“the very thing they had spent a century planning to avoid

Surely the very “balance of power” theory (unearthed above as the reason the British always fight wars in Europe) would go against that view. The powers were so “balanced” in 1914 that war was inevitable…”

Indeed, the point I was making though was that Britain was trying to avoid being sucked into a large scale land war in Europe; the planning was to make any contribution largely maritime and economic, where Britain held sway. She would then be able to withdraw if it suited and hold the whip hand in any peace negotiation. http://cricketandcivilisation.blogspot.com/2007/11/great-war-ii-why-trenches.html

If people like this oppose the Iraq war, it must indeed have been a noble undertaking, and one can only be honored by their disapproval.

“in many sectors the Germans were sitting pretty in purpose-built deep entrenchments (some with all the comforts of home) which the blatant incompetence of british generals allowed them to build (often in by far the best strategic positions) in 1914?”

1. So why did the Germans lose?

2. How did the Generals manage to take the new army of 1916 and turn it into the strongest in the world (again, the only time in Britain’s history its army has held that status) in 1918 if they were ‘incompetent’?

3. You keep referring to Corrigan et al as revisionists. In fact your Blackadder IV style history is the true revisionism, in that it was not the received view after the war at all, only with the rise of pacifism from the 30s.

4. “I doubt you could find much to back up yours outside the Biggles-style bravado of subalterns who knew they would be dead within the week whilst I would be quite happy to take you to the Imperial war Museum for a look at the letters and diaries ordinary soldiers were writing at the time.”

Bollocks. There are many letters etc going the other way too.

Yes I can see that. That’s why I said what I did.

I think if the Nazis had a free choice between Madagascar and Poland in a non-war setting they would have chosen Madagascar. As you say the extermination would have happened almost unnoticed and unremarked.

I think it’s a good reminder also that people should not be so quick to dismiss those people of African descent of who talk of a holocaust among their people taken into slavery. It would have been much the same with Madagascar – a huge casualty rate on the outgoing passage, huge death rate from tropical diseases, and the rest wasting away through Japanese POW-style overwork. And through it all “German honour” would have been maintained.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2277589,00.html

Baker prefers to note Goebbels’s comment on a photograph of Churchill: “This man walks over dead bodies to satisfy his blind and presumptuous personal ambition.” Baker also includes cameos which suggest, incorrectly, that Churchill was antisemitic. For example, he quotes from an essay in Churchill’s 1937 book Great Contemporaries which identified the malign Trotsky by his race: “‘He was a Jew,’ wrote Churchill with finality. ‘He was still a Jew. Nothing could get over that.’” But Baker omits the context. Churchill was explaining that Trotsky’s Jewishness was an obstacle to his becoming autocrat of Communist Russia, and he criticised “so narrow-minded a reason”.

Now there is no reason why Goebbel’s views of Churchill should not be used in a history book, but to use a nazi’s view as (the only) evidence of the character of a man he never met and to miss out the context of a quote is pure David Irving.

Baker is a novelist and we have talked many times before about the difference between artistic writing and history. There is no reason why a novelist shouldn’t invent character motivations, fantastic scenarios and even invert morality. A historian should never be doing these things. Baker knows this and his book is part of the postmodern project to blur the boundaries and problematise the writing of history.

Dangerous stuff.

Good review of Baker’s book here.

“A book that can adduce Goebbels as an authority in order to vilify Churchill has clearly lost touch with all moral and intellectual bearings. No one who knows about World War II will take “Human Smoke” at all seriously. The problem is that people who don’t know enough, and who enjoy the spectacle of a writer of apparent authority turning the myth of “the good war” upside down, will think “Human Smoke” is a brave book. Already a reviewer in the Los Angeles Times has praised it for “demonstrating that World War II was one of the biggest, most carefully plotted lies in modern history.” That people who think this way about the past will apply the same self-righteous ignorance to the politics of the present and future makes “Human Smoke” not just a stupid book, but a scary one.”

Yep, it is pretty sick

see http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/article.php?id=1861 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WG02QqRYf0

Of course doesn’t want to read historical material – he wants ownership of it: an impossible thing to demand as historians do not reconstruct the past but only attempt to interpret it. Just as the nazis issued their own historical textbooks Wilby would like the dominant narrative about WW2 to be his own simplistic one. No historian worth his salt thinks there could be any such thing as a single view – well except military historians maybe! Whatever, one judges a society by how it treats its historians and their differing views (as long as they don’t differ outside the boundaries of agreed knowledge!)

I don’t really want to argue the facts about WW1 by the way but I think it a given that there are as many historians who think the generals were blunderers as those who think them justified. Almost as many as there are functionalists and intentionalists on the subject of Hitler. Any other