Review of Stephen E. Ambrose's _The Good Fight_

[jbor]

----------
> From: JBFRAME at aol.com
> 
> 
> 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.

The primary sources that A.J.P. Taylor analyses in _Origins_ show just how
much the politicians on each side underestimated and misjudged one another.
They were still negotiating the issues, not really believing total war was
going to happen, hours before the declaration. But Ambrose's new book is not
so much interested in the origins of the war, as Taylor's is, but about its
course and conclusion. The main point in Schwarz's review of the book is
that the Allied forces generally (and America's entry into the war in
particular) were *not* motivated by a desire to quell Hitler and Nazism, nor
was the war effort a response to the horrors of the Holocaust, however, this
has become the myth, a "victor's history", as Otto notes, and one which
Ambrose perpetuates vigorously and with large distortions of "the facts".
Further, it's this myth about the good guys and the bad guys which Pynchon
goes a long way towards exposing as false in _GR_.

> 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.

Well, no, that's all just so much rhetorical pap and somewhat irrelevant.
With Ambrose's "pop history" there's a far more insidious form of
indoctrination at play, one which precedes the political and economic
agendas you mention: it's called *nationalism*. As Schwarz notes: "This book
will likely become, as the publisher predicts, "THE book on World War II for
kids." And it will no doubt help fuel yet another American generation's
prejudices and ethnocentrism.

best