60 million people died in World War II
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WWII: A Classical War of Modern Violence | National Review - 0 views
Opinion | The Nazi-Fighting Women of the Jewish Resistance - The New York Times - 0 views
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Opinion | Was Nazi Germany Defeated or Liberated? Germans Can't Decide. - The New York ... - 0 views
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the discussion of May 8 as a day of liberation, however well intentioned, does not just challenge the far-right narrative. It also muddies historical reality and could contribute exactly to what many of those who embrace it wish to avoid: a shunning of historical responsibility.
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At a time when living memories are disappearing, some Germans — now and in future generations — will take the talk of liberation literally, glossing over the complicity of the masses in Nazi crimes.
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It was in an effort to oppose this mentality that on V-E Day in 1985, the president of West Germany, Richard von Weizsäcker, gave a speech that is now considered one of the most important in the country’s postwar history. Germans at the end of the war, he said, felt “exhaustion, despair and new anxiety.” Yet, he went on, “with every day something became clearer, and this must be stated on behalf of all of us today: The 8th of May was a day of liberation. It liberated all of us from the inhumanity and tyranny of the National Socialist regime.”
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While the impulse today to interpret May 8 as a day of liberation — if only through a retrospective lens — is understandable, few seem to have taken into account the danger that many Germans will take the term at face value, as historical reality. But as generations pass, and as the last victims and perpetrators perish, keeping the facts straight becomes even more important.
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In a poll commissioned by the German weekly Die Zeit before the 75th anniversary of V-E Day, 53 percent of respondents agreed with the false statement that “it was just a few criminals who instigated the war and killed the Jews.” In another poll commissioned by a German public broadcaster, 23 percent didn’t even have a grasp of what the Holocaust was.
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To be clear, German leaders today employ the notion of liberation to embrace their historical responsibility, not to deny it. This was clear when President Frank-Walter Steinmeier spoke on the 75th anniversary of V-E Day. It had taken three generations “for us to wholeheartedly admit” that May 8 is “a day of liberation,” he said.
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Though the liberation was “imposed from outside,” he said, Germans subsequently played a part in “our internal liberation.” This was a “long and painful process which involved facing up to the past,” he said, and “fighting to stop silence and denial from prevailing.” The process of internal liberation, in other words, meant rejection of a Schlussstrich.
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The point is not to saddle current and future generations with guilt, but to ensure that the unvarnished truth remains clear. No good lesson can be drawn from history without a full understanding that the guilty were all around, and that they fought to the end.
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Normandy Commemorates D-Day With Small Crowds : NPR - 0 views
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When the sun rises over Omaha Beach, revealing vast stretches of wet sand extending toward distant cliffs, one starts to grasp the immensity of the task faced by Allied soldiers on June 6, 1944, landing on the Nazi-occupied Normandy shore.
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Several ceremonies were being held Sunday to commemorate the 77th anniversary of the decisive assault that led to the liberation of France and western Europe from Nazi control, and honor those who fell.
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On D-Day, more than 150,000 Allied troops landed on the beaches code-named Omaha, Utah, Juno, Sword and Gold, carried by 7,000 boats. This year on June 6, the beaches stood vast and nearly empty as the sun emerged, exactly 77 years since the dawn invasion.
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For the second year in a row, anniversary commemorations are marked by virus travel restrictions that prevented veterans or families of fallen soldiers from the U.S., Britain, Canada and other Allied countries from making the trip to France. Only a few officials were allowed exceptions.
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On June 6, 1944, "In the heart of the mist that enveloped the Normandy Coast ... was a lightning bolt of freedom," French Defense Minister Florence Parly told the ceremony. "France does not forget. France is forever grateful."
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Most public events have been canceled, and the official ceremonies are limited to a small number of selected guests and dignitaries.Denis van den Brink, a WWII expert working for the town of Carentan, site of a strategic battle near Utah Beach, acknowledged the "big loss, the big absence is all the veterans who couldn't travel."
