Writing in the mid-20s about the Great War, Winston Churchill wrote that the grotesque casualties of the Battle of the Somme and others might have been avoided " if only the Generals had not been content to fight machine-gun bullets with the breasts of gallant men, and think that that was waging war.” I'm just writing to say I like that line. General Douglas Haig, who would have been understood by even casual readers of that line on its first publication as among its targets, if not indeed the chief of its targets. is said to have been (understandably) furious over it. What is more interesting for me is the role that this conviction might have played in certain strategic arguments between Churchill and Roosevelt during the following war. Roosevelt wanted a US/UK front in northwestern Europe as soon as possible. Stalin understandably agreed -- a new front would at the least tie up German resources and take some pressure off the eastern front on which the R...
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Four books have especially shaped my thinking on the relations between the Eastern and the Western traditions in philosophy, broadly speaking. I’ll just give you author, title, date for three of them, and a short explanation of the fourth. William Johnson, THE STILL POINT (1970) Thomas Tweed, THE AMERICAN ENCOUNTER WITH BUDDHISM (1982) Rick Fields, HOW THE SWANS CAME TO THE LAKE (1992). Now the fourth. Get a hold of Kitaro Nishida, AN INQUIRY INTO THE GOOD (1990). As the title suggests, this is NOT a work of history but a substantive philosophical work. Further, the 1990 edition, from Yale University Press, is a translation of a book by the named Japanese scholar that he wrote, in his native language, in 1911. Nishida was very well aware of western philosophy, and an admirer of the American pragmatists in particular. His “inquiry into the good” is very self-aware about his blending of traditions east and west. Nishida died near the end of the second world war. During his li...
In a Different Key: The Story of Autism By John Donvan and Caren Zucker Crown Publishers, New York, NY, 2016. 670 pages, $30. Reviewed by Christopher C. Faille Autism is part of who I am. Or, at least, I believe so. There’s never been anything so formal as a diagnosis, but people who love me, including some with credentials as health care providers, have told me, usually with some effort at softening the presumed blow, that I am “on the spectrum.” I have long since given up any impulse to argue the point. I don’t believe I’ve ever owned the term “autism” in public before, so I will use this book review, then, as a coming-out moment. The readers of The Federal Lawyer know something of me, from my numerous book reviews in the magazine. You have had plenty of opportunities to judge both my analytical abilities and the sort of stylistic quirks that enter into my prose style. That doesn’t make you diagnostic authorities, but it does mean that you are an appropriate community ...
Greek politics. The left-wing party Syriza, which took office as the result of a populist revolt against pressure from the northern European powers, and especially Germany, and as a rebellion against the perceived willingness of earlier Greek governments to bow before that pressure ... that party, in office, has bowed, in a big way, to just that pressure. That's a short history of recent Greek politics and a primer in why a civil war is now underway in Syriza. Former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis (pictured here) has now taken to criticizing his former boss, prime minister Alexis Tsipras. But here's the reason I'm writing about the subject just now. On Monday of this week, YV said that AT had become "the new DeGaulle." Press reports say that this insult constitutes a new level of acrimony between the two men, indicative of the depth of the intra-Syria split. Really? If I were called a new DeGaulle I'd probably feel flattered. Churchill and Rooseve...
From a short book by Christian Hartmann, OPERATION BARBAROSSA. From chapter 3, "The Eve of War." The Soviet Armed Forces also found themselves in a period of upheaval. By the early 1940s, little remained of their origins in the dramatic years of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War: the political symbolism, perhaps, and the system of having commissars shadow the officers, as well as a few commanders whose careers had begun in 1917. But it was precisely in the officer corps that it was evident how much the Red Army had changed. The officers had been among the first victims of the purges that took place between 1937 and 1940. Of the 5 Marshalls of the Soviet Union, 3 'disappeared', along with 29 of the thirty army commanders and commissars, and 110 of the 195 division commanders. In total, of the 899 highest-ranking officers, 643 were persecuted and 583 killed. In all, about 100,000 ordinary soldiers were subject to some form of repression. This was no coinc...
On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag (the parliament building) in Berlin, Germany, caught fire. A suspect, Marinus van der Lubbe, soon confessed, and portrayed himself as a lone-wolf arsonist. But Hitler had only just become Chancellor, and the fire gave him an opportunity to consolidate his power – he saw a broad Communist plot behind van der Lubbe, and soon prevailed upon President Paul von Hindenburg to suspend civil liberties to allow for the “ruthless confrontation” with that conspiracy. From the start, many anti-Nazis agreed with Hitler that van der Lubbe was merely a cog. On their account, the Hitler and his henchmen themselves had been the malefactors. Since the end of the Second World War, the hypotheses of the lone-wolf arsonist and of the Nazi conspiracy have vied for dominance. Defenders of the lone-wolf view need not harbor any Nazi or neo-Nazi sympathies: distinguished historians like Hans Mommsen, Ian Kershaw, and A.J.P. Taylor have take...
My recent reading has included Eri Hotta's book of the title and subtitle above. Eri Hotta, a Japanese woman who has been educated, and been an educator, just about everywhere -- the US, the UK, Israel, etc. looks like this: Parts of the book are based upon a diary kept by Kafu. Kafu was a very distinguished man of letters, though by 1941 his own prime as a writer/editor was passed. he had founded an important literary magazine in 1916. At any rate, by 1941 his writing energies seemed to have been going almost exclusively into his own journals. But he was a keen observer of the world around him, and keen on listening to the people there and their stories. This is something he wrote, in the summer before the attack on Pearl Harbor. In Hankou, [China], this young soldier and his comrades broke into a house of a physician who had two beautiful daughters. The doctor and his wife begged the Japanese soldiers not to touch the girls, offering them all the gold and silver ...
Four brief passages from the Manchester/Reid book. The italicized materials below are each taken from pp. 506-07. "It was over India and empire that Churchill and Roosevelt had their first serious political argument. Roosevelt presumed he could speak frankly to Churchill on most matters, including -- and mistakenly -- India. Churchill, out of politeness, kept Roosevelt abreast of Cripp's progress, or lack thereof." Stafford Cripps, in the spring of 1942 the most prominent member of the Labour Party in the War Cabinet, had gone to India to attempt to negotiate an understanding with the nationalist leaders, in particular Gandhi, by offering them semi-independent for India after the war if they would assist in the resistence to Japan in the meantime. It wasn't going well. But back to the book: "When the talks broke down, Roosevelt blamed Churchill, in the most frank terms. The two men had very different long-term objectives. Beyond the defeat of Hitler, Ch...
Late last year the publisher Little Brown brought out the third volume of a biography of Winston Churchill that has been in the works for decades, The Last Lion. The first volume, by William Manchester, The Last Lion: Visions of Glory , appeared in 1983. The second volume, subtitled Alone , came out five years later. Then Manchester put the final volume on the back burner and turned to another project, A World Lit Only By Fire , his informal meditation on medieval Europe, published in 1992. In 1998, Manchester suffered two strokes. He had, by this time, compiled extensive research materials for volume three, including interview transcripts, but had only made a start onthe actual composition. Over the following years, Manchester realized that his condition was not going to allow him to complete this project, and in 2003 he told his friend Paul Reid, a feature writer for Cox Newspapers, "I'd like you to finish the book." Manchester passed away the following yea...