A new look at a historical problem both logistical and humanitarian, with obvious implications today.
A historical survey of the plight of post–World War II refugees and their role in the formative years of the Cold War rivalry between East and West.
At the end of World War II, writes Australian historian Fitzpatrick, the four powers occupying the former Third Reich faced an unprecedented problem: feeding, housing, and otherwise caring for millions of displaced persons. Among these were the Jews who survived the Holocaust, as well as 7 million German POWs and “millions of German refugees expelled from Eastern European states who were pouring into Germany.” The Soviets adopted stern measures: a Russian who had been taken prisoner unwillingly was sent to Siberia; a Russian who had willingly gone over to the enemy was executed; someone who was an “inconvenient” between-states individual (e.g., a Polish Jew) was sent packing to the West, “trucked over into the American or British zone for the Allies to deal with”; and so on. The Western powers tended toward clemency, with displaced persons sent to college, given jobs, and often sent as émigrés to nations needing to renew their labor forces, especially Australia and Canada. The two contending systems caused friction, especially the Allied willingness to incorporate former enemies into postwar military forces: in the Soviets’ eyes, this “was sinister, an indication of the Western Allies’ intentions to use the DPs…as the nucleus of military forces that might be used against the Soviet Union in the future.” Contentions over how to treat displaced persons, and especially Jews being allowed to travel to Palestine, fed into larger disagreements between the Soviet bloc and the West, shaping the subsequent Cold War. Differences in how to treat refugees are at the forefront of much international conversation today, Fitzpatrick notes in closing, so that her study becomes an instructive lesson in practical politics as well as history.
A new look at a historical problem both logistical and humanitarian, with obvious implications today.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9780691230023
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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