The History Book Thread! looks like I need to set up space for a Nazi shelf

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sleep with the vicious: Apr 2, 2010

Grand Fromage posted:

Yang Jisheng's work is equally good. But it's not like there's a fundamentally different take or anything. All that stuff happened, it's well documented, plenty of living people remember it. Even the Party eventually admitted it happened during reform and opening in the 80s, though I wouldn't go talking about it today. There's not really a moral position you can arrive at other than disdain for the people who were responsible for tens of millions of deaths. Anything else would be denialism.

It's not denialism to say that Frank Dikotter, a leader of the Victims Of Communism foundation which explicitly includes and mourns the Nazis in its count of victims, has a bad faith perspective on the reasons behind certain actions that Mao and co took which is often just "they were so drat evil and didn't want people to be free", and it comes through in his writing. I'm not denying any of the outcomes and I don't have any chapters off the top of my head that I disagree with. I gave the example of Kotkin, who calls Stalin "the despot" every second paragraph, as a historian with a right wing background and perspective who is better able to recognize his own ideology and put his subjects actions in proper context.

I haven't read Tombstone yet but I'm also interested in this topic and open to recommendations.

# ? Oct 13, 2022 03:23

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# ? May 15, 2024 19:34

Epicurius: Apr 10, 2010; College Slice

It's been a while since I read the books, but I don''t seem to remember that Dikotter says Mao did what he did because he was "so drat evil and didn't want people to be free". The books tend to make clear that the Great Leap Forward was due to Mao's overoptimistic views of collectivization and his push for rapid industrialization, and that the Cultural Revolution was a way for Mao to deflect criticism against him to groups and individuals that he thought were hostile (and then it took on a life of his own and were encouraged by factions like the "Gang of Four" and their supporters, who wanted to take and hold onto power as Mao got sick.

I mean, Mao was pretty drat evil, but he did the stuff he did for a reason, and Dikotter discusses that, even if he spends more attention on the effect that these programs had on the people than the government elite.

# ? Oct 13, 2022 04:56

Sailor Viy: Aug 4, 2013; And when I can swim no longer, if I have not reached Aslan's country, or shot over the edge of the world into some vast cataract, I shall sink with my nose to the sunrise.

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

It does a good job upending a lot of ahistorical assumptions because it�s very questionable in an academic and research sense and is much more of an ideological polemic than history. There�s a reason why, with only a couple exceptions, the editorial reviews for the book are not from anyone in the field of Anthropology or evolutionary science and the one big name that stands out is James C. Scott who has a lot research in the field but is 85 years old now and has always written with a very open and clear argument in favor of Anarchism. Most every other review is by some publication like the Atlantic, Jacobin, New Statesman, etc.

I would infinitely rather recommend a title like The Horse, the Wheel, and Language by David Anthony.

Do you have a link to any thorough/interesting critiques of Dawn of Everything? Reading it I was definitely vacillating between "this is so cool" and "hmm, that seems like a reach", even though I'm broadly sympathetic to the authors' politics.

# ? Oct 13, 2022 08:21

Mantis42: Jul 26, 2010

Politics aside, Dikotter is a much better writer than Yang. I put down The World Turned Upside Down because there was hardly any narrative or interesting analysis, it was just a constant rotating list of long named political organizations being formed and disbanded and long lists of names of people being appointed to run said organizations. It's really dull.

# ? Oct 13, 2022 09:28

neongrey: Feb 28, 2007; Plaguing your posts with incidental music.

Chairman Capone posted:

One of the craziest things I've seen is a few years ago, when I was in Guatemala, some book store was selling a defense of United Fruit. That was crazy to see. Wish I could remember what it was.

that seems like a book where they just put it there so that anyone who tries to buy it just wakes up in the hospital, but wow i'm curious what that would even say .

quote:

The first bonus episode of Blowback S2 is about the coup in Guatemala which covers some of the United Fruit stuff.

Ah, cool, I think I only ever listened to the first season of that, thanks.

Epicurius posted:

Try Peter Chapman's "Bananas".

And I'll check that out too, thanks.

# ? Oct 13, 2022 09:35

Shimrra Jamaane: Aug 10, 2007; Obscure to all except those well-versed in Yuuzhan Vong lore.

