Customer Reviews:
Getting To A Nub.......2006-11-06
Colourful history that tends to ask more questions than provide answers. Not as successful as Maurice Collins' 1946 classic "Foreign Mud".
Deeper research is still needed into the merchant companies, their composition and practices, that participated in the opium trade world-wide: a trade that made huge fortunes for individuals and Imperial nations in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
A Total Travesty.......2006-10-21
This book represents literally the worst scholarship I have ever seen. It makes no pretense of careful, thorough, or new research into its subject, but relies almost exclusively on two secondary sources--both in English, both still in print. Its dependence on Jack Beeching's book on the same subject is so thorough that it renders this book completely superfluous. I feel like my time and money were wasted on this when I could have skipped it entirely and headed directly to the source.
In addition to its total lack of new insight into the subject, the book seems not have benefitted from editorial oversight prior to publication. In one chapter, the same quotation is used in two different contexts, citing two different sources, with no attempt at explanation. Indeed, I was surprised to find several ungrammatical sentences scattered throughout, as if an early draft had somehow made it to the presses. If this was a term paper, it would have been handed back for a rewrite. There is no excuse for something of such poor quality sitting on bookstore shelves.
It is insulting to the reader that this book was ever allowed to the see the light of day. The authors ought to have their academic credentials revoked.
A fascinating and entertaining - but poorly edited - account .......2006-08-30
...of gunboat diplomacy in perhaps its most tragic and despicable grandeur. I enjoyed this book and learned a great deal about an intriguing but, by me, previously unexplored history of events. Anyone who is interested in modern Chinese history and affairs including East/West relations would, I think, greatly benefit from a study of the events covered in this book. The UK, which thanks to Wilberforce and others, had suppressed the African slave trade, squandered so much of its moral authority in trying to force a dysfunctional Imperial China into commercial relationships that would fund the UK addction to Chinese silk and tea. Virtually all the Brits could find to sell the Middle Kingdom was opium and thus the UK became a sanctimonious, hypocritical superpower insisting that China admit, on the one hand, missionaries to preach the Gospel and liberate Chinese souls and, on the other, opium merchants to ensnare Chinese addicts and their treasure. (As another reviewer noted, it is hard indeed to read of the events in this book and not be reminded of how modern addictions of cheap petroleum and drugs have had a deleterious effect on the US balance of payments, foreign policy, and world image.) However, whether this particular volume would, for the serious scholar, be the best book on this fascinating subject, I cannot say. Reading it, I was constantly struck by the conviction that this book would have benefitted enormously had it been placed in the respective hands of a well-informed critic and a good editor prior to being published. I enjoyed the authors' hip and humorous style - each chapter reminded me of an entertaining college lecture - but since I found the editing so wanting, I was less confident in how thorough, balanced, and reliable the authors actually were with the mass of information they presented.
Everything Old is New Again.......2006-04-22
War as window dressing.
Tea in China. Oil in Indonesia. Oil in the Gulf.
Opium in India. Opium in Cambodia. Opium in Afghanistan.
Trade lobbyists in London. Trade lobbyists in Washington.
Tax addicts in Parliament. Tax addicts in Congress.
Profit imperative. World domination.
Hot topics too hot for anyone with SUVs, weekend boats, wives or children to handle.
TOW explains (to me, anyway) why the mercantilists got the Islamic crazies to "start" the war:
Hypnotics for the Yellow Peril.
Oil for the equally addicted over here.
Taxes for the 'crats.
Sigh.
very well researched.......2006-01-16
This is a very good book , indicating a lot of research and studies
For the layman who has no knowledge of China's decline in the 18th and 19th centuries, this a must-read.
There are, to me, a few points of inaccuracies and incompletenss about Hong Xiuquan and his Taiping Tianguo.Hong's fall was not
solely due to Zeng Guofeng. The English mercenary General Charles Gordon was not mentioned at all. In addition, in-fighting and disunity among Hong's subordinates played a very crucial role.
None the less, the book is highly recommended
Average customer rating:
- Cooly courageous, deadly accurate and enriching.
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Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification, and National Identity
Jan-Werner Muller
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
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Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past
ASIN: 0300083882 |
Book Description
This important book examines the various reactions of German intellectuals to the unification of Germany and explores their peculiar role in defining national identity since 1945. Clearly and elegantly, Jan-Werner Müller assesses the development of German political thought in the decades after World War II, considers some of the continuing blind spots among German writers and thinkers, and explains why unification created a crisis for many intellectuals.
Customer Reviews:
Cooly courageous, deadly accurate and enriching........2000-10-20
What an astonishing ride. This is the complex, profound story of some of the world's most famous intellectuals thinking their way through the shock of post-war Germany and reunification. Locked in frivolous abstractions, their theories were in every detail dramatic, exquisite failures. Terrified of the people they pretended to care about, with almost no instrumental understanding of real-world economics or culture, they blustered and strutted through a sewer of dirt-stupid intellectual tribalism. Not only has Jan-Werner Muller clarified the seriousness of the events, he has introduced some bright new minds to the English-reading world.
