Sunday, the 80th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland, Vice President Mike Pence spoke in Warsaw’s Pilsudski Square of “five decades of untold suffering and death that followed” the invasion. Five decades! What Pence was saying was that, for Poland, World War II did not end in victory but defeat and occupation by an…
Is the prospect of looming global recession merely an economic matter, to be discussed within the framework of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 – which is to say, whether or not, the Central Bankers have wasted their available tools to manage it? Or, is there a wider pattern of geo-political markers that may be…
Author’s preface German dictator Adolf Hitler had a central role in initiating World War II, by pursuing a list of bold and aggressive foreign policy actions dating from the mid-1930s, and culminating in his invasion of Poland in the autumn of 1939 – an attack which had prior agreement with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who…
Review of Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (University of Chicago Press, 2013), xii + 351 pgs., hardcover. Another D-Day (June 6) celebration on has come and gone. It has been ten years since I posted this on the LRC blog: According to an article about Antony Beevor’s new book, D-Day,…
Some may remember that in 2005 a major media controversy engulfed Harvard President Larry Summers over his remarks at an academic conference. Casually speaking off-the-record at the private gathering, Summers had gingerly raised the hypothetical possibility that on average men might be a bit better at mathematics than women, perhaps partially explaining the far larger…
On my many walking visits to the vast Normandy battlefield in France, I kept recalling the ever so wise dictum of Prussia’s great monarch, Frederick the Great: ‘he who defends everything, defends nothing.’ On this 74th anniversary of the D-Day landings, it’s well worth recalling the old warrior-king Adolf Hitler, a veteran of the infantry,…
