The first time I ever saw a photo of Lenin’s embalmed corpse on display in its mausoleum in Moscow, the sight gave me the creeps. There was something dreadful about making a body into an icon–a sort of zombie-esque quality … Continue reading →
Norman Geras is a man who has thought long and hard about the Holocaust. Recently, he tackled the controversial question of whether the Holocaust was, “in some significant moral sense, singular or unique in the long catalogue of calamities that … Continue reading →
To Americans, the finer points of parliamentary systems are, quite literally, foreign territory. So the recent German election results, murky and confusing to begin with, seem even murkier and more confusing to us Yanks. One thing is clear, though: the … Continue reading →
A while back, in the course of doing some research on World War II and the Holocaust, I came across a statistic that absolutely stunned me: the percentage of Jews in the population of Germany immediately prior to World War … Continue reading →
In this thread about the decision to drop the atomic bomb, anonymous asks: Why didn’t they drop a nuke on an unpopulated area and say, ‘See that goddamn horror? We’ll drop another one on your heads in two days if … Continue reading →
Both Austin Bay and Clive Davis recently cited this famous essay by literary critic Paul Fussell in their posts on the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb. I had read Fussell’s 1988 essay, provocatively titled “God Bless … Continue reading →
A few days from now will be the sixtieth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The rightness of that decision is still being vigorously debated. Here’s an article from the Weekly Standard (hat tip: Austin Bay) … Continue reading →
I recently came across an article on the history of the all-volunteer military. I found it fascinating, and so I thought I’d call your attention to it. Prior to reading it, if you’d asked me to sketch the history of … Continue reading →
I’m reading a book I find exceedingly fascinating. It’s called American Brutus, and it’s a fairly new biography of John Wilkes Booth, by Michael W. Kauffman. John Wilkes Booth and Lincoln are two figures about which most of us think … Continue reading →
I know it’s not a real cheerer-upper, but I recently read Tolstoi’s The Death of Ivan Illych. Actually, you could say that I re-read it, since my first encounter with the novella was in a Russian literature course I took … Continue reading →
I was reading a thread at LGF about Talabani’s selection as interim President of Iraq, when I saw this remark by a commenter named sandspur: Just saw a little clip of Talabani on FNC. Sorry I can’t quote him verbatim, … Continue reading →