Michael Jordan Played Basketball Well

I think the "counterintuitive" style of journalism in which people sometimes appear to care more about producing an "interesting" argument than a true one gets pretty annoying. That said, surely there's something to be said for giving some consideration to originality of ideas and the goal of provoking further thought on the part of the audience. Do we really need a Richard Cohen column about how World War II was, in fact, a good war? Surely there's some more pressing topic that the precious Washington Post op-ed page real estate could be devoted to.

It is, however, a reminder that I'm glad to work in a medium where there are no space restrictions and I can cover important things and trivial ones to my heart's content.

Comments

We all know why Richard Cohen wrote that piece, and it has absolutely nothing to do with WW2...

Posted by soullite | April 1, 2008 2:52 PM

I'm not going to read Cohen's column or Nicholson Baker's book, but someone should tell the Washington Post that Anne Frank died.

Posted by David B. | April 1, 2008 2:55 PM

When I saw that headline in the Post, I thought it was going to be about Pat Buchanan's book that Matt wrote about last week.

I guess this is becoming a bit of a theme.

Posted by SoCalJustice | April 1, 2008 3:05 PM

Not that it's a surprise, but the only salient thing about Cohen's column is how vacuous it is. He writes 500 words of "Yes it was justifid! So there!" Seriously, fire that guy. A smart eighth grader could do a better job.

Posted by Francisco The Man | April 1, 2008 3:06 PM

What does he mean by "we"? I know he's old, but is he really old enough to have fought in WWII?

Posted by Jim W | April 1, 2008 3:07 PM

Richard Cohen is lazy. That's all you need to know about why he decided to write that piece.

Posted by blah | April 1, 2008 3:08 PM

"Do we really need a Richard Cohen column about how World War II was, in fact, a good war?"

No: you need an Afghan-American or an Iraqi-American to tell you why the wars your non-Jewish countrymen are fighting in those countries are good wars.

Posted by Juan | April 1, 2008 3:11 PM

Richard Cohen is 66 or 67, so he might have served in the First Infant-try Division during World War 2.

Posted by phil | April 1, 2008 3:16 PM

I have not read Baker's book - read the NY Times Book Review and am intrigued. My guess is Cohen wildly misrepresents Baker. Baker's point, it seems from the reviews, is the way in which we waged war; the Tokyo firebombing, Dresden (the worst act the allies commited?), the whole total war issue - not that Baker was against defeating Naziism or Fascism. But again, someone who has read Baker's book could shed some light. Only this I know: Cohen cannot be trusted.

Posted by MaxGowan | April 1, 2008 3:17 PM

What MaxGowan said. Even having only read the NY Times and LA Times reviews of Baker's book, it seems that to summarize the book's argument as "we should not have fought World War II" is both incredibly simplistic and totally wrong.

I guess Cohen gets to write his own taglines, though. Or else whoever does write the taglines for the online Post has a particular readership in mind.

Posted by James Gary | April 1, 2008 3:27 PM

Wow, vacuous doesn't begin to describe it. Cohen's rebuttal to Baker consists of quoting something silly Gandhi said. Never mind that Baker explicitly disclaims Gandhi, "indifferent to suffering".

Posted by Haukur | April 1, 2008 3:37 PM

Richard Cohen writes:

One casualty of a bad war such as that in Iraq is the growing feeling that no war is worth the cost. This was an important sentiment in Europe after the horrors of World War I, and it produced the supine response to Hitler and the celebrated 1933 declaration by the young debaters of the Oxford Union "that this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country."

September 1, 1939 - Germany invades Poland
2 days later Britain declares war on Germany
831 days later Germany declares war on the United States

I would have a lot more respect for Cohen's use of the word "supine" to describe the response of British youth to increasing German aggression in the mid 1930s if he had introduced an equivalent word to describe the way American political leaders waited more than two years to join a war that was actually happening. Of course, this myopia regarding the existence of the second world war between September 1939 and December 1941 is a commonplace in America and is certainly not limited to the likes of Richard Cohen.

Posted by ndm | April 1, 2008 3:38 PM

Ghandi was against WWII too.

