On 09/24/2020 9:15 AM Mark Lause <markalause@...> wrote:

This particular story is attributed to WH staff sources and confirmed by Republican officials in Pennsylvania.

On Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 12:03 PM Steven L. Robinson < srobin21@...> wrote:

You are assuming this whole cottage industry of stories about Trump refusing to give up power comes from the White House.  It makes more sense to me that these stories are coming from Democrat sources or sources friendly to the Dems to rally the support of their base.  If that is so, it seems to be proving effective.

SR

On 09/24/2020 8:39 AM Mark Lause < markalause@...> wrote:

The U.S. is not now and never has been a "democracy."  Our eighteenth century gentleman's system of government has always reserved mechanisms like this for them to engage in the ultimate monopoly of "cancel culture."

Still,  it's very peculiar for such a story to be leaked and they always leave me wondering whether the leaking is more important than the story itself.   As began with the size of the inaugural crowd, Trump and his circle floats a lot of this raw sewage to test responses.  

If they were doing this to test the response of the Democrats, they needn't have bothered--Chuck and Nancy will write a very strongly worded letter if the results of an election are overturned. 

It rather seems most immediately that this is a test of how loyal the Republican functionaries in those states are going to be to the new regime in the RNC.  

On 09/24/2020 8:39 AM Mark Lause <markalause@...> wrote:

The U.S. is not now and never has been a "democracy."  Our eighteenth century gentleman's system of government has always reserved mechanisms like this for them to engage in the ultimate monopoly of "cancel culture."

Still,  it's very peculiar for such a story to be leaked and they always leave me wondering whether the leaking is more important than the story itself.   As began with the size of the inaugural crowd, Trump and his circle floats a lot of this raw sewage to test responses.  

If they were doing this to test the response of the Democrats, they needn't have bothered--Chuck and Nancy will write a very strongly worded letter if the results of an election are overturned. 

It rather seems most immediately that this is a test of how loyal the Republican functionaries in those states are going to be to the new regime in the RNC.  

_._,_._,_

From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <h-review@...>
Date: September 24, 2020 at 10:40:19 AM EDT
To: h-review@...
Cc: H-Net Staff <revhelp@...>
Subject: H-Net Review [H-Buddhism]:  Grace on Victoria, 'Zen Terror in Prewar Japan: Portrait of an Assassin'
Reply-To: h-review@...

Brian Daizen Victoria.  Zen Terror in Prewar Japan: Portrait of an
Assassin.  Lanham  Rowman &amp; Littlefield Publishers, 2020.  392
pp.  $34.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-5381-3166-4.

Reviewed by Stefan Grace (Assistant Editor, Digital Dictionary of
Buddhism)
Published on H-Buddhism (September, 2020)
Commissioned by Erez Joskovich

_Zen Terror in Prewar Japan_ centers around a biography of Inoue
Nisshō (1886-1967), infamous prewar political agitator and
ringleader of a band of murderous activists, told principally through
Inoue's own words. The author, Brian Daizen Victoria, deftly handles
Inoue's autobiography so that the line between his self-aggrandizing
and the additional historical background provided is always clear to
the reader. As is obvious from the title of Victoria's book, the two
most important hypotheses are that: (1) Inoue's actions make it
appropriate to define him as a "terrorist" and (2) though commonly
described as a "Nichiren sect priest," Inoue is best understood as
being an adherent of Japanese Zen Buddhism.

To prove his hypotheses, outside of the eleven chapters on Inoue and
general history, Victoria gives roughly equal space to discussing (1)
the concept of terrorism and how it applies to Inoue (see esp.
chapter 13) and (2) Mahāyāna and Zen Buddhist philosophy and how
their ethics--or rather the lack thereof--allow them to be used as an
ideological weapon in the hands of terrorists such as Inoue (see esp.
chapter 14). While the proofs provided are convincing on the whole,
it might be argued, as I will do more fully below, that a slight
modification of the hypotheses to focus more on prewar nonsectarian
Japanese Buddhism (avoiding the complicated issue of defining
"sectarian affiliation" in prewar Japan) and dealing with the concept
of fascist violence more generally might have brought a more fruitful
result.

In this final book of Victoria's trilogy on the relationship between
twentieth-century Zen Buddhism and Japanese expansionism and
militarism, the author ties up and refines many of the arguments from
the earlier two books, _Zen at War_ and _Zen War Stories_.[1]
Accordingly, Victoria introduces an abundance of fascinating
historical and philosophical side notes throughout, meaning that
every chapter provides so much more than its title would suggest.
Below, however, I will attempt to summarize its contents as briefly
as possible.

After a foreword by James Mark Shields of Bucknell University, the
preface discusses the reaction, both positive and negative, to the
first two, highly influential books of this trilogy. On the negative
side, Victoria notes that readers "charged, for example, that my
translations of [D. T.] Suzuki's [1870-1966] war-related writings, or
those of well-known Zen masters, were taken out of context or
exaggerated, or simply mistranslated," while, on the positive side,
Robert Aitken wrote, "Victoria exposes the incredible intellectual
dishonesty of Japanese Buddhists who perverted their religion into a
jingoistic doctrine of support for the emperor and imperial expansion
during the period 1868-1945. Good job! We must face this dark side of
our heritage squarely" (p. xvi).

