Zachary Shore

This Is Not Who We Are by Zachary Shore tackles the issue that is at the core of almost every issue within any country (or any group), who are we. In this case, it is about the United States and uses several key decisions from World War II as the material from which to examine the question.

While the specific details of the decision-making processes and the opinions of both those in power and of the American public are very interesting, I actually came away with a greater appreciation for how show more difficult it is to accurately make any broad sweeping statement about any "we." I will try to explain what I mean.

It is easy to see, for example, the internment of Japanese Americans as both wrong and emblematic of what the country is. And I'm not sure it is an incorrect assessment, within certain limitations. Yet it is also easy to see the move to help in recovery, for both our allies and our former enemies, as emblematic of what the country is. And again I think it is a reasonable statement, within limits. Those broad sweeping assessments, and many others, live side-by-side, often on the same issue. Many argued against the inhuman actions, yet we did them anyway, so that is indeed who we are. Some wanted to extend their revenge and not help others, yet we helped anyway, so that is indeed who we are. How is this possible?

I tend toward cynical, so I lean toward reconciling these opposites in a way that highlights the inhuman aspects that face outward in times of conflict, partly because even in relatively peaceful times, like now, we are still doing inhumane things to our fellow human beings under the misguided flag of nationalism. So for me, we are vengeful, immoral, and unethical when we have something as a country to gain, as determined by those in power. Whether most of the citizens agree don't matter to these people, they have power and they choose to rule rather than govern. Once our government (and by extension many large corporations that work with the government on things) has killed, maimed, and destroyed lives and landscapes, we suddenly become humane and virtuous. The people as a whole instigate this and the government, having accomplished what they wanted, then becomes a compassionate government (temporarily). This isn't entirely a case of one entity flip-flopping, but rather two entities that have different ways of viewing human lives. The powerful represented by the government they bought, and the "people" who are ashamed and try to save face.

Nothing in this book makes me see things any different than this. In fact, depending on how one wants to assess this wealth of information, it can support my position. Yet I don't think it takes that position. Shore presents what was said and done, what was debated and what was decided, and while the final pages show how decency has periodically triumphed, it doesn't agree or disagree with my point that the powers that be have always and, unfortunately it appears, will always do whatever vileness is necessary (even to our own citizens) for their perception of "security" or "right."

I highly recommend this to readers who like to learn about the decision-making that takes place in high levels of government, and especially those interested in the period during and shortly after WWII.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. show less

This is a superb bit of diplomatic micro-history covering a series of foreign policy crises between 1933 and 1939, using the question of what facts Hitler had to hand when he made a number of important decisions.

This book is illuminating about German and European history in the run-up to the cataclysmic Second World War but it should really be seen as a contribution to a much deeper contemporary concern - how can we be sure that we have true information in making policy decisions?

This issue show more is going to become one of ever more vital importance under conditions where the veracity of any claim being made about the world is increasingly subject to serious questions about the prior manipulation of information, as well as about its control by interested parties.

Shore refers to the contemporary Middle East in passing in his conclusions - the book was published in 2003 - and we have our own intimate experiences during precisely that period of how information was supplied, blocked and hidden as inconvenient by officials.

He covers each of six cases in intimate but not dull detail. I admire, above all, his courage in making intelligent judgments about what would most likely have filled those gaps where evidence is not direct and clear.

I argued in a Lobster article before this book was published that 'truth' in contemporary political analysis required both a rigorous attitude to the evidence but equally a sensible judgment on the gaps in the record.

There is a tendency in the less intelligent historian to restrict themselves only to the evidence to hand yet where the gaps are is where something happened. We must adopt a Japanese approach to silences and voids as things of a sort.

Our founding engasgement with the Exaro project - www.exaronews.com - represents the first part of the necessary equation: the forensic uncovering of evidence without making conspiratorial leaps or allowing ideology or partisanship get in the way.

