Doug lying about DeLong reviewing Richard Evans' Lying About Hitler

[jbor]

----------
>From: Doug Millison <millison at online-journalist.com>
>
> In his review of the Evans book, DeLong discusses another history
> (A.J.P. Taylor's)  that has been mentioned several times in this
> forum to support the notion that Germany didn't start WWII -- DeLong
> shows how this sort of argumentation relates to the historial
> approach of Holocaust deniers.

Well, that's quite incorrect actually, on both counts. DeLong places him
into a rather elite group: "Thucydides, Syme, Taylor, and
Gibbon--more-than-reputable historians, great historians ... "
>
> In Evans's view, a historian is a member of and a participant in an ongoing
> discourse that grounds itself most firmly in the available primary sources.

Which is exactly what A.J.P. Taylor's book does. By the way, Taylor is no
apologist for Hitler. Perhaps Doug should have read Taylor's book before
attempting to finagle him into the current diatribe.

> And A.J.P. Taylor's Origins of World War II is
> ultimately a failure because its psychological picture of Hitler's
> motivations and aims is inconsistent with what else we know about Hitler
> from primary sources outside the book.

And what would those "outside" sources be I wonder?

>  Misquotation and
> mistranslation are greater sins against Clio than merely averting one's eyes
> from pieces of evidence, or telling history to make a particular point
> rather than as it really happened.

Indeed. A lesson Doug should take note of.

By the way, here's a response and reply to DeLong's review printed at the
site:

------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Bruce Bartlett  At: BBart12561 at cs.com  Date: Wednesday May 16th, 2001
10:02 AM

I think you were a little hard on Taylor.  I think the essential point is
that he was concerned with the origins of the war, not its conduct.  And his
argument that the allies could have stopped Hitler through concerted action
at almost any moment before September, 1939, is irrefutable.  They created
Hitler, in a sense, by giving him easy victories that strengthened him
politically and emboldened him, leading him to go further and further with
each subsequent aggression.  I still think it is possibly the most
insightful book I have ever read.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Brad DeLong  At: delong at econ.berkeley.edu  Date: Wednesday May 16th,
2001 11:01 AM

Perhaps I was too hard. I did learn a lot from _Origins of the Second World
War_.

But its picture of Hitler the Enlightenment despot seeking cheap gains and
additional provinces is not credible, unless you believe in a sharp
personality shift on Hitler's part from canny politician with limited aims
to genocidal megalomaniac sometime between Munich and Barbarossa...


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