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Over the anniversary weekend, many local residents have come out to visit the monuments marking the key moments of the fight and show their gratitude to the soldiers. French World War II history enthusiasts, and a few travelers from neighboring European countries, could also be seen in jeeps and military vehicles on the small roads of Normandy.
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Some reenactors came to Omaha Beach in the early hours of the day to pay tribute to those who fell that day, bringing flowers and American flags.
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On D-Day, 4,414 Allied troops lost their lives, 2,501 of them Americans. More than 5,000 were wounded. On the German side, several thousand were killed or wounded.
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The cemetery contains 9,380 graves, most of them for servicemen who lost their lives in the D-Day landings and ensuing operations. Another 1,557 names are inscribed on the Walls of the Missing.
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Normandy has more than 20 military cemeteries holding mostly Americans, Germans, French, British, Canadians and Polish troops who took part in the historic battle.
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Opinion | Joe Biden Is Electrifying America Like F.D.R. - The New York Times - 0 views
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The best argument for President Biden’s three-part proposal to invest heavily in America and its people is an echo of Franklin Roosevelt’s explanation for the New Deal.
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We should be cleareyed about both the enormous strengths of the United States — its technologies, its universities, its entrepreneurial spirit — and its central weakness: For half a century, compared with other countries, we have underinvested in our people.
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in my hometown, Yamhill, the New Deal was an engine of opportunity. A few farmers had rigged generators on streams, but Roosevelt’s rural electrification brought almost everyone onto the grid and output soared. Jobs programs preserved the social fabric and built trails that I hike on every year. The G.I. Bill of Rights gave local families a shot at education and homeownership.
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Yet beginning in the 1970s, America took a wrong turn. We slowed new investments in health and education and embraced a harsh narrative that people just need to lift themselves up by their bootstraps
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What does that mean in human terms? I’ve written about how one-quarter of the people on my old No. 6 school bus died of drugs, alcohol or suicide — “deaths of despair.” That number needs to be updated: The toll has risen to about one-third.
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The most important thread of Biden’s program is his plan to use child allowances to cut America’s child poverty in half. Biden’s main misstep is that he would end the program in 2025 instead of making it permanent; Congress should fix that.
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Roosevelt started a day care program during World War II to make it easier for parents to participate in the war economy. It was a huge success
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Then there are Biden’s proposed investments in broadband; that’s today’s version of rural electrification. Likewise, free community college would enable young people to gain technical skills and earn more money, strengthening working-class families.Some Americans worry about the cost of Biden’s program.
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As many Americans have criminal records as college degrees. A baby born in Washington, D.C., has a shorter life expectancy (78 years) than a baby born in Beijing (82 years). Newborns in 10 counties in Mississippi have a shorter life expectancy than newborns in Bangladesh. Rather than continue with Herbert Hoover-style complacency, let’s acknowledge our “grave internal disorder” and summon a doctor.
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WashingtonPost.com: 11 Israelis, 4 Arab Guerrillas Die In Day of Olympics Terror - 0 views
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The politics of the 1930s are still playing out in Eastern Europe - The Washington Post - 0 views
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Soviet-imposed communism, I wrote that night in an article for The Post, had suppressed the politics that drove events in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and other East Bloc states before World War II
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Thirty years later, the politics of the 1930s are still playing out in the former Eastern Bloc. Poland is governed by an authoritarian-minded right-wing government closely aligned with a reactionary Catholic Church. An uneasy peace prevails in the splintered remains of Yugoslavia after a devastating ethnic war.
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They are authoritarian and socially reactionary — anti-LGBTQ rhetoric is a favorite theme of Poland’s ruling party. Prewar evils such as irredentism and anti-Semitism are alive in mainstream politics to a degree they are not on the other side of the former Iron Curtain.
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Yet some legacies of communist rule have proved enduring, perhaps because they are all too compatible with the resurgent illiberal movements.
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One is the use of state-run national television for political propaganda. After the establishment of democracy, Poland moved to make its government-owned network independent, similar to the BBC.
