Pre-Xmas reading list

Two things worth reading this weekend:

1. 'Lesbians of mass destruction' by William Saletan at Slate.

Excerpt:

James Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family, says Cheney's pregnancy is a bad idea because a father "makes unique contributions to the task of parenting that a mother cannot emulate," such as "a sense of right and wrong and its consequences." You must be kidding. Cheney's partner is a former park ranger. They met while playing collegiate hockey. If they want a night out to catch an NHL game, Grandpa Dick can drop by to read bedtime stories about detainee interrogation.

The rest of Saletan's very sober and reasonable argument against the arguments against gay marriage is equally worth reading.

2. 'Parasites of Plunder?' Richard J. Evans's review of Götz Aly's book, Hitler's Beneficiaries at The Nation. It is, apparently justifiably, not entirely positive.

A taste of Evans's tone:

Hitler's Beneficiaries, it has to be said, does not begin well. The opening pages on prewar Germany contain many sweeping claims that have long since been exploded by serious research. Thus, contrary to what Aly says, the German middle classes were not impoverished by the hyperinflation of 1922-23 (it was great for debtors, mortgage holders and the like); relatively few Communists went over to Nazism in the early 1930s; the plebiscite that brought the Saar (an ethnically German region on the French border under the control of the League of Nations since 1919) back to Germany was not a free election; and the Nazi leadership did not make automobiles "affordable to everyday Germans." Nazism preached equality, but as with so many aspects of Nazi rhetoric, the reality was very different, and to speak repeatedly, as Aly does, of the Nazis' "socialism" is to mislabel what is better seen as populism; real socialist regimes were very different in their basic political thrust, and few things in this book are less convincing than its attempt to show that the Third Reich was a genuinely redistributive regime that robbed the rich to pay the poor.

Ouch.

If you're interested in the history of Germany or of the Second World War this makes for concise, well-informed reading.

Moreover, it stands as a salutary warning against overly monocausal explanations of historical development. (Statement of interest: I'm not an expert on German history, though I'm a great admirer of Evans's book In Defense of History. Evans's response to criticisms of that book is available here.)