Book Description
In this book Durrill describes in graphic detail the disintegration, during the Civil War, of Southern plantation society in a North Carolina coastal county. He details struggles among planters, slaves, yeoman farmers, and landless white laborers, as well as a guerrilla war and a clash between two armies that, in the end, destroyed all that remained of the county's social structure. He examines the failure of a planter-yeoman alliance, and discusses how yeoman farmers and landless white laborers allied themselves against planters, but to no avail. He also shows how slaves, when refugeed upcountry, tried unsuccessfully to reestablish their prerogatives--a subsistence, as well as protection from violence--owed them as a minimal condition of their servitude.
Customer Reviews:
A real eye opener........2001-07-03
I found this to be the best civil war documentation so far for this region. My own research turned up a great great uncle who fought for the Union Army after my great great grandfather was imprisoned. The Unionist side has never been told as well as Durrill's studies have brought it to light. Too much time has been spent studying the great battles, but the Battle of Plymouth ranks right up there in importance. How many yankees think that all southerners agreed and fought for the south, only God knows. They should read this one.
A real eye opener........2001-07-03
I found this to be the best civil war documentation so far for this region. My own research turned up a great great uncle who fought for the Union Army after my great great grandfather was imprisoned. The Unionist side has never been told as well as Durrill's studies have brought it to light. Too much time has been spent studying the great battles, but the Battle of Plymouth ranks right up there in importance. How many yankees think that all southerners agreed and fought for the south, only God knows. They should read this one.
An observation of economic division in the South, 1861-1865........1999-03-11
A book not fully appreciated without a first hand knowledge of the Albemarle region of North Carolina, Mr. Durrill certainly delves into the (sometimes remote) interests of social historians. The author chose as the location for his study, a small town inside a very rural county in North Carolina. The town, Plymouth, located in Washington County, was not only a military objective of two opposing armies, but a focus of division between many economic classes. Mr Durrill presents the county very accurately as a region of very rich and very poor struggling for political and social power during the period immediately prior and during the 1861-1865 war. Presented as a war within a war, the book documents many conflicts betweeen planters and yeoman farmers, between civilians and soldiers, and not most inconsequentially, between armies. Tracing the removal of the planters' slave labor forces from the Albemarle region behind Confederate lines and showing the effects of a social upheaval, the author has shown the importance of all classes of people in maintaining the inequities of the Southern agricultural antebellum economy. Wayne Durrill has presented the economic ideals that each social group manipulated in their own interests through the war years, and shown how ideals changed with each advance or retreat of a military force.
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Music of Another World (Jewish Lives)
Szymon Laks
Manufacturer: Northwestern University Press
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Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps (Oxford Historical Monographs)
ASIN: 0810118025 |
Book Description
Colin S. Gray has advised governments on both sides of the Atlantic about military affairs, and he looks into the future to provide some intriguing answers about the ways Western armed forces—which have traditionally been trained to fight conventional, not guerrilla, warfare—may have to evolve.
Customer Reviews:
Explores the idea that while war is ever changing, its basics remain the same.......2006-06-22
ANOTHER BLOODY CENTURY: FUTURE WARFARE explores the idea that while war is ever changing, its basics remain the same: it'll always be with us, it has an unchanging nature and character, it's driven by politics, and it embraces strategic surprises. That said, ANOTHER BLOODY CENTURY narrows the focus to strategic prediction's problems, the fallacies inherent in the idea of a foreseeable future when warfare is involved, and futuristic types of warfare mechanisms which argues that in practice war is a controlled process. Any who would understand warfare's evolution and future must consider the basic tenants observed in ANOTHER BLOODY CENTURY: FUTURE WARFARE, which looks under the hype for the realities.
Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch
Fine study of warfare.......2006-05-23
In this fascinating book, Colin Gray, Professor of International Politics and Strategic Studies at Reading University, continues the argument of his classic `Modern Strategy' - Clausewitz still rules. "Technology is important, but in war and strategy people matter most." There is no golden key to military success.
His argument is that war and warfare will always be with us. War has an unchanging nature but a variable character, so history is our best guide to the future. Irregular warfare between states and non-state foes may be the dominant form of warfare for some years, but interstate war, including great power conflict, is not over. The political context is the main driver of war's incidence and character. Above all, warfare is political, though also social and cultural. Surprise in future warfare is certain. Efforts to regulate war by international political, legal and moral measures and attitudes are worth pursuing; however, perceived belligerent necessity can always trump them.
His particular conclusions are unconventional but well argued: "the less active we are in attempting to speed reform in the Islamic world, the better. Such reform is the only comprehensively effective answer to Al Qaeda, but it cannot be imposed from outside." "Terrorism will neither vanish nor be comprehensively defeated (technically an impossibility, since it is a mode of warfare), but it may resume its more usual position as a permanent background danger, typically of much lesser gravity than interstate war." "nuclear weapons are useful. If they are not useful, why do the declared nuclear weapon states continue to hold them and why do others aspire to join their ranks? It so happens that biological, chemical, and radiological weapons also can be useful. The phenomenon that impedes comprehension and strategic empathy amounts to nothing less than demonization."