Sailor Viy posted:

Do you have a link to any thorough/interesting critiques of Dawn of Everything? Reading it I was definitely vacillating between "this is so cool" and "hmm, that seems like a reach", even though I'm broadly sympathetic to the authors' politics.

Well I don�t have any specific writings critiquing that book, it is just months old after all. But what in particular stands out in my mind is its very unorthodox descriptions of very early city states such as Ur and other Mesopotamian settlements. This work, like some others, runs head first into a critical flaw where some academic tries to transpose modern concepts of class or caste back to a time way before that would even be understood. The argument then follows that �well back in those days there was far less of a hierarchical societal structure and people lived freer lives.� Which can be true in a literal sense but extremely wrong in a functional sense regarding how these early civilizations saw themselves, their place in the world, and how they were governed. These early cites are often times treated as some blank canvas in that some people use pieces evidence to claim that they were the doom of the free and unrestricted natural being of human existence. And others will claim that they were actually the culmination of a needs based collective organization that was in those more innocent days the peak of societal equality only to later be corrupted.

Essentially the main thesis of this book and other works like it is that societal structures that we recognize as civilization are unnaturally imposed on humanity basically as a longview critique against the current capitalist system. Which again is true in a literal sense in that all civilization IS a social construct that we collectively agree to make work. It�s not something dictated by some unfeeling deterministic universe. BUT it brushes aside the very very long, and critically, VARIED development of humanity across the world and ironically imposes far more conscious and borderline conspiratorial explanations on why things happened then actually occurred. It�s a polemic that ironically removes human agency for the large majority while at the same time attributing �unnatural� choice and invented impositions to a smaller group of elites. Which again, is very much transposing one type of modern view of the world way way back.

Shimrra Jamaane fucked around with this message at 13:21 on Oct 13, 2022

# ? Oct 13, 2022 13:15

Grand Fromage: Jan 30, 2006; L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?

sleep with the vicious posted:

It's not denialism to say that Frank Dikotter, a leader of the Victims Of Communism foundation which explicitly includes and mourns the Nazis in its count of victims, has a bad faith perspective on the reasons behind certain actions that Mao and co took which is often just "they were so drat evil and didn't want people to be free", and it comes through in his writing. I'm not denying any of the outcomes and I don't have any chapters off the top of my head that I disagree with. I gave the example of Kotkin, who calls Stalin "the despot" every second paragraph, as a historian with a right wing background and perspective who is better able to recognize his own ideology and put his subjects actions in proper context.

I haven't read Tombstone yet but I'm also interested in this topic and open to recommendations.

Hadn't heard about that, I know nothing about the dude beyond his work. Personally I don't care, not interested in defending everything he's ever said and he wouldn't be the first guy with some lovely political opinions to do good history. But if you do care then just read Yang, it's fine.

There aren't any other great recommendations for the topic in English really since nobody else has had access to the sources they did. And nobody will again for the foreseeable future, unfortunately.

# ? Oct 13, 2022 19:22

sleep with the vicious: Apr 2, 2010

Grand Fromage posted:

Hadn't heard about that, I know nothing about the dude beyond his work. Personally I don't care, not interested in defending everything he's ever said and he wouldn't be the first guy with some lovely political opinions to do good history. But if you do care then just read Yang, it's fine.

There aren't any other great recommendations for the topic in English really since nobody else has had access to the sources they did. And nobody will again for the foreseeable future, unfortunately.

Fair enough, and I didn't mean to come across like I was attacking you, more that I just wish Dikotters approach was different because it is really disappointing to me that there aren't more in depth books on such an important period of history.

# ? Oct 13, 2022 20:09

smr: Dec 18, 2002

sleep with the vicious posted:

Fair enough, and I didn't mean to come across like I was attacking you, more that I just wish Dikotters approach was different because it is really disappointing to me that there aren't more in depth books on such an important period of history.

I did not get this vibe from Dikotter's books, just to present a countering opinion. They read as pretty straight-forward descriptions of "things that actually happened" with good sourcing on that and "here's what the people involved actually said/did", also sourced well. I really did not detect a baseline "communism is evil, let's work backwards from that into how I'll present these historical records" attitude in any of the three books.