Shore is a good historian and fulfils this primary requirement brilliantly. However, he goes further, as he should do, and becomes an equally brilliant intelligence analyst in interpreting the facts in the most probable way.

Once or twice I might demur on his judgments - once or twice - but that goes with the territory. For example, he possibly over-eggs the 'terror' aspect of Naziism in policy-making as opposed to the impacts of careerism and the standard bureaucratic obsession with position.

This is not to deny the terror represented by the Nazi regime or the reality of collaboration and resistance amongst the conservative elite - the case of Von Papen is instructive in how terror can work with almost scalpel-like precision in the hands of political genius.

It is simply to point out that second-guessing human motivation is perhaps a judgment too far and to say that much of the conduct Shore describes in closed political and bureaucratic systems is far from unique to national socialist Germany.

Our own experience of working inside the New Labour culture from 1992 to 1996 indicated precisely the same processes of competitive control of information, manipulation of facts, deliberate denial of access for bearers of inconvenient truths and so on. The rest is history.

Almost all political and state systems operate in much the same way - as do corporations, churches, NGOs and probably clubs and societies - anywhere where individuals have a career or personal stake in the retention or acquisition of power.

As for the history, Shore throws new insight on several problems that make this book an invaluable additional secondary source to set against the 'big histories' that most people will buy.

I draw attention here to only two of many - the factional struggle about whether to support Ethiopia or not in its struggle against Italian imperialism in 1934 and the final decision of Hitler and Stalin to cut a deal before partitioning Poland.

The first provides particular insight on the balance of power betwen traditional conservate realism and the more intuitive and ideological approach of Hitler.

It is interesting that conservative realist and ideological aims were similar in terms of the issue at hand - ultimately anschluss with Austria - but the conservatives took a traditional line of national interest that saw Italy as threat to the dream of German unification.

Hitler saw things differently, bigger perhaps, exploiting Italian resentments at Western refusal to respect its rights in order to build an axis of resentful powers (Germany, Italy and Japan) where anschluss could be positioned as relatively small beer to imperial domination of 'spheres'.

It is not too fanciful to see the struggle between traditional State Department realism and the hysteria of both neo-conservatism and liberal internationalism mirroring this story in our own time.

The second set of insights come from the account of the information flows surrounding the Nazi-Soviet Pact which is positioned in our conventional history as a particularly heinous act - it looks less so in the light of the information provided by Zachary Shore.

On the contrary, Stalin now looks as if he had no alternative because of the blundering of that utter fool Chamberlain whose commitment to appeasement seems to have been much deeper than any of us might ever have thought.

We can never know what might have happened if Chamberlain had not blundered, working behind the backs of his own nation and much of his party.

Chamberlain gave Germany the opportunity to demonstrate itself and have demonstrated by the facts to the Soviet Union that Britain would never provide the security guarantees for the Soviet Union that might have saved Poland.

Litvinov was only the first of many sacrifices to Chamberlain's errors of judgment.

The Soviet Union left the decision to join with Germany very late but it had every cause to make that decision given the asinine handling of the situation by the British Government - I refer you to Chapter 6 which is damning.

We have got into the habit of pouring all the blame for killing on the tyrants but blundering fools must also take their share of the blame.

If Chamberlain had not been such a fool, it is quite possible that millions would not have died, or at least have had some more years of life.

Never again should not just mean no war but no more blundering fools - regrettably they still continue to appear with alarming regularity.

As Shore points out if indirectly, the information flow at the hands of Saddam was a material fact in a fairly recent war. We now know that a misreading of a diplomat's statements were interpreted as giving the green light to an invasion that need not have happened.

This brings us back to information flow in our culture and the importance of process, system and transparency (within limits).

Elected politicians can and should define the national interest as the needs and desires of the people through the democratic process (which must be more than competing party cadres)

But, as in war, the performance of policy needs to be left to the professionals. By all means get new professionals if the old ones are not up to the job but let them be professionals.

Hitler's 'achievements' from a German nationalist perspective were quite remarkable but he was, in my opinion, pushing at an open door.

