Word: war
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...sets a brisk pace through the long series of events that eventually led to his conversion to Christianity. It was the end of the Great War that disgusted him with a godless humanity. On the night when victory was celebrated in London, Muggeridge saw "for the first time what human beings were like when they cast aside all restraint -shouting, grimacing, flushed in their jubilation. The scene with its apocalyptic flavor," he continues, a trifle apocalyptically, "recalled to me vividly the lurid Dore illustrations in an edition of Dante's Inferno among my father's books." He took...
...published it under his own name. Marais shot himself in 1936. Shortly after, his complete study of white ants, i.e., termites, and a slim, chatty book of reminiscences about baboons were published in Europe. Marais had studied baboons in the Transvaal for three years just after the Boer War, when the absence of farmers with guns made the beasts approachable. He began, but never completed, a serious text based on his scientific observations of them. Now that text has been rediscovered...
Count Me Out. In 1945 there was an Allied consensus-which no longer exists-on the doctrine of collective guilt, that all Germans shared the blame not only for the war but for Nazi atrocities as well. Like the denazification program itself, FitzGibbon starts from that consensus, and with the feeling that at the time "it would not have been possible, either psychologically or politically, simply to ignore the monstrous crimes committed in the name of the Third Reich." How just or justified the Allied judgment was seems to FitzGibbon far less clear. "Theologically," he observes, " 'collective guilt...
...Denazification, FitzGibbon, who served as an intelligence officer in Europe during World War II, has dug up the corpse of the "1,000-year Reich" and considers how Kiesinger's Germany could have risen from its grave-a Babbitt out of Buchenwald. He discusses Allied punishment of war crimes, which was limited to a handful of the worst offenders. But his main concern, as the title implies, is denazification, the broader program of combined punishment and re-education variously applied to hundreds of thousands of Germans by the occupying powers. His book raises questions of conscience which, though they...
Such absolutist considerations had little to do with the actual proceedings against the Nazis, both for war crimes and denazification in general. These were, as FitzGibbon notes, much tainted by expediency and confusion. In practical terms, too, their results have been mixed. Ironically, some of the criminals of Auschwitz got off "extremely lightly" because the rules of evidence, which the Nazis had scrapped, had been reimposed in the name of justice by the Allies. Most Nazis were soon issued their Persilscheine ("whitewash slips," a name derived from a brand of soap powder). Modern Germany is run by the Persils...