Posted by Nathan Clark | April 1, 2008 3:38 PM

No, it makes perfect sense for Cohen to be writing this. The whole myth of World War II is the primary, arguably the sole, intellectual justification for American global hegemony. (I'm using myth in a broad sense, not to say that the narrative is false but that it serves a sacred function).

Unless you believe the standard narrative (the virtuous but naive Anglo-Americans who tried appeasement, Churchill's foresight and wisdom, and the centrality of Britain and America in defeating Hitler) then it doesn't make sense to blindly support whatever new wars America enters into. I happen to believe some of the standard narrative (the evilness of Hitler) but not all of it (I think appeasement was primarily motivated by anti-communism, not lily-livered-ness; and of course Hitler was defeated not by Churchill but by the Red Army). That little bit of skepticism makes it difficult for me to automatically assume that every war America enters into.

So Cohen is right to regard this as a central myth in need of protection.

By the way, as I understand it, Baker doesn't go too deeply into the Allied bombings of European cities. Rather he offers a counternarrative to the myth of appeasement I describe.

Posted by Jeet Heer | April 1, 2008 3:56 PM

Richard Cohen is still accorded credibility within a major American newspaper.
It is wrong.

Posted by Brian M. | April 1, 2008 4:19 PM

Richard Cohen is still accorded credibility within a major American newspaper.
It is wrong.

Posted by Brian M. | April 1, 2008 4:20 PM

The idea that the United States entered World War II to end the Holocaust is as big of a fairy tale as the idea that the US entered the Civil War to end slavery. (Both outcomes rose out of the circumstances of the wars, and made them worth fighting.)

Allied leaders had reports of mass killings at Auschwitz in April 1943, but blew them off as exaggerations until they were backed up in mid-1944, when the US had already been in the war for two and a half years.

Hitler was defeated not by Churchill but by the Red Army

Seventy-five percent of Germany's casualties for the entire war were against the Soviet Union.

Germany invaded the Soviet Union with 166 divisions on June 22, 1941. Meanwhile, the Afrika Korps had two German divisions and eight Italian divisions.

The Soviets had already stopped the Germans at Stalingrad by the time the Allies landed in North Africa on November 6, 1942, and the Soviets counter-attacked on November 19. Operation Torch was in response to the Soviets pressing the British and Americans for a second front to pressure the Germans, but the Germans had alrady reached their high-water mark on the Eastern Front. Germany's last major offensive in the East, at Kursk, was in July 1943.

On D-Day (June 6, 1944), the Germans had 58 divisions in France, Belgium and Holland, and 239 divisions on the Eastern Front. The Allies invaded Normandy with 39 divisions.

A couple of weeks after D-Day, the Red Army marked the anniversary of the Nazi invasion with an offensive involving 1,245,000 men (approximately 124 divisions). A diversionary attack on Finland with 41 divisions was larger than the Normandy invasion force.

Posted by kirkaracha | April 1, 2008 4:21 PM

NDM said: "Of course, this myopia regarding the existence of the second world war between September 1939 and December 1941 is a commonplace in America and is certainly not limited to the likes of Richard Cohen."

Let me guess you're British. Look WW2 started prior to Sept 1939 for a lot of people, ask the Czechs or the Chinese for example.

Posted by hankest | April 1, 2008 4:28 PM

Wow, an actual person who knows history! Thanks much, kirkaracha.

Speaking of which, ndm, please read a little more - FDR was on to Hitler from the very beginning. It took, oh, Peal Harbor, for us to enter the war. (Then, btw, it was Germany and Italy that decared war on the U.S.) But this had been brewing for some years. FDR has to run for an unprecedented third term, while isolationism ran very high among our countrymen. Long story.

Posted by maxgowan | April 1, 2008 4:30 PM

"FDR has to run for an unprecedented third term, while isolationism ran very high among our countrymen. Long story."

The similarities between FDR and Bush are interesting:

In response to a surprise attack that killed ~3000 Americans, both invaded Arab countries that had nothing to do with the attack.

Both were accused of sending men into battle with insufficient armor initially.

Both were accused of violating the Constitution in their actions to defend the home front.

And you can keep going. Have fun with it.