However, in contrast to these realistic judgements, he espouses the idealist notion that the US state is the prime defender of `world order', a notion that whitewashes all those illegal US aggressions to enforce selfish US interests. So he joins Bush and Blair in opposing `efforts to regulate war' - "we need to be careful lest an ill-advised and undue respect for UN rules and procedures is permitted fatally to obstruct the forces of order, which is to say principally the United States."
Bush and Blair see themselves as the sheriff and deputy of `world order', but why share their delusion?
Book Description
Winner of the Avery O. Craven Prize of the Organization of American HistoriansAnother Civil War explores a tumultuous era of social change in the anthracite regions of Pennsylvania. Because the Union Army depended on anthracite to fuel steam-powered factories, locomotives, and battle ships, coal miners in Schuylkill, Luzerne, and Carbon Counties played a vital role in the Northern war effort. However, that role was complicated by a history of ethnic, political, and class conflicts: after years of struggle in an unsafe and unstable industry, miners expected to use their wartime economic power to win victories for themselves and their families. Yet they were denounced as traitors and draft resisters, and their strikes were broken by Federal troops. Focusing on the social and economic impact of the Civil War on a group of workers central to that war, this dramatic narrative raises important questions about industrialization and work-place conflicts in the mid-1860s, about the rise of a powerful, centralized government, and about the ties between government and industry that shaped class relations. It traces the deep, local roots of wartime strikes in the coal regions and demonstrates important links between national politics, military power, and labor organization in the years before, during, and immediately after the Civil War.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent Scholarship.......2007-02-18
This study of the coal miners labor struggle in the Anthracite regions, primarily in Schuykill County, PA is well researched and most importantly well written. It also elucidates on the discrimination of the Irish during this period of "Nativism" and the "No Nothings" in the US. Extremely well documented, it will be an excellent resource for additional study of this critical period in labor history and it's impact on the Civil War.
Book Description
The definitive condemnation of America's reckless foreign policies, by "the foremost modern historian of war" (The Guardian).
Another Century of War? is a candid and critical look at America's "new wars" by a brilliant and provocative analyst of its old ones. Gabriel Kolko's masterly studies of conflict have redefined our views of modern warfare and its effects; in this urgent and timely treatise, he turns his attention to our current crisis and the dark future it portends.
Another Century of War? insists that the roots of terrorism lie in America's own cynical policies in the Middle East and Afghanistan, a half-century of realpolitik justified by crusades for oil and against communism. The latter threat has disappeared, but America has become even more ambitious in its imperialist adventures and, as the recent crisis proves, even less secure.
America, Kolko contends, reacts to the complexity of world affairs with its advanced technology and superior firepower, not with realistic political response and negotiation. He offers a critical and well-informed assessment of whether such a policy offers any hope of attaining greater security for America. Raising the same hard-hitting questions that made his Century of War a "crucial" (Globe and Mail) assessment of our age of conflict, Kolko asks whether the wars of the future will end differently from those in our past.
Customer Reviews:
A Must Read for ALL.......2006-07-13
Here is a concise little book on what is the crucial global issue of our times, progressively since 1945, and certainly after 1991. At last, its author Gabriel Kolko has accomplished what no Western author whom I have so far read - has done: He sums up and presents a "refreshingly different" perspective - which is infact represents the actual point of view - of America and its global conduct and policy since the unfortunate year of 1945 when fate straddled the world with it as a superpower. I say refrehingly different because the standard refrains we hear in this regard everyday consist either of the standard American propaganda fare of "The War on Terror" or the opposing stand of the Islamic World, which blames America for all that ails it. Not one of these opposing parties permits the truth to be seen, as both will be embarrased by it: This book shows how the main US strategy against the Soviet Union in the Cold War of 1947-1991 entailed the courting and equipping of the demonic forces of Islamic revival as well as the dangerous fostering and aiding of the primitive and delinquent tribal-feudal cultural essence of Middle Eastern and Central Asian societies such as those of Saudi Arabia and the Pashtuns of both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Ther result was inevitable - a globally significant infestation of those rundown and ill societies with a widespread network of fanatical Islamic terrorist groups that led to 9/11, and from whose involvement America and its global Anglo alliance that controls the world - will now never escape. It "serves them right" is a simple maxim of justice forgotten in nowaday's complex and pretentious world, but which applies fully to post-1945 US global misconduct and its consequences. Kolko ably demonstrates that the American role in the world as superpower was driven by an insatiable lust and sheer greed to gain eventual control over as much as possible of the basic resource that underlies the functioning of modern industrial civilisation: petroleum; and that the malintentioned plan the US laid to trap and destroy the USSR did its work, but then that contrivance turned upon its own master in a fiercely unexpected way that it didn't even do on its intended target...As an eye witness to what the US did in Afghanistan during the 1980s and 1990s, I have long fought adversity to lay the truth of that foul and yet far reaching episode bare before the eyes of the world, and as such can vouch that every word, analysis and opinion of Kolko's matches mine 100% and that assertion is no exaggeration, even though I don't know the man, nor have I read his other books. It simply shows that both of us function on the same level, as both of us desire to present the objective truth. I keep this little book among my basic essential "manuals", and leave it to the reader to appreciate further. It is a must read for ALL.
