I'm A Sucker For Interiors And Carefully, Beautifully Filmed People Sitting In A Big Room. My Appetites Are Simple.
There Was A Lot Of Maneuvering On The Part Of The Roosevelt Administration To Get The Stars Aligned So That That Attack Would Happen. There's Just No Question About That; You Don't Even Have To Look At The Decoding Of Diplomatic Cables Or Anything Else. Fdr's Own Admiral Thought It Was A Bad Idea To Have The Fleet Confined In One Place Way Out In The Middle Of The Pacific.
The Equivocations, The Confusions, The Contradictions. There's No Way We Can Live Through Or Comprehend Something So Big That Happened So Long Ago. We've Lost True History. But If We Are Willing To Tolerate The Contradictions, And If We Suffer Through Events Rather Than Ticking Them Off, We May At Least Get Closer To Understanding What Happened Than If We Grip The Handrail Of A Carefully Polished And Reassuringly Heroic Narrative.
Just As The People Who Lived Through The Second World War Thought Different Things On Different Days, I Think Everybody Who Goes Through That Period Carefully Now Thinks Different Things On Different Days.
I Wanted To Apprentice Myself To The Dailiness Of The War's Beginning Phase. It's Truer And More Frightening That Way - When You're Afloat On A Little Dingy In The Midst Of It All.
I Certainly Felt I Had An Idea Of World War Ii, And It's Probably The Idea That Many People Share: There Was This Insane Aggressor, And There Was Really Only One Way To Proceed In Resisting Him. What I Didn't Realize Is That There Were Many Voices Belonging To Reasonable, Interesting, Complicated People Who Had A Different Way Of Interpreting The Possible Responses To The Hitlerian Menace.
I Wrote About World War Ii Because I Didn't Understand It. I Think That's The Reason That Historians Are Drawn To Any Subject - There's Something About It That Doesn't Make Sense. I Wanted To Work My Way Through What Happened Slowly, And Look At Everything In The Order In Which It Took Place.
I Am Closer To The Pacifist Side, In That I Think That The British Response To German Aggression, Which Was To Try To Starve The Continent Into A State Of Revolt And To Terrorize German Civilians With Bombing Raids, Was Part Of The Total Catastrophe.
I Keep Thinking I'll Enjoy Suspense Novels, And Sometimes I Do. I've Read About 20 Dick Francis Novels.
In Fact, You Could Make The Argument That A Historian Like Shlomo Aronson Does In Passing In One Of His Books, That The Bombing Campaign United The German Nation Behind Hitler, And Actually Contributed To The Sustaining Of His Power.
Until A Friend Or Relative Has Applied A Particular Proverb To Your Own Life, Or Until You've Watched Him Apply The Proverb To His Own Life, It Has No Power To Sway You.
The Force Of Truth That A Statement Imparts, Then, Its Prominence Among The Hordes Of Recorded Observations That I May Optionally Apply To My Own Life, Depends, In Addition To The Sense That It Is Argumentatively Defensible, On The Sense That Someone Like Me, And Someone I Like, Whose Voice Is Audible And Who Is At Least Notionally In The Same Room With Me, Does Or Can Possibly Hold It To Be Compellingly True.