In the first chapter Victoria defines and briefly discusses the
concept of terrorism. Among several possible definitions, he chooses
to employ the following as a lens through which to discuss the
actions and statements of Inoue: "a tactic employed, typically by the
weak, to place pressure on the powerful, especially governments, to
do the terrorists' bidding" (p. 2). Victoria claims that the
"ultimate goal" of the book is "to take readers inside the mind,
inside the very 'skin,' of one terrorist leader, a leader who,
together with his followers, felt he had found in his Zen training
the basis and justification for acts of terrorism" (p. 8). In my
opinion, it would have been helpful for readers conversant in
Japanese to have seen a discussion here of the source words that were
translated into English as "terrorism" (and its variants).[2]

In order to "get into the skin" of the terrorist Inoue, after some
historical background in chapter 2, the subsequent chapters recount
his life as told through his own words in sources such as the
transcripts of his extensive 1933-34 courtroom testimony following
the Blood Oath Corps Incident of 1932 and his own 419-page
self-aggrandizing autobiography, published in 1953 under the title_
Ichinin, Issatsu _(lit. One Person Kills One [Person])_. _Victoria's
reasoning for allowing Inoue to tell his own story is inspired by the
work of Norman Cohn, from which Victoria draws the conclusion that
the only way to "truly understand the 'subterranean world' Inoue and
his band members inhabited" is by entering that world and "walking in
their footsteps" (p. 4). Victoria cautions, however, that entering
Inoue's world is not a positive acknowledgment of the repugnant
thoughts of terrorists (p. 4) or of the actions of Inoue that
"changed, with tragic consequences, the course of modern Japanese
history" (p. 5).

Chapter 13 mainly tackles the issue of terrorism and Inoue's
relationship with it. However, subsections "Toward a Theoretical
Understanding," "An Alternative Possibility," and "Who Benefits?"
present alternative models, outside the lens of terrorism, for
understanding Inoue's actions and the phenomenon of ideological
assassinations in general. One of the suggestions points to the
early-postwar work of political scientist Maruyama Masao, who makes
use of the idea of "fascism from above and fascism from below" to
place the actions of figures such as Inoue on the lowest rung in a
hierarchy of "Shrine," "Official," and "Outlaw" fascism. Another
method presented here for understanding Inoue's actions is by way of
"a question that is key to legal and police investigations: 'Cui
bono?'" (p. 184). Here, Victoria raises the question of whether
powerful and influential men, such as Tōyama Mitsuru, may have been
the "voice of Heaven" who directed Inoue's "actions at pivotal
moments in his life" (p. 185), conceivably with Emperor Hirohito
pulling the strings behind the scenes and using Inoue as a hitman.

As Victoria indicates in the acknowledgments at the opening of his
book, Herbert Bix, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book
_Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan_ (2000), was an important
influence in making it clear to Victoria that "Emperor Hirohito's
wartime role was far more important than his popular image as a
powerless puppet of Japan's military leaders" (p. ix). It is clear
that Bix's work, in combination with the important questions Victoria
raises, provides grounds for renewed analyses of the prewar period in
Japan. Through the suggestion of these alternate models, Victoria
opens the path for interesting future research that further explores
the wider, multifaceted concept of fascism in prewar Japan and the
role of the emperor in political violence.

Chapter 14, "Unraveling the Religious Matrix," explores Victoria's
second main hypothesis, namely that it is most appropriate to
understand Inoue's spiritual beliefs as being reflective of
affiliation with Zen. The chapter discusses the characteristics of
the Nichiren sect, to which Inoue is commonly ascribed affiliation,
and through an analysis of its history, argues that Inoue should not
be considered an adherent of such for two main reasons: (1) while
Inoue showed deep interest in both Zen and the writings of Shinran
(who is primarily followed by the True Pure Land sect), the Nichiren
sect "demanded every other sect of Buddhism in Japan be destroyed as
_jakyō_ (false teachings)" (p. 200) and (2) "Nichirenism had its own
unique political program" (p. 201), which meant that Inoue would have
to abandon his complete faith in the emperor, with the latter taking
second place to the authority of the Nichiren sect leaders.

This chapter also discusses the famous story of the Buddha
"compassionately" murdering a robber, as told in the _Upāyakauśalya
Sūtra_ (The Skill in Means Sutra), to highlight the fact that
sophistry has been used in both the Therāvada and Mahāyāna
traditions since ancient times to justify acts of violence (see esp.
p. 206). Although Victoria claims that a longer analysis of Buddhist
ethics is outside the scope of the present work (p. 220), as a reader
I was left wanting more on this topic and would have liked to see
Victoria's take on a few of the many Zen _kōan_ that explicitly deal
with themes of violence, iconoclasm, or antinomianism such as
"Nanquan Kills a Cat" (_Biyanlu_, Case 63), on which Inoue is known
to have lectured (p. 113). Although the chapter indirectly discusses
the antinomianism that has long been read into the ethical worldview
of Chan/Seon/Zen, Victoria strangely never mentions this term,
perhaps in order to make the ideas more understandable for a wider
audience. In any case, it would have been useful to hear his take on
the validity of applying this term, particularly in the context of
arguments such as that made in D. T. Suzuki's _Nihonteki reisei_
(Japanese Spirituality; 1944) regarding Christian antinomianism and
the rejection of the possibility of such in Japanese Zen.[3]

In chapter 15, Victoria provides a conclusion to his trilogy of works
on Japanese Zen and violence, stating that "Zen, at least in its
Japanese form, is essentially 'ethics-less'" (p. 221). This is
apparently due to the fact that Zen monks promoted the teachings of
Confucianism "in order to provide a religious sanction for the
existing social order," which meant a "reciprocal relationship of
justice between superiors, who ought to be benevolent, and
subordinates, who are required to be loyal to their superiors" (p.
222). This reciprocity later becomes a one-way relationship, with
citizens having an unconditional filial obligation to obey the
emperor, and this obligation was reinforced by prominent Zen
figures--leading Victoria to opine that this "ethics of unquestioning
loyalty unto death" was "the very antithesis of Buddhist ethics."
Personally, however, I find this opinion questionable. That is to
say, considering the previous chapter on Buddhist ethics throughout
history and the ensuing discussion in chapter 15 on Buddhist
justifications for violence, it seems a "No true Scotsman" fallacy to
argue that Zen philosophy, in particular, is the antithesis of
Buddhist ethics. In Victoria's own words, "As much as Buddhists, East
and West, may seek to deny it, Buddhism has a long history of
justifying killing, one way or the other" (p. 230). The remainder of
the book is composed of an epilogue that contextualizes the issue of
terrorism in our own times, with reference to events in the United
States and other countries, and a set of three appendices that
provide important and interesting historical background to the events
outlined in the main body.

