Activities, but also in terms of i did logical mobilization in terms of propaganda, in terms of the way you motivate a populous in order go to total war. And i indicated to you that when various leaders talked about the war as being motivated by racial ideology in attempts to secure racial purity, theres a total lizing effect. So when Adolph Hitler talks about the destruction of the jews in 1939, very clearly thats the language of total war in its own way. Equally i spoke to you before about the language of human rights and the articulation of war aims by Franklin Roosevelt and the various other allied leaders and wait in which they promised human rights would be secured everywhere in the world. Also a total guarantee. Other frooiss that have a totalizing quality are those like Unconditional Surrender which we talked about implying that there had to be a total victory rather than an arm miss stus. Today i want to talk about a specific trop in the language of total war, and that is reve
You, you seek revenge, you retaliate, they interp fret pre as a wrong, they come back at you. The momentum of total lang wachbling war is sped onwards by the rhetoric and ideas of revenge. When hitler talks about the destruction of the jews, he phrases it in the language of revenge. He blames them, obviously, inappropriately, but he blames them for the german loss in world war i, he blamed it for the Great Depression and for starting world war ii. So it is an act of revenge, in part. Weve also seen of course the language of revenge in terms of the americans fighting the japanese in the pacific. Im going to talk a little bit today about the language of revenge worked for some other combatants in the european theater of operation on both of axis and the allied side and weight effort to seek revenge drove the war onward in europe in the years that we have now reached, which are approximately those of 1942 43. And i want to begin by looking at the czech government exile. The man you see on
Obviously a totalizing effect. When hitler talks about the destruction of the jews, that is clearly the language of total war. I talked to you about human rights. The way in which allied leaders promised that human rights would be secured everywhere in the world. Also a total guarantee. Other phrases that have a total izing quality are the terms Unconditional Surrender implying to had to be a total victory and no armistice. But i want to talk about a specific trope in the language of total war and that is the trope of revenge. Revenge, by its very nature, is a sort of ratchet. Somebody commits a wrong against you. You seek revenge. They retaliate. They interpret that as a wrong. They come back. And so on and so forth. The momentum of the language of total war is fed onwards by the rhetoric and the ideas of revenge. When hitler talks about the destruction of the jews, he phrases it in the language of the revenge. He blames them, obviously wrongly, for the defeat of the german luftwaffe
She was not quite 11 when train convoys organized by a London stockbroker carried her and hundreds of other Jewish children from Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II.