Work of a great historian.......2006-03-25
This work of the great Gabriel Kolko documents the many many military interventions committed by our side since WWII and why they have in general been abject failures. He ends with the unfortunately all too likely prediction that such interventions will continue in the new century.
Strange Bedfellows.......2006-02-08
Great book that explains the US relationship to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey. Quick concise read that is easy to digest. Not necessarily political, liberal, or anti-Bush regime.
Suetoniusian History.......2004-10-06
With the attacks of September 11 says Kolko, the war has come to American shores, and will remain there. To avoid future similar catastrophes, the US should become realistic in its ambitions, recognize the limitations of military power, and end the folly of thinking it necessary to micromanage the affairs of other countries. Helpful too he says would be eliminating the breeding grounds of "terrorism" by raising the standard of living of the destitute around the world. The prognosis is not good, as the US continues to pursue in spades policies similar to those that have produced catastrophe.
In a slim, powerfully written volume of flawless prose, Kolko draws together seamlessly the many divers threads of what he shows to be disastrously misguided continued attempts of the United States to intervene militarily and meddle in the affairs of nations around the globe in a world far more complex than it was even fifty years ago. He covers whole histories of wide and disparate political domains in literally several sentences or paragraphs. His voice is unique in bringing the light of truth and understanding to US foreign affairs and the mess we're in.
Kolko's fundamnental thesis, obvious, as it so often is with genius, is that political problems have political and social, not military, solutions. With the notable exceptions of Vietnam and Korea, the US military machine is quite capable of gaining victories in its imperial adventures. Unfortunately, these more often result in concomitant political catastrophe: US "arms have not brought peace to the world even though Communism has virtually disappeared and can no longer explain the behavior of the US and its allies...we now live in an era of growing insecurity that will very probably see more trauma like (September 11) as well as (similar) responses..." writes Kolko.
Kolko points out the monstrous irony that the two nemeses the US has most demonized over the last decade, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, it has previously supported with massive military, economic, and diplomatic aid and treated as friends. Because of these and similar Machiavellian intrigues, and despite the fall of the Soviet Union, the world is a far more dangerous place. And what is new, especially for the American people.
The examples of military triumphs that have become political calamity is a long list and continues to grow; and will continue to grow under the unilateralist and militarist policies of the Bush administration. Worse, and far more ominous, is Kolko's analysis of Bush foreign policy as being ad hoc, improvised, opportunist, and confused. He documents flip-flops in Bush policy, which show the conservative ideology to be as malleable as conservatives often lament of the liberal. Kolko is very edifyingly in and out of a complex and lucid history of the petrol- and geo- politics of the Middle East like a cold bath.
The CIA, for example, sine qua non deposed the moderate but nationalist Iranian President Mossadegh in 1954 and installed in his stead the extremist Shah. He instituted policies supposedly beneficial to US interests, that is, multinational oil corporations - a military victory. With the Iranian Revolution of 1979 however, the US ushered the Shah into exile, and Khomeini came to power - a political catastrophe. Iran became far more influential in the region in a way supposedly inimical to US interests. In another Machiavellian intrigue, the US supported Saddam Hussein's Iraq in its war with Iran 1980-88. Indeed the US helped both sides against the other in that war because, as Henry Kissinger so eloquently put it, we hope they both lose. There were millions of casualties in the war, another US military triumph. But when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the US had another major political calamity on its hands, which has festered into today's crisis.
It is often mentioned as proof of Saddam being a thug and a tyrant that he launched chemical attacks on the Kurds. In a case of intentioanl amnesia, ignored is that the US continued to support him as staunchly after he did so as before. Often noted is that Saddam Hussein launched chemical attacks against Iran in the war, but, more amnesia, rarely that he did so with the help of US intelligence and Western corporation-supplied technology for WMD. These are the rule rather than the anomaly in US foreign affairs, and makes Kolko's formulation that political problems have political and social, not military, solutions, all the more urgent.
Turning his attention to Afghanistan, Kolko says despite the idealistic protestations, the US went to war out of revenge and to maintain its military "credibility." Because the US always needs help from other nations in its military adventures (and almost as often makes promises it doesn't keep to get it) the maintaining of this "credibility" now extends beyond the domains of the US itself and its troops, to a wide variety of shifting and changing alliances and coalitions, says Kolko. A political complication which often seeks, in the final analysis folly, military solution. While US power, largely unchallenged by a countervailing threat since the demise of the Soviet Union, often guarantees military victory against the Taliban and elswhere, for example, political catastrophe is much more likely to follow than solution.
