Weaponized Compassion

November 3, 2014August 22, 2021 Rilaly1 Comment

Ask a modern-day liberal how they arrive at the notion that the progressive method of problem solving is more effective than conservative one, and you’ll undoubtedly hear the word “kindness” dropped at one point in their explanation. If they do not use that word, they will undoubtedly drop the words “compassionate” or “nice” in some form. If we point out that most of the kind and compassionate big government fixes for ending poverty have resulted in numerous unintended consequences, and that it could be argued that many of those programs have ended up doing more harm than good, we should be prepared to hear their “best intentions” argument. Those who vote Democrat want these programs to succeed of course, but they are not so concerned with the programs’ success that they would vote to “fix” them, or change them if some cold, numbers-oriented accounting spreadsheet proved them ineffective. Their greater concern is that their favored politician puts forth an effort to solve the problem.

Political philosophy professor Leo Strauss says that it’s a mistake “to presume to understand important political philosophers better than they understood themselves, unless one had already put in the hard work necessary to understand them as they understood themselves.”

In an attempt to avoid undue partisan characterization, when it comes to trying to understand why common, ordinary citizens profess an allegiance to the progressive method to problem solving, we provide a characterization of the progressive ideology from someone who could be said to be a forefather of modern day liberalism, former President Franklin Roosevelt:

“Divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”

If the manner in which most progressives characterize their philosophical pursuit of problem solving is this stark, then it stands to reason that a politically astute observer who opposes it must be cruel, greedy, and callous. If that’s not the case, then the next logical conclusion would have to be that the observer who rejects the problem solving approach of the modern liberal is either not very astute, or woefully uninformed.

On those occasions when I’ve been able to discuss these matters with a concerned liberal citizen, I’ve found that they make an exception for me, because I’ve established the idea that I’m a nice person who means well. They might question my sources of information, my overall knowledge of the situation, and my status in life, such that it places me above those in need. Yet, most of them find it difficult to view me as inherently evil, because they know me, but they choose to view me as anecdotal evidence of those who share the evil mindset. Their extreme characterizations of opposing viewpoints, William Voegeli writes in his Imprimis piece, are a natural result of the repeated messaging from liberal politicians and activists that he calls “weaponized compassion”.

Using compassion as a weapon against the opponents of modern liberalism can be viewed in the following quotes:

“I am a liberal,” public radio host Garrison Keillor wrote in 2004, “and liberalism is the politics of kindness.”

Last year (2013) President Obama said, “Kindness covers all of my political beliefs. When I think about what I’m fighting for, what gets me up every single day, that captures it just about as much as anything. Kindness; empathy—that sense that I have a stake in your success; that I’m going to make sure, just because [my daughters] are doing well, that’s not enough—I want your kids to do well also. Empathetic kindness is “what binds us together, and . . . how we’ve always moved forward, based on the idea that we have a stake in each other’s success.”

Conservatives might view this type of “Mean People Suck” messaging as so condescending and simplistic that it could not possibly be effective, but it is. In election after election, exit polls reveal that such themes have worked for liberals, for generations. The reason for this, writes Voegeli, is that Republicans have never mounted an effective defense against it.

“If conservatives had ever come up with a devastating, or even effective rebuttal to the accusation that they are heartless and mean-spirited: a) anyone could recite it by now; and, b) more importantly, liberals would have long ago stopped using rhetoric about liberal kindness versus conservative cruelty, for fear that the political risks of such language far outweighed any potential benefits. The fact that liberals are, if anything, increasingly disposed to frame the basic political choice before the nation in these terms suggests that conservatives have not presented an adequate response.”

The problem that exists for Republicans, as it has for most of my life, is how does one defeat a negative? How does a political party prove to the population that they are not mean? An individual candidate can try to prove that they are personified evidence to the contrary, but that candidate will usually end up, as John McCain did in the 2008 Presidential Election, expending so much of their time and resources trying to defeat the charge of being mean that not only do they get distracted from other substantive issues, they leave the electorate wondering if they are protesting too much and, in fact, a mean person.

Money

If these two philosophical pursuits of problem solving can be broken down to admittedly simplistic structures, it could be said that when one sifts through all of the rhetoric that both sides of the aisle engage in, the crux of the difference between the two philosophies revolves around money. Those who allocate more tax payers dollars to a problem are deemed more compassionate, and those who don’t are viewed as mean, cruel, and in favor of the rich.