The overarching hypothesis of this book, and the trilogy as a
whole--namely that Zen lent fertile intellectual ground to Japanese
expansionism and militarism--is convincingly argued. However, as an
important part of the significance of this particular work lies in
the possible implications of high-ranking figures' involvement in
political violence, it may be argued that the term "terrorist"
conversely obfuscates the point. On the one hand, Victoria bases his
labeling on the fact that terrorism is "a tactic employed, typically
by the weak, to place pressure on the powerful, especially
governments, to do the terrorists' bidding." On the other hand,
however, the fifty-odd pages of appendices and other content
throughout the main body seem very much designed to insinuate that
Inoue was well connected to highly influential men who may have been
controlling his actions for their own gain. What is more, the
insinuation is made (particularly in the section on Tōyama Mitsuru,
pp. 293-95) that Emperor Hirohito may have supported--or even
directed--Inoue's terrorist acts. Surely Hirohito was the polar
opposite of "weak." And, while Inoue is on record referring to
himself as a terrorist (as noted above), why should we take him at
his word when there is evidence to suggest misdirection may have
benefited him?

When we turn to the issue of Inoue's status as an adherent of the Zen
sect, it is important to note that Victoria's model for defining what
counts as a "Zen Buddhist" in this book appears to be mainly based on
the writings of D. T. Suzuki (see esp. p. xvi). However, as Richard
Jaffe has pointed out, Suzuki's flavor of intellectualized Buddhism
becomes more coherent when understood as a combination of various
religious and philosophical thought traditions of both "East" and
"West."[4] I believe that an important clue to understanding Suzuki
can be found in Judith Snodgrass's suggestion that his understanding
of Buddhism took on a variety of different names over his long
lifetime--with him first promoting it as "Mahāyāna Buddhism," then
"Eastern Buddhism," and then "Zen"--but that the content remained
essentially the same throughout.[5] That is to say, "Zen," in this
case, refers less to the temple-based sect as traditionally
conceived, and more to the idiosyncratic lay spirituality embraced by
Suzuki and other contemporaneous intellectuals such as Inoue
Enryō--with this spirituality being popularly consumed by Japanese
intellectuals in the prewar period under the banner of "Buddhism."

Viewing Suzuki in this light makes it necessary to question the
legitimacy of labeling other prewar lay Buddhists, such as Inoue
(Nisshō), as being strictly affiliated to any given sect. As in the
case of "terrorism," Inoue certainly does refer to himself as being
an adherent of Zen (see, e.g., pp. 114 and 200), but Inoue's own
statements muddy the waters on this issue: "I don't belong to any
particular sect. My family was affiliated with the Rinzai Zen
sect.... However, at present, my thoughts are almost entirely those
of the Mahāyāna school of Buddhism" (p. 145). Note here that
Snodgrass argued that Suzuki also saw himself primarily as a
"Mahāyāna Buddhist" early in his writing career. Perhaps in this
comment, Inoue had intended to ascribe himself membership to a
similar sort of intellectualized lay Buddhism. Another issue relevant
to explore would be the existence of "pan-Buddhist" organizations
such as Myōwa-kai, which Victoria mentions in relation to its
support of Japan's full-scale invasion of China in 1937 (p. 219).
Perhaps it would be appropriate to understand Inoue's thought more in
the context of prewar intersectarian movements such as the Myōwa-kai
or against the background of efforts by those such as Henry Steel
Olcott and the Theosophical Society to unify the different sects of
Buddhism.

On a related note, Victoria discusses Inoue's second and most
profound major spiritual experience, which occurred while in prison,
and details how it was primarily brought on through a contemplation
of the writings of Shinran (1173-1263). The authenticity of this
experience, Victoria tells us, was praised by Rinzai Zen master
Yamamoto Gempō; however, Victoria's explanation of Inoue's
overcoming of "what the Zen sect calls the "no-self "(_muga_)" could
be misleading for some readers (p. 110). That is to say, it is very
important to note that the term _muga_ is not at all exclusive to
Zen. And, the obvious question would be, how is _muga_ treated in the
context of Shinran's writings? Although it does not appear
frequently, it can be seen as part of a quote from the _Nirvāṇa
Sūtra _in Shinran's magnum opus, the _Kyōgyōshinshō_. Fittingly,
there is an English translation of this passage by none other than D.
T. Suzuki himself, who renders _muga_ as "no ego":

"There is really no such thing as murder. Even when the ego really
exists, no harm comes out of the act of murdering. If there is _no
ego_, what harm can come out of it? Why? If there is an ego, the ego
is not subject to change; it is eternal. It then cannot be killed....
How can we make a criminal case out of killing? If there is _no ego_
at all, all things are impermanent. If impermanent, they go through
changes every moment. As they are constantly reduced to nothing, both
the killer and the killed are also constantly reduced to nothing.
This being so, who is to be considered guilty? [italics mine]" (p.
166).[6]

Here, the_ Nirvāṇa Sūtra_ (at least in Shinran's Japanese
translation) lays out, albeit in the "heretical" voice of court
minister Kichitoku, a logic under which murder becomes not only
permissible but irrelevant and no hindrance to salvation. While a
conclusive analysis of Inoue's relationship with the thought of
Shinran is beyond the scope of this review and my own exegetical
skills, the above quote seems to be of sufficient relevance to
warrant further investigation. Regardless of the result of such, I
would argue that the issue of Inoue's exclusive affiliation to the
Zen sect requires more attention.