I would appreciate, if you wanted to spend the time, you pointing out any evidence of this in the books. I really want that not to come across as a call-out, because it is not, I am open to re-examining my recollection of the books but they're all huge so any specific examples would be welcome. Or if there's a summary article or something out there that covers this that you agree with, I'd take the link.

# ? Oct 13, 2022 21:59

Minenfeld!: Aug 21, 2012

History is in interpretation not a list of "things that actually happened."

# ? Oct 13, 2022 22:03

smr: Dec 18, 2002

Minenfeld! posted:

History is in interpretation not a list of "things that actually happened."

Sigh; fine: he scrupulously defines incidents as happening to the best of the historical record's ability to describe them. I do not have any evidence of him deliberately leaving facts out or misconstruing them. He goes to great lengths to define and explain his sources and their limitations as he perceives them throughout the books.

# ? Oct 13, 2022 22:31

Chairman Capone: Dec 17, 2008

neongrey posted:

that seems like a book where they just put it there so that anyone who tries to buy it just wakes up in the hospital, but wow i'm curious what that would even say .

I think the gist was just that the coup was all the CIA�s doing and the company had nothing to do with it. Which, talk about a convenient scapegoat�.

# ? Oct 13, 2022 23:01

CrypticFox: Dec 19, 2019; "You are one of the most incompetent of tablet writers"

Sailor Viy posted:

Do you have a link to any thorough/interesting critiques of Dawn of Everything? Reading it I was definitely vacillating between "this is so cool" and "hmm, that seems like a reach", even though I'm broadly sympathetic to the authors' politics.

https://notevenpast.org/a-false-dawn/ I think this is a pretty good concise critique, written by a UT anthropology professor. The core issue he has with the book is summed up in this quote from the review:

quote:

Despite denouncing �cherry-picking�, the book � though written by two distinguished scholars� consciously avoids the standard academic protocols of the academic world today. They carried out this project as a labor of love alongside their more routine academic publications. They therefore felt able to disregard some of the conventions when necessary. They declare that if they had actively cited and refuted specialists in different fields that they traverse during the course of this wide-ranging survey they would have written a book or two or three times as long as the current one.

Instead, they have mainly mapped what they believe happened and pointed out flaws in others� arguments only where these reflected more widespread misconceptions. Cavalier disregard allows them to introduce their own surmises and thus give birth to their own family of misconceptions. As it is, �imagine� is one of the most widely used verbs in this book. The limits to others� imagination are frequently invoked as evidence. For example, �it is hard to imagine� that Montesquieu did not learn of Native American political ideas from the delegations that came to Paris. In general, the authors consciously accept or massage the evidence for arguments that they support, while criticizing, deriding � or more often, ignoring, those they dislike. Equally, there is occasionally presentation of established academic findings with a �Gee-whiz, whoda thunk it!� air reminiscent of that triumph of American marketing, Ripley�s Believe it or Not.

But their disregard of established protocols goes further more than once. Take the claim that contemporary American office workers work more hours �overall� than medieval European serfs did. This turns out to be based on the sociologist Juliet Schor�s book, cited without page number. But while Graeber and Wengrow refer to �serfs� even their incomplete endnote refers to �peasants�, Schor actually refers to adult male laborers (The Dawn n.17, Chapter 4; Schor, 1991: 45). Not all male peasants were serfs: and outdoor work in the fields or mines demands considerable effort that cannot be long-sustained. Nor does the weather allow it. It is therefore not comparable to contemporary American machine-supported and indoor work. Having made a claim unsupported by even their own shaky reference, Graeber and Wengrow then cite it as a proven fact and even �know� what the �average medieval baron� would have considered a reasonable demand upon his serfs. Neither baron nor serf are mentioned in the source cited! This does not prevent the authors from wrapping themselves in the authority of the Social Sciences when needed and parading hundreds of endnotes to awe the reader.

...

Ultimately therefore, this is a stimulating but flawed book. It compels the reader to grapple with novel ideas and connects far-flung themes. It forces ideas that that usually siloed in their little scholarly niches into conversation with each other. But the reader is also forced into researching and fact-checking across many diverse fields. The process is slow and exhausting, if educative. A good survey � even a polemical one � should not demand so much of its readers.

