Paul Fidalgo

This is the last of the Four Horsemen's books that I have read (and I heartily recommend all of them), and I was putting this one off because I assumed it might be something of a retread – choir-preaching, if you will. Indeed, if you have seen Hitchens debate or appear on television, you've come across a lot of what is in this book. What in one unified tome, God is Not Great is an excellent and quick read, at that (though perhaps more like a series of related essays than a single narrative, particularly in the second to last section which is something of a truncation of Jennifer Hecht's “Doubt: A History”). Happily, I can also say that even though it is Hitchens it, like the books of Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett, is not arrogant, it is not mean-spirited. Hitchens takes this subject very seriously, sees real consequences to superstition and theism, and makes a hard-nosed, unapologetic case. Confidence is not arrogance, telling hard truths is not mean. You may find more to disagree with in the more nuanced political positions he takes, but his case against religion is compelling.

I've had this sitting in my collection unfinished for years now. Once so excited about it (I'm a huge fan of Gore on the whole), it's essentially a book-length indictment of Bush rather than a real defense of reason-based policy. That's fine, but now it's 2010, the damage of the Bush administration is not news, and though it must never be forgotten, I'm full for now. Shelving this about 2/3 of the way through.

Yes, I loved this book, and the irony is that had it not been offered free for the Kindle, I never would have read it. Let me be more blunt, actually. Not only would I not have read it, but I would have scoffed at it.

“His Majesty's Dragon”?? Come on. At best I would have read the title aloud in a mocking tone and escaped the fantasy/sci-fi section with haste. See the cover art? Just like every other magic-y, Lord-of-the-Rings-y, fantasy book you see piling up in bookstores. What's to differentiate one from another? They all blend together into a haze of something that might as well be labeled “for fans of this genre only.”

But it was free for the Kindle. So I took a look. I checked up on some reviews, and the Washington Post was very favorable. What the hell, I need metro train reading, let's try the first few pages.

Hooked. Schooled.

It's smart, it's charming, it's subtle. It respects the reader, the characters are fully realized, complete with quirks that are just visible enough to fool you into thinking these people (and dragons) are real.

So smart business model. I'll be buying all the rest in the series forthwith. Stupid-sounding titles or no.

Oh, and having read the book, the title's not actually stupid. Hmph.

This is reprinted from my blog Near Earth Object.

The edition that I own of William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich advertises that the book is one that “shocked the conscience of the world.” I saw this mainly as an indication of what the book must have meant to a public that might not have been as familiar with the crimes of the Nazis and, well, accustomed as we are today to frequent and thoughtless analogies; from goofy Mel Brooks Hitler parodies to the Soup Nazi, as a society we seem to have digested this period of human history as just that, a period of history, distant and with little relevance.

I think we may be doing a disservice to ourselves. I don't mean to say that this terrible period should not be the subject of humor and satire — it must! — but having now completed Shirer's enormous book, I am beginning to think that we are forgetting too much.

It's easy to say that, for example, the tea-baggers calling Obama Hitler and comparing the health care bill to the Final Solution are out-of-bounds, an example of overheated rhetoric. But in a way, saying that these kinds of comparisons “go too far” really doesn't go nearly far enough. And it may upset some of the more bloodthirsty liberals as well to hear that, yes, even doing a Bush or Cheney-to-Hitler comparison is way, way off base.

Let's not even deal with the Obama/health care comparisons; they make no sense in the least. But the Bush/Cheney comparisons usually stem from the idea that the Bush team was imperialistic, hungry for the resources of other nations, and mainly heartless about who it hurt in its quest for power. Fine. All of that was true of Hitler. But it's also true of just about every other imperial power in human history. You can't be imperial unless you build an empire. You can't build an empire unless you take someone else's territory. You usually can't do that without committing — or at least sincerely threatening — unthinkable violence.

But we use Hitler and Nazism as the standard of human evil for good reason. The Holocaust might be the most evil, horrific event of our species' history even if had been merely a mass extermination — but it was not the first nor the last genocide, not the first or last slaughter of millions, that humans have known. The Holocaust was that plus, if it can be imagined, several additional levels of cruelty; the starvation, the slavery under unimaginable conditions, the insane medical experiments, the sadism of the Nazi captors, and the raw industrialism of the killing — rounding up the populations of already-rotted-out villages and systematically executing whole neighborhoods and families at once, forcing the soon-to-be dead to jump into pits filled with their dead neighbors and relatives before they themselves were murdered.

And when all was lost for the Third Reich, it was not enough to lose the war. Had Hitler had his way in his final days and hours, the entirety of Germany would have crumbled with him, as he ordered every aspect of German life — stores, waterworks, utilities, factories — destroyed so there would be nothing left for the Allies to take. As horrifically as he had treated his enemies, he was about to let the same happen to his own “superior” people for no other reason than pride.

Perhaps it's not worth trying to figure out whether anyone in human history was “worse.” I'm no historian by any means. There are probably men and systems that were more evil but had less opportunity to do such harm (I don't put it past the likes of Al Qaeda or the regime in North Korea to behave so madly and cruelly given the means to do so), and those who may have done more damage and caused more suffering, but are not remembered in the same way. But trivializing the terror that was Nazism in our daily parlance, to use the imagery as something applicable to our current politics is to forget. It's to forget the tens of millions who not only died because of Hitler and his henchmen, but to forget the deep, unspeakable suffering of all those who found themselves beneath the Nazi boot.

And it is to forget what it is that brought Nazism to the forefront of German life. It is instructive that Hitler never succeeded in some violent takeover of Germany, despite attempts to do so. In the end, Hitler achieved power through “official” channels, bit by bit gaining the approval and acquiescence of the government and institutions, and bit by bit exploiting a frustrated and angry populace by stoking its rage, its fears, and its pride. Shirer himself, in a 1990 edition of his 1960 book, wondered whether a then-newly-reunified Germany might be ripe for another similar episode. 20 years later, his fears have not come true. Not there, anyway.

But he was right to be watchful. To trivialize the Third Reich today is to lose sight of how it could happen again, not in the Obama-is-Hitler sense, but in the sense of a charismatic person or persons taking advantage of a weakened and frightened public and a spineless government, and doing things in their name that they did not think human beings were capable of. It can happen again, but if we don't learn the right lessons from history, we'll miss it. And it will be too late.

All that said, do your brain a favor and take the big chunk of time you'll need to read Shirer's book. Learn something, why don't you.

A good read, but more importantly, a really solid education; Not simply in terms of the history of doubters, but the history of, well, thought. Of philosophy. For someone who didn't quite get the education he might have liked, this book is a great tour through different ways of thinking about the world, freed from the gauze and blur of supernaturalism.