Criticism
Churchill’s The Second World War, published from 1948, said that the war was simply the completion of a second Thirty Years War, while books by A. J. P. Taylor and Fritz Fischer in the 1960s blamed the German people and saw Hitler’s plans as a continuation of the German foreign Policy of Bismarck and Wilhelm II. Churchill claimed that WWII was simply part two of a thirty years war, echoing Foch’s remark that the Treaty of Versailles was "an armistice for twenty years."
However, Henig shows Hitler’s foreign policy differed from the past in four distinctive areas.
- As Hilder said, German Eastward expansionism pre-1919 was to preserve the status quo, not for racial genocide.
- Hitler, as stated in Mein Kampf and reiterated in 1933, rejected Wilhelmine colonial and trade policies.
- Hitler, unlike Bismarck, intended to destroy Russia.
- Hitler intended to destroy the international system itself which Gustav Stresemann had used for revision.
All four differences are integral parts of Hitler’s long-term plans. Bell agrees that the new elements are more important than the continuity arguments, adding that German political and military leaders in the 1930s did not want a war of conquest. This helps dispel a second theory, namely Taylor’s and Fischer’s ideas that the German people themselves were to blame. In 1936, the Reichstag cheered Hitler’s peace proposals, and Broszat believes that the German people wanted simply peaceful revision. Hitler also agreed to Munich, at least in part, because he saw the complete lack of enthusiasm for war in Germany. Rich agrees that Hitler was a completely unique, or abnormal, phenomenon, ultimately expressed in his genocide, as previous Germans rulers of Poland never pursued extermination.
Read more about this topic: Second Thirty Years War
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.”
—Richard Holt Hutton (1826–1897)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“It is ... pathetic to observe the complete lack of imagination on the part of certain employers and men and women of the upper-income levels, equally devoid of experience, equally glib with their criticism ... directed against workers, labor leaders, and other villains and personal devils who are the objects of their dart-throwing. Who doesn’t know the wealthy woman who fulminates against the “idle” workers who just won’t get out and hunt jobs?”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)