useful as a warning).
First, I want to explain why I think this is a point worth making. For the most part, when we critique fascism (and other authoritarian ideologies), we focus on the inability of these ideologies to deliver on the things we – the (I hope) non-fascists – value, like liberty, prosperity, stability and peace. The problem is that the folks who might be beguiled by authoritarian ideologies are at risk precisely because they do not value those things – or at least, do not realize how much they value those things and won’t until they are gone. That is, of course, its own moral failing, but society as a whole benefits from having fewer fascists, so the exercise of deflating the appeal of fascism retains value for our sake, rather than for the sake of the would-be fascists (though they benefit as well, as it is, in fact, bad for you to be a fascist).
But war, war is something fascists value intensely because the beating heart of fascist ideology is a desire to prove heroic masculinity in the crucible of violent conflict (arising out of deep insecurity, generally). Or as Eco puts it, “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life, but, rather, life is lived for struggle…life is permanent warfare” and as a result, “everyone is educated to become a hero.”2 Being good at war is fundamentally central to fascism in nearly all of its forms – indeed, I’d argue nothing is so central. Consequently, there is real value in showing that fascism is, in fact, bad at war, which it is.
Now how do we assess if a state is ‘good’ at war? The great temptation here is to look at inputs: who has the best equipment, the ‘best’ soldiers (good luck assessing that), the most ‘strategic geniuses’ and so on. But war is not a baseball game. No one cares about your RBI or On-Base percentage. If a country’s soldiers fight marvelously in a way that guarantees the destruction of their state and the total annihilation of their people, no one will sing their praises – indeed, no one will be left alive to do so.
Instead, war is an activity judged purely on outcomes, by which we mean strategic outcomes. Being ‘good at war’ means securing desired strategic outcomes or at least avoiding undesirable ones. There is, after all, something to be said for a country which manages to salvage a draw from a disadvantageous war (especially one it did not start) rather than total defeat, just as much as a country that conquers. Meanwhile, failure in wars of choice – that is, wars a state starts which it could have equally chosen not to start – are more damning than failures in wars of necessity. And the most fundamental strategic objective of every state or polity is to survive, so the failure to ensure that basic outcome is a severe failure indeed.
Judged by that metric, fascist governments are terrible at war. There haven’t been all that many fascist governments, historically speaking and a shocking percentage of them started wars of choice which resulted in the absolute destruction of their regime and state, the worst possible strategic outcome. Most long-standing states have been to war many times, winning sometimes and losing sometimes, but generally able to preserve the existence of their state even in defeat. At this basic task, however, fascist states usually fail…
[Devereaux enumerates examples…]
… This is, however, not an invitation to complacency for liberal democracies which – contrary to fascism – have tended to be quite good at war (though that hardly means they always win). One thing the Second World War clearly demonstrated was that as militarily incompetent as they tend to be, fascist governments can defeat liberal democracies if the liberal democracies are unprepared and politically divided. The War in Ukraine may yet demonstrate the same thing, for Ukraine was unprepared in 2022 and Ukraine’s friends are sadly politically divided now. Instead, it should be a reminder that fascist and near-fascist regimes have a habit of launching stupid wars and so any free country with such a neighbor must be on doubly on guard.
But it should also be a reminder that, although fascists and near-fascists promise to restore manly, masculine military might, they have never, ever actually succeeded in doing that, instead racking up an embarrassing record of military disappointments (and terrible, horrible crimes, lest we forget). Fascism – and indeed, authoritarianisms of all kinds – are ideologies which fail to deliver the things a wise, sane people love – liberty, prosperity, stability and peace – but they also fail to deliver the things they promise.
These are loser ideologies. For losers. Like a drunk fumbling with a loaded pistol, they would be humiliatingly comical if they weren’t also dangerous. And they’re bad at war…
“On the Military Failures of Fascism,” from @BretDevereaux.
See also: “How Did the Nazis Really Lose World War II?” (source of the image above)
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As we penetrate posturing, we might recall that it was on this date in 1940, in the early days of The Battle of the Atlantic during World War II, that British cruiser HMS York stopped the 3,359-ton German steamer Arucas 50 miles south of Iceland. Arucas’ crew of 42 Arucas scuttled the ship.
Arucas had sailed out of Vigo, Spain on 9 Feb in an attempt to break the Allied blockade.
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