Posted by Juan | April 1, 2008 4:39 PM

Right on, Jeet.

Cohen is a court intellectual; a high priest; a kept man. His purpose is to justify, apologise for, and sacralize the warfare state and its works. The lack of success in our current wonderful adventure, and the distance of time from our holy Greatest Generation, are degrading the myth. The myth is necessary for the respectable establishment. Therefore the mass media will spend any necessary amount of time and space to reinforce it.

Posted by Leonard | April 1, 2008 4:42 PM

FDR was on to Hitler from the very beginning. It took, oh, Pearl Harbor, for us to enter the war.

As Ian Kershaw details in his new book Fateful Choices, American assistance to the UK was so aggressive that the German navy was rarin' for war, and Hitler pretty much considered the U.S. to be in an undeclared war with Germany.

Hitler always saw the U.S. as the final enemy (see Tooze's new book) and apparently was very, very poorly informed about the strong isolationist sentiment here -- otherwise he might've been smart enough not to declare war on us.

Posted by Anderson | April 1, 2008 4:43 PM

re appeasement: I believe a portion of the upper (and largely ruling) class of France and UK (and germany as well) was quite anticommunist and therefore sympathetic to one degree or another to any other form of anticommunism. All classes had suffered hugely in WW1 and that was never far from anyone's mind. To repeat the Somme or Verdun was not militarily or politically feasible. I suspect there was also a feeling that the peace had not been successful, and that perhaps the reparations had been the cause. Had the war begun in 1938, There would have been a great advantage of Czech forces, but with the former Austria to its south (now Ostmark in the new, kleindeutsch Germany), it would been less use. And neither French nor British military planners intended an offensive (as would in fact happen to Poland), so the german forces would have defeated the Czechoslovak army.
The Polish army might have acted, but it is not likely; only the Soviet Union was willing to act (and I'll assume their army was in even worse shape in 1938 than it was in 1941), but would need Polish permission to cross to fight Germany (absolutely unthinkable). If any have ever seen a map of pre-war Czechoslovakia, you will see it seems to extend farther east. The eastern province of Ruthenia provided the link to the USSR in case events after WW2 followed the course of what happened after WW1.
In the west, a determined German offensive could well have led to a negotiated peace (I believe the Germans, like the French and british, originally planned on a replay of the offensive of 1914).
This is all a bunch of ifs, but there were a lot of ifs that contributed to allied victory.

Posted by Pierre de Fermat | April 1, 2008 4:55 PM

Bush is the anti-FDR. Do some reading. Start with Burns' Solder of Freedoms. Good God.

Posted by maxgowan | April 1, 2008 4:56 PM

Re: Anderson's post

Raeder and Doenitz were begging Hitler to let them go to war in the summer of 1941. It's a good thing they lost out, because if the Happy Time had started right at the beginning of the war for the US, instead of being forced to wait months after the declaration, until the summer of 1942 (the North Atlantic is awful in the winter, and most U-Boats operated on the surface, submerging when they closed on targets), then our abysmally unguarded merchant fleet would have been overwhelmed.

Posted by Greg | April 1, 2008 5:01 PM

In the words of Bart Simpson: "There are no good wars. Except for World War II, the American Revolution and the Star Wars Trilogy."

Posted by Bob | April 1, 2008 5:03 PM

I'm not sure an op-ed piece, including Cohen's, is all that different from what Matt describes (and defends) as a journalistic piece that gives "consideration to originality of ideas and the goal of provoking further thought on the part of the audience."

I'm sure there are more relevant things for Choen to report on, but my problem is not with the op-eds, or else of similar nature, but actual front page news stories that are printed without much consideration to the facts.

Posted by AKBY | April 1, 2008 5:10 PM

Of all the leaders and all the plans, the only one who came out of WWII with what he wanted was Stalin.

The record shows that there's a good chance Hitler would have been dispensed with in 1938 if the Brits and French hadn't sold out the Czechs at Munich. Most of the German General Staff was appalled at the idea of going to war before 1941 or '42. They knew they'd eventually lose, and were prepared to mount a coup if Hitler insisted on going to war over Sudetenland. Instead, the "allies" folded, Hitler looked like a hero to the Germans, and it took about 40 million deaths to finally end it.