In Afghanistan, the US reluctantly supported the Northern Alliance, not a far cry from the Taliban. The military action largely completed, the area now suffers the same neglect which is sure to exacerbate the poverty and political chaos that gave rise to three decades of war. Worse, and Kolko examines this in terse detail, the war in Afghanistan has brought increased destabilization to all of South Asia, and especially to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, which ramifications and consequences will be of far more significance to American "interests" and security. Add in the increasing destructiveness of modern weaponry, and their proliferation, and US adventurism and unilateralism, and what do you have? Nostalgia for the simpler and more secure political times of the Cold War.
An important book.......2004-05-01
Few historians understand US foreign policy as well as Gabriel Kolko. Normally, he writes massive books packed with footnotes, drawing information from stacks of declassified government documents. But this time, he's used his decades of research to briefly summarize his thoughts on the post-9/11 world.
Fortunately, his opinions are kept to an absolute minimum. This book is full of historical information that backs up his point of view. He covers the US response to 9/11 in Afghanistan, the history of the conflict there with the Soviet Union, and its connections to oil reserves and political influence. Then he describes the connections between the KLA in Kosovo, Osama bin Laden, and Pakistan. It's amazing how he can condense so many facts into so few pages. He makes it easy to understand and impossible to forget.
He goes on to describe the failures of US foreign policy. This part of the book will get under the skin of some Americans, as Kolko shows that US plans for stability in the Middle East have failed miserably. He finishes up with a quick look at economic ties to foreign policy, pointing out that the military-industrial complex is unable to promote peace.
There is a lot of essential information in this book. Kolko knows what he's talking about. His conclusions are unsettling (to the say the least). He concludes that the world cannot survive another century of war, so the imperial ambitions of the US must change. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand what's happening in the world at the beginning of the 21st century.
Book Description
This book is a provocative, forcefully argued, and thoroughly documented reassessment of President Truman’s profound influence on U.S. foreign policy and the Cold War. The author contends that throughout his presidency, Truman remained a parochial nationalist who lacked the vision and leadership to move the United States away from conflict and toward détente. Instead, he promoted an ideology and politics of Cold War confrontation that set the pattern for successor administrations.
This study sharply challenges the prevailing view of historians who have uncritically praised Truman for repulsing the Soviet Union. Based on exhaustive research and including many documents that have come to light since the end of the Cold War, the book demonstrates how Truman’s simplistic analogies, exaggerated beliefs in U.S. supremacy, and limited grasp of world affairs exacerbated conflicts with the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. For example, Truman’s decision at the Potsdam Conference to engage in “atomic poker” and outmaneuver the Soviets in Europe and Asia led him to brush aside all proposals to forgo the use of atomic bombs on Japan.
Truman’s insecurity also reinforced his penchant to view conflict in black-and-white terms, to categorize all nations as either free or totalitarian, to demonize his opponents, and to ignore the complexities of historic national conflicts. Truman was unable to view China’s civil war apart from the U.S.-Soviet Cold War. Belittling critics of his support for the corrupt Guomindang government, he refused to negotiate with the emergent PRC. Though he did preserve South Korea’s independence after North Korea’s attack, he blamed the conflict solely on Soviet-inspired aggression, instead of a bitter dispute between two rival regimes. Truman’s decision to send troops across the 38th parallel to destroy the North Korean regime, combined with his disdain for PRC security concerns, brought about a tragic wider war.
In sum, despite Truman’s claim to have “knocked the socks off the communists,” he left the White House with his presidency in tatters, military spending at a record high, McCarthyism rampant, and the United States on Cold War footing at home and abroad.
Customer Reviews:
Who was Responsible for Starting the Cold War?.......2007-08-11
Harry S. Truman, the accidental president from Independence, Missouri, has enjoyed a rebirth of popularity since the 1970s, after leaving office with exceptionally low approval ratings in January 1953. His more recent popularity revolves around the Truman story of humble origins, machine politics, and a good man having greatness thrust upon him. Truman rose to the occasion and demonstrated effective leadership in a time of crisis. He took decisive action to end the war and win the peace, carrying forward the plan to create a strong international entity in the United States and championing the Marshall Plan to help Europe recover from World War II among other initiatives. Moreover, his resolute resistance to the Soviet Union as the cold war began to dominate international politics in the latter 1940s proved critical to ensuring a democratic Western Europe. For most historians, especially those of the dominant consensus mindset that assign blame for the origins of the cold war to Stalin and Soviet adventurism, Truman acted forthrightly to counter Soviet might. Couple that with an apparent homeyness and frankness and Truman's resurrection was assured. That is essentially the story told in David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning Truman biography and a host of other publications.
Offner takes issue with this dominant interpretation and assigns the preponderance of blame for the origins of the cold war to Truman. Like revisionist historians of the 1960s and 1970s, he contends that Truman was essentially a small time politician from a backwater who proved unable to master the tides of history around him. While acknowledging his successes with the Marshall Plan and selected other initiatives, Offner finds that the Truman should nonetheless receive the lion's share of the condemnation for the cold war. Representative of many such statements in "Another Such Victory," Offner writes that "Stalin put the interests of the Soviet state before the desire to spread Marxist-Leninist ideology, pursued pragmatic or opportunistic agreements, recognized America's vast military and industrial power, and always calculated what he called the `correlation of forces'" (p. 27). In other words, Offner asserts that Stalin and the Soviet Union was never the threat that Truman believed. Truman's lack of experience on the international stage and a raft of character flaws made matters much worse than they ever had to be with the Soviet Union.
