Review of Stephen E. Ambrose's _The Good Fight_

[JBFRAME at aol.com]

In a message dated 05/26/2001 1:49:53 AM Pacific Daylight Time, 
jbor at bigpond.com writes:


> undergraduates around the world taking
>     twentieth-century-history classes have found it hard to avoid grappling
>     with the "Taylor thesis" -- that is, his argument that World War II in
>     Europe was caused not so much by a megalomaniacal Adolf Hitler as by the
>     misguided policies of Britain and France.
> 
> 

At the risk of stating the obvious, it is pretty clear that Hitler, a 
demagogue & unabashed anti-Semite, began the war with aggression by a bitter, 
humiliated military machine that thought it was using him.  At the same time 
he was aided in his designs by the imperialists of Western Europe who 
misjudged his aims &, to an extent, shared his prejudices & distrust of the 
working-class.  
It was also the short-sighted policies of the Western "democracies" that made 
possible "left-wing" dictators like Stalin.

Ambrose is part of a recent trend in pop history of what I like to call the 
"History Channel" school.  He is a good writer of popular prose & would serve 
better as a novelist.  In an age of the decadence of imperialism, such people 
are good servants of the oligarchies that grease the creaky wheels of 
post-modern Capitalism.

jbf


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