Now, we are back to about 1936. We'll bail out in Iraq, and won't go to war again unless we have no vital interests at stake, someone else pays for it, and the war can be won with no casualties in less than the span of an average sit com.

Mr. Powell has it absolutely right. The last chance to stop Hitler short of war was thrown away by Chamberlain who sold out Czechoslovakia at the Munich Conference. As historian Walter Goerlitz states in his, "History of the German General Staff," the top general staff officers, Frisch and Von Blomberg were planning a coup against Hitler as they considered him a dangerous gambler. Of course, when Hitlers' gamble at Munich paid off, their attempted coup collapsed. Soon thereafter, Hitler got rid of Frisch and Von Blomberg and put his toadies in charge, taking command himself. After that, war was inevitable.

Posted by SLC | April 1, 2008 5:30 PM

"...Most of the German General Staff was appalled at the idea of going to war before 1941 or '42. They knew they'd eventually lose, and were prepared to mount a coup if Hitler insisted on going to war over Sudetenland...."
I've heard it was the reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936, but I suspect they would have failed then as they did in 1944 when the reality of defeat was very plain.
Yes, Stalin got what he wanted and more, but in 40 years that disintegrated, and a thoroughly revived western europe had been established.

Posted by Pierre de Fermat | April 1, 2008 5:36 PM

Pierre de Fermat, I love your name.

Posted by 55 | April 1, 2008 5:38 PM

both invaded Arab countries that had nothing to do with the attack

The Allies invaded Morocco and Algeria, which were territories of Vichy France. Vichy France collaborated with Nazi Germany. Germany was formally allied with Japan, which committed the Pearl Harbor attack.

Iraq had no involvement in the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Posted by kirkaracha | April 1, 2008 5:42 PM

I have a wonderful explanation of the name, but the "Comments" is too small to contain it.

Posted by Pierre de Fermat | April 1, 2008 5:52 PM

"it seems that to summarize the book's argument as "we should not have fought World War II" is both incredibly simplistic and totally wrong."

I read Human Smoke, and I'd say that summary is simplistic, but not totally wrong. It's too bad that that's how it's being reviewed, and while Cohen's review is probably the laziest, at least he didn't call the book "perverse" and "scary" like Adam Kirsch did in the Sun.

Human Smoke is not a conventional historical argument; it has no thesis. It's just a series of carefully chosen (perhaps "cherry-picked") anecdotes that cluster around a number of arguments, among them:

-That the Allies callously did very little to save any of the Nazi's most defenseless victims.

-That the Allies, especially Churchill, poured a lot of time and imagination into devising ways to starve and bomb as many of the civilians Hitler held prisoner as possible, to impel them towards an uprising that never happened.

-That it's at least plausible to imagine other paths which could have ended in Hitler's defeat that involved much less devastation.

And more! Okay, I'm not really doing the book justice. There's a lot in there, and it doesn't quite ever come together into an easily summarized argument. I'd say Baker's point is that if we were better people, if the Allies really had been transcendantly heroic, then that war wouldn't have been necessary in the first place. But people are assholes, so it was inevitable.

Posted by David H. | April 1, 2008 5:57 PM

"I have a wonderful explanation of the name, but the "Comments" is too small to contain it."

Oof. If you're a woman...marry me.

Posted by 55 | April 1, 2008 5:59 PM

Yeah World War II was a good war, except for the 50 million or so people who were killed and the millions more who were maimed or displaced. Other than that it was just a dandy war.

Posted by AnotherBruce | April 1, 2008 6:11 PM

"The Allies invaded Morocco and Algeria, which were territories of Vichy France. Vichy France collaborated with Nazi Germany. Germany was formally allied with Japan, which committed the Pearl Harbor attack."

The Allies invaded Western Sahara, which had as much to do with the Pearl Harbor attack as Iraq had to do with 9/11.

Posted by Juan | April 1, 2008 7:22 PM

jeeze juan, maj strasser might disagree.

Posted by Pierre de Fermat | April 1, 2008 7:45 PM

Go Pierre!