Offner presented a restatement of a standard revisionist conception about the origins of the cold war. Truman and several of his advisors, he wrote, "were American politicians of limited international experience and vision suddenly thrust into positions of global leadership. Their soles, their sensibilities, were undoubtedly hardened by witnessing a global war of unparalleled devastation and atrocities. They were appalled and frightened by Soviet advances in Europe and Asia and readily equated Communists with `Nazis and Fascists' or other imperial or `Tsarist' aggressors. They quickly persuaded themselves that if they got `tough,' they could make the Russians more `manageable' and willing acceded to American principles and interests..." (p. 99). At the same time, according to Offner, Truman mishandled the Soviet Union at every turn, misjudged intentions in Eastern Europe, failed in China and Korea, and engaged in nuclear threats and innuendo in an effort to force greater pliability from cold war rivals.
In the end, Offner's "Another Such Victory" is largely a restatement of the criticisms of American leadership offered in the revisionist work of such authors as Gabriel and Joyce Kolko's "The Limits of Power," first more than published thirty years ago, and Daniel Yergin's "Shattered Peace" (1977). Additionally, Offner's work abandons much of the nuanced criticisms present in Melvyn Leffler's masterful "A Preponderance of Power" (1992), which also seeks to roll back the arguments of the pro-Truman community but does so with more balance and reason. Indeed, a major criticism of Offner's book is that, despite its in-depth research and detailed documentary approach, he says little in this book that moves the historiography beyond where Leffler left it more than 15 years ago. What he does do, and it is an important contribution, is provide a massively referenced presentation of the story well-grounded in documentary sources.
Beyond that, we learn that Truman was parochial, given to fits of rage, racist and biased toward others, limited in experience and judgment, and manipulative in his dealis with Stalin. He might have taken a different approach, Offner states, by seeking a true collaborative arrangement with the Soviet Union. His personality and limitations would not allow it, according to Offner.
As a counterpoint to the Truman revisionist position present in such works as David McCullough and Robert H. Ferrell "Another Such Victory" may prove useful. Offner, however, goes too far in his zeal to tarnish Truman's image. Melvin Leffler's work is much more useful as thoughtful criticism of Truman and the origins of the cold war.
Falls short of a convincing condemnation.......2003-07-21
In this book, Harry Truman is not the common man who makes good, but rather a small town politician who was unable to rise to the demands of high office. The narrow and petty viewpoint espoused by Truman and those advisors he trusted led to constant provocation of the Soviets and was a large factor in the division of Europe between Western democracies and Eastern satellites.
Offner reviews the key moments of early post-war foreign policy and uses each to demonstrate how Truman and his advisers were unable to win the peace and instead locked the world into Cold War trench lines that became as immutable as those on the front lines of World War I. Offner believes that American intransigence played a major role in provoking the USSR to descend its Iron Curtain. Seen by many as a usurper to Franklin Roosevelt's mantle, Truman was in no position to implement the decisions of Yalta or forge a new policy for the post-war world.
Offner contends that Truman's decisions from the beginning were confrontational rather than cooperative. The author presents Truman's initial meeting with Russian Foreign Minster Molotov and shows how the president dresses down the envoy and enjoins him to "keep his promises." It is with this attitude that Truman attends the Postdam Conference in July 1945
The ultimate disposition of Europe is a key area for Offner's analysis. The division of Europe that came in the post-war days was not the inevitable outgrowth of Stalinist greed, to Offner, but was rather the natural and expected reaction of a war-weary Russia that felt itself being once again encircled by hostile forces. The introduction of the Marshall Plan was viewed by the USSR as an attempt on the part of America to purchase Europe at cut-rates.
When the Western Powers announce a plan to rearm their sectors in Germany it is countered by a Soviet proposal to create a unified but unarmed and neutral county. The eventual separation of Germany into the Western Eastern halves is the result of years of increasing tension and the desire by the United States and Britain to re-arm their erstwhile enemy as a bulwark against the communists to the East.
By 1947 Truman was confident enough to promulgate his own policy and abandon the façade of the wartime alliance which had all but disintegrated. The Truman Doctrine was the central policy for the rest of the president's time in office. It stated a willingness to fight against communism anywhere it attempts to overthrow a non-communist government. It made no distinction between "outside pressure" as opposed to "armed minorities," thus linking internal revolutions with the perceived threat of the USSR and its attempts at world conquest.