Although obviously only a matter of personal taste, I would have
preferred to have seen the focus on Zen in_ Zen Terror in Prewar
Japan_ being shifted more to an exploration of nonsectarian Buddhism.
The sections on terrorism could have been greatly reduced or excluded
to be replaced with a discussion of the larger issues of fascism and
political violence. And, it would have perhaps improved the flow of
the book to have the appendices reworked into the main body, given
their great importance to the central themes. Victoria's use of the
unreliable autobiographical emic narrative of a terrorist carefully
juxtaposed with objective historical facts, etic categorization, and
elements of what was at the time "pop" Japanese Buddhist philosophy
(I am referring here to works such as those by Suzuki) is an
interesting methodologic template for future studies. It might be
opined, however, that in bringing personal narratives more into focus
in Buddhist studies, we must be ever more vigilant in balancing them
correctly to avoid falling back into a Carlyle-esque "Great Man"
modernist worldview or into a world of moral relativism where values
and "goodness" become irrelevant.

One of the great benefits of this book is bringing back more squarely
into view an understanding of Japan's wartime aggression as a
backdrop to understanding modern Japanese Buddhism in today's time of
political correctness. Victoria refers to or implies several times
the greed of Western countries in their expansionism in Asia, and it
is important to note that _Zen Terror in Prewar Japan_ is not "Japan
bashing." Rather, it shows how Japan and Japanese Buddhism are not
somehow mystically superior to the West and Western Christianity, but
rather are similarly culpable when it comes to their morally
questionable histories. While the book feels to me like several
monographs squeezed into one, Victoria provides so many helpful and
interesting resources in this book that any small flaws are dwarfed
by its overall importance. Regardless of the ultimate validity of its
hypotheses, the book is sure to open new paths for researchers
concerning the idea of modern Japanese Buddhism and political
violence. I personally found that it reinvigorated my own interest in
the topic and provided many important leads to follow, particularly
in connection with the role Buddhist philosophy may have played in
advice given to the emperor by his inner circle.

Notes

[1]. Brian Daizen Victoria, _Zen at War_ (New York: Weatherhill,
1997), and _Zen War Stories_ (London: Routledge, 2002).

[2]. That being said, an investigation of Victoria's sources where
Inoue directly or indirectly refers to his own actions as "terrorism"
(see, e.g., pp. 154 and 190) shows that Inoue actually used the
katakana loanword "_tero_," which is satisfying to know in light of
the accusations Victoria mentions of misdirection or mistranslation
in previous works.

[3]. I refer here to the printing of _Nihonteki reisei_ found in vol.
8 (1999) of the 1999-2003 edition of Suzuki's complete collected
works, _Suzuki Daisetsu zenshū, _40 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten);
see pp. 132-33.

[4]. See Richard Jaffe, ed., _Selected Works of D. T. Suzuki, Volume
I: Zen_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015),
introduction, esp. pp. xiii-xv.

[5]. Judith Snodgrass, "Japan's Contribution to Modern Global
Buddhism: The World's Parliament of Religions Revisited," _The
Eastern Buddhist _43, nos. 1 and 2 (2012): 81-102; see pp. 82-83 and
100.

[6]. Daisetz Teitarō Suzuki, trans., _Shinran's Kyōgyōshinshō:
The Collection of Passages Expounding the True Teaching, Living,
Faith, and Realizing of the Pure Land, _ed. The Center for Shin
Buddhist Studies under supervision of Sengaku Mayeda (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2012). Note that this particular version of
Suzuki's translation, completed circa 1965, was first published in
this edition. See Shinshū Seiten Henshū Iinkai, ed., _Shinshū
seiten_ (Kyoto: Higashi Honganji, 1978), p. 256, for the True Pure
Land sect's version of Shinran's quote of the _Nirvāṇa Sūtra_.

Citation: Stefan Grace. Review of Victoria, Brian Daizen, _Zen Terror
in Prewar Japan: Portrait of an Assassin_. H-Buddhism, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2020.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55549

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.

_._,_._,_

From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <h-review@...>
Date: September 24, 2020 at 10:14:36 AM EDT
To: h-review@...
Cc: H-Net Staff <revhelp@...>
Subject: H-Net Review [H-War]:  Zonderman on Yamin, 'Archaeology at the Site of the Museum of the American Revolution: A Tale of Two Taverns and the Growth of Philadelphia'
Reply-To: h-review@...

Rebecca Yamin.  Archaeology at the Site of the Museum of the American
Revolution: A Tale of Two Taverns and the Growth of Philadelphia.  
Philadelphia  Temple University Press, 2018.  Illustrations. 160 pp.  
$19.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4399-1642-1.

Reviewed by David Zonderman (North Carolina State University)
Published on H-War (September, 2020)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey

As the Museum of the American Revolution was being constructed, in
the summer of 2014, an archaeological excavation of the site in
downtown Philadelphia also took place. This work was mandated by
federal law, and it would have been tragically ironic if an
institution designed to present cutting-edge interpretations of
America's War of Independence was built literally on a foundation
that obliterated pieces of the city's history. Rebecca Yamin's
account of this excavation and its material findings is an accessible
and richly illustrated guide to what urban archaeology can tell
readers about the history of one of America's great cities.  