For a lengthier critique, a historian at Stanford wrote a 15 page critique that covers a variety of issues he has with the methodology and conclusions of the book: https://www.academia.edu/69494234/R...ory_of_Humanity

There's also a number of other critical reviews out there, here's two other critical reviews by three anthropologists: https://mronline.org/2021/12/20/the-dawn-of-everything-gets-human-history-wrong/.

Here's another one by a Stanford archaeologist, which is focused on his disagreement with *The Dawn of Everything's* interpretation of archaeological evidence: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/720603 (It's less negative than some of the other ones, and more narrow).

There's some others out there too, these are the ones I could find with a quick search.

# ? Oct 14, 2022 02:41

Sailor Viy: Aug 4, 2013; And when I can swim no longer, if I have not reached Aslan's country, or shot over the edge of the world into some vast cataract, I shall sink with my nose to the sunrise.

CrypticFox posted:

https://notevenpast.org/a-false-dawn/ I think this is a pretty good concise critique, written by a UT anthropology professor. The core issue he has with the book is summed up in this quote from the review:

For a lengthier critique, a historian at Stanford wrote a 15 page critique that covers a variety of issues he has with the methodology and conclusions of the book: https://www.academia.edu/69494234/R...ory_of_Humanity

There's also a number of other critical reviews out there, here's two other critical reviews by three anthropologists: https://mronline.org/2021/12/20/the-dawn-of-everything-gets-human-history-wrong/.

Here's another one by a Stanford archaeologist, which is focused on his disagreement with *The Dawn of Everything's* interpretation of archaeological evidence: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/720603 (It's less negative than some of the other ones, and more narrow).

There's some others out there too, these are the ones I could find with a quick search.

Cheers!

# ? Oct 14, 2022 06:13

Ras Het: May 23, 2007; when I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child - but now I am a man.

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

Well I don�t have any specific writings critiquing that book, it is just months old after all. But what in particular stands out in my mind is its very unorthodox descriptions of very early city states such as Ur and other Mesopotamian settlements. This work, like some others, runs head first into a critical flaw where some academic tries to transpose modern concepts of class or caste back to a time way before that would even be understood. The argument then follows that �well back in those days there was far less of a hierarchical societal structure and people lived freer lives.� Which can be true in a literal sense but extremely wrong in a functional sense regarding how these early civilizations saw themselves, their place in the world, and how they were governed. These early cites are often times treated as some blank canvas in that some people use pieces evidence to claim that they were the doom of the free and unrestricted natural being of human existence. And others will claim that they were actually the culmination of a needs based collective organization that was in those more innocent days the peak of societal equality only to later be corrupted.

Essentially the main thesis of this book and other works like it is that societal structures that we recognize as civilization are unnaturally imposed on humanity basically as a longview critique against the current capitalist system. Which again is true in a literal sense in that all civilization IS a social construct that we collectively agree to make work. It�s not something dictated by some unfeeling deterministic universe. BUT it brushes aside the very very long, and critically, VARIED development of humanity across the world and ironically imposes far more conscious and borderline conspiratorial explanations on why things happened then actually occurred. It�s a polemic that ironically removes human agency for the large majority while at the same time attributing �unnatural� choice and invented impositions to a smaller group of elites. Which again, is very much transposing one type of modern view of the world way way back.

Isn't this pretty much the argument of the book? That society has taken many surprising forms over many millenia, and identifying any clear patterns and projecting them into pre-history is blinkered and usually ideologically motivated? It really sounds like you're actually repeating the message of the book, not criticising it

# ? Oct 14, 2022 09:55

Shimrra Jamaane: Aug 10, 2007; Obscure to all except those well-versed in Yuuzhan Vong lore.

Ras Het posted:

Isn't this pretty much the argument of the book? That society has taken many surprising forms over many millenia, and identifying any clear patterns and projecting them into pre-history is blinkered and usually ideologically motivated? It really sounds like you're actually repeating the message of the book, not criticising it

Yeah that�s not an unfair take on my post, I�m not very articulate, but I really should emphasize that some things they use as evidence are just incorrect.

# ? Oct 14, 2022 13:12

Ras Het: May 23, 2007; when I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child - but now I am a man.

Yeah even to a complete layman a lot of the evidence in the book looks like "this is what COULD HAVE happened", but it felt like a very conversational sort of book, a comparison of arguments and an expansion of horizons. The general thesis is "human society has been more diverse than we've thought"

# ? Oct 14, 2022 17:24

Shimrra Jamaane: Aug 10, 2007; Obscure to all except those well-versed in Yuuzhan Vong lore.

Yeah that�s my issue. I mean it�s not some abomination to the historical discourse. But it�s closer to a Malcolm Gladwell sort of book that somehow pushed through and got a lot more hype.

# ? Oct 15, 2022 15:09

Lawman 0: Aug 17, 2010

I'm like halfway through and enjoying it but it is clearly something that should be understood critically.

# ? Oct 15, 2022 23:55

Fate Accomplice: Nov 30, 2006

I just finished listening to G.J. Meyer's The Borgias - the Hidden History and it was fun and informative, but may as well been subtitled "it's highly unlikely anything you heard about the Borgias really happened"

Next up is J. North Conway's Queen of Thieves.

# ? Oct 16, 2022 22:52

Shimrra Jamaane: Aug 10, 2007; Obscure to all except those well-versed in Yuuzhan Vong lore.

Unfortunately in real life Alexander VI did not get in an epic fist fight with a Florentine assassin.

# ? Oct 17, 2022 02:45

Kull the Conqueror: Apr 8, 2006; Take me to the green valley,
lay the sod o'er me,
I'm a young cowboy,
I know I've done wrong

I finished Hobsbawm's The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848 the other day. It may have been the driest book I've ever read but having known nothing about the period I found it very informative. Anybody else get down with it?

# ? Oct 17, 2022 20:10

PatMarshall: Apr 6, 2009

Yes. It's a good book, as are the rest of the series (although the 20th century volume is probably too close to the material). Obviously it's a Marxist history and has some blind spots, but I really enjoy Hobsbawm.

# ? Oct 17, 2022 20:49

Kaiser Schnitzel: Mar 29, 2006; Schnitzel mit uns

Kull the Conqueror posted:

I finished Hobsbawm's The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848 the other day. It may have been the driest book I've ever read but having known nothing about the period I found it very informative. Anybody else get down with it?

I didn't find that dry at all, and it was really helpful to me to read a Marxist viewpoint on history. The others in the series are mostly great, the last one or two have a bit of a blind spot around the realities of the Soviet Union, but he was a really brilliant and important historian.

# ? Oct 18, 2022 00:56

Railing Kill: Nov 14, 2008; You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

Lawman 0 posted:

I'm like halfway through and enjoying it but it is clearly something that should be understood critically.

# ? Oct 18, 2022 01:46

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

I thought it was pretty moist. If a historian makes amusing references to the novels/movies of the time period, I generally won't find the book dry.

# ? Oct 18, 2022 01:51

grassy gnoll: Aug 27, 2006; The pawsting business is tough work.

Any recommendations for a history of currency that isn't by goldbugs or crypto bros?

# ? Oct 18, 2022 07:32

Chairman Capone: Dec 17, 2008

grassy gnoll posted:

Any recommendations for a history of currency that isn't by goldbugs or crypto bros?

It's not a universal history of currency, in fact it's very specific, but I would highly recommend The Currency of Socialism: Money and Political Culture in East Germany by Jonathan R. Zatlin. I read it in grad school and it's one of the books that's stuck to mind since.

# ? Oct 18, 2022 14:22

plogo: Jan 20, 2009

grassy gnoll posted:

Any recommendations for a history of currency that isn't by goldbugs or crypto bros?

I'm probably a bit too into the weeds for this one, but a couple of recent ones you might find interesting are:

The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes by Stefan Eich
Money and Empire: Charles P. Kindleberger and the Dollar System by Perry Mehring
How Global Currencies Work: Past, Present, and Future by Barry Eichengreen, Arnaud Mehl, and Livia Chitu

This is not directly about currency, but the best narrative account of US central banking in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s is Confidence Game by Steven Soloman. Similarly not directly what you asked for, but this podcast with Tim Baker goes into the history of the politics of currency in the US from a lefty perspective https://thedigradio.com/podcast/inflation-politics-with-tim-barker/ .