Offner comes closest to proving his thesis when he discusses the disastrous events in Asia. Inheriting support for Chang Kai-Shek and his GMD from Franklin Roosevelt, Truman was boxed in by his own policies. Even sending over General Marshall as a mediator between Chang and Mao was pre-ordained to fail as long as the American government simultaneously supplied materiel to the GMD during the negotiations. The failure of the Americans to recognize the People Republic of China caused Mao to turn to the USSR for assistance creating, at least temporarily, the self-fulfilling prophecy of "Monolithic Communism."
The fear that China was the first of the Asian dominoes to fall caused Truman to misperceive the North Korean attack on South Korea as another attempt by the Soviets to expand their empire. The Truman Doctrine meant this could not be allowed to succeed. Korea quickly became a quagmire with three years of fighting and thousands of American deaths all to re-establish the status quo. Much of the delay was caused by Truman's refusal to return POWs on an "all for all" basis. Instead, he attempted to prevent any POW from being involuntarily returned to his home nation. This was in fact contrary to the custom of war and the most recent Geneva Convention. While Truman's reluctance in part came from the poor treatment the USSR had given to repatriated POWs from World War II, it was small comfort to those who fought and died while this point was debated.
Another Such Victory is a well-written overview of the key issues in foreign policy faced by Truman. Each chapter contains an introduction summarizing the events to be presented a content section with details of the events and decisions, and a summary/conclusion section to review the chapter. The tendency to use the same quote over and over again throughout the chapter can go beyond adding emphasis and lead instead occasionally to a feeling of repetitiveness on the author's part.
Offner gives short shrift to the domestic politics and attitudes that prevailed during the Truman years. Though the book centers on foreign policy, the Truman presidency did not exist in a vacuum and domestic pressures played a large role in the ongoing development of policy abroad. Certainly throughout this period the red-baiting of Joseph McCarthy, the passage (over Truman's veto) of the MaCarran Act, and the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee were forces to be considered in any decision involving Communism.
Offner has the advantage of time and perspective as he judges the actions that Truman took sixty years ago. However, lost in the distance of time is the context of the period in which these decisions were made. Munich may have become a tired analogy by the 1990s, but Truman was living with the results of Chamberlain's appeasement less than a decade after it happened.
Offner has the temporal advantage of sixty years and the editorial advantage of choosing what material he will include to develop his viewpoint, both of which he uses liberally. It is true that mistakes were made, but Another Such Victory falls short of a convincing condemnation of Truman for provoking the Cold War.
Stalinist Drivel!.......2002-07-26
This book is right out of the KGB's disinformation file. It is the line they peddled for 40 years, until the whole corrupt system collapsed around their ears. Apparently there are still true believers living as free men in the USA (thanks to the likes of Harry Truman & Ronald Reagan) where they are able to diseminate the tired old, and now defunct, party line without fear of censorship.
Has this guy read none of the voluminous material that has been made available during the 1990's by both the Russian government (ie. KGB archives - published by Yale UP) and that of the US (ie. the Venona transcripts)? Or does he think, as many of the comrades do, that they are all forgeries?
Had this author been a Soviet academic living under the Communist regime who wrote a book accusing Stalin of being responsible for the Cold War not only would his work not have been published, but he would have found himself in the GULAG.
Such are the blessings of American Democracy and the American Capitalist system that even someone who has nothing intelligent to say can do so without fear of govenment reprisals, and find a publisher willing to publish his nonsense in the hope of making a few bucks.
Stanford UP should have more sense than to publish such rubbish.
There are plenty of Marxist/Maoist publishing houses around where this kind of book could find a more appropriate outlet. What's more the History Book Club should be ashamed of itself for diseminating it.
The case against Harry Truman.......2002-06-21
This is an interesting book, with its own eccentricities. When Truman left office he was one of the most unpopular presidents in American history. But his fundamental decency and frankness only endeared people after the presidencies of Johnson and Nixon, and his academic reputation only increased after the first clash with the cold war revisionists in the early seventies. Whereas his next five successors were all tarred by the Vietnam debacle, Truman's confrontation with Stalin and the formation of the western alliance appears to be the hallmark of responsible realism. Offner's critical account, by contrast, is the lengthiest denunciation of his foreign policy since Gabriel and Joyce Kolko's The Limits of Power, published thirty years ago.
The greatest weakness of this book is how little new there is in it. Although this book has 98 pages of notes to 474 pages of text, the most common primary source are the documents published in the foreign relations series, most of which were published two decades ago. Although Offner cites more than 30 sets of private papers, most have been readily available for years. Indeed, this book is not all that different from Melvyn Leffler's A Preponderance of Power (1992). The most important difference is that whereas both books provided a large amount of damning criticism of Truman, Leffler's overall verdict was somewhat softer than Offner's. Offner's book is also more focused on Truman's own personal role. Offner does provide more on the creation of Israel, and the partition of Germany, though he says little about the cold war's consequences in Latin America, where the confrontational atmosphere helped cut short a brief liberal interlude. There are a few errors: Thomas Dewey won 189, not 89, electoral votes in 1948 and Klement Gottwald in 1947 was Czechoslovakia's prime minister, not its president. Somewhat more discouragingly, Offner, in his criticism of the atom bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, does not discuss the counter-arguments of Richard Frank in his book Downfall. And many scholars would vigorously disagree with his assertion that half the Palestinian refugees in 1948 left voluntarily or at the instigation of their leaders.