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After the war, while West Germany de-Nazified, East Germans, Hungarians and Poles were told they bore no responsibility for fascism or the Holocaust, which were portrayed as capitalist crimes.
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Eastern Europe is far better off than in 1989. Its people are vastly richer and, in spite of creeping authoritarianism, far freer. But the euphoria I saw and shared in that momentous weekend in Berlin seems a little naive 30 years later. We underestimated the tenacity of the culture created by Soviet communism — and the perils of a return to history
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From World War II, Economic Lessons for Today - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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the oft-repeated notion that it took World War II to end the economic nightmare of the ’30s: If a global war was needed to return the economy to full employment then, what is going to save us today?
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While the war helped the recovery from the Depression, the economy was improving long before military spending increased. More fundamentally, the wrenching wartime experience provides a message of hope for our troubled economy today: we have the tools to deal with our problems, if only policy makers will use them.
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Starting in the mid-1930s, Hitler’s aggression caused capital flight from Europe. People wanted to invest somewhere safer — particularly in the United States. Under the gold standard of that time, the flight to safety caused large gold flows to America. The Treasury Department under President Franklin D. Roosevelt used that inflow to increase the money supply.
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The economy responded strongly. From 1933 to 1937, real gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of almost 10 percent, and unemployment fell from 25 percent to 14. To put that in perspective, G.D.P. growth has averaged just 2.5 percent in the current recovery, and unemployment has barely budged.
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The lesson here is that fiscal stimulus can help a depressed economy recover — an idea supported by new studies of the 2009 stimulus package. Additional short-run tax cuts or increases in government investment would help deal with our unemployment crisis.
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What of the idea that monetary and fiscal policy can do little if unemployment is caused by structural factors, like a mismatch between workers’ skills and available jobs
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businesses and workers found a way to get the job done. Factories simplified production methods and housewives learned to rivet.
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Here the lesson is that demand is crucial — and that jobs don’t go unfilled for long. If jobs were widely available today, unemployed workers would quickly find a way to acquire needed skills or move to where the jobs were located.
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at the end of World War II, that ratio hit 109 percent — one and a half times as high as it is now. Yet this had no obvious adverse consequences for growth or our ability to borrow.
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what about the national debt? Given the recent debt downgrade, it might seem impossible for the United States to embark on fiscal stimulus that would increase its ratio of debt to G.D.P.
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Everyone understood then why the nation was racking up so much debt: we were fighting for survival, and for the survival of our allies. No one doubted that we would repay our debts. We had done it after every other war, and raising taxes even before the attack on Pearl Harbor showed our leaders’ fiscal resolve.
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someone needs to explain to the nation and to world markets just why we must increase the debt in the short run. Unemployment of roughly 9 percent for 28 months and counting is a national emergency. We must fight it with the same passion and commitment we have brought to military emergencies in our past.
Pearl Harbor: How Eisenhower planned the U.S. response to the Japanese attack - The Was... - 0 views
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The Economic Impact of World War II - 0 views
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U.S. war spending helped add $236 billion to the debt. It was a 1,048 percent increase, the largest percentage increase to the debt of any president.
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A review of U.S. gross domestic product growth by year reveals that the economy grew at least 8 percent annually between 1939 and 1944. Between 1941 and 1943, it grew more than 17 percent a year.
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To pay for it, the government expanded the income tax and introduced mandatory withholdings from paychecks. In 1939, 4 million Americans paid federal taxes. That rose to 43 million by 1945.
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TreasuryDirect KIDS - The History of U.S. Public Debt - The New Deal (1933-1936) to Wor... - 0 views
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All the New Deal programs were paid for, and run by, the Government. This meant that the Government’s debt grew a great deal. The U.S. debt was $22 billion in 1933 and grew by 50 percent in the three years that followed, reaching $33 billion.
