World History

NNadir

(37,038 posts) Thu Dec 4, 2025, 01:47 PM Yesterday

So I just finished (finally) Jackson's book "France on Trial" and am moving to Elkins "A Legacy of Violence."

"France on Trial" is about the treason trial of Marshal Petain, the oldest French "Head of State" ever of the Vichy regime, a puppet state of Nazi Germany after the French defeat in 1940.

The former World War I hero, for his defense at Verdun, was convicted of treason and sentenced to death, although the sentence was not carried out. He lived his life out on an island off the French coast, a sort of St. Helena island on which Napoleon died (perhaps poisoned).

Reading about an oldest head of State tried and convicted of treason and sentenced to death is sort of, um, uplifting in these times.

The book was extremely well written, and described in detail the trial, what was covered and what was ignored (Vichy participation in the murder of French and refugee Jews), and in a final segment, how Petain's memory has played a role in the development of an extreme right wing in France right up to the modern day.

Now I'm moving on to "A Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire," by Caroline Elkins.

From the Guardian Review:

Caroline Elkins made front-page headlines a decade ago when her research into Britain’s brutal suppression of the Mau Mau movement in Kenya in the 1950s resulted in a high court case and, uniquely, reparations to 5,228 surviving Kenyans who, the British government accepted, had been subject to years of systematic torture and abuse. That case relied on evidence uncovered in Elkins’s 2005 book, Britain’s Gulag, which had argued that up to 320,000 Kenyan Kikuyu people had been held in British detention camps as part of a campaign of terror that “left tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, dead” and untold numbers of lives ruined by forced labour, starvation, torture and rape.

When Elkins’s book came out, her findings – partly based on the testimony of Kikuyu survivors – were widely dismissed as, at best, exaggerations by a generation of historians wedded to stubborn ideas of Britain’s “enlightened” and “benign empire”. Her history was dramatically vindicated, however, when an unknown cache of 240,000 top secret colonial files, removed from Nairobi at the time of Kenyan independence in 1963, were disclosed on the eve of the 2011 trial. The files had been stored in a high security foreign office depository at Hanslope Park, near Northampton. At the time of that high court victory, Elkins noted that she had for years put on hold a wider inquiry into the methods of British colonial governance in the years after the second world war, in order to substantiate the survivors’ case, research that would now be illuminated by the fact that the secret document store also held “lost” records from 37 other former colonies. She was both vindicated and outraged by the discovery: “After all these years of being roasted over the coals, they’ve been sitting on the evidence? Are you frickin’ kidding me? This almost destroyed my career.”

This book, a decade on, is that wider history that Elkins had postponed. Partly resting on the Hanslope Park files, it argues that the sadistic methods that marked the last acts of empire in Kenya were not an anomalous aberration but learned behaviours of imperial power...

It's a long thick book, and I can only devote a few hours a week to read history, so it will probably take longer than it took to finish - cover to cover, something I don't always do - than "France on Trial."

Still, we need to understand these things, built on racism and cruelty more than ever in these times of the reign of American racism and cruelty.

I'm not dead yet, and I want to die understanding as much as I can fit into one life.

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So I just finished (finally) Jackson's book "France on Trial" and am moving to Elkins "A Legacy of Violence." (Original Post) NNadir Yesterday OP

both are going on my reading list now mike_c Yesterday #1

Churchill Won the 1953 Nobel Prize for Literature. His literary skill, particularly in his famous speeches... NNadir 5 hrs ago #2

mike_c

(36,879 posts)

1. both are going on my reading list now

Reply to NNadir (Original post)

Thu Dec 4, 2025, 04:28 PM

Yesterday

Thanks for the recommendation. I'm currently slogging through Churchill's six volume history of WW2-- it's long and detailed, but I'm enjoying Churchill's style more than I anticipated. I wish there were comparable histories by FDR and Stalin.

I completely agree with you about wanting to understand all we can while we're here!

NNadir

(37,038 posts)

2. Churchill Won the 1953 Nobel Prize for Literature. His literary skill, particularly in his famous speeches...

Reply to mike_c (Reply #1)

Fri Dec 5, 2025, 02:23 PM

5 hrs ago

Last edited Fri Dec 5, 2025, 02:57 PM - Edit history (2)

...changed the world for the better, as did his courage.

His command of the English language, among major political figures, was and remains, without parallel.

He is, of course, one of the most important historical figures of the 20th century, a giant.

His political and strategic military stances, and indeed his moral views, are far more subject to criticism than those of his literary skill.

He was, above all, an imperialist, which certainly complicated his relationship with his American allies, and led to a great deal of suspicion of his motives with his American allies in the war.

I discussed Nigel Hamilton's considerations of the testy relationship between the Americans and the British, led by Churchill, in a trilogy, of his relationship with FDR here:

I have started reading Nigel Hamilton's trilogy on FDR as Commander in Chief during the Second World War

...and here:

An account of a very sick FDR struggling to get the United Nations in place as he faded rapidly into death.

Hamilton was born British, but has become a naturalized American citizen.

He contends that FDR had to manage Churchill to keep him from doing harm to the war effort, as well as to assert American repugnance of British colonialism, which colored all strategic considerations in the war. In particular, the United States wanted very much to limit, to the point almost of prevention, British participation in the Pacific War against Japan, since Americans did not want to die for British colonial interests in what was then Burma, Malaysia, and Singapore as well as India.

Churchill is therefore something of a historically ambiguous figure, an indispensable figure if only for his courageous stance in going it alone in what was clearly an extremely risky and widely perceived, then, as being doomed, fight against Hitler from 1940 until the German attack on the Soviet Union in June of 1941.

His pressure to support the "Germany First" strategy was probably wise, although the efforts of the American Joint Chiefs of Staff, particularly in the case of the Anglophobe Admiral Earnest King, to still divert enough American resources to switch to an aggressive rather than defensive posture in the Pacific, was equally wise.

Hamilton makes the case that the US had to confront some level of British - for lack of a better term - cowardice in confronting Germany.

Churchill's "soft underbelly" thinking for the battle on the Italian peninsula was perhaps the worst decision in the war in which he had his way. The entire war in the Mediterranean Sea was Churchillian, and was viewed by many in the American military, not without justification, as a means to protect British colonial interests.

The "Legacy of Violence" book to which I referred in the OP, begins with an account of recent demonstrations that included spray painting the pedestal of a statue of Churchill, with "Churchill was a racist."

The spray painted graffiti is, unfortunately, represents a true statement. The "White Man's Burden" by which Britain justified the violence of colonialism was actually propaganda to whitewash outright theft, supported by murder.

Other posts I've made about the fascinating personality of Churchill are here:

The Mystery of Winston Churchill's Platypus Has Been Solved.

Based on the interesting premise of the book jacket, I asked my wife I could buy it, and did so.

The latter book, which I have only read partially, draws distinct contrasts with respect to colonialism between a former British colonial officer, George Orwell, and Winston Churchill, two of the most important Brits ever to have lived, save of course the likes of a few others, in particular, Issac Newton and William Shakespeare.

I personally live in fear of Orwell's vision. The "Telescreen" turns out to be the internet.

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