Yamin explores how this one project uncovers layers of Philadelphia
history that extend from its colonial roots in the seventeenth
century all the way to its redevelopment in the late twentieth
century. There are shattered plates and mugs that indicate several
taverns from the revolutionary period; and Yamin takes time to
explain the crucial role that such places played in urban politics
during the late eighteenth century. But the history on this site also
expands far beyond what is now being told in the new museum that sits
at the corner of Chestnut and Third Streets. Through a broad sampling
of material remains, Yamin tells the story of a city block as it
evolved from a collection of small houses into commercial and craft
shops then on to manufacturing sites devoted to tanning, button
making, printing, and eventually patent medicine in one of the city's
first skyscrapers: the Jayne Building.

This concise book also gives readers a glimpse into the methods of
urban archaeology--including a deep dive into privies and "night
soil" that yields all kinds of insights into daily life and diet, and
the particular importance of ceramics and industrial refuse at this
site. Some of the artifacts unearthed can be dated to the
revolutionary era, and they are now in the new museum's collections
and exhibits. Many other objects come from before and after that time
period and offer glimpses into the changing economy of Philadelphia
across four centuries. Yamin blends discussions of artifacts
uncovered in the dig--especially a multitude of ceramics, glass
bottles, typeface, buttons, and pipe stems--with documents available
in Philadelphia's many archives to help reconstruct those patterns of
urban change and the impact of such transformations on "common folk"
even down to individual residents who populated long-forgotten
alleyways on the block where the museum now stands. In fact, the
documentary records even more than the archaeological material help
to sketch out the presence of enslaved men and women blocks away from
the "cradle of liberty."

The book contains a plethora of color photographs of many
archaeological finds, as well as numerous historical and contemporary
maps of the site and surrounding neighborhoods. There are also
various color-coded pages where Yamin offers intriguing sidebars on
material culture analysis and intimate portraits of various
personalities who called this locale their home and/or place of
business. All of this apparatus makes for a lively presentation, but
any attempt at an overarching narrative or analytical arguments often
gets broken up in all these digressions.

By blending meticulous archaeological analysis with dogged archival
research, Yamin offers a micro-historical study of this one city
block that adds to our understanding of Philadelphia's social and
economic history at the time of the American Revolution. But this
book also extends far beyond that one time period, even as it says
little about the impact of the Revolution itself in any military
manner. It will be up to the museum to help tell that story of the
fight for independence, but the ground on which the museum stands has
yielded many more historical accounts of an ever-changing American
city.

Citation: David Zonderman. Review of Yamin, Rebecca, _Archaeology at
the Site of the Museum of the American Revolution: A Tale of Two
Taverns and the Growth of Philadelphia_. H-War, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2020.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53791

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.

From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <h-review@...>
Date: September 24, 2020 at 10:15:08 AM EDT
To: h-review@...
Cc: H-Net Staff <revhelp@...>
Subject: H-Net Review [H-War]:  Friedman on Williamson, 'The British in Interwar Germany: The Reluctant Occupiers, 1918-30'
Reply-To: h-review@...

David G. Williamson.  The British in Interwar Germany: The Reluctant
Occupiers, 1918-30.  Second Edition. London  Bloomsbury Academic,
2017.  Illustrations. 360 pp.  $130.00 (cloth), ISBN
978-1-4725-9582-9.

Reviewed by Sara Friedman (University of California Berkeley)
Published on H-War (September, 2020)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey

David G. Williamson's second edition of _The British in Interwar
Germany: The Reluctant Occupiers, 1918-30_, first published in 1991,
is encyclopedic in scope. It presents an extraordinarily detailed
account of military, administrative, and diplomatic decisions on the
part of British occupiers, as well as the realities within which they
worked. The British, directing their operations first from Cologne
and then from Wiesbaden, were there to enforce the Treaty of
Versailles. As indicated by the subtitle "reluctant occupiers,"
Williamson argues that they were pulled into continental politics
and, more pointedly, into a mediator role between France and Germany.

Reluctance forms the springboard for Williamson's analysis. Britain's
territorial ambitions were global whereas France's were European. The
British were thus forced into an unwanted mediatory position, trying
to soften the harsh French line while enforcing the treaty. Their own
aim was to preserve the balance of power on the continent, fearing
looming Bolshevism in the East and hoping for a stable, peaceful
Germany. This made them more receptive to German attempts to revise
the Treaty of Versailles, as Germany could check both French and
Bolshevik ambitions. On the ground, Williamson argues, this resulted
in a disinterested benevolence on the part of British occupiers,
fostering relatively good relations between troops and civilians.
Although the British failed to keep the peace in the region with the
Ruhr crisis, the crisis proved to be a turning point. When the French
acceded, British goals of German economic recovery and territorial
integrity began to be realized. With the Dawes Plan and the Treaty of
Locarno, Germany's foreign relations slowly began to normalize, yet
enough concern remained about Germany's disarmament that British
troops remained stationed in the Rhineland, the last personnel
leaving in 1930.

Williamson identifies five distinct phases of the British occupation:
an immediate, assumedly temporary occupation of the Cologne Zone, the
Treaty of Versailles's ratification and the beginnings of Britain's
mediator role, the Ruhr crisis, the Dawes Plan and Treaty of Locarno,
and a prolonged withdrawal. He handles progression through these
phases on a diplomatic level and from a British perspective. As a
result, the book does not explicitly engage with other literature on
the interwar period with a more continental focus. Such classics as
Detlev Peukert's _The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical
Modernity_, published in English in 1992, Eugen Weber's _The Hollow
Years: France in the 1930s _(1994), or more recent scholarship, such
as Annemarie Sammartino's _The Impossible Border: Germany and the
East, 1914-1922 _(2010), might have proved useful interlocuters and
lend crucial German and French interwar perspectives.

