Zachary Shore

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 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.… (altro)

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 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.… (altro)

The author sets out to show how certain mistakes were made and how intelligent people made them. Shore starts slowly but makes some interesting observations throughout as he compares the (correct) decisions made by people like Eisenhower and Kennedy and the (poor) decisions made by Rumsfield and other neocons. I like to keep well away from commenting on American politics but it wouldn't surprise me if there were many people who disagreed with some of Shore's findings.

This book never reached any great heights in me, until almost the last page when he makes a casual remark that left me needing to reread the sentence a few times. It also provided the answer to my question "What's with the odd author photo and what is he carrying?"

In the end, "Blunder" didn't quite live up to what I expected of it, but I will be interested to see how he further develops the theories he posits here.… (altro)

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: 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.… (altro)