Posts

Showing posts from April, 2017

The Non-historical Basis for the War on Confederate Symbolism

The Civil War was caused by slavery. The Civil War was fought over slavery. These two historical contentions represent the essence of our difficulty in seeing America’s bloodiest war in its proper context.  One of these statements is a historical fact.  The other is a historical fiction, or at least an incomplete fact. And the primary problem today is that many do not recognize the difference between the two statements at all and thus legitimize a fiction by equating it with a fact. How we got here has been a topic of interest on this blog before .  But, more recently, three incidents in particular have come to my attention that require me as a thinking person to respond, clarify and attempt to correct the subtle, fundamental error made by many today. First, there is the initiative by the mayor of New Orleans to rid the city of its public Confederate statues and memorials. According to the mayor’s office, this is an attempt to redress the statues placed in the late nineteent

My Life With Albert Speer: Part One

I recently finished reading Speer: Hitler's Architect , a fascinating and highly critical biography of a historic figure who has interested me since high school.  I intent to write a review of that book.  It will be in two parts.  The new material mixed with my recollections of the older material in my library and this motivated me to review my modest collection on Albert Speer .  This new biography by Martin Kitchen is my fifth biography on Speer. Let's start with the fact that I have read Speer's autobiography Inside the Third Reich several times in my life, though not recently.  I have read his prison memoirs, Spandau , twice.  His last work, Infiltration , was so boring and obviously self-serving that I never finished it.  I was always impressed with Speer as a genuinely intelligent, creative and introspective person, with a keen awareness of technology and productivity and dramatic affect.  His entanglement with the Nazis was a source of interest to me. Here was a