Podcasts

From the podcasts, one thing in particular that I hadn't really thought about before was how the economic problems in the U.S. affected the economy in Germany. It's pretty common knowledge that Germany had significant economic problems after World War 1, but I guess I never considered how a depression in America could add to this problem. In the Post-War Economic problems podcast, Evan or Rem, I don't remember which, mentioned that a major concern was that the U.S. was going to have to pull funds from the rebuilding of Germany. So, indirectly, you could even say that the Depression was somewhat of a factor in causing World War 2, as Germany was left in a greater state of despair than they would have been if the United States had been capable of helping them.

Book Report

The book I read was Flyboys by James Bradley, about the mistreatment and murder of 8 prisoners of war taken at Chichi Jima during World War 2, just 25 miles away from Iwo Jima. This book was really interesting to me because it was about the perspective of both the United States and Japan. The story of these 8 prisoners was a focus, becaue it had been classified for so long, but the bigger picture was looking at all of the little factors and cultural trends that led to the way that Japan and the United States were at the time of World War 2. I thought this was really cool because the event that the author was talking about was something that the Japanese did that was really horrific, but he still managed to tell both sides relatively without bias. I learned a lot about Japanese culture that I didn't know, including that the suicidal kamikazes and samurai and stuff, was not originally part of their military culture, it was mostly the government twisting tradition to control people. I also learned that the U.S. wasn't as innocent as they pretended when it came to Imperialism and their policies in colonized nations. This book was very interesting due to the fact that it gave me such a new perspective on things that I already thought  I had a pretty good understanding of.

124-137 Goff Reading

This totalitarian government business is confusing to me. World War I was the downful of a lot of the old monarchies because people began to see how ineffective it was to have one person ruling. So why, right after realizing this, would they allow a dictator to take power? I guess I understand that they wanted security after the uncertainty of the war, but it seems like this is not really the way to go. Totalitarian governments ended up being a huge cause of World War II, and this really shouldn't have come as a huge surprise. When you give one, power-hungry, unbalanced person and in most cases, former military leader, all of the power, you really shouldn't expect that ehy're going to do their best to stay out of a war, or that they even have the diplomatic capabilities to avoid war. Obviously it's easier to say this in hindsight, people at the time were pretty scared, but seriously, crazy dictator doesn't scream "security" to me.