Watching Elizabeth again earlier this year (as well as enjoying various kinds of historical fiction lately) inspired me to seek out some books about her era. I've already read books about Walsingham and the armada, so I decided to find a good biography of Elizabeth herself: Allison Weir's The Life of Elizabeth I.

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I wrote before about Hitler and the decision to invade Russia. Here's a post from Marginal Revolution giving an additional reason: Germany's economy was based on plunder, and they couldn't sustain it without constant expansion (see the comments for more).

I don't know much about Canadian internment camps -- hell I don't even know that much about American ones. fortunately for me, The Electrical Field had a little "bookclub" section at the back featuring an interview with the author, where she talked a bit about Canada's policies. The US's treatment of Japanese citizens was bad, and Canada's was even worse, if you can believe it. I just wanted to quote a couple of passages because well it's pretty fucked.

"In Canada, the government seized and sold land and personal property and the proceeds were used to build the camps. In other words, they made Japanese Canadians pay for their own incarceration. In the United States there were panic sales, looting, and depreciation, but no government sale of property because of constitutional protections. Families were not broken up in the United States as they were in Canada. ... a policy of exile to Japan and dispersal eastward continued for years after the war ended. These policies were intended to permanently destroy the Japanese Canadian coastal communities. ... It seems sad to me that there is no Little Tokyo or Japantown in anywhere in Canada -- only vestiges of the original one in Vancouver. This is the legacy of the Canadian government's policy of forced dispersal. There has been, as a result, a kind of cultural impoverishment for my generation."

One of the most interesting questions for me about Nazi Germany and WWII is: could they really have won the war? It seems to me that when you read a book that focuses on the allied side -- say, about the codebreaking efforts at Bletchley Park -- every hurdle is treated as being of monumental importance, with the implication that if it hadn't gone right, the war might have been lost. So, for example, when you read about Bletchley you start to suspect that without the intelligence that Turing and the others extracted, the war would have been lost. On the other hand, when you read about the Nazis, they start to look like a bunch of clowns (horrifying, villainous clowns, but clowns in the end). Both in Speer's book and one I read a while back about the relationship between Hitler and his generals, the overall sense is that Hitler was a strategic amateur who had some early victories due to his unconventional ideas but, as the war went on, was unable to make strategic decisions and unwilling to listen to any of his army experts. The decision to attack Russia (and the repeated decisions to not pull back before it was too late) just seems to ice the whole question: it seems the act of a madman. Though I've seen it asserted that even before then, Germany was already reaching its limits.

It seems to me not just a question of historical chin-stroking to wonder whether they could have won. A world in which we were only an Alan Turing or a Winston Churchill (or a luckily discovered Enigma machine or a this or a that) away from utter doom is a terrifying place. If it should happen again (and it will in one way or another, won't it), what happens if we don't have that one thing? On the other hand, a world in which Hitler's very boldness and his hypnotic control over people were ultimately his downfall, in which any man mad and power-hungry enough to gain that kind of power must inevitably suffer hubris and fail, seems reassuringly tidy. It's like the Greek tragedies of old: having been through the story (I refer here to reading/thinking about the war, not to having lived through it), and seen the villain-protagonist brought low by his own flaws, we end up, with our cathartic experience, reassured in the proper working of the universe. But are we justified in thinking that way, or should we be wondering "what if?"

Here's a bit from Speer about the contrast between how the democracies prepared themselves for war and how authoritarian Germany, where the leaders secretly feared public insurrection, prepared:

In order to anticipate any discontent, more effort and money were expended on supplies of consumer goods, on military pensions or compensation to women for the loss of earnings by their men in the service, than in the countries with democratic governments. Whereas Churchill promised his people only blood, sweat, and tears, all we heard during the various phases and various crises of the war was Hitler's slogan: "The final victory is certain." This was a confession of political weakness. It betrayed great concern over a loss of popularity...

It reminds me of the days after 9/11, when many Americans began to think of ourselves, at least at times, as a country at war. And I think many people, at least a little, craved a sort of Churchillian call to sacrifice, as though an effort of blood, sweat, and tears were the only noble response to 9/11 and way to honor the victims. And I think a certain amount of dissatisfaction set in when there was no demands made on most of us at all, beyond standing in long airport lines for a few months.

Not to politicize this; I don't think that "no sacrifice required!" response is a bush or a republican thing. It's more the character of modern civilized life, that we think we deserve a world of at most minor inconvenience, where irritation is about as close as we get to the heights of classical greek tragedy. A catastrophe can of course shake us from that feeling occasionally, but never permanently.

I don't mean this to be a particularly politicized comment, but there are some ways in which I can't help seeing parallels between the Germany that fell under Hitler's influence and modern America, or modern western culture generally. Here's a quote, from the introduction to Speer's book:

In a time when nothing in the democratic process seemed to work, Hitler's words sounded a loud call to many young men who by 1931 were convinced of the necessity for bold, new remedies for Germany's deep troubles. The succession patched-up coalition governments that governed neither long nor well and could find no answers at all to Germany's economic depression, social unrest, and military powerlessness had to be replaced by a man and a party with new solutions, by a leader who knew the meaning of strength and law and order.

It's a veritable cliche to say that bad times and fear among the masses can lead to a dictatorship that promises wealth and security, but what struck me about this statement was less that aspect than the assertion that it was the perceived failure of democracy that opened the door. And who in our country who's at all interested in politics has not thought sometime in the past decade or so that democracy was having some serious problems?

I started reading Albert Speer's Inside the Third Reich. For those who don't know, Speer was an architect and earlier admirer of Hitler. Hitler made Speer his personal architect and the recipient of his most grandiose schemes for the thousand-year reich. Speer, for example, was responsible for the "cathedral of light" and gigantic stadium at Nuremburg. About halfway through the war, Speer also became the minister in charge of armaments and construction for the war effort and was one of the most important men in Germany. At the Nuremburg trials, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison and eventually published his memoirs.

His book is one of the most candid insights into the workings of the reich ever found. I'm finding it fascinating and mean to post some quotes and comments. There are many interesting details, though as always the big picture of nazi germany is almost too much to even process, never mind comment on intelligently.