Most of Europe, fifteen years on from Versailles, knew that Germany had to be accommodated. There is scarcely a claim of the nationalists that might not have been 'sorted out' by professional diplomacy within ten or twenty years of a determined commitment to do so.

What Germany required was Bismarckian conservatism or internal transformation from its militaristic and rather strange culture into something truly liberal. What it got was a violent emotional reaction to humiliation under a charismatic hysteric.

One of the virtues of this book is that it raises questions about Hitler himself. He was undoubtedly a political genius but he was not and never could be a statesman.

The stories here should help knock on the head any lingering idea that he was quite the decisive all-knowing courageous leader (in foreign policy) who just went too far of revisionist legend.

The real story is that he was an ideologue and fantasist about power - just like today's liberal internationalists, neo-conservatives and Islamists - riding for a fall.

His tactical genius in domestic politics was translated into 'wins' in foreign policy but he was well served by his supine (UK) or weak (France) or distracted (Italy) potential opponents.

But underlying his tactical skills was a degree of strategic nonsense that had defeat in-built into it - the exact reverse of Stalin whose domestic ideology had ultimate defeat written into it while his realist foreign policy built a short-lived empire.

Germans are ashamed of Hitler for some very good reasons - thuggery being one - but they should add to the charge sheet that they allowed a genuine ideologue to operate the machinery of state. Let us hope we never make the same mistake today. show less

The author is a historian who seems to specialize in military history from the point of view of strategic studies. He begins by defining a blunder as a cognitive act, that is, one that involves conscious decision making, and which has made matters worse. This would be in contrast to an error, which may or may not have involved any conscious thought and could just as well have made matters better as making them worse.

He then goes on to analyze seven major causes of blunders-

Exposure Anxiety: show more The fear of being seen as weak,

Flatview: Seeing the world in one dimension,

Cure-allism: Believing that one size really fits all,

Infomania: The obsessive relationship to information,

Mirror Imaging: Thinking the other side thinks like us

Static Cling: Refusal to accept a changing world, and

Cognition

These are illustrated by various examples. Usually one would expect a lot of military examples from such an author, and there are some, but on the whole these are fairly balanced with examples outside of the strict military domain. Many American authors also tend to spend a great deal of time analyzing 9/11 from the point of view of their thesis, and once again, although 9/11 is mentioned, it is used in a balanced way. The author is also refreshingly frank about criticizing American decisions and policies in various international involvements such as Viet Nam and Iraq.

I found the examples of King Mongkut of Siam and Ho Chi Min of Viet Nam to be the most interesting because the analysis was new
to me and these examples will certainly lead to some additional reading on my part. The King of Siam used his skills as a statesmen to keep his country from falling to imperialist pressures that swallowed up most of the southeast asian empires of his day. Ho Chi Min lead the Vietnamese people in resistance and ultimate victory over two countries with vastly superior technologies and armies, namely those of the French and Americans, surely there are lessons to be learned in that feat.

Overall, a thoughtful and brisk read. show less

I have a very busy schedule so this took an embarrassing amount of time for me to finish. That shouldn’t take anything away from the book. I found this book fascinating. I love history in all forms and while this book covers WW11 era America, a time that has received a lot of attention, this book goes behind the scenes of some of America’s biggest policy decisions at the time and picks apart the many players and the levers they were pulling on at the time. This book is full of little show more known information about people that may be household names. For example, everyone today is familiar with Herbert Hoover and the catastrophic financial downturn the proceeded WW11, but I never knew he was also a committed humanitarian who having lost the presidency to FDR, went back to work in the Truman administration trying to prevent the entire European continent from starving following the devastation of WW11. There is a heavy focus on the Japanese internment and the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, perhaps too narrow considering the title, but the great deeds and misdeeds of the US Government could perhaps take up many volumes so maybe a slender focus is a good thing. Thank you Netgalley for the copy in exchange for an honest review. show less