There is not a lot of consensus about how this stuff works so be prepared to look at this history from a variety of theoretical / ideological angles.

In general, this stuff can be pretty dry, so from a readability perspective I would recommend the Perry Mehring and Steven Soloman books.

plogo fucked around with this message at 15:44 on Oct 18, 2022

# ? Oct 18, 2022 15:40

plogo: Jan 20, 2009

Chairman Capone posted:

It's not a universal history of currency, in fact it's very specific, but I would highly recommend The Currency of Socialism: Money and Political Culture in East Germany by Jonathan R. Zatlin. I read it in grad school and it's one of the books that's stuck to mind since.

I would also recommend Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution by Rebecca Spang along these lines as a more specific history.

# ? Oct 18, 2022 15:42

Kull the Conqueror: Apr 8, 2006; Take me to the green valley,
lay the sod o'er me,
I'm a young cowboy,
I know I've done wrong

Kaiser Schnitzel posted:

I didn't find that dry at all, and it was really helpful to me to read a Marxist viewpoint on history. The others in the series are mostly great, the last one or two have a bit of a blind spot around the realities of the Soviet Union, but he was a really brilliant and important historian.

Yeah I was probably being a little unfair with the dry comment; the majority of the time, I was captivated by his characterizations of class and ideology. There were occasional specifics that completely glazed my brain, but maybe it's because I have not often read all-encompassing histories like this very much.

# ? Oct 18, 2022 16:44

team overhead smash: Sep 2, 2006; Team-Forest-Tree-Dog:
Smashing your way into our hearts one skylight at a time

grassy gnoll posted:

Any recommendations for a history of currency that isn't by goldbugs or crypto bros?

It�s kind of a tangent to what you�re asking for but I found Debt, the first 5,000 years interesting as it covered the periods and conditions when currency broke down. Should cover some of the gaps and alternatives people used.

# ? Oct 18, 2022 17:31

Mokelumne Trekka: Nov 22, 2015; Soon.

not sure if this was already brought up but Frank Dik�tter has a new book out next month, China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower.

I recently read Wild Swans which ends near Mao's death. although Wild Swans is a personal account and a speed-run through historical events, it was a good summary and I think Frank Dik�tter's new book will pair well with it - speaking as someone relatively unread on 20th century Chinese history

# ? Oct 18, 2022 18:00

Silver2195: Apr 4, 2012

team overhead smash posted:

It�s kind of a tangent to what you�re asking for but I found Debt, the first 5,000 years interesting as it covered the periods and conditions when currency broke down. Should cover some of the gaps and alternatives people used.

How accurate is this considered? Much like The Dawn of Everything, I�ve seen a few economists and/or historians saying that Graeber gets a lot wrong in it.

# ? Oct 18, 2022 18:14

Shimrra Jamaane: Aug 10, 2007; Obscure to all except those well-versed in Yuuzhan Vong lore.

Richard J Evans and his book The Pursuit of Power is basically a more detailed and academically updated version of Eric Hobsbawm�s books on the 19th century. I couldn�t recommend it enough.

And Richard Evans is a huge fan of Hobsbwam and especially his important role in the evolution of historiography even if he doesn�t agree on some ideological things. Man wrote a giant biography on him.

# ? Oct 18, 2022 18:22

grassy gnoll: Aug 27, 2006; The pawsting business is tough work.

Thanks for the recommendations, y'all. I'm always down for recommendations that are related but not necessarily dead on, and it's one of the reasons I like asking for recs in this thread.

# ? Oct 19, 2022 22:47

Fate Accomplice: Nov 30, 2006

Fate Accomplice posted:

Next up is J. North Conway's Queen of Thieves.

finished this and Isaacson's The Code Breaker. Queen of Thieves was bland and unexciting, and the Code Breaker was dry - the actual events surrounding CRISPR's discovery weren't super dramatic, just a lotta back and forth about who gets credit for what, who submitted which paper when, etc. Important stuff, certainly, but not super gripping.

Next up is Richard Rhodes' Energy - a Human History.

# ? Oct 19, 2022 23:41

smr: Dec 18, 2002

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

Richard J Evans and his book The Pursuit of Power is basically a more detailed and academically updated version of Eric Hobsbawm�s books on the 19th century. I couldn�t recommend it enough.

