The Politics of Hysteria: The Sources of Twentieth-Century Conflict

History

Pfaff, William

Stillman, Edmund

World

Greenwood Pub Group

1971 Random House. New radicalism of freedom. 210 pp. Hardcover.

Condemned to freedom

Science & Math

Environment

Random House]

The author of National Book Award nominee Barbarian Sentiments and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker traces nationalism's origins and shows its threatening, divisive power in the post-Cold War world. National ad/promo.

The Wrath of Nations: Civilization and the Furies of Nationalism

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

Simon&Schuster

In this "refreshing antidote to the swell of books about the end of modernity" (Ivan Sanders, Commonweal), William Pfaff writes an enthralling narrative of the fall of empires and the rise of nations-- and with them, of modern nationalism, the most important of all political forces as we enter the next century. 
Rooted in the human need for secure place, communal loyalty, and individual identification, nationalism has both created nations and ruined them. It paved the way for Nazism but eventually destroyed it. It brought down the European colonial empires, but has left Africa confronting anarchy, and much of Asia dominated by ambitious and authoritarian new nations. It forced Soviet armies out of Afghanistan and Eastern Europe, and eventually led to the downfall of Communism. 
Writing with both urgency and sobriety, William Pfaff shows that without understanding this ineradicable factor in our political life, we cannot reckon with the realities that may await us.

The Wrath of Nations: Civilizations and the Furies of Nationalism

A hidden moral history of the twentieth century unfolds in William Pfaff's fascinating story of writers, artists, intellectual soldiers, and religious revolutionaries implicated in the century's physical and moral violence. They were motivated by romanticism, nationalism, utopianism -- and the search for transcendence. To our twenty-first century, already plunged -- once again -- into visionary terrorism and utopian quests, they leave a warning.... The account begins with Italy's Futurists, who glorified war as "the world's only hygiene"; painted speed, action, and noise; invented "found sound" and chromatic pianos; thought violence sublime; and demanded "reconstruction of the universe." Gabriele D'Annunzio, poet, playwright, and nationalist buccaneer, created a revolutionary utopia in a Dalmatian city stolen in 1919 from Woodrow Wilson and the Versailles Treaty makers. In doing so, he invented the political style and rituals of Fascism, as well as Third World liberation. T.E. Lawrence, archaeologist and spy, guided the Arab revolt against the Turks, becoming both "Uncrowned King of Arabia" and masochist secular saint. Ernst Jünger, artist and scientist, the German army's most decorated hero of World War I, made heroism a political ideology and became intellectual leader of the National Cause. Hitler was a follower. In World War II Jünger plotted Hitler's assassination and survived to become a symbol of Franco-German reconciliation. Willi Münzenberg, Lenin's propaganda genius and an original member of the Comintern, invented the political "front" organization, created the Sacco and Vanzetti case, and seduced a generation of "innocents" to the Communist cause before becoming a dissident himself. He wasstrangled by Soviet agents in a French forest. André Malraux, fantasist "Byron of the 1930s," world-famous novelist, emulator of T.E. Lawrence, and make-believe leader of the Chinese revolution, discovered "that daydreaming gives rise to action." He created and led an air squadron for Republican Spain, wrote himself into the script of the French Resistance as a hero -- and became one. Arthur Koestler, the most famous scientific journalist in Europe, was a Comintern spy in Spain; condemned to death there, he abandoned the cause and wrote Darkness at Noon, the most influential anti-Communist work of its time, before committing suicide in 1976. Others with roles in The Bullet's Song are Benito Mussolini, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Che Guevara, Charles de Foucauld, Simone Weil, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Europe's terrorists of the 1970s, and "Popski" -- Vladimir Peniakoff -- the honorable man who found happiness in leading his private army to war.