This case study nevertheless hints at larger issues. Williamson
addresses relevant comparisons--Inter-Allied Military Control
Commission policies in Germany outside the Cologne Zone, British
colonial policy in general, and the politics of occupation with an
eye to World War II. The way Germany is treated, certainly by the
military and diplomatic officials in question, but also to some
extent by the author himself, is as a sort of colony. Occupation is
inherently violent--the book acknowledges the occasional deadly
accident--but the overall impression is surprisingly positive.
British occupation troops were well tolerated by the populace because
the geopolitical stakes for Britain were low. Unlike in France's
case, there existed little motivation for revenge on political or
individual levels.

Williamson's source base runs the gamut from local to geopolitical,
often through an administrative lens. This "history from above"
presents an almost hermetically sealed focus on the case study. It
refrains from speeding ahead to the interwar period's inevitable end
and abstains from foreshadowing, and this is valuable in itself. In
the introduction, Williamson states his intent to integrate social
history into the diplomatic narrative; this perspective is gestured
at through some subaltern sources but not fully included on its own
terms. It would have benefited from dialogue with such scholarship as
Nicoletta Gullace's_ The Blood of Our Sons_, Martin Pugh's _Women and
the Women's Movement in Britain, 1914-1999_, and especially Julia
Roos's article "Women's Rights, Nationalist Anxiety, and the 'Moral'
Agenda in the Early Weimar Republic."[1] However, it is difficult to
criticize the book for limitations so clearly acknowledged by its
stated scope.

_The British in Interwar Germany _would serve well as a reference for
scholars of the interwar period and of occupations in general.
Williamson gives a blow-by-blow account of the British occupation
with a wealth of information; the sober, calculating, pragmatic
attitude the author ascribes to the occupiers seems to inform his own
writing, which prizes attention to detail over interpretation.

Note

[1]. Nicoletta Gullace,_ The Blood of Our Sons: Men, Women and the
Renegotiation of British Citizenship during the Great War_ (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Martin Pugh, _Women and the Women's
Movement in Britain, 1914-1999_ (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000);
and Julia Roos, "Women's Rights, Nationalist Anxiety, and the 'Moral'
Agenda in the Early Weimar Republic: Revisiting the 'Black Horror'
Campaign against France's African Occupation Troops," _Central
European History_ 42, no. 3 (September 2009): 473-508.

Citation: Sara Friedman. Review of Williamson, David G., _The British
in Interwar Germany: The Reluctant Occupiers, 1918-30_. H-War, H-Net
Reviews. September, 2020.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55186

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.

From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <h-review@...>
Date: September 24, 2020 at 10:14:00 AM EDT
To: h-review@...
Cc: H-Net Staff <revhelp@...>
Subject: H-Net Review [H-War]:  Conversino on Hill, 'The Red Army and the Second World War'
Reply-To: h-review@...

Alexander Hill.  The Red Army and the Second World War.  Cambridge  
Cambridge University Press, 2017.  xviii + 738 pp.  $19.95 (paper),
ISBN 978-1-107-68815-5.

Reviewed by Mark J. Conversino (Air University)
Published on H-War (September, 2020)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey

Did Nazi Germany lose the war against the Soviet Union or did the Red
Army win it? Was the outcome--Germany's total defeat in the East at
the hands of Soviet forces--brought about, in Alexander Hill's words,
by Stalin's "faceless hordes and overwhelming might overcoming
superior German tactical and operational capabilities" (p. 1)? Or, on
the other hand, did victory come through Moscow's superior marshaling
and use of its human and physical resources to blunt and then break
Hitler's war machine? There is an important difference in how one
answers these and myriad related questions. The Cold War-era view of
the Nazi-Soviet war generally assumed the former position, that
Germany's defeat could be explained in quantitative terms and
ultimately blamed on Hitler's erratic leadership. David Stahel, in
his superb book _Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the_
East, considered Hitler's invasion doomed to inevitable failure from
almost the start, asserting that while Allied victory was by "no
means clear in late August 1941, Germany's inability to win the war
was at least assured."[1] Likewise, as Stahel and many other scholars
of this war make abundantly clear, the Wehrmacht's operational
prowess--indeed, operational brilliance, especially in the opening
months of the invasion--could not compensate for strategic
miscalculations nor a grand strategy so unhinged from reality as that
pursued by the Nazi elite. The alternative view is that the Soviet
Union could have been defeated but that the Red Army, while
benefitting from German mistakes and miscalculations and the efforts
of the Western Allies, won the war on the merits of its own
performance and the enormous sacrifices of the Soviet people.

Alexander Hill, professor of military history at the University of
Calgary, sets out to answer this question through an analysis of the
Red Army's effectiveness, or lack thereof, from the experiences
gained in Spain and along the Mongolian border with the Japanese
Empire through the conquest of Berlin and the destruction of the last
vestiges of German resistance in Czechoslovakia. To accomplish this,
Hill employs English- and Russian-language sources, archival and
otherwise, to "present a picture of change and continuity within the
Red Army" from the start of Soviet industrialization to the end of
the Great Patriotic War in May 1945 (p. 9). Hill's work is not a
detailed narrative overview of the war's major campaigns and battles,
and the author assumes that readers have read at least one of the
many "sound overviews" of the war--whether John Erickson's two-volume
set or David Glantz and Jonathan House's _When Titans Clashed_ (1995)
(p. 9). Still, this work provides more than enough of that historical
narrative that readers less familiar with the course of the
Nazi-Soviet war will find it useful and illuminating. While the
author based this work heavily on Soviet archival sources, he also
used Soviet published sources, made more effective in light of
post-Soviet release of other materials.