And Richard Evans is a huge fan of Hobsbwam and especially his important role in the evolution of historiography even if he doesn�t agree on some ideological things. Man wrote a giant biography on him.

The Pursuit of Power was fantastic and I say that as a big Hobsbawm fan. I dare say the actual writing in Pursuit is better.

# ? Oct 20, 2022 05:19

Shimrra Jamaane: Aug 10, 2007; Obscure to all except those well-versed in Yuuzhan Vong lore.

It would be criminal to mention Richard Evans and not bring up that his mammoth three part magnum opus on the Third Reich remains the definitive historical account for the period. There have definitely been some continued dives into Third Reich research in the decade since the final volume came out that fleshes out details that had been opaque but it still absolutely holds up scholastically.

Also the man�s brutal takedown of Brandon Simms� 2019 biography on Hitler is terrific reading.

https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/27/hitler-only-the-world-was-enough-and-hitler-a-life-review

quote:

�Hitler was a socialist,� has become a mantra for the �alt-right� in the US as it seeks to discredit Democratic politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Dinesh D�Souza�s book The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left expounded this claim at length in 2017, comparing points of the Nazi party�s 1920 programme with policies put forward by modern Democrats. So, anyone who claims to be a socialist is really a Nazi who wants to set the country on the road to totalitarianism, war and genocide. Obamacare is only the start; enslavement and death will be the end. It�s a claim that has spread through the Republican party and has been echoed by Donald Trump Jr.

Now it has found its way across the Atlantic in the form of Brendan Simms�s new book, the central argument of which is that �Hitler�s principal preoccupation throughout his career was Anglo-America and global capitalism, rather than the Soviet Union and Bolshevism�. Everything in his life can be traced back to this obsession. �Hitler wanted to establish what he considered racial unity in Germany by overcoming the capitalist order and working for the construction of a new classless society.� Throughout his career, �Hitler�s rhetoric� was �far more anti-capitalist than anti-communist�. Simms asserts �the centrality of the British Empire and the United States in the gestation of Mein Kampf�, just as he claims of Hitler�s long unpublished Second Book that �the main focus of the text was the overwhelming power of Anglo-America, and especially of the United States�.

Hitler has been the subject of a string of major biographies, from those by Alan Bullock and Joachim Fest to, most recently, Ian Kershaw and Volker Ullrich. But they have all, Simms writes, got him wrong: �The extent to which he was fighting a war against �international high finance� and �plutocracy� from start to finish has not been understood at all.� Now he has come along to set us all right.

There are good reasons, however, why the overwhelming consensus of historical scholarship has rejected any idea that Hitler was a socialist. Simms emphasises the violence of Nazi stormtroopers in the early 1930s against German conservatives rather than socialists and communists, but in fact the latter made up the overwhelming majority of the 200,000 or so opponents of Nazism who were thrown into concentration camps during Hitler�s first year in power. As for Mein Kampf, it was the threat of communism and socialism that dominated the political part of the text, in which Hitler expounded his belief that �the Bolshevisation of Germany � means the complete annihilation of the entire Christian-western culture�. In similar fashion the main focus of the Second Book was not the US, which is mentioned only on a handful of pages, but the need for �living-space� in eastern Europe and German claims to Italian South Tyrol.

The central planks in the socialist platform have always been the belief that capitalism oppresses the mass of the people and needs to be overthrown, or at least moderated and regulated in their interest. Simms claims that �what Hitler did very effectively� was �to nationalise German industrialists by making them instruments of his political will�. But this was not economic or financial control exercised in the interests of the people, nor did Hitler nationalise industry or the banks in any meaningful sense of the word. Rather, he set a political course for rearmament as part of his drive to war that pushed industrialists such as Thyssen and Krupp to devote ever more resources to arms production in the interests of increasing their profits. The result was heightened exploitation of the workers, as the overheating of war production forced them even before 1939 to work longer hours without extra pay. This was not socialism, whatever else it was.