The Bullet's Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia

Americas

"For years," William Pfaff writes, "there has been little or no critical reexamination of how and why the successful postwar American policy of 'patient but firm containment of Soviet expansionist tendencies...has over decades turned into a vast project for ending tyranny in the world. We defend this position by making the claim that the United States possesses an exceptional status among nations that confers upon it special international responsibilities, and exceptional privileges in meeting those responsibilities. This is where the problem lies. It has become somewhat of a national heresy to suggest the U .S. does not have a unique moral status and role to play in the history of nations and therefore in the affairs of the contemporary world. In fact it does not." Cogently, thoughtfully, powerfully, Pfaff lays out the historical roots behind the American exceptionalism that animates our politics and foreign relations-and makes clear why it is flawed and must ultimately fail. Those roots lie in the secularization of western society brought about by the Enlightenment, and in America's effective separation from the common history of the west during the nineteenth and early parts of the twentieth century, during which it failed to gain "the indispensable experience Europeans have acquired of modern ideological folly and national tragedy." We are, thus, hubristic and naïve in our adventurism, and blind to the truth of the threats we face. No mere critic, Pfaff offers insightful observations on how we can and must adapt to Muslim extremism, nuclear competition, and other challenges of our time.

The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America's Foreign Policy

Reference

Bloomsbury USA

When Barbarian Sentiments first appeared in early 1989 the Berlin Wall had not been breached, the Soviet Union was still an "evil empire," and the United States called itself the "leader of the free world." William Pfaff offered an iconoclastic, coruscating examination of America's predicament in a world that had escaped the conventions of American public debate and the old categories (and pieties) of American foreign policy. 
In this wholly revised and enlarged edition, Pfaff reconsiders American policy in the post-Cold War world. As he observed originally, it has been hard for us to accept that there are problems at the heart of American national security that may have no solution. We recoil from acknowledging the complexities and perversities of history, and there are exhausted ideas, Pfaff suggests, like dead stars, that continue to shape our political culture. The problem is how to free ourselves from them. At the beginning of a new century, this is ever more true, and Pfaff's troubled reflections on the moral significance of the American experience in the modern world is even more pertinent today than a decade ago.

Barbarian Sentiments: America in the New Century

Hill & Wang Pub

Discusses Soviet and American misconceptions about radical national movements in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe

Barbarian Sentiments: How the American Century Ends

Anthropology

FEAR, ANGER AND FAILURE is a critical account of the war on terror and the events and forces influencing it or provoked by it, composed of newspaper columns dating from the afternoon of September 11, 2001, and ending in late December, 2003. These articles discuss American policy and personalities but also the dramatic change the Bush administration's conduct has produced in Washington s relations with its European allies. The Israeli-Palestinian struggle, crucial to American interests in the Middle East, was necessarily a part of these dynamics. The articles cover the lead up to the war and the political and economic directions the U.S. has taken since then, and discusses the geopolitical implications for Europe and the rest of the world.The defeat in Baghdad was implicitly acknowledged by President George W. Bush when he announced on November 14, 2003 that the process by which American Occupation authorities in Iraq would hand power over to Iraqi authorities would be accelerated, with a target date of June 2004. What has happened since then vindicates this interpretation.The dream promoted by Mr. Bush and his advisers was that a dramatic democratic transformation of Iraq could be accomplished, provoking quasi-revolutionary political change elsewhere in the Arab Moslem world, accelerating modernizing forces in Islamic society as a whole. Even before the capture of Saddam Hussein failed to improve the situation, this policy was proven to be what its critics had always said it was, a naïve, sentimental, a-historical and utopian illusion.Pfaff's columns provide insights into the shifting international dynamics and the reasons why Europeans - and many Americans - distrust what appears to be a newly aggressive American imperialism. He also discusses NATO and other institutions that we have relied upon to help craft a peaceful and cooperative future.After September 11, 2001, it was easy to forget the economic uncertainties of the preceding summer, the obvious flaws in the presidential election of 2000, and other brewing problems. But the weaknesses are still with us, and a crack-down on liberties may not be the best answer.

Fear, Anger And Failure

Algora.Publishing

Fear, Anger and Failure: A Chronicle Of The Bush Administration's War Against Terroe From The Attacks Of September 11, 2001 To Defeat In Baghdad

Agathon Pr

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