His latest masterpiece justifying the assassination of Suleimani goes out of its way to praise Erwin Rommel as a "worthy adversary." A couple of things here.pic.twitter.com/VqyaXqGUb1
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His latest masterpiece justifying the assassination of Suleimani goes out of its way to praise Erwin Rommel as a "worthy adversary." A couple of things here.pic.twitter.com/VqyaXqGUb1
One, it's abundantly clear that Stephens does not know what he's talking about. Troops under Rommel's command murdered Jews in North Africa.
Two, it's also abundantly clear that all that Stephens knows about Rommel was probably gleaned from History Channel documentaries in the 1990s, or hack "Good War" books like Andrew Roberts', or from the James Mason biopic. Probably from all three.
The broader point is that he's pretty clearly drawing his information on World War II from older sources that are committed to the myth of the "clean" Wehrmacht, where it wasn't the honorable German soldiers who committed war crimes, but rather the evil Waffen-SS.
This is *patently* untrue -- Wehrmacht officers and ordinary German soldiers routinely committed war crimes and were actively complicit in the Holocaust.
The reason why this is incredibly lazy of Bret is because the myth of the clean Wehrmacht has been debunked by historians -- and studied in its own right as an important postwar phenomenon -- for DECADES.
There was a very famous (and controversial) exhibit that toured Germany about this in 1995.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wehrmachtsausstellung …
This book was published in English in 2002.https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674025776 …
These are NOT NEW findings. And yet Bret appears to be totally unaware of any of this. Because he's a lazy writer and a lazy thinker.
In this case, though, his laziness is part of a broader, systemic problem of downplaying or minimizing the Wehrmacht's crimes for political purposes during the Cold War.
Not out of overt Nazi sympathies, necessarily, but rather to avoid unpleasant questions like, "Why are we letting Erich von Manstein be the de facto leader of the West German military?"
What's especially frustrating is how, even after decades of debunking, the myth of the clean Wehrmacht remains part of wargaming culture. I encountered it all the time when I regularly played online games in my teens and 20s.
But is it asking too much for a columnist at the New York Times to have a little bit more of a sophisticated understanding of the Wehrmacht than some rando drooling over the Tiger II in World of Tanks?
ADDENDUM: Upon re-reading the column, it occurs to me that the implication Stephens is making is that it would be wrong to assassinate a "worthy adversary" like a Rommel, as opposed to a genuinely evil man like Suleimani. Well, funny story...
The British TRIED to kill Rommel.https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/how-british-special-operations-raid-intended-kill-or-capture-erwin-rommel-went-wrong-35022 …
And the United States DID assassinate Admiral Yamamoto Isokoru, the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack who has been consistently portrayed in postwar media (think "Tora, Tora, Tora" though there are others) as a "worthy adversary."https://www.businessinsider.com/operation-vengeance-us-kills-pearl-harbor-planner-isoroku-yamamoto-2018-12 …
I'm sure Stephens feels like we're picking the fleas (bedbugs?) in his pocket, attacking him for all of four words in a column. But it actually undercuts the way he frames his piece -- as talking about the assassination as an act of moral justice!pic.twitter.com/RuuAdufPwz
I was at the antiwar rally in Times Square earlier today and got handed a flyer by someone from the Revolutionary Communist Party. When the *REVCOMMS* are better able to non-controversially articulate the "Soleimani was a bastard" argument, you know you're in trouble.pic.twitter.com/TLWABu6swT
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