Much of the Critics section of this week’s New Statesman is devoted to our annual history special. In his “Critic at large essay”, the historian David Cesarani surveys the changing face of Holocaust historiography. “Holocaust studies” as we recognise them today were born, Cesarani argues, in the aftermath of the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. The work of Jewish historians who’d either been interned in the camps or had fought as partisans shattered forever “the stereotype of Jews passively accepting their fate”. Nevertheless, Cesarani concludes, “the ‘lessons of the Holocaust’ seem no clearer” than they did 50 years ago, and “efforts to comprehend the Jewish tragedy continue to provoke as much controversy as reflection”.
In the lead book review, John Gray considers the long and bloody history of political violence. Reviewing Max Boot’s history of guerrilla warfare, Invisible Armies, and Martin A Miller’s The Foundations of Modern Terrorism, Gray argues that “lumping together every kind of irregular warfare into the category of terrorism, as is often done today, blurs the difference between those who have terror as a tactic in guerrilla warfare … and networks such as al-Qaeda that have opted for terror as their sole strategy.” Happily, Gray concludes, “we hear little these days of the absurd ‘war on terror’”.
Also in Books: Britain’s former special representative in Afghanistan, Sherard Cowper-Coles, reviews Return of a King: the Battle for Afghanistan by William Dalrymple and Games Without Rules: the Often Interrupted History of Afghanistan by Tamim Ansary (“if those who have directed [the latest war in Afghanistan] had applied the lessons that leap from the pages of both these books, the Afghan people might have harvested a more enduring dividend from the spilled blood and squandered millions of the last, lost decade”); Juliet Gardiner reviews Engineers of Victory by Paul Kennedy (“[Kennedy shows that] a greater understanding of the vital contribution of logistics and supply lines, plus the imagination, practical ability and dogged hard work of the ‘problem solvers’, … eventually coalesced to achieve an Allied victory”); Daniel Swift reviews The Pike, Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s biography the Italian nationalist poet and later fascist sympathiser Gabriele D’Annunzio (“In fashioning himself into a public figure, D’Annunzio prefigured both mid-20th century fascism and our modern cult of celebrity”); Connor Kilpatrick, managing editor of Jacobin magazine, reviews Freedom National, James Oakes’s book about the destruction of slavery in the United States (“it was not the inevitable march of progress that destroyed American slavery – it was a political movement”).
PLUS:
Jonathan Derbyshire talks to the historian Norman Stone about his latest book on the Second World War, his admiration for AJP Taylor and the future of secularism in Turkey, where he lives and teaches: “[Syrian refugees] make sure their little girls and little boys are doing their Quran lessons separately. But that’s precisely the kind of thing that secular Turkey was set up stop. This is fantastically dangerous …”
Elsewhere in the Critics:
Ryan Gilbey reviews Pablo Larrain’s film No (“No is an inspiring watch”); Kate Mossman reviews new albums by Anais Mitchell and Jackie Oates (“much of the thrill of this music lies in [Mitchell’s] fresh utterance of attitudes and ideas that have slipped out of view …”); Thomas Calvocoressi visits “Light Show”, a new exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London; Rachel Cooke is not convinced by Stephen Poliakoff’s latest magnum opus on BBC2; Antonia Quirke is delighted to hear some frank discussion of sex on Radio 4; plus Will Self’s Madness of Crowds.
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