Here is my five-minute review on the remarkable, recent book by Philippe Sands on the intersection of four individual lives and the sweeping changes in international law brought about by World War II and the Holocaust, today in “Hijacking HIstory.”
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In the wake of the American Midterm elections in November 2018, “Hijacking History” looks at how the elections are likely to be viewed in the light of history. In order to understand how, we have to see them in the context of the rules of the Constitutional process in America. What to outsiders may have seemed like a mixed verdict on the Trump administrations, looks very different when framed by the structure of America’s political system. Some knowledge of how America’s electoral system is structured give Democrats reason to hope in 2020, based on the outcome of the Midterm elections of 2018.
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In this second of two episodes I conclude my recollections of my Fulbright semester in Halle an der Saale, Germany in 2007-2008. What did Germans want to know most about Americans, and what do Americans need to know about Germans? I discuss my talks before German audiences in Chemnitz, the former Karl Marx Stadt. Interest in the American presidential election of 2008 was keen here, even though these citizens hardly ever even saw an American. The positive and negative aspects of the German way of life are subjects of reflection. The rise of the radical right neo-Nazi party, NPD, and the day it made an appearance in Halle is also discussed. Few nations have to deal with political factions so radical as does Germany, but few nations have the experience in doing so that Germans have had in the last 72 years.
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Watch for my 4-part podcast series on “The Politics of Disbelief: America’s Response to the Holocaust, 1929-1945,” coming in March 2019. They will be the best episodes I have created thus far.
Here is a trailer for the podcast series coming in March.
Topics covered in trailer:
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In this edition of “Hijacking History,” the first of two episodes on the same topic, I look at the first half of my experience as a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Germany during the autumn-winter semester, 2007-2008. This podcast provides a Rashoman-like series of impressions that I drew from the experience. Some of the things that I thought that I learned turned out to be a bit wide of the truth but this podcast is how it all seemed to me at the time. It is impossible to really know your own culture until you have experience in another. This was the experience of a lifetime and I aspire to capture parts of it in these two episodes. Watch for episode Two in this two-part series in the next few days. Happy listening!
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n this podcast I episode, I review Howard P. Willens’s 2013 book in the context of decades of conspiracy theorizing and what we thought we knew about the first official investigation of the assassination of John Kennedy, the Warren Commission. While most people simultaneously somehow manage both to disbelieve the findings of the Commission’s Report and refuse to read it, Willens walks us through what actually occurred during the investigation. He also reinforced the excellent case, already made by rational scholars, that the mistakes of the Warren Commission were neither terribly unusual for an investigation by human beings, nor destructive of its conclusions. Willens takes us through the evidence and makes a strong case that the Warren Commission essentially was the best explanation for that tragic event, and that it remains standing in spite of the conspiracizing and the imagining that has usually. taken the place of a serious regard for the facts.
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