Doug lying about DeLong reviewing Richard Evans' Lying About Hitler

[Paul Mackin]

One slight misstep on the part of DeLong (clumsily conflating the origins of
the War and the Hitler regime's wartime conduct) throws Millison into his
nutty compulsion to project Holocaust denial on anyone within mudslingly
range.

            P.

----- Original Message -----
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2001 4:57 PM
Subject: Re: Doug lying about DeLong reviewing Richard Evans' Lying About
Hitler


>
> ----------
> >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...
>
>
> best