In the America of Truman and Eisenhower, the Germany of Adenauer, the Britain of Churchill, and other Western democracies, power brokers who answered to working-class and rural constituencies—grassroots party politicians, trade union and
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“When the well-disciplined soldier emerged from the mud of the trenches, he let himself be led to an anonymous death, meted out on an industrial scale. If an element of heroism could be recognized in this, it was simply on account of his capacity to slavishly endure the dehumanized horror, when the mutilated bodies of the veterans and the minds destroyed by trauma haunted a Europe fascinated by the spectacle of its own decline. The Arab warrior, on the other hand, was as capable of hatred as he was capable of love; his explosions of anger could follow his most magnanimous gestures. For him, war was still romantic, an ‘excitement’ whose tragic outcomes he accepted as a fatality inherent to life. In short, the Arabs were different from us, so different that ‘they have no objection to being killed’, as Hugh Trenchard, head of the RAF general staff, explained to the sensitive souls of the British Parliament.49 Arabs loved war precisely because it involved a confrontation with death, and as opposed to the effeminate Europeans, they did not make the flabby distinction between combatants and non-combatants. If you thought about it properly, not bombing them would almost amount to insulting their values.”
― Governing from the Skies: A Global History of Aerial Bombing
― Governing from the Skies: A Global History of Aerial Bombing
“As spaces of promiscuous proximity, often lit poorly if at all, where existential fear suddenly was converted to the euphoria of being still alive and no longer having anything to lose, bunkers were also places of uncontrolled sexual encounters. The concern to discipline sexual conduct seems to have played a greater role in Great Britain than in Nazi Germany. Contrary to an idea born in the 1950s, according to which Nazism was marked by sexual repression, the anti-bourgeois dimension of the Volksgemeinschaft implied certain possibilities of sexual liberation.37 The British ‘people’s war’, on the other hand, was based far more strongly on a community founded on the bourgeois family and the need to repress sexual deviance, imputable both to women and the lower orders. As a clear sign of the particular role played by the family, the British authorities were initially against the idea of collective shelters, fearing that, in this mixing of classes, bourgeois virtue might be contaminated by the bad habits of the ‘lower orders’, leading to moral dissolution followed by a challenge to the social order. The middle classes were thus encouraged to build shelters in their gardens, which had the additional advantage of privatizing part of the costs bound up with air-raid precautions – something unthinkable in Germany, where the collective ideology of the Volksgemeinschaft was paramount.”
― Governing from the Skies: A Global History of Aerial Bombing
― Governing from the Skies: A Global History of Aerial Bombing
“The mapping uncovered widespread deep valleys below the ice sheet, many of which lie below sea level. Many valleys also originate far inland and end at the sea. Out of 123 marine-terminating glaciers, “60 drain 88 percent of the ice sheet in area and are grounded below 300m depth at their termini, meaning they are deep enough to interact with subsurface warm Atlantic waters and undergo massive rates of subaqueous melting.”32 Under the right conditions, this could lead to a rapid meltdown that would affect a substantial portion of Greenland.”
― Vanishing Ice: Glaciers, Ice Sheets, and Rising Seas
― Vanishing Ice: Glaciers, Ice Sheets, and Rising Seas
“In France, Georges Vacher de Lapouge, the chief figure of French anthroposociology, led a comprehensive research programme in the 1890s, gaining sympathisers all over the Western world and some degree of academic legitimacy in his home country.96 His German colleague Otto Ammon, in contrast, met with strong opposition from the German anthropological establishment when he began putting forward his ideas in the late 1880s and 1890s. After the turn of the century, however, the roles were reversed, with Ammon winning increasing scientific acclaim in Germany and Lapouge being ostracised from the French scientific community.”
― Measuring the Master Race: Physical Anthropology in Norway 1890-1945
― Measuring the Master Race: Physical Anthropology in Norway 1890-1945
“Laws and regulations that corporate lobbyists are unable to persuade national democratic legislatures to enact can be repackaged and hidden in harmonization agreements masked as lengthy trade treaties, which are then ratified by legislatures without adequate scrutiny. Whatever its minor benefits, legislation by treaty represents a massive transfer of power from democratic legislatures to corporate managers and bankers. Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of the tax haven Luxembourg who became the president of the European Commission from 2014 to 2019, described how the European Council systematically expanded its authority by stealth: “We decree something, then float it and wait some time to see what happens. If no clamor occurs . . . because most people do not grasp what had been decided, we continue—step by step, until the point of no return is reached.”
― The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite
― The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite
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