Renown budget cutter, and former Indiana Republican Governor, Mitch Daniels believed he has at least one effective counter to the idea that the austerity measures that conservatives employ for problem solving are hateful.

“You ought to be the most offended of anybody,” he says to liberals, “If a dollar that could help a poor person is being squandered in some way.”

I think that we can say that most honest, and well-meaning liberal citizens believe that when their hard-earned tax dollars are devoted to helping the poor, they don’t mind paying those taxes, and they will vote for any politician who pledges to do so. The question I’ve always had for these citizens of good intentions is what percentage of your tax dollar, ostensibly devoted to fighting poverty, ends up being allocated to the bureaucracy devoted to fighting poverty? What percentage of that dollar goes to administrative costs, various other bureaucratic expenses, and what percentage ends up being fraudulently wasted, abused, and trapped in the bureaucratic red tape of redundancies? What percentage of that hard-earned, tax payer’s dollar actually makes it to the poor people that that bureaucracy is intended to help, and what percentage ends up being squandered in some way?

Another way of framing the same question I would have for those who vote Democrat for the expressed intent of helping the poor, or resolving economic inequality, through the various methods of tax allocations, government regulation, etc., is what are the various programs’ rates of success?

The liberal response to former Governor Daniels’ quote is that he is hateful, racist, against the poor, against women, and mean. If Daniels followed the John McCain model of countering such charges, he would then spend so much of his time defending himself against these charges that his central message would get lost in the shuffle, and people would walk away thinking that he’s mean. It’s called weaponzied compassion.

The aspect of Mitch Daniels’ argument that Mitch Daniels doesn’t discuss, in his rational argument against liberals, is that the solvency issue, or the effectiveness of the welfare program, isn’t of primary concern to liberal citizens. They simply want more for more, and anyone who attempts to cut the amount of money going to entitlement programs, or decreases the increase from the previous year, is deemed mean, hateful, racist, and engaged in a war against the poor.

When these numbers are put into actual and proverbial spreadsheets, it can be proven that while the welfare program has expanded exponentially in the last two generations, the needle of the poverty rate hasn’t moved much at all. This appears to be of less concern to liberal citizens, when as Daniels points out it should be their primary concern.

Why doesn’t the welfare program work very well? Why have there been so many problems with the wealth redistribution aspects of Obamacare? Why has Lyndon B. Johnson’s (LBJ) 1964-65 Great Society program failed to move the poverty level over the last fifty years, and why do most of the well-intentioned plans of liberalism fail to achieve on a level that could promote liberalism as the ideal political philosophy for all Americans, as opposed to the twenty some odd percent who maintain unwavering belief?

The cynical conservative would say that these programs have inherent flaws that keep those immersed in these troubled programs voting for the career politicians who promise to fix them in every election cycle. These programs are never fixed, but politicians have vowed to fix them, or the system, for as long as most of us have been alive.

While this might apply to liberal politicians, the liberal citizen would inform you that they have nothing to gain from the stagnancy, or failure, of the program for which they advocate. They don’t understand how a conservative could be rooting on the failure of a program ostensibly designed to help the poor. Most conservatives are not, of course, they just have a different way of approaching the matter, but the conservative methods to fixing the problem are complicated, difficult to understand, numbers oriented, long-term, and very difficult to sell on a campaign trail. When people can’t grasp the totality of such an approach, they feel stupid, and when they feel stupid they need someone to help them understand it, or if that’s not possible, to, at least, make them feel better about not understanding it. What better way is there to relate to these people, and their confusion, than to call those with alternative, and complicated, solutions names? People understand name calling, it’s street, and it reaches us on a base level equivalent to bathroom humor –a tool that some comedians employ when they fear they’re losing an audience. This type of response unites us all in a manner –a Jerry Springer manner– that a complicated explanation with long-term problem solving techniques cannot.

“I conclude that the machinery created by the politics of kindness does not work very well–” writes Voegeli, “in the sense of being economical, adaptable, and above all effective– because the liberals who build, operate, defend, and seek to expand this machine don’t really care whether it works very well and are, on balance, happier when it fails than when it succeeds.”

To accentuate this particular point, William Voegeli pulls out his Oxford English Dictionary to provide us with the literal definition of compassion.

“Compassion means suffering together with one another. Compassion is the feeling or emotion, that a person is moved by when witnessing the suffering or distress of another, and by the desire to relieve it.”

