My Amazon Review of Ian Kershaw's "The Global Age: Europe 1950-2017"

From Renewal to Decline

After giving a rave review to Ian Kershaw’s “To Hell and Back” three years ago, I was looking forward this sequel on the history of Europe from 1950- 2017. Unfortunately I was somewhat disappointed. Perhaps it is difficult for historians to write about events they lived through, and like him I lived through many of the events he discusses.

In 1950 Europe was in ruins and the nuclear sword of Damocles was hanging over the continent by the American and Soviet super powers. The Marshall Plan was just beginning to take effect and it remained to be seen whether or not a real recovery would take place. Twenty years later Western Europe was largely booming and in the east a drab poverty was the rule of the day.

To Kershaw Europe’s great success during that period was the establishment of the welfare state. To me, on the other hand, the great achievement was placing the economy largely on a market-oriented footing that enabled the boom. Here much credit goes to the German economic miracle.

Kershaw is a child of 1968, but never mentions his own role in the youthful cultural and political revolution that took place then. He was 25 at the time. Although I experienced 1968 in America it is my understanding that far from being separate, the cultural revolution was part and parcel with the political revolution. Even the most serious of politicos of the day we caught up in sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll.  Nevertheless Kershaw rightly states that to the youth in the East, the western revolutionaries were clueless had had no idea how repressive a state could be. In other words they were spoiled children.

Kershaw gives great credit to Gorbachev in ending the Cold War Personality is important, just as the roles of Hitler, Stalin and Churchill were important in his earlier volume He also rightly gives credit to German prime minister Helmut Kohl However, he fails to credit the very deft handling of bringing about the end of the Cold War to the Bush-Baker team in the U.S.

He is way too critical of Margaret Thatcher’s harsh neo-liberalism. In my opinion Thatcher saved Britain by being Churchillian in reorganizing the economy for economic growth. Kershaw is way too concerned about the collateral damage, but to paraphrase the master builder Robert Moses, “you have to break eggs in order to make an omelet.  

Although the E.U. started with great promise, its survival is open to question. The first failure was its lack of intervention in the Yugoslavian Wars, a humanitarian disaster that required U.S. military force and diplomacy to bring it to an end. The E.U. failed to listen to the anti-immigrant stirrings in the late 1990s that would come to a full boil in 2015. To all too many Europeans the E.U. is being run for the elite by a group of nameless and faceless bureaucrats. That is one reason why the U.K. wants to leave. Kershaw is part of that elite. And to top it off, Europe remains unwilling to fund its own defense.

He rightfully calls out unregulated finance capitalism to for causing the 2008 financial crisis. Although the crisis had its origins in the U.S., Wall Street was aided and abetted by greedy European banks chasing yield. Further, while the U.S. required its banks to recapitalize, Europe did not. Hence the crisis lingers today where negative interest rates are becoming normal.

I don’t think Kershaw was harsh enough on the communist governments of the East. I was in East Berlin and Moscow in the spring of 1990. The contrast between East and West Berlin was striking. Simply put the West was alive and the East was dead. In Moscow such common drug store items as Bayer Aspirin and Tampax was not available even for upper middle income consumers.

I have two other quibbles he leaves out data on the collapse in birthrates across Europe, especially in the East, Italy and Spain. That is evidence of the lack of a future orientation and it will make the welfare state promises made to elderly untenable. Lastly he completely leaves out the rise of antisemitism, the scourge of Europe in his first volume.  It is not only coming from the far right, but we see it in the Moslem immigrants and in Britain’s Labour Party.

Despite my criticisms, Kershaw has given us a very usable history of how modern Europe came into being and for that he deserves credit.

For the full amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1AIX5VT8R7ZF4/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Clara Bingham's "Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost its Mind and Found its Soul"

The Late 60’s Through Rose Colored Glasses

Journalist Clara Bingham, born into the Louisville Courier Journal family, reflects her elite bias that was typified by the “radical chic” of 1970. Born too late (1963) to experience the late 1960’s she writes as a “wanna be” member of the Weather Underground. Her book is series of oral histories to describe the period between Woodstock (Summer 1969) to the end of 1970 as the anti-Vietnam War movement reached its apogee. The interviewees are a mixture of new left political types, veterans, G.I.s, pop culture figures, feminists, Black Panthers, LSD/marijuana entrepreneurs, high Nixon administration officials, occasional police officers and F.B.I. agents. She is at her best with histories of the Army math center bombing at the University of Wisconsin and National Guard killings at Kent State.

Although she has a host of interviewees her sample is biased towards her focus on the Weather Underground and in particular, Bernadine Dorhn and Bill Ayers. Recall that the Weather Underground glorified violence by initiating the “Days of Rage” in Chicago in 1969 and three of their members died in a bomb making factory in a very toney section of Greenwich Village. The victims of the bomb were to be G.I.s at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Ayers and Dorhn, both children of privilege, are unrepentant to this day. Not true of Michael Kazin and Mark Rudd who dropped out of the organization and moved on. Kazin is now a distinguished historian at Georgetown and Rudd taught for years at a community college in New Mexico. Rudd noted, and this is important, that it is results, not intentions that matter. Bingham’s failure is to look more to intentions than results.

I was more than a casual participant in the milieu of the late 1960s. In fact I knew several of her interviewees including Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, David Mixner, Barry Romo and Carl Bernstein. But unfortunately in her over-coverage of Dorhn and Ayers she leaves out her opponents in SDS who did not go the bomb making route. For example she could have interviewed Mike Klonsky and Marilyn Katz, both Chicago neighbors of Dorhn and Ayers. She also avoided interviewing the folks involved in what was then called the Revolutionary Communist Party. She fails bringing out the fact that there were an awful lot of little Lenins running around. They were hardly democratic and they worshipped at the altar of the Castro and Ho Chi Minh dictatorships. However, that would not have been consistent with her story line of how the late 1960s gave birth to the new soul of America.

She also quite accurately how much the new left was in thrall of the Black Panthers as the vanguard of the revolution, but she neglects to bring out that all too many of the panthers were street thugs. To bring out that point it would have helped if she interviewed former Ramparts editor David Horowitz who over the following decades moved from left to right. He witnessed the thuggery of the panthers in the Oakland of the early 1970s.

To be sure the reaction to the horrors of the Vietnam War and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s changed America to its very core, but it would have helped if Bingham gave a more balanced account. Although on balance the 1960s were a force for good, the era left quite a bit of wreckage in its wake. 

The full amazon URL is:

https://www.amazon.com/review/R46LFVT6B2VES/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv