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Hitler: Still Messing With Our Heads

Christopher Clark London Review of Books
Two new books on the fascist leader walk different paths; one identifying Hitler as key to virtually every juncture of the party’s rise and fall while the other looks more toward his racial worldview as profoundly preoccupied with ‘Anglo-America.

The Fascist Threat and How to Combat It

Mark Solomon Portside
Proto-Fascism - seeding of the political ground for full-born fascism, tends to move from threat to reality when principal segments of finance capital no longer consider parliamentary democracy, their preferred form of rule, to be a guarantor of their hegemony. That tendency is increasingly global.

books

Making Their Own History

Ingo Schmidt Solidarity
Historians of the bourgeois persuasion tend to focus on the doings of major figures in history. Less emphasis is placed by them on the role of working people, often nameless and ill-remembered. Edward Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class was a methodological breakthrough in showing how a working class made itself. The book under review follows that precedent, charting how ordinary Europeans from the Middle Ages to post-Soviet Europe made their own history.

United and Popular Front: Lessons from 1935-2017

Paul Krehbiel CCDS-Discussion
Millions of people are protesting Trump's ascension to power, beginning with the powerful Women's Marches the day after Trump assumed office. Street demonstrations, rallies, mass Congressional phone calls and town hall meetings, and much more have continued since. How best to build this resistance movement? While we can learn from many sources, the success of the United Front and Popular Front strategies of the 1930's and beyond provide important lessons for us today.

Fascism Today

Ted Pearson Portside
The advent of Donald J. Trump to the Presidency of the United States has generated an avalanche of interest in fascism. It is the 2016 number one lookup on the Merriam-Webster site. Google reports that searches for fascism-related topics have surged since election day, 2016. Why all the sudden interest? It would not be empty speculation to recognize that people are alarmed by the Trump Presidency and are trying to see where it fits in the political spectrum.

It Can Happen Here

David M. Kotz Dollars & Sense
The rise of a right-wing nationalist regime in the United States is now a realistic possibility.

books

High Hitler: How Nazi Drug Abuse Steered the Course of History

Rachel Cooke The Guardian
This new book details a little-known aspect of the leaders of Nazi Germany: that many of them, including Hitler himself, were drug addicts. Rachel Cooke has interviewed author Norman Ohler and gives us this portrait.

books

Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914-1945

Alan Wald Solidarity
This new book by Enzo Traverso is "a master class in historical analysis," writes reviewer Alan Wald. This "full-on riveting reconceptualization of 1914-1945 as a 'European Civil War,"' he adds, "is a benchmark achievement in the flowering of socialist scholarship by the generation identifying with May 1968."
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