The book begins with a chapter-length examination of the Red Army in
the late 1920s, on the eve of the adoption of the first Five Year
Plan and Stalin's "Great Turn" in Soviet development. Familiar parts
of the narrative include a concise analysis of Mikhail
Tukhachevskii's impact on the Red Army along with the general
militarization of Soviet society, the adoption of tanks,
mechanization, and aircraft, and the formulation of the doctrine of
Deep Battle. He notes, however, that by the late 1930s, the Red Army
had an abundance of relatively modern tanks and aircraft but lacked
the overall mechanization necessary to make Deep Battle an
operational reality (something that would dog the Red Army well into
the war itself). On the eve of war, Hill deems the Red Army far more
capable of defending Stalin's "socialist Motherland" than it had been
even a decade before. On the other hand, while it was large and well
equipped (even if much of its equipment was rapidly approaching
obsolescence), the Red Army suffered from indifferent training, and a
bureaucratized, stifled, and overly politicized leadership hobbled
the Great Purge, a calamity that would cost the Red Army dearly in
the early stages of the war. Hill rightly notes as well that
significant flaws in command and control and combined arms
coordination, together with deficiencies in reconnaissance, rear area
support, and overall communications manifested themselves in the Red
Army's bumbling invasion of eastern Poland. Unfortunately, Stalin and
his advisers took little notice of these faults because the Red Army
was ultimately successful in its brief Polish campaign. The
disastrous Winter War against Finland just months later, however,
would bring all of these shortcomings into high resolution. Expecting
a relatively easy victory, the Red Army found itself mired in a
costly stalemate, despite its superior numbers in men and equipment.
To prevail over stubborn Finnish resistance, the Red Army eventually
focused on winning at the tactical level through the application of
overwhelming firepower, suffering 126,000 irrecoverable losses in
what was essentially a palate cleanser for the fighting to come.
Alarmed, perhaps, by the debacle of the Winter War, the Soviets
subsequently left nothing to chance in staging the largely bloodless
occupation/seizure of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania under the secret
provisions of the Nazi-Soviet Pact: from the outset, they employed an
overwhelming force of 500,000 troops backed by several thousand tanks
and armored vehicles. Bereft of outside assistance, the governments
of the Baltic republics chose not to resist, resulting in just a few
dozen Soviet casualties.

Despite cataloguing these obvious problems within the Soviet armed
forces, Hill is within the mainstream of military historians in
asserting that Germany's defeat at the hands of the Soviets was
inevitable, writing that it is "difficult to imagine it [Operation
Barbarossa] achieving more than it would" (p. 119). The important
thing for Stalin and the Soviet Union was that, whatever its
shortcomings, the Red Army fought--first, by wearing down the
Germans, then by breaking them utterly and completely. In this
regard, Hill echoes the assessments of other historians of the German
invasion--while the Wehrmacht piled up dazzling operational
victories, each operational success the Germans achieved was
essentially setting the stage for their ultimate failure. Hill wrote
that "every success limited German potential to concentrate resources
for the next as losses mounted and supply lines were increasingly
strained" (p. 232). In some areas, Soviet resistance collapsed with
alarming speed; in others, Soviet troops fought with grim
determination. With their country's literal survival at stake, Soviet
armies executed, without "particular initiative and creativity,"
frequently pointless frontal assaults (p. 240). These relentless
Soviet counterattacks not only cost the Red Army dearly, they
steadily wore down the Wehrmacht as well, inflicting losses on the
German army not seen in any of its previous campaigns in this war. As
an aside to this, Hill even includes a brief, but enlightening,
discussion of the Red Army's use of vodka to fortify its assault
troops, as well as its use as a tonic for frayed nerves and sagging
morale, concluding that "it is actually possible that vodka rations
improved Red Army effectiveness" (pp. 243-44).

Interestingly, Hill notes that contemporary Russian historians fall
largely into two camps: revisionists who seek to unwind the
triumphalist Soviet narrative of the war and Russian neo-Soviet
types, seeking to replace the Communist Party with Russian patriotism
as the driving force of victory. They, and the majority of their
contemporary Western counterparts, agree that, in Hill's words, the
"Red Army became a more effective fighting force as the war
progressed" (p. 2) and that Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, likewise,
became a "more effective military leader than he had been when it
[the Soviet-German war] started" (p. 3). Yet Hill centers his
attention throughout the book on the concept of "effectiveness" in
this context. Despite suffering appalling losses in the first months
of the war, the Red Army saved the Soviet Union from certain
annihilation at the hands of a barbarous enemy. "If the aim was to
repel the Nazi-German invader and its allies, and then defeat them"
Hill writes, "then the Red Army achieved the objective and was
effective" (p. 3). "However," Hill writes, "rarely do we consider
effectiveness in terms of achieving a goal at any cost" (p. 4). He
further grants that while the Red Army played a leading
role--"possible [_sic_] the principal role"--in defeating the German
Wehrmacht, it did so while suffering mind-boggling losses that were
not all the result of the operational skill, ferocity, or barbarism
of the German assault and their occupation policies. A substantial
proportion of Soviet losses stemmed from the regime's bungling and
mistakes Stalin and his marshals made prior to and during the first
eighteen months or so of the war. Certainly, in the early weeks and
months of the invasion when the very existence of the Soviet state
and its people was at stake, the Red Army hurled men into battle
often with slight regard for the state of their training or
equipment. Hill, however, notes that even when there was no
compelling operational or strategic reason to do so, Stalin and the
Red Army's generals displayed all too often "a criminal disregard for
the lives of [their] troops in hammering away at German forces in
ill-conceived operations" (p. 6).