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Taking part in this war was very expensive for the U.S. Not only did the U.S. pay for its own military, it also lent money to Britain and other countries fighting the German military. The estimated cost for the U.S. was $323 billion. To help pay for the war, the U.S. took on more debt, borrowing about $211 billion. Much of the debt was in the form of U.S. Savings Bonds, which were al
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What's Wrong With Saying War Is 'Normal' in the Middle East | Time - 0 views
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n the days of tension that have followed the U.S. airstrike that took out Iran’s Gen. Qasem Soleimani, an old trope about the Middle East has reared its ugly head. On Wednesday on Fox News, former Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland repeated it when she claimed that in “…the Middle East, they’ve been fighting for 4,000 years. It’s been an ethno-sectarian battle and psychodrama, and they’ve been killing each other for millennia. Their normal state of condition is war.”
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This trope is frequently turned to by those who would have the world believe that war in the Middle East is somehow innate and inevitable. But a look at the history of the region reveals that it’s simply not true. People in the Middle East haven’t “been killing each other” at any rate that exceeds average human levels of conflict. Indeed, the region that lays claim to being the “cradle of civilization” had developed quite, well, civilized and complex systems of compromise and coexistence that allowed its diverse peoples, faiths and ethnic groups to live together over very long periods of time.
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In fact, imperial systems like those that ruled the Middle East for most of its history — spanning vast swathes of the globe and encompassing an immense diversity of ethnicities, faith traditions and customs — have of pragmatic necessity had to develop systems of accommodation, ways to avoid war.
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Even the Mongols, famed for their brutality in conquest, realized the necessity for coexistence. In the 13th century, after creating the largest contiguous land empire the world has ever known, they established the “Pax Mongolica” — the Mongol Peace — that guaranteed religious freedom to all Mongol subjects.
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As war has devastated Syria in the past nine years, the conflict has taken on an overtly sectarian dimension, and it’s not uncommon for observers to issue fatalistic comments along the lines of K.T. McFarland’s. Sectarian conflict has been said to date back 1,400 years to the founding of Islam, and we frequently hear, as Fox news viewers did this week, that somehow people in the region are irrational, stubbornly embroiled in ancient conflicts and unable to join the modern world. There were sectarian identities in the medieval era, of course, and these sometimes led to conflict. But the intensity of current sectarian cleavages is a surprisingly recent development, effectively beginning with the arrival of European political modernity and only made worse by the post-WWII rise of the authoritarian Arab state. Later, tensions were aggravated by the Lebanese Civil War and by the post-2003 U.S. occupation of Iraq, which remade its sectarian landscape.
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Love, Loss, and Leadership in a Time of Mass Death- An Interview with Erik Larson | His... - 0 views
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the most surprising thing, and the most delightful, was that Churchill was a lot of fun. He had a great sense of humor and absolutely no sense of personal vanity. He could be a total jerk, yes, and his closest associates knew well that he could be rude, inconsiderate, overbearing, and capricious. But, he was funny, charming, affectionate, and his staff adored him.
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He understood the grand sweep of British history, and was able in his speeches to place his listeners in that story, so that they too felt a part of it and understood that only with their help would that grand story continue. He made his listeners feel bolder and stronger, and cast them as champions and guardians of that history.
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Churchill seemed to understand that courage and confidence were infectious—that by expressing his own courage and confidence at all times, he could help the public find their own.
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Popular myth tends to compartmentalize elements of the German air campaign into neat boxes, namely the so-called “Battle of Britain” and the “Blitz.” In reality, the campaign consisted of a seamless escalation that did not end until May 10, 1941.
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What we think of as the Battle of Britain resolved nothing, though it did lodge the RAF and its fighter pilots forever in the pantheon of British heroes. The Blitz followed soon afterward, with the first deliberate German raid on London, on Sept. 7, 1940, which was followed by another 56 consecutive nights of raids against the city. The British endured this phase, but even then the raids did not end. Winter weather forced interruptions, but the raids that did occur were even more severe, with possibly the worst of the war taking place on May 10, 1941. Over the winter the risk of invasion waned, because of weather, but with the advent of spring, the threat once again seemed grave—though intelligence began detecting a shift in Hitler’s attention toward the East. It was that shift, and Churchill’s staunch defiance, that ultimately ended the invasion threat, and caused the Luftwaffe to suspend its raids against London.