Posted by maxgowan | April 1, 2008 8:23 PM

"One casualty of a bad war such as that in Iraq is the growing feeling that no war is worth the cost."

So apparently, the real tragedy of Iraq is that American may think twice about supporting the next disastrous campaign against the enemies of civilization/Israel. This has been another episode of: "Richard Cohen: Despicable Human Being."

Posted by faux facsimile | April 1, 2008 8:45 PM

Lots of good stuff in the comments, but I found MY's intro to his post amusing for reasons that he may not have thought about. MY talks about the counterintuitive or contrarian style of argument at arm's length like he knows nothing about it, when if you read his stuff for more than a week it's lousy with it. I blame Slate, Lord Saletan, and his evil minions for corrupting poor Matt and all that's good and true in the world. Plus the DH rule.

Posted by scottreads | April 1, 2008 9:22 PM

I think people tend to forget how important the Lend-Lease Act was to Allied victory in WWII. Without the $50 billion in US aid ($700 billion in 2007 dollars) both England and the USSR would have fallen to Germany. England had no planes left and the USSR was a backward country entirely dependent upon rail until we supplied them with heavy trucks. The Act, signed in March 1941 (prior to the German invasion of Russia), allowed the US industrial machine to gear up in anticipation of our official entry into the war. Germany had been stockpiling munitions for almost 8 years at that point. And FDR was no fool, he knew that the more Germans the Soviets killed, the fewer Americans that would die.

I believe that Hitler said of Chamberlain's appeasement at Munich, "they have cheated me out of my war." He was trying to provoke a war in the East. He wanted alliance with Britain, after all, for 4 years they had allowed German rearmament and the invasions of the Rhineland, Austria, the Sudetenland, and then the rest of Czechoslovakia. It wasn't until Chamberlain laid down the marker over Poland that Hitler made his pact with Stalin.

No one in Europe has any right to complain about when the US entered the war.

Posted by Just Karl | April 1, 2008 10:10 PM

And here I was ready to argue about how Michael Jordan killed the NBA.

Posted by Just Karl | April 1, 2008 10:12 PM

What happened to your campaign against "scare quotes" you know about how Plato had two hands and no letters and "Plato" has 5 letters and no hands and all that "Emerson Hall" blogging ?

I guess you decided you don't have enough grit to achieve "victory" and that it would be "interesting" and "counterintuitive" if you began relying on scare quotes in place of "arguments." Is that what happened "?"

Posted by Robert Waldmann | April 1, 2008 10:38 PM

Scottreads is right about Yglesias guilt in counter-intuivism.

This place is indeed lousy with it.

Physician, heal thyself!

Posted by Ben Cronin | April 1, 2008 11:37 PM

A new book argues that we should not breathe oxygen. It is wrong.

Posted by Cohen vs Straw Man | April 1, 2008 11:37 PM

Inconvenient facts

Baker's book very consistently and thoroughly avoids constructing any sort of theory about WWII. He simply presents a series of anecdotes which render laughable all of the fine and noble rationalizing theories about WWII that we were raised on.

Baker may have a replacement theory in mind. I heard him on an NPR program seeming to argue that Ghandi and other pacifists were right about the war, though perhaps he was simply trying to goad his interviewer into actually unpacking, for demolition, the tacit theories about WWII that "everyone knows", that are so irrefutable that they never have to face any even half-way serious attempt at refutation. But in his book, he makes absolutely no movement in the direction of constructing an alternate grand theory, moral or otherwise, about the war.

But the question of what theories Baker thinks may or may not be supported by the material he has gathered in this book is not really important. The facts themselves are very important. They constitute the particulars of the prosecution that our side's war criminals in that war never had to face, because we won the war and thereby escaped our Nuremberg Tribunal. The losers of that war are not compelled to continue in the belief that National Socialism was anything but pathological nonsense. But because our side never had to face its guilt, we have been compelled to continue to act as if starvation blockades and strategic bombing were as legal as church on Sunday, and as necessary for our national security as breathing is to life.