With these caveats in mind, Offner provides a compelling case. It may not be new, but it is based on strong evidence. Truman was a parochial man, giving to making blandly prejudicial comments about blacks, Asians and Jews. The history he read was uncritically patriotic, didactic and melodramatic and this encouraged unhelpful tendencies in Truman's diplomacy. Offner does not say the cold war was Truman's fault, but clearly he did many things to make things worse. He accused the Soviet Union of clearly breaking treaty committments when the language was ambiguous, simplied complex problems in Korea and Greece to Soviet agression, and wrongly viewed Mao as a Soviet puppet.
Truman's positions usually had considerable support from the other members of his adminstration. But it is also true that Truman ignored Harriman's advice to be more accommodating towards the Soviet Union in Japan. He failed to support Byrnes' suggestion of demanding Chiang Kai-Shek's support for a coalition government as a quid pro quo for transporting Nationalist troops to Manchuria, and in doing so lost his best chance to stop a civil war, that Chiang would almost certainly lose. He ignored Kennan's and Elsey's belief that the Truman Doctrine was overstated, and he believed that the Russians were about to attack Turkey when even the Turks knew that was not going to happen. Truman ignored General Clay's and General Marshall's calls for compromise in Germany, which lead to partition. He ignored Acheson and Lillienthal's proposals for sharing atomic energy and by choosing Bernard Baruch to head the plan, guaranteed that the Soviet Union would never support it. Truman ignored the consensus of most State Department experts that recognition of Mao was inevitable. Truman never dealt with Enrico Fermi's opposition to making an H-bomb, and he and Acheson ignored George Kennan's belief that they should at least try to negotiate in good faith with Stalin over the latter's offer to reunify Germany in 1952.
One should point out that Truman's bombing of Nagasaki, if not Hiroshima, showed a horrifying moral blindness and indifference. Truman and Acheson did not even try to discuss Mao's offers of a relationship in 1949. Truman and his advisers also ensured that the Marshall Plan would only offer aid to the Soviet Union on terms that they knew it would reject. In the Korean war Truman unwisely supported MacArthur's expansive plans, ignored clear Chinese warnings, supported elements of MacArthur's dangerous policy even after firing him, and probably extended the war two years because he did not recognize that "voluntary repatriation" of POWS violated the Geneva Convention and under South Korean and Taiwanese police was often a farce. Even in Poland, where Stalin's conduct was most unforgivable, the United States could have conceded the Oder-Neisse border, which it eventually did. If one had to point out the fundamental flaw of Truman's foreign policy, it was that it sought to rehabilitate Germany economically without doing the same for the Soviet Union it had so viciously ravaged. Ultimately, Offner provides a clear case against the limitations of Truman's foreign policy.
Book Description
Lieutenant Fern's warm and personable letters, spanning two years at sea in the South Pacific, offer an alternative view of life aboard ship during World War II. Seizing every opportunity for an adventure, he muses upon his assignment living at sea and its inherent challenges. His varied duties aboard three different ships afford Fern numerous vantage points regarding his unique war experiences. Lieutenant Fern's letters are descriptive, intriguing, and amusing, often evoking smiles and laughter from the reader as he reveals his quick adjustment to life at sea, the camaraderie he readily establishes with his fellow officers and crewmates, and his opportune ventures to the surrounding islands. He embraces every situation with an eagerness for novelty and excitement.
Fern's gift for language, marked not only by scholarliness but lightheartedness as well, is a refreshing blend of fluency and vitality. His appreciation and extensive knowledge of nature enhance his eloquent descriptions of the islands, the sky, and the sea. His narrative is enticing and entertaining while at the same time informative and educational.
These letters present a stimulating view of the events of WWII constructed by a person who lived them during his assignment in the South Pacific. They speak to us across time, offering a personal perspective of living history. One need not be a military buff to appreciate this first-person war story. Another Side of World War II will hold the attention of a wide audience.
Customer Reviews:
An intimate and vivid detailing of events from the perspective of someone deeply involved with the progression of the war.......2006-04-06
Another Side Of World War II: A Coast Guard Lieutenant In The South Pacific by Juliana Fern Patten is the engaging personal story of one man's experiences of World War II in the South Pacific Theatre. Compiled from letters, logs, and photographs of the time, Another Side Of World War II provides readers with an intimate and vivid detailing of events from the perspective of someone deeply involved with the progression of the war. A welcome contribution to the growing library of World War II military memoirs an and biographies, Another Side Of World War II is very highly recommended to all readers with an interest in first-hand accounts, as well as those in search of a better understanding of World War II and America's participation in the South Pacific combat zones.
Average customer rating:
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Another Chance: Postwar America, 1945-1968
James Burkhart Gilbert
Manufacturer: Temple Univ Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
1945 - Present
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General
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ASIN: 087722224X |
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