Give War a Chance or The Continuities of German History

Give War a Chance: Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind's Struggle Against Tyranny, Injustice, & Alcohol-Free Beer

Author: P J ORourk

In the spirit of his savagely funny and national best-seller Parliament of Whores, Give War a Chance is P. J. O'Rourke's number one New York Times best-selling follow-up. O'Rourke runs hilariously amok by tackling the death of Communism, sanctimonious liberals, and America's perennial bad guy Saddam Hussein in a series of classic dispatches from his coverage of the 1991 Gulf War. Here is our most mordant and unnervingly funny political satirist on: Kuwait City after the Gulf War: "It looked like all the worst rock bands in the world had stayed there at the same time." On Saddam Hussein, O'Rourke muses: "He's got chemical weapons filled with ... chemicals. Maybe he's got The Bomb. And missiles that can reach Riyadh, Tel Aviv, Spokane. Stock up on nonperishable foodstuffs. Grab those Diet Coke cans you were supposed to take to the recycling center and fill them up with home heating oil. Bury the Hummel figurines in the yard. We're all going to die. Details at eleven."

Interesting book: Mastering Windows Network Forensics and Investigation or Conscience of a Liberal

The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race Across the Long Nineteenth Century

Author: Helmut Walser Smith

This book addresses the long term of German history, tracing ideas and politics across what have become sharp chronological breaks. Smith argues that current historiography has become ever more focused on the twentieth century, and on twentieth-century explanations for the German catastrophe. Against conventional wisdom, he considers continuities - in the concept of nation and the ideology of nationalism, in religion and religious exclusion, and in racism and violence - that are the center of the German historical experience and that have long histories. Smith explores these deep continuities in novel ways, emphasizing their importance, while arguing that Germany was not on a special path to destruction. The result is a series of innovative reflections on the crystallization of nationalist ideology, on patterns of anti-Semitism, and on how the nineteenth-century vocabulary of race structured the twentieth-century genocidal imagination.

Table of Contents:

Introduction page 1

1 The Vanishing Point of German History 13

2 The Mirror Turn Lamp: Senses of the Nation before Nationalism 39

3 On Catastrophic Religious Violence and National Belonging: The Thirty Years War and the Massacre of Jews in Social Memory 74

4 From Play to Act: Anti-Jewish Violence in German and European History during the Long Nineteenth Century 115

5 Eliminationist Racism 167

Conclusion: Continuities in German History 211

Acknowledgments 235

Index 239