Posted by Glen Tomkins | April 2, 2008 12:01 AM

it's very interesting that nicholson baker's books attract this self-righteous rage from liberal neocons. this one gets praised by a real novelist in the sunday nyt book review but was trashed by william grimes in the daily, much as cohen trashs it. but this is nothing compared to leon weiseltier's front page nytbr of baker's 'checkpoint'--a brilliant little book about how bush drives people crazy. weiseltier basically wanted baker to commit suicide for writing anything so anti-american.

Posted by annie | April 2, 2008 2:32 AM

Michael Jordan was a mediocre player in a sport that almost everyone else in the world just sucks at. Think about it.

Posted by aleks | April 2, 2008 8:24 AM

The Allies invaded Western Sahara, which had as much to do with the Pearl Harbor attack as Iraq had to do with 9/11.

Posted by Juan | April 1, 2008 7:22 PM
**********************

Someone should have told you this a long time ago, but Germany declared war on the US. I'll give you three guesses whether or not Iraq did the same.

Posted by aleks | April 2, 2008 8:35 AM

You should never expect anything good from a Cohen screed, but in this latest one the thing that stood out for me was this: At no time does the twit say that he actually read the book, or even held it in his hands long enough to read the jacket blurbs. What launched this latest flight of blithering stupidity was a review of the book.

Gotta admit, if he's getting paid to hyperventilate and pose about second- or third-hand "information" like that, Cohen's got one helluva sweet gig.

Posted by sglover | April 2, 2008 11:19 AM

Yeah Juan I mean I remember Baghadad Bob holding news conference after 9/11 to declare Iraq's Alliance with Al Queda and their own declaration of war with America! The only similarity in the two wars is that 9-11 like 12-7 allowed the Adminstration to declare war on an enemy they had longed to destroy, of course members of FDR's cabinent weren't complicit in the manufacture and sale of Zyklon B in the same way that Rummy was tied to Saddam's purchase an development of Chem weapons, but hey who's counting.

Posted by Sean | April 2, 2008 12:09 PM

We don't do Declarations of War anymore. We do Congressional Resolutions. In the case of Iraq there were three significant ones: 1990, 1998, and 2002.

On "the...way Rummy was tied to Saddam's purchase and development of Chem weapons...", suffice to say that this is the same link that joins all yellow journalism--stories based on rumors, innuendo, lies, and the occasional feat of mental telepathy.

Posted by Robert Powell | April 2, 2008 2:10 PM

Re Pierre de Fermat

Mr. de Fermat has apparently forgotten that there was a big difference between 1938 and 1944 relative to the possibility of a coup against Hitler. In 1938, the German Army was still independent of Nazi Party control as the two top men, Frisch and Von Blomberg were not Nazis. In 1944, the military was completely under Hitlers' thumb, with the General Staff officers being Hitler toadies. Notice that the highest ranking officer involved in the 1944 coup was Erwin Rommel, who was incapacitated due to being wounded in an air attack on his limousine in France. Ludwig Beck, who was the instigator of the 1944 coup attempt, was no longer in the army at the time. The role that Heinz Guderian played is still rather murky to this day. It would appear that he was aware of the possibility of a coup but had no part in it, other then keeping his mouth shut.

Posted by SLC | April 2, 2008 3:28 PM

I appreciate SLC's point, but I do not believe the General Staff would have succeeded in 1938. The high command had barely been able to force itself to get rid of the kaiser 20 yrs before (and for which some members suffered) and this with revolution in germany, the western front collapsing, growing chaos behind the lines. heck, add influenza. the civilian leaders had a much better grasp of the situation in 1918, but there were effectively none in 1938. The fact Frisch and von blomberg were not nazis does not mean they could or would have pulled off a coup -- and that is what was necessary, with hitler and probably(definitely) others shot (and quickly). and would the army have done it? would the ss have allowed it? I cannot say it was impossible; I feel it is just less likely than we'd like to think.
I would also say this assumes the western powers were ready to go to war if necessary. they were not. WW1 did more damage to europe than is often recognized in the US. the death and maiming of a generation was not forgotten in the late 30's. See Adam Gopnik's review of recent books on the war. Martin Gilbert's book on the war mentions, in the introduction, how he grew up with the (doleful) reminders of it all around him. I feel that to understand why the British and French did not stop the rise of hitler, you have to know what they went through 1914-1918, and how that affected policies 1919-1938.

