Wake the kids, phone the neighbors, pay Uncle Ray’s bail and get Grandma out of the home.
It’s a two for one LoB book review.
The first one is On The Eve by Bernard Wasserstein.
Wasserstein chronicles European Jewry through the 1930s and postulates that it was in a massive decline, demographically, culturally and spiritually.
If you’ve ever wondered how the Nazis were able to do what they did to the Jews, the answer is simple. They had the rest of Europe spending ten years laying the ground work.
Between the rush to assimilate, intermarriage, Communism under Stalin, and the wide-spread adoption of Nuremberg type laws outside Germany, the fate of Judaism in Europe was sealed before the war broke out.
Even England and France were complicit in this decade that set the stage for the Holocaust, as well as the United States.
If you are at a loss to understand European antisemitism in this day and age, you can remove Zionism from the picture, and you don’t need to blame the Muslims. Jew hating is one of the lasting cultural icons of European civilization and they are proud of it.
The take away is not that the Jews were murdered by the Nazis because they couldn’t get out. The Germans were more than happy to just see them leave. They were murdered because no one would let them in.
For ten years Germany was given permission by the rest of Europe to do what they wanted with the Jews and they followed Germany’s lead.
Vacation in Europe and spend my money there? No thanks.
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The second book is James Donovan’s The Blood of Heroes; The 13 Day Struggle For The Alamo- And The Sacrifice That Forged A Nation.
Donovan places the Alamo in the context of the events of the preceding years and it’s aftermath.
Far from the symbol of jingoism and racism some libtards would have you think, it was one piece of a much broader, complex and nuanced time.
The author parallels Mexico’s desire to attract development to its northern states and Americans’ displeasure with Andrew Jackson’s governance.
You see what happens when citizens put their trust in a constitution that is discarded by an increasingly centralized and tyrannical Federal government, and I mean Mexico not the united States.
Other Mexican states rebelled against federal rule and were crushed.
Many Texians of non-Anglo origin (Tejanos) had the same complaints and fought side by side with American immigrants. The Texians who were ultimately forced to fight for independence were only one or two generations removed from the American revolution, which was a living symbol of liberty rather than merely a historic event.
The Alamo was a strategic stop-gap, whose downfall gave Mexico the key to conquer the rest of Texas; which they nearly accomplished with merciless brutality, such as the massacre at Goliad.
After the Alamo fell, Texians (civilian and military) fled the onslaught of the Mexican army with a scorched earth policy, burning their own towns and homes, until final victory at the battle of San Jacinto.
The Texians embodied an essential spirit of Americanism that was on its way to becoming and has nearly been conceptualized out of existence.
When it comes to vacation plans, to paraphrase David Crockett,
The Europeans can go to hell, I’m going to Texas.
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