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I relied on intelligence reports and diaries, in particular the diary of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s chief of propaganda. Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels simply could not understand why Churchill didn’t give up and seek some sort of peace. To them, he seemed like some kind of crazy person. Goebbels in his diary expresses surprise time and again at his unwillingness to seek a negotiated end to the war.
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my goal, strange as it sounds, is not to inform, though anyone who wishes can quote my books in their PhD theses. Rather, I’m drawn by story. My goal is to create as rich a historical experience as I possibly can—all true of course—in the hope that readers will be able to descend into the past and linger there a while as if they were part of whatever saga is unfolding
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Robin Lindley: Who are some historians or other writers that you see as inspirations or influences? Erik Larson: David McCullough. Barbara Tuchman. Dava Sobel—her “Longitude” was one of the books that made me start thinking about writing narrative history. More recently I’ve become a huge fan of Andrew Roberts, a foremost Churchill scholar
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I think the main parallel is that these times require us all to pull together, just as Londoners had to do. For us, the noblest thing is to stay home, and if we do go out, wear a mask. My home city of New York has millions of heroes, now, staying home, losing jobs, going nuts—figuratively and literally—all to help prevent the deaths of countless other souls whom they do not know and will never meet.
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World War II coronavirus: The shadow hangs over the pandemic age - The Washington Post - 0 views
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eaders in Europe marked the 75th anniversary of the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany in recent days. Wreaths were laid, somber speeches intoned, and promises made to “never forget.”
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The coronavirus pandemic has reminded us of how much World War II is hard-wired in the West’s political imagination.
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In Europe, the trauma of the war now forever lurks beneath the continent’s appeals for unity and solidarity.
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In the United States, the great wartime mobilization of resources and manpower seemed to reflect what this unique nation was capable of achieving when set against a global, existential threat.
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Of course, there’s a limit to these metaphors’ potency. In geopolitical terms, the Trump administration and nationalist governments elsewhere in the West are almost explicitly interested in breaking up the post-World War II political and economic order, not rallying it
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“We might forgive our leaders’ frequent and self-serving language of war and their invocation of Churchill in 1940 if only it is accompanied by some of that wartime spirit that reset and expanded the boundaries of the possible,” wrote Oxford University historian Margaret MacMillan. “What had seemed fantastical or too expensive in peace — mass producing penicillin, splitting the atom, making jet engines — swiftly became reality.
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But figures like Trump and Johnson, whose political parties presided over years of austerity or maintain an aversion to social spending, aren’t the sort of statesmen who would champion a New Deal or forge the National Health Service.
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“Many of the actions undertaken to put the United States on a war footing in the 1940s were natural outgrowths of Franklin Roosevelt’s decade-long attempt to equip the federal government with new capabilities and grant it the necessary authorities to overcome the Great Depression,”
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“The creation of new agencies and organizations was second nature to that generation, as was a willingness to experiment boldly, persistently, and swiftly on what might provide immediate relief for millions of affected Americans. Those habits have long since been forgotten.”
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And maybe, as a virus paralyzes the globe, the lesson that matters is not one of leadership or courage or sacrifice, but something more tectonic and imperceptible.
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“From the vantage point of the 21st century, if there is a historical grand narrative that does justice to the significance of the 1945 moment, it is not that of international organizations like the Bretton Woods institutions or national welfare states,” wrote Adam Tooze
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It is, rather, “what 21st-century environmental historians call the ‘Great Acceleration,’ the vast and dramatic acceleration of humanity’s appropriation of nature that reached a turning point in the middle of the 20th century,”
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“In its globe-spanning dimensions, in its multifaceted integration of the land, the sea, and the air, and in its violent intensity, World War II was an anticipation and driver of that process, which continues down to the present day.”
