“How Wars Begin and End” – A.J.P. Taylor
I don’t think this is a book I would recommend for the simple reason that I don’t trust the author. In numerous places as I read the book something seemed off. I couldn’t argue the facts, but sometimes a conclusion was stated that felt wrong.
However, when I read this paragraph his worldview became clear and from that point on I found myself with little confidence in the author:
“…I sometimes think that what people in the West dislike about the Soviet Russia, or what many people dislike about Soviet Russia, is not the bad things in Soviet Russia but the good ones. It is not so much that people dislike the labour camps, the suppression of freedom of thought, the constant thought control, the secret police. What many people really dislike is that Russia has no capitalists and no private landlords. Marxism – which is, after all, a perfectly legitimate and coherent system of economic thought – is now used as a term of abuse and it is supposed that anyone who is a Marxist can hardly be British at all, even though Marxism was after all invented in the British Museum. No system of thought is more fully integrally British than Marxism, but this is not how people think of it nowadays.”
Obviously, we have to read any book with discretion. However, with Taylor there is a worldview I believe to be fundamentally flawed. He was not a communist and was critical of elements of Russia. However, he was left-leaning and faced a lot of controversy during his life time due to some of his views.
It was a good book in some ways, but personally I think other historians and books do a better job.
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