Luke Crawford's Reviews > Strange Defeat

Man, this book is hard to beat. On prose quality and emotional resonance alone, it's the best book on world war two that I've read (and I've read... quite a number of books on the subject.) I mean, being written by a resistance fighter while the war was active, obviously it's a lot less scientific than other examinations of the war, but Bloch can write. For that matter, a lot of his values really resonate today....

"I feel neither pride nor shame in my origins. I am, I hope, a sufficiently good historian to know that racial qualities are a myth, and that the whole notion of Race is an absurdity which becomes particularly flagrant when attempts are made to apply it, as in this particular case of the Jews, to a group of co-religionists originally brought together from every comer of the Mediterranean, Turco-Khazar, and Slav world"


"What, probably, more than anything else marks the true leader is the power to clench his teeth and hang on, the ability to impart to others a confidence that he feels himself. This he can do only if he does feel it. Never, until the very last moment, must he despair of his own genius. Above all, he must be willing to accept for the men under him, no less than for himself, sacrifices which may be productive of good, rather than a shameful yielding which must remain for ever useless."

I was writing the other day, about how leadership requires a degree of nietzschean self-deception that I'm not really capable of, or at the very least that I'm not able to do well and still feel okay about myself. I think such a level of self-deception may conflict with looking at problems logically. I've prided myself on being willing to do things even though I accept that I will probably fail, and while this is fine for an Engineer, it is death to a leader.

I dunno, though, some of his rants against the far left ("Those on our side of the barricades") seem to strike awful close to home with the recent elections;

"But what is really remarkable is that these extremist lovers of the human race showed no surprise at all when, on the road that led to capitulation, they found themselves walking arm in arm with the born enemies of their class, the sworn foes of their ideals. As a matter of fact, odd though such an alliance may seem, its intellectual basis is to be found in conditions long antecedent to a supervening political hostility."

That was the thing that was really striking to me about the last political election. I mean, first that so many people thought that things were bad, economically, but second that so many people on the left refused to support a moderate candidate, leading us to the current situation.