Capitalism - Feudalism without the Kings

Tax the Rich

Website Wednesday

(Edit: Looks like I spoke too quickly re: Google Books selections. The public domain books and magazines seem to be complete but copyrighted books, Five Little Monkeys....etc., are just about 15 page previews. Makes sense.)

Woody Allen made me write this post today. Not his movies, but the fracas over a twitter his son sent demeaning Woody on Father's Day. If you want to read about all this, there's still a posting on Huffington Post Entertainment with over 5,000 comments. What got me interested in this issue (and the event which triggered all this modern day uproar happened 20 years ago; when probably a lot of the commenters were not even a "a gleam in their father's eye."), was the vitriol against Allen by people who obviously didn't know the facts (because they got them wrong) but had read enough about it to form lifelong cast-in-stone opinions.

Now, I'm not going to go into this 20+ year-old court case because it's too long and will spin me away from my main point which is, as I've harped before: myth becomes meme and meme becomes truth.

Which brings me to Max Hastings and WWII:

  http://www.maxhastings.com/

Max Hastings is an historian whose book, Inferno, (All Hell Broke Loose in England) looks at World War II as it really happened. It was a war occupying most of the inhabited earth, not a jingoistic event of which we're still singing praise to the brave western world (US and Britain) almost 70 years later.

I wanted Inferno for the December holidays and got it for my anniversary, which is today. I liked the reviews for the book; now I like the book. Even only about 30 pages into it, I'm getting a feeling of WWII as comparable to the horror of the Thirty's Year War (without the religious tone) when European countries were invaded repeatedly. When Hasting describes the Germans arriving in a Polish town and casually shooting a young child who panics and freezes in the street, I understand clearly the universal horror the medieval farmer felt as he spied the invaders appear in the distance.

But even more than this intimacy with horror, Hastings removes the "western" flavor of the sacrifice and finally we get a book which values the unbelievable slaughter the Russians endured to provide the Allies with a much-needed Eastern Front. 

Hastings, unfortunately, has his critics because of his inclusion of the Soviet Union's vital contribution to WWII. For too long in western Europe and the US, the myth and then the meme (The Greatest Generation) has been that this war's sacrifice was primarily in the western world. I don't think this book alone will alter the meme but it's such an important addition for getting a true history of this time period.

Hastings' website is chocked full of articles, lectures and speeches dealing with World War II and other events. Here's a fact I didn't know: in Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940-45, he writes that the British would have been content to push D-Day (Allied invasion of Normandy, 6-6-44) into 1945. Also, he explores a great fear of the German solider: that, if captured, the Russians would do the same to them as they did to the Russians - even a bully doesn't like to get bloodied.

Take your time going through this site. There's a lot here for thought and analysis.

And now, to bring us back to our mundane lives but still keeping with myth to meme to truth, there's:

 http://books.google.com/books

Now Google Books is a "poor relation" competitor to Project Gutenberg at the moment since its cache of classics is pretty paltry at present, though I do expect this to change. But it's their old magazine section which I find interesting. Not that I expect truth from magazine articles but there is always an advantage when you read contemporary documents. This is shown with all the mis-facts in the Woody Allen comments. (He was not married, nor lived with Mia Farrow; Soon-Li was not his adopted daughter, etc.) The advantage of reading contemporary articles is that errors are usually corrected or mentioned in Letters to the Editors. Twenty years after a fact, memories get cloudy.

Google Magazine has a lot of this century's issues but also a treasure trove of old Life magazines and some real "gems" like an issues of Weekly World News from the 1990s with headlines such as: Priest Explodes During Exorcism.  

Oh, and completely off-topic; this Google site has Five Little Monkeys with nothing to do! The whole illustrated book! I used to love reading that series to the kids.

Back on track: do look at the websites of Max Hastings and Google Books. You won't be disappointed.