Still, by mid-1944, Hill notes, the Red Army was "in many ways at the
peak of its effectiveness in terms of balancing cost and clear
benefit" (p. 498). When the Red Army launched its own summer
offensive that year, code-named Bagration, on the third anniversary
of the German invasion, the Soviets combined superior operational
prowess with a massive superiority in personnel and equipment to
achieve one of the war's greatest victories--the destruction of
German Army Group Center. The Soviets, admittedly aided by Hitler's
stand-fast orders, clearly not only outgunned the Germans by a huge
margin but outfought them as well. Hill notes further the
contribution of the Western Allies to Soviet success that critical
summer, citing a heretofore unseen degree of Soviet mobility and
sustainment provided by thousands of Lend-Lease trucks and vehicles.
While Soviet losses remained high, Hill concludes that the Red Army,
by the second half of that year, was reducing German strength far
more economically than earlier thanks to "a combination of its
increased effectiveness and other factors such as Hitler now being
the one to throw away troops with attempts to hold territory at any
cost" (p. 511). By the end of 1944, the Red Army had "shown what a
combination of qualitative improvement and quantitative might could
achieve" (p. 512).

However, Hill's account of Soviet operations through to the end of
the war demonstrated that despite growing manpower shortages, postwar
political aims drove operations that often incurred, once again, huge
numbers of casualties. Large-scale offensive operations in peripheral
theaters such as in Hungary, gained notable victories, including the
defeat of the puppet government of that country and opening the route
to Vienna, but neither result was "crucial for defeating Nazi Germany
by this stage" (p. 526). Indeed, the author is highly critical of
other such peripheral Soviet operations in East Prussia, where German
units, cut off from the main front by February 1945, put up a
desperate and futile resistance to the very end of the war. Rather
than simply screen and contain these stranded German units, the Red
Army battered away at them at great cost. He likewise notes that the
Soviet leadership sacrificed many of their soldiers' lives for
postwar territorial gains rather than for any reason related to the
immediate defeat of the enemy. Even with Germany's defeat an absolute
certainty, in the conduct of the Soviets' Berlin operation,
"political factors were now increasingly prominent as military and
justified heavy losses that would have been intolerable for the
democracies fighting to the west" (p. 541). Hill rightly stipulates
that the barbaric nature of the Soviet-German war, including its
duration, could explain the enormous disparity in losses suffered
between the USSR and the Western Allies. Yet "such arguments hide the
extent to which Stalin and the Soviet system under Stalin exacerbated
the price of what under any circumstances would have been a costly
struggle" (p. 560). Despite the clear progress and institutional
learning exhibited at all levels of the Red Army and even the Kremlin
leadership, Hill concludes "the late-war Red Army was still
man-for-man, tank-for-tank, aircraft-for-aircraft all too often not
as effective as either its principal opponent or key allies in terms
of the ability to destroy the enemy ... without first being
destroyed" (p. 566).

Readers familiar with the nature of Stalinism and the Soviet state
itself should not be surprised by these conclusions. Hill includes a
chapter on Stalin's purges of the Red Army's officer corps, but this
was but one relatively small element of his vicious and often
capricious rule. In the 1930s, as Timothy Snyder and others have
documented, "the Soviet Union was the only state in Europe carrying
out policies of mass killing."[2] Before the Second World War, the
Stalinist regime, as Snyder noted, had "already starved millions and
shot the better part of a million."[3] In his quest to turn the
Soviet Union from a backward, agrarian empire into a modern
industrial giant, Stalin terrorized and enslaved millions of his own
people on flimsy or nonexistent charges of wrongdoing, committed
genocide in Ukraine, and even murdered tens of thousands of otherwise
loyal members of the Communist Party and even his inner circle. We
should not expect, then, that such a regime would wage war any
differently than it did, even after the tide had turned decisively in
Moscow's favor. After all, whether building "socialism" at home or
waging war to save and then expand the Soviet empire, results were
all that mattered to Stalin and the military and civilian leaders who
lived or died at his whim.

Despite immense losses among its ranks and the civilian society that
supported it, the Red Army had not only saved the Soviet Union, it
ultimately and completely vanquished its foes and drove into the very
heart of Europe, where Soviet power would hold sway for the next
forty-five years. Taking all this in hand, Hill concludes that "both
the Red Army and the Soviet system had passed the test of total
war--a considerable achievement when one considers the state of the
Red Army and Soviet economy in the 1920s. Millions had paid the
ultimate price for that victory--a sacrifice on an unprecedented
scale that stands as a chilling reminder of the potential of modern
industrial states to wage intensive, sustained, and total war" (p.
582). Military professionals and academic specialists alike will
benefit from Hill's analysis. The Red Army and the Second World War
is meticulously researched, including among its sources an extensive
number of Soviet and Russian sources, including diaries, memoirs,
interviews, and eyewitness accounts. Hill adroitly includes concise
accounts of the war's dozens of operations and battles that, together
with his insightful analysis, will make this a valuable single-volume
resource for all those seeking to expand their understanding of this
still-evolving narrative of this crucial period in military,
European, and Russian history.

Notes

[1]. David Stahel, Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the
East (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 451.

[2]. Timothy Snyder, _Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
_(New York: Basic Books, 2010), x.

[3]. Snyder, _Bloodlands_, xi.

Citation: Mark J. Conversino. Review of Hill, Alexander, _The Red
Army and the Second World War_. H-War, H-Net Reviews. September, 2020.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55197

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.