Picking the Bones: Reclaiming the Past from the PoliticiansMainstream, 2004 - Počet stran: 240 While politicians seek evidence of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons in Iraq they overlook the fact that in human history, war itself has always been the greatest weapon of mass destruction. Its tools, whether machine guns, bombs or missiles of one form or another, are merely variations on a theme. The atomic bomb in Hiroshima killed as many as 100,000 civilians in a matter of seconds while the British naval blockade of Germany between 1914 and 1919 killed 1,000,000 Germans by slow degrees.Since the terrorist strikes of 11 September, history, its methodology, terminology and its particular concern with objective truth have been damaged - the language of historians subverted by politicians and the media; the past pillaged for examples to support modern political agendas. Picking the Bones strikes back in an attempt to restore the integrity of historical studies by demonstrating that the future is never merely a reworking of the past. Regan explores the drawbacks of demonising and glorifying historical characters for political purposes - Hitler is always the architect of the Holocaust and never the successor of Bismarck, and Churchill the man of Britain's 'finest hour', never the leader who planned to use anthrax on German cities in 1944. Mythologising history has become a tactic of unscrupulous politicians, along with disinformation and a new misleading rhetoric used to describe war and liberation. How should we really define weapons of mass destruction - are they elusive biological and chemical devices still being hunted months after the supposed end of a 'victorious' war against Saddam Hussein or are they the UN sanctions which inflicted death on 500,000 children under five in Iraq? |
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Strana 62
... rhetoric of war was simple : war to win peace . In a pre - Orwellian age , Lee would have been puzzled at the double - think that goes into modern wars . What would he and his contemporaries have understood from the rhetoric of modern ...
... rhetoric of war was simple : war to win peace . In a pre - Orwellian age , Lee would have been puzzled at the double - think that goes into modern wars . What would he and his contemporaries have understood from the rhetoric of modern ...
Strana 64
... rhetoric for two reasons : 1. Hitler had nothing to gain from invading Britain . His real enemy was Soviet Russia and time spent overcoming Britain would be time wasted . Even victory over Britain would not make war against the Soviet ...
... rhetoric for two reasons : 1. Hitler had nothing to gain from invading Britain . His real enemy was Soviet Russia and time spent overcoming Britain would be time wasted . Even victory over Britain would not make war against the Soviet ...
Strana 125
... rhetoric about ' America's divinely appointed mission as beacon of liberty and freedom ' . Was this the rhetoric of a Cold Warrior or of a Puritan bigot named John Winthrop ? Or perhaps neither , just an - - ' acting President ' playing ...
... rhetoric about ' America's divinely appointed mission as beacon of liberty and freedom ' . Was this the rhetoric of a Cold Warrior or of a Puritan bigot named John Winthrop ? Or perhaps neither , just an - - ' acting President ' playing ...
Obsah
Introduction | 7 |
Hellroaring Jake Smith | 160 |
God Only Knows | 177 |
Autorská práva | |
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