Germany

Posted by: John Phoenix By Stephen Karganovic | Strategic Culture Foundation Throughout the decades of the Cold War, whilst the blocs were competing, two major attractions worked powerfully to the advantage of the West. Firstly, the comfort and prosperity that it was able to provide to its citizens, which its Eastern rivals could hardly match. The second feature that in the eyes of the world gave the West a huge competitive edge was the comparatively better performance of its institutions with regard to individual liberties. The twin advantages of prosperity and the impression that the West valued freedom successfully neutralised much of the theoretical critique of the capitalist social and economic model. In particular, the West’s ostensible commitment to personal liber...

Posted by: John Phoenix Bombing in Europe was never a winning strategy, says Richard Overy in The Bombing War. ‘Icannot describe to you what a curious note of brutality a bomb has,’ said one woman who lived through the initial German raids on London during the second world war. This woman’s ambivalent reaction to having a bomb rip through her bedroom typified the shocking reality of a different type of war to any that had ever been fought before. For as Richard Overy makes eminently clear in his extraordinary and far-reaching history of Europe’s bombing war, this was the first time civilians actually became a part of the front line. The cause of this was the advent of aerial bombardment, which, Overy says, exposed ‘the democratic nature of total war, which insisted th...