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The Virus and the Blitz - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Britain during the Blitz has gone down in history as the exemplar of national resilience—a role model for any nation going through a hard and stressful time, whether a war, terror attack, or pandemic.
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ow did the British do it? What can we learn? What exactly are national resilience and social solidarity made of, and how are they built?
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If you want to list the factors that contributed to the country’s indomitable resilience, start with a sense of agency. Brits needed to feel that they were not helpless or passive, that the nation was taking positive action every second of every day.
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Churchill set a frenetic pace for his whole government, showering his aides with “Action This Day” memos.
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The second element of British resilience was intense social connection. People were forced together every night in tightly packed group or family shelters.
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In national crises, a sort of social and psychological arms race takes place. The threat—whether bombings or a pandemic—ramps up fear, unpredictability, divisiveness, fatalism, and feelings of weakness and meaninglessness. Nations survive when they can ramp up countervailing emotions and mindsets
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Third, laughter. Brits credit themselves, accurately, for being a comic people. During the war, every disaster was turned into an occasion for humor,
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The fourth factor in British resilience was moral purpose. Friedrich Nietzsche once remarked that “he who has a why to live for can endure any how.” The Brits had a firm sense of the moral rightness of their cause, the unique evil Hitler represented, and the reason they had to endure all this
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Finally, there was equality. During moments of threat and crisis, people are intensely sensitive to inequality, to the feeling that some people are being treated better than everybody else.
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The pressure of the situation induced people to be frenetically social. Singers offered free concerts, which were packed. Larson reports that young women would set up dates for every night, planning weeks in advance, so as to never be alone
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This happens when countries take actions, even if only symbolic ones, that make frightening situations feel more controllable and predictable. This happens when they foster social solidarity by paying extreme attention to fairness. This happens when they intensify social connection and create occasions for social bonding and shared work.
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Societies that build resilience do not hide behind a wall of happy talk or try to minimize the danger.
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Resilience is built when people confront a threat realistically, and discover that they have the resources to cope with it together.
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Resilience is built when people tell a collective story about the danger that places the current terror they are facing within a larger redemptive context. When all this is over, we’ll be better because of it.
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What was once a scary threat to be avoided, releasing a surge of destructive cortisol, becomes a challenge to be met, releasing a cascade of adrenaline.
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Evolution equipped us to deal with short bursts of terror, such as getting chased by a lion, not to cope with long, unrelenting months of stress.
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Isolation, fear, and stress send the autonomic nervous system into overdrive, and weaken the immune system. The social-distancing measures we are taking to avoid the coronavirus make us more susceptible to it when it comes.
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in some ways, COVID-19 presents an even more dire challenge to us than the bombing did to Great Britain in 1940. A study by the Russell Sage Foundation found that what makes societies resilient during a crisis are high levels of faith in institutions, high social trust, high levels of patriotism and optimism, and high levels of social and racial integration. The United States that confronts the coronavirus pandemic has catastrophically low levels of all these things.
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Worse, unlike the Blitz, this pandemic deprives us of the thing social resilience needs most—close physical and social connectio
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In America, the pandemic finds a country that has already seen a recent tripling of the number of people suffering from depression, a sharp increase in mental-health issues of all varieties; a sharp rise in suicides, and record levels of tribal hostility and polarization. The dread and isolation that COVID-19 causes threaten to exacerbate all this, to drive people even farther apart.
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Today, the world is threatened by a virus. The moral story we tell has to be less about the evil we face and more about the solidarity we are building with one another. The story we tell has to be about how we took this disease and turned it into an occasion to become a better society
Opinion | If we'd just given up on other things the way we have on the coronavirus - Th... - 0 views
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Historian Tracy Campbell was not expecting his book on the American home front in 1942 to be as relevant to 2020 as it has become. “After the searing heat of a crisis passes, often the original feelings of impending doom can be almost forgotten,” he writes in the epilogue of The Year of Peril: America in 1942.
