Word: shirer
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...question Shirer's book poses: Can what is left of civilization save itself? For it is the nature of men in crises that they usually prefer what is strong and effective, no matter how brutal, to what is weak and ineffectual, no matter how exalted...
Again & again Author Shirer urges the British to bomb Berlin regularly even if they can spare only a few planes. He says the Germans simply cannot take...
...last the Nazi censors made it impossible for Shirer to broadcast anything but propaganda. They made it hard for him to broadcast even that. A favorite trick was for the censors to hold his copy until it was too late to go on the air. Once when this happened, the German Broadcasting Co. cabled New York: "Regret Shirer arrived too late today to do broadcast." So Shirer went home. As his ship moved out of Lisbon harbor, he observed that European civilization had shrunk to little more than the coast he was escaping from...
Moral Vacuum. One advantage of a diary is its informal catching of passing moods, backgrounds, people. Sandwiched among the great disasters in this book are many casual entries about the European civilization which Shirer loved. They are revealing. There is the usual chitchat about El Greco's greens, The Decline of the West and The Magic Mountain, "a tremendous novel." There is a murmuring of the evocative names of storied cities. There is gnashing of teeth, impotent anger, weeping, physical illness at each new Nazi success...
...European civilization, as Shirer's people embody it, has become a complex of nostalgias, apathies, pleasant habits. As a moral force to counteract the Nazis' immoral force, it is a mere buzz. Another reason for the swift Nazi successes is made clearer: the Nazis found a moral vacuum, rushed in to fill it with a workable immorality. Europe could not save itself...