Simms�s reduction of virtually all the major events in the history of the Third Reich to a product of anti-Americanism even extends to episodes such as the nationwide pogrom of the Reichskristallnacht in November 1938, when thousands of Jewish businesses and synagogues were destroyed and 30,000 Jewish men put into concentration camps. Apparently this was caused by �Roosevelt�s hostility to Hitler and his defence of the Jews�. The invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 was launched in order �to strike at Britain, and to deter the United States � Barbarossa was to be a campaign of conquest and annihilation, for reasons more to do with Anglo-America than the Soviet Union itself�. Even the Holocaust, we should not be surprised to learn, was �primarily driven � by his fear of Britain and the United States�.

All this is nonsense, and indeed, Simms is forced to contradict himself by the sheer weight of the evidence against his thesis. The invasion of the Soviet Union was, he concedes, �part of a much broader ideological war against Bolshevism�: �a struggle between two world views�, as Hitler put it. He admits that Hitler �was not completely opposed to all forms of capitalism�, only �unproductive� ones: in other words Jewish-owned capital, as with, for example, department store chains � he forced Jewish owners out but did not close them down. Interviewed by the Daily Express correspondent Sefton Delmer in 1931, Hitler said: �My job is to prevent the millions of German unemployed from coming under communist influence.� He did not even mention America in outlining his foreign policy aims to the journalist.

Time and again, Simms uses rhetorical sleight of hand to underscore his claim that the US was the main focus of Hitler�s foreign policy by referring to �Anglo-America� when he is in fact just talking about Britain. He quotes a proclamation from Hitler saying on New Year�s Day 1944 that the war was being fought against the �Bolshevik-plutocratic world conspirators and their Jewish wire-pullers�; a few lines later this has become in Simms�s words a struggle against �Anglo-American imperialism�, and all mention of the Bolsheviks has disappeared. Yet Hitler was quite clear about the issue: �Everything I do is directed against Russia,� he said.

Simms claims that Hitler was engaged in �a war of annihilation against Anglo-Saxons, the Jews and their Bolshevik puppets�. But there was no war of annihilation against �Anglo-Saxons�; indeed, it was striking that when in 1944-45 the camps were emptied as the Red Army advanced, British, American and French prisoners were relatively well treated, while the evacuation of Slavs and the few remaining Jews turned into death marches in which tens of thousands were murdered.

The military conduct of the war in Simms�s view was also directed against the US: even �the drive on Stalingrad, like the entire war, was primarily driven by the contest against Anglo-America�. But contrary to Simms�s denial of the fact, Stalingrad held a special significance for Hitler because of its name. Pursuing his claim to the centrality of �Anglo-America� in the Nazi war effort, Simms declares that the capitulation of axis forces in Tunisia in May 1943 �was a much greater disaster than Stalingrad, with well in excess of 130,000 Wehrmacht personnel taken prisoner, many more than had entered captivity� at Stalingrad. But these are phoney statistics. In fact, about the same number of German and allied troops were captured on both occasions (around 235,000). The real difference was in the numbers killed � some 50,000 or so in Tunisia, anything up to 750,000, more than 10 times as many, at Stalingrad. It was north Africa that was the sideshow, not Stalingrad, the effects of which on the strategy and morale of the Germans were shattering.

Hitler�s genocidal antisemitism was based on the paranoid belief that Jews were racially pre-programmed to engage in subversion and conspiracy, whether from the communist and socialist left or from capitalist �profiteering�. In the end, Simms hasn�t written a biography in any meaningful sense of the word, he�s written a tract that instrumentalises the past for present-day political purposes. As such, his book can be safely ignored by serious students of the Nazi era.

It�s beautiful.

# ? Oct 20, 2022 05:48

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# ? May 15, 2024 19:34

Digital Jedi: May 28, 2007; Fallen Rib

Punkin Spunkin posted:

Can definitely recommend all of his stuff, so far i've read
Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe
Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization
Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East
Kiev 1941. Hitler's Battle for Supremacy in the East
Operation Typhoon. Hitler's March on Moscow
The Battle for Moscow
Retreat from Moscow

Just finished "The Battle for Moscow" other day and it was great. The ineptness of the Werchmant every time is just halarious. At every point they just go with the worse decision. I'm glad they did but never knew just how bad at the invasion they truly were. And how utterly screwed they basically were from the start.

Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East is going to be the next one I start

# ? Nov 7, 2022 03:22

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > The History Book Thread! looks like I need to set up space for a Nazi shelf

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