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Arnold Schwarzenegger: Don't Be a Schmuck. Put on a Mask. - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Many people told me that the Constitution gives them rights, but not responsibilities. They feel no duty to protect their fellow citizens.
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That’s when I realized we all need a civics lesson. I can’t help but wonder how much better off we’d be if Americans took a step back from politics and spent a minute thinking about how lucky we are to call this country home. Instead of tweeting, we could think about what we owe to the patriots who came before us and those who will follow us.
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I am not an academic, but I can tell you that selfishness and dereliction of duty did not make this country great. The Constitution aimed to “promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.” It’s right there in our founding document. We need to think beyond our selfish interests.
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I often think about how many Americans sacrificed to make this country great. John Adams wrote that “it was the Duty of a good Citizen to sacrifice all to his Country.” Or, as the classic film Team America taught us: “Freedom isn’t free.”
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Our country began with a willingness to make personal sacrifices for the collective good. It’s right there in the closing line of the Declaration of Independence: “We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
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Our country became great because every generation before us knew that liberty and duty go hand in hand. I am worried that many of my fellow Americans have now lost sight of that.
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When I look at the response to this pandemic, I really worry about the future of our country. We have lost more than 600,000 Americans to COVID-19. Are we really this selfish and angry? Are we this partisan?
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George Washington wrote, “Every post is honorable in which a man can serve his country.” When we wear a mask or get a vaccine, we are serving our country and our fellow citizens.
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When people call this fascism, I can’t stand it. Just a few generations ago, this country stood up to real fascism. (And yes, I know that my father was on the wrong side of that conflict.) And we didn’t win just because of our love of freedom. We won because Americans came together and did their duty.
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“Wearing a mask is nothing compared with what we were going through then,” one member of that generation, Bill Platts, recently told the Idaho Statesman. “It’s so comical nowadays to think that somebody won’t wear a mask when in those days they would do anything for the United States.”
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We are fighting a war against what President Donald Trump correctly called an “invisible enemy.” Hospitals are once again filling up in some states. Deaths are rising.
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Some people want to create an alternative America, where we have no responsibility to one another. That America has never existed.
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They may tell you that what we are doing to fight the war against the coronavirus is unprecedented. They’re full of crap. They are lying to you because they make money from your anger.
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As Americans, we have agreed to vaccinations to eradicate diseases since George Washington mandated the smallpox inoculation for his troops. “Upon the principle of self-defense, of paramount necessity, a community has the right to protect itself against an epidemic of disease which threatens the safety of its members,” the Supreme Court said in 1905, in a ruling supporting vaccine mandates.
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We need to prove to ourselves and to the world that we can unite to defeat a common enemy, because, trust me, the coronavirus is not the biggest challenge we will face this century.What will you do for your country?
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The Decision That Cost Hitler the War - The New York Times - 0 views
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He was also sure that the United States would enter the war against him sooner or later. He thought the only solution was pre-emptive: to get control of enough oil and food from the Soviet Union to enable Germany to hold its own against Anglo-America in a long war.
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the only alternative he saw to immediate war on the United States was slow but certain strangulation at Anglo-American hands. With a nod to an epigram from A. J. P. Taylor, Simms and Laderman offer this summation: “Hitler committed suicide for fear of dying.”
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Early December 1941 is the moment of the war in which plausible alternate scenarios seemed to loom the largest
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What if Vichy France and Fascist Italy had drawn closer together in a “Latin front,” as they were discussing at the time?
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What if the Japanese had attacked the British in Malaya and Singapore but not attacked the United States?
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What if the German who spied for the Soviet Union in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, had not supplied his masters with accurate information on Japanese plans, allowing Stalin to move 20 divisions from the east and redeploy them to Moscow for the shattering counterattack of Dec. 5?
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The other thing the book does effectively is to pay careful attention to how the timing of events played out around the world, especially in the pattern of reactions to Pearl Harbor.
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One of the last surprises in this book is how many world leaders saw accurately from that moment how the future would unfold.