All posts filed under: War

Gun Control in Nazi Occupied-France: Tyranny and Resistance (Stephen P. Halbrook)

Published by Charles

This is an academic monograph, rather than a work of propaganda or political inspiration. Those looking for a rabble-rousing polemic in the style of today’s mass-popular conservative authors, or of a Wayne LaPierre speech, will be disappointed.  What the reader gets instead is far more valuable:  an understanding of modern history as it relates to gun control, and illumination of how gun seizures may work in practice if our own government turns criminal.

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (Christopher R. Browning)

Published by Charles

It seems to me that we in the West are like men in a cavern, out of which lead many paths, none signposted.  Some paths lead to bright futures, but other paths lead to terrible ones, among them those where, once again as we did not so very long ago, we slaughter each other over ideology.  And the way back is closed, so we must choose one path forward.  The service of this book is that it illustrates Solzhenitsyn’s dictum, that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart.  Thus, reflecting upon this book may help us choose the correct exit from the cavern, and to that end, it is worth bearing the unease that comes over us when we read books like this. This book, a staple of Holocaust studies for twenty-five years, has recently risen to fresh prominence due to repeated mentions of it by Canadian psychologist, and superstar, Jordan Peterson.  His focus on the book arises from his own decades-long study of evil regimes, and his thought on how …

The White King: Charles I, Traitor, Murderer, Martyr (Leanda de Lisle)

Published by Charles

As with Nicholas II, the last ruling Romanov, how we view Charles I is largely set by how his days ended.  And as with Nicholas, we have been further conditioned by generations of propaganda pumped out by the winners and their ideological allies, claiming that it was Charles’s own bad philosophy, coupled with incompetence, rather than mostly bad luck and choices only wrong in retrospect, that led to his death.  Leanda de Lisle’s The White King rejects the fake news and offers an even-handed view.

The Saboteur: The Aristocrat Who Became France’s Most Daring Anti-Nazi Commando (Paul Kix)

Published by Charles

This is the story of a man—Robert de La Rouchefoucauld, scion of one of the oldest noble families in France, who lived from 1923 to 2012.  He led a life in full; the focus of this book is his three years fighting against the Germans in France, as a résistant.  It is a tale of bravery and derring-do, and it is gripping.  But even more, it is terribly sad, because reading about this past makes us realize how masculinity and duty as exemplified by La Rouchefoucauld are no longer celebrated, but rather denigrated, to the detriment of all of us.

The Russian Revolution: A New History (Sean McMeekin)

Published by Charles

I am currently very focused on the ascent to power of Communism in Russia, not because it had anything to recommend it, but for the lessons it can teach us.  Some of those lessons are ones the author of this book, Sean McMeekin, wants to impart—the dangers of left-wing ideology, primarily.  Those are valuable lessons, certainly, but if we haven’t learned them after many decades of left-wing horror shows, we’re not going to learn them from this book.  The lessons I am seeking, therefore, are more dynamic:  how power can be grasped and used in fluid, chaotic situations, and by what kind of people.  And those lessons are also on full display in this book, even if I did not learn any new ones.

Napoleon: A Life (Andrew Roberts)

Published by Charles

For some time now, I have been claiming that what we are likely to get, and probably need, whether we like it or not, is a Man of Destiny.  The original man called that was, of course, Napoleon Bonaparte.  Neither my claim nor Napoleon is popular nowadays.  We have gotten used to hearing that individual men don’t matter—that history is instead, take your pick, a matter of struggle for economic advantage, or of the opinions and actions of the masses, or of blind and random fate, or of group politics of one type or another.  This book, Andrew Roberts’s generally positive take on Napoleon, shows the falsehood of those claims, and proves that what matters is men.  Not men in general, but a tiny subset of men who make, and have always made, the world what it is, and what it will be, good and bad.

Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook (Edward Luttwak)

Published by Charles

Given that zombie survival manuals and similar how-to books are today all the rage, on sale at every Costco, Edward Luttwak’s Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook seems like a selection from the same genre.  Namely, of somewhat jokey books that purport to tell you what to do in a strange, disastrous situation, while effectively acknowledging that if you do end up being chased by zombies, hurriedly turning to the index, finding the entry “When Being Pursued,” then scrambling to locate page 102, isn’t probably the best tactic for survival.  But instead, this book is the real thing, I think—an actual practical handbook on how to overthrow the state.  More precisely, how to overthrow a weak state, a banana republic, though I will give some thought to relevance in the modern American context.

The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States (Jeffrey Lewis)

Published by Charles

For some time now, I have been telling my children, none of whom have ever lived through any event that significantly harmed America, that sooner or later, history will return.  The older ones roll their eyes; the younger ones have no idea what I mean.  This book shows what I mean, through a fictionalized look at a 2020 nuclear attack by North Korea on South Korea, Japan, and the United States.

The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic (Mike Duncan)

Published by Charles

How the Roman Republic ended is well known, even in these undereducated days, but all the attention focus goes to Julius Caesar.  True, he was the pivot of the actual end of the Republic, but what came before and after was more important.  What came after, during the long reign of Augustus, may not be as thrilling as story, but it dictated much of the later history of the West (and of the Roman East, now temporarily in thralldom).  This book covers the other side of the transition, what came before—a period that nowadays is nearly forgotten, but is perhaps more critically important in what it can teach us today.

The Arms of Krupp 1587-1968 (William Manchester)

Published by Charles

The late William Manchester, master of twentieth century popular history, made his reputation with this book, published in 1968.  There will never be another book on the Krupp family like it, and not just because it’s so long, nearly half a million words and a thousand pages.  It is also because the Krupps are largely forgotten today, fifty years later—and because Manchester personally talked to nearly everyone in, and connected to, the Krupp family at its height, and those people are all dead.  Just as dead is the firm itself, since the sole proprietorship that was “Krupp” no longer exists in that form or has any connection to the Krupp family.  Sic transit gloria mundi, if “gloria” is the right word.