Posted by Pierre de Fermat | April 2, 2008 5:09 PM

First, to the original posting/threads: I just bought Baker's book, and it's safe to label Cohen's tirade as a pathetic misrepresentation.

Second, thanks to all and especially Pierre for a high level of discourse. (As I have learned, this is hardly the case on Matt's site.) Having firmly entered my middle age, I learned a lot of what I forgot, plus what I never knew.

Posted by MaxGowan | April 2, 2008 7:58 PM

Re Pierre de Fermat

1. I would respectfully suggest that Mr. de Fermat read Walter Goerlitzs' book on the German General Staff in which it is shown that Frisch and Von Blomberg were up to their ears in plotting a coup against Hitler in 1938, only to have Chamberlain pull the rug out from under them. Being the two top officers in the General Staff, they were in a much better position to pull it off then were Ludwig Beck and Erwin Rommel in 1944 who, for all intents and purposes, were far from the action.

2. Mr. de Fermat makes the point that the British and French militaries were unprepared for war in 1938. So was the German army as the full rearmament was far from complete. It is true that Britain and France had been bled white by the First World War. But so had Germany. Just as a matter of fact, the German armed forces were in no condition to conduct a major war in 1938, which was why Frisch and Von Blomberg considered Hitler to be reckless gambler.

3. Chamberlains' defense that Britain used the time between the Munich conference and September, 1939 to hasten British rearmament is piffle. The Germans made much better use of the time and were in a far stronger position by May, 1940, relative to Britain and France then was the case in 1938. The results of the events of May/June, 1940 speak for themselves.

Posted by SLC | April 2, 2008 9:00 PM

Pierre de Fermat is on solid ground in his skepticism about counter-factual history. There are lots of reasons to think that a coup in '38 would have been difficult to pull off no matter what.

Nevertheless, it was perhaps the best chance to avoid the war, and it was certainly eliminated as a possibility by Franco-British betrayal at Munich. There were actually a few "near miss" assassination attempts mounted by the conspirators against Hitler then, including a bomb in wine bottles placed aboard his plane that failed to detonate. The aristocratic Prussian leadership of the German Army hated Hitler almost uniformly while they were traditionally the strongest supporters of the Kaiser, so I think there's really no good analogy with 1918.

In terms of unpreparedness, the French actually had more tanks and modern planes than Germany in 1939. What they didn't have was the will to fight. Even a token offensive in 1939, when the entire German Army was in Poland, might have ended the war before it really got going.

Posted by Robert Powell | April 3, 2008 3:08 AM

Re Robert Powell

While it is true that the combination of Britain and France had more tanks and aircraft then did Germans in 1939, they were fatally handicapped by their incompetence in the proper utilization of these weapon systems. The high commands in Britain and France considered tanks to be an infantry support weapon, more on the order of mobile artillery. They completely ignored the writings and essays of such promoters of the proper use of tanks as the spearheads of offensive tactics as General Fuller, and General Patton. This was in sharp contrast to the folks on the other side of the hill, particularly General Guderian who, in his autobiography, "Panzer Leader," specifically mentions General Fuller as having a substantial influence on his thinking. Thus compare the advice given the French high command that the Ardennes was impassible by tanks with the advice General Guderian provided to the German General Staff which was that the Ardennes provided no obstacle to the passage of tanks.

Posted by SLC | April 3, 2008 10:36 AM

All true. I was just trying to emphasize the importance of attitude--sometimes a willingness to fight is the only way war can be avoided.

After all, deciding that "peace at any price" is a viable strategy is an idea whose time came, went, and apparently has come again.

Posted by Robert Powell | April 3, 2008 11:25 AM

Apparently we do need to be reminded that people have rights.

At least Nicholson Baker and Matthew Yglesias (and Mark Kurlansky and Sam Anderson and the people buying this book) need to be told, over and over again, that people have rights.

When pacifists and isolationists are held up as heroes (as opposed to saints who stay holy, pure and undefiled in their souls) then we do need to be reminded that people have rights.

Posted by Ed Moose | April 4, 2008 7:09 AM