Three big assumptions proved wrong: one, that the Iraqi people would welcome us as liberators; two, that oil would soon pay for Iraqi's rebuilding; and, three, that we have plenty of troops, weapons, and equipment for the postwar situation.
From the early 1960s to the mid-1980s - the era of military dictatorship when South Korea was rebuilding itself from a postwar economic basket case to a humming, modern nation - military schools were the track of choice for ambitious young men.
You could grow up in Germany in the postwar years without ever meeting a Jewish person. There were small communities in Frankfurt or Berlin, but in a provincial town in south Germany, Jewish people didn't exist.
We were postwar middle-class white kids living in the slipstream of the greatest per-capita rise in income in the history of Western civilization; we were 'teen-agers' - a term, coined in 1941, that was in common usage a decade later - a new, recogni...
The electronics industry expanded rapidly and the seeds for the semiconductor and software revolution were planted. The postwar period also saw the suburbanization of America, the rise of the homeowner, the build-out of the interstate highway system,...
Well, you know... I grew up in postwar Britain, when you were lucky to get anything to eat. People in America have absolutely no conception of how austere England was after the war. While you were all sort of eating butter and eggs, we were eating ra...
The substance of every true and stable political organism is something resembling an Order, a Männerbünd in charge of the principle of the imperium, comprising men who see loyalty as the basis of their honor.
The '50s in general are written off as a boring decade following the turmoil of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath - the postwar Labour government, the cold war, the arrival of the New Look in fashion, etc. But I remember it as a very e...
It's time for a recovery and reassessment of North American thinkers. Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler and Norman O. Brown are the linked triad I would substitute for Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, whose work belongs to ravaged p...
In the dynamics of the main family of the story, a rising socialist in England's postwar government expects his grandparents to be pleased that the local aristocrat's garden is commandeered to allow the people to get coal underneath. Instead, the gra...
Postwar America was a very buttoned-up nation. Radio shows were run by censors, Presidents wore hats, ladies wore girdles. We came straight out of the blue - nobody was expecting anything like Martin and Lewis. A sexy guy and a monkey is how some peo...
I have often noticed that nationalism is at its strongest at the periphery. Hitler was Austrian, Bonaparte Corsican. In postwar Greece and Turkey the two most prominent ultra-right nationalists had both been born in Cyprus. The most extreme Irish Rep...
After visiting these two places (Berchtesgaden and the Eagle's lair on Obersalzberg) you can easily see how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived. He ha...
It is truth, in the old saying, that is 'the daughter of time,' and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Churchill tried and failed to preserve one empire. He failed to preserve his own empire, but succeeded in aggrandiz...
Museum architectural search committees have invariably included the Kimbell in their international scouting tours of exemplary art galleries (a practice pioneered by Velma Kimbell, the founder’s widow, in 1964). Those groups no doubt respond to the...
[Turgidson advocates a further nuclear attack to prevent a Soviet response to Ripper's attack] General "Buck" Turgidson: Mr. President, we are rapidly approaching a moment of truth both for ourselves as human beings and for the life of our nation. No...
