Unnecessary Wars
Unnecessary Wars

Author: Henry Reynolds

Publisher: NewSouth

Published: 2016-04-01

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1742242278

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‘Australian governments find it easy to go to war. Their leaders seem to be able to withdraw with a calm conscience, answerable neither to God nor humanity.’ Australia lost 600 men in the Boer War, a three-year conflict fought in the heart of Africa that had ostensibly nothing to do with Australia. Coinciding with Federation, the war kickstarted Australia’s commitment to fighting in Britain’s wars overseas, and forged a national identity around it. By 1902, when the Boer War ended, a mythology about our colonial soldiers had already been crafted, and a dangerous precedent established. This is Henry Reynolds at his searing best, as he shows how the Boer War left a dark and dangerous legacy, demonstrating how those beliefs have propelled us into too many unnecessary wars – without ever counting the cost.

Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War"
Churchill, Hitler, and

Author: Patrick J. Buchanan

Publisher: Forum Books

Published: 2009-07-28

Total Pages: 546

ISBN-13: 0307405168

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Were World Wars I and II inevitable? Were they necessary wars? Or were they products of calamitous failures of judgment? In this monumental and provocative history, Patrick Buchanan makes the case that, if not for the blunders of British statesmen– Winston Churchill first among them–the horrors of two world wars and the Holocaust might have been avoided and the British Empire might never have collapsed into ruins. Half a century of murderous oppression of scores of millions under the iron boot of Communist tyranny might never have happened, and Europe’s central role in world affairs might have been sustained for many generations. Among the British and Churchillian errors were: • The secret decision of a tiny cabal in the inner Cabinet in 1906 to take Britain straight to war against Germany, should she invade France • The vengeful Treaty of Versailles that mutilated Germany, leaving her bitter, betrayed, and receptive to the appeal of Adolf Hitler • Britain’s capitulation, at Churchill’s urging, to American pressure to sever the Anglo-Japanese alliance, insulting and isolating Japan, pushing her onto the path of militarism and conquest • The greatest mistake in British history: the unsolicited war guarantee to Poland of March 1939, ensuring the Second World War Certain to create controversy and spirited argument, Churchill, Hitler, and “the Unnecessary War” is a grand and bold insight into the historic failures of judgment that ended centuries of European rule and guaranteed a future no one who lived in that vanished world could ever have envisioned.

Warmongers
Warmongers

Author: R. T. Howard

Publisher:

Published: 2019-07-15

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 9781445694382

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New paperback edition - Warmongers challenge assumptions about the value of war in the past and the present; examining major historical figures and events, it will provoke discussion about when and in what circumstances force is ever really justified - pertinent at a time of ongoing war in, and war-weariness about, Syria and Afghanistan.

The Stupidity of War
The Stupidity of War

Author: John Mueller

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-03-04

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 1108843832

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This innovative argument shows the consequences of increased aversion to international war for foreign and military policy.

Taxing Wars
Taxing Wars

Author: Sarah Elizabeth Kreps

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 019086530X

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"Why have the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq lasted longer than any others in American history? One view is that the move to an all-volunteer force and drones have allowed the wars to continue almost unnoticed for years. Taxing Wars suggests how Americans bear the burden in treasure has also changed, with recent wars financed by debt rather than taxes. This shift has eroded accountability and contributed to the phenomenon of perpetual war"--

Churchill and the Avoidable War
Churchill and the Avoidable War

Author: Richard M. Langworth

Publisher:

Published: 2015-10-25

Total Pages: 122

ISBN-13: 9781518690358

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World War II was the defining event of our age-the climactic clash between democracy and tyranny. It led to revolutions, the demise of empires, a protracted Cold War, and religious strife still not ended. Yet Churchill maintained that it was all avoidable: "If the Allies had resisted Hitler strongly in his early stages...he would have been forced to recoil." Here is a transformative view of Churchill's prescriptions, and the degree to which he pursued them in the decade before the war. It shows he was both right and wrong: right that Hitler could have been stopped; wrong that he did all he could to stop him. Could WW2 have been prevented? Yes-at one juncture in particular-but with great difficulty.

America Aflame
America Aflame

Author: David Goldfield

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2011-03-15

Total Pages: 642

ISBN-13: 1608193748

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In this spellbinding new history, David Goldfield offers the first major new interpretation of the Civil War era since James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. Where past scholars have limned the war as a triumph of freedom, Goldfield sees it as America's greatest failure: the result of a breakdown caused by the infusion of evangelical religion into the public sphere. As the Second GreatAwakening surged through America, political questions became matters of good and evil to be fought to the death. The price of that failure was horrific, but the carnage accomplished what statesmen could not: It made the United States one nation and eliminated slavery as a divisive force in the Union. The victorious North became synonymous with America as a land of innovation and industrialization, whose teeming cities offered squalor and opportunity in equal measure. Religion was supplanted by science and a gospel of progress, and the South was left behind. Goldfield's panoramic narrative, sweeping from the 1840s to the end of Reconstruction, is studded with memorable details and luminaries such as HarrietBeecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman. There are lesser known yet equally compelling characters, too, including Carl Schurz-a German immigrant, warhero, and postwar reformer-and Alexander Stephens, the urbane and intellectual vice president of the Confederacy. America Aflame is a vivid portrait of the "fiery trial"that transformed the country we live in.

Our Ancient Wars
Our Ancient Wars

Author: Victor Caston

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2016-02-05

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0472121596

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Many famous texts from classical antiquity—by historians like Thucydides, tragedians like Sophocles and Euripides, the comic poet Aristophanes, the philosopher Plato, and, above all, Homer—present powerful and profound accounts of wartime experience, both on and off the battlefield. They also provide useful ways of thinking about the complexities and consequences of wars throughout history, and the concept of war broadly construed, providing vital new perspectives on conflict in our own era. Our Ancient Wars features essays by top scholars from across academic disciplines—classicists and historians, philosophers and political theorists, literary scholars, some with firsthand experience of war and some without—engaging with classical texts to understand how differently they were read in other times and places. Contributors articulate difficult but necessary questions about contemporary conceptions of war and conflict.