This definition of compassion does not include a wish to suffer the identical fate of the sufferer, but that they want to suffer the trials and tribulations of others vicariously, and they do want someone to do something about it, regardless how effective that something is.

As Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in Emile:

“When the strength of an expansive soul makes me identify myself with my fellow man, and I feel that I am, so to speak, in him, it is in order not to suffer that I do not want him to suffer. I am interested in him for love of myself.”

Those who reject this characterization as simplistic still need to ask the question why liberals would be for programs that have, historically, proven ineffective? Why would their answer to the problems that everyone acknowledges exist in the welfare program be more welfare? With a fifty year track record of failure, why would so many liberals consider LBJ’s Great Society program to be a success?

The co-editor of a book called Pathological Altruism, Barbara Oakley explains her point of view:

“It’s the indifference –blithe, heedless, smug, or solipsistic– that liberals have to actual results that defines them as pathological altruists. It’s the idea that they can appear compassionate by being for these programs,” and thus be perceived as wonderful people by their peers, “That drives them to be for these programs even if they have a poor track record.”

Those who have introduced a results-oriented refutation of these programs to liberals –or people that are generally for such altruistic programs– have either witnessed genuine surprise on their face, or they’ve been greeted with a very frustrated person who reacts in a manner that suggests that a results-oriented presentation is obnoxious. To those who are surprised, some of us have recognized that not only did they not know these facts and figures that we’re presenting to them, but that the very idea of investigating for this kind of information never occurred to them.

“Pity is about how deeply I can feel,” wrote the late political theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain. “And in order to feel this way, to experience the rush of my own pious reaction, I need victims the way an addict needs drugs.”

***

As a former fraud investigator of charitable enterprises, firsthand experience informed me that some people are pathologically altruistic. There’s nothing wrong with giving, of course, and there may be some merits to blind, uninformed giving, but those merits, as Rousseau points out, are generally immersed in how one views themselves, or how they want to be viewed.

There’s an old line that suggests: “Who cares why people give, as long as they give.” The same could be said, I suppose, when it comes to why some people are for government programs ostensibly designed to help poor people: “Who cares how effective they are, as long as they have the best of intentions.”

The calls I made to these charitable givers involved a disturbingly high number of givers who claimed that it was my company’s responsibility to police these charities, because we allowed them to use our payment service for their transactions. It was, in fact, our job to see to it that the charities who used our service were giving a universally accepted rate to intended recipients, but I couldn’t shake the idea that by castigating the company I worked for, these givers were absolving themselves of the responsibility of knowing, or learning, the true percentage of recipients that were actually being helped by their charitable giving and making more informed choices for their charitable giving going forward.

The givers did their part, in other words by caring enough to give money, and their responsibility concluded at that point. The same could be said, I believe, of those who absolve themselves of the effectiveness of federal government poverty programs. “I pay my taxes,” is something one might hear from one that learns that the poverty rate hasn’t moved much in fifty years, “and I vote Democrat. I can’t help it if they can’t get their act together.”

As a fraud investigator of charities, I was not permitted to provide those I called the actual percentage of the charitable givers’ dollar going to support the organization’s stated cause, but I was able to tell them where to find that number. The very idea that I would call these people to ask them questions about their charitable largess did raise some concerns among some about the institution they selected for their charity, but they were in the minority.

The question I would’ve loved to ask those (too few in my humble opinion) who were concerned about the charitable institutions I was calling about, had my company allowed me to do so, is, “Even though, as you say, it’s our responsibility to police this charity, will you continue to give to this charity? Even though you now wonder if the practices they engage in are, at the very least, questionable?” The answers, I believe, would’ve been fascinating for political scientists and psychologists to study, for it would’ve suggested that the most important part of charitable giving, for some, is to prove that they care, and the actual responsibility of seeing to it that people are helped is another entity’s responsibility. One could argue that most people, conservative and liberal, work very hard, and they are too busy to dot the I’s, and cross the T’s involved in the process of giving, and they they have to rely on others to see to it that their generosity is pushed through to its end. My firsthand experience with pathological altruism revealed that most people care more about caring than they do the ultimate reality of other people being helped.

Killing Hitler

October 16, 2014October 29, 2016 RilalyLeave a comment

Any discussion of World War II (WWII) begins and (unfortunately) ends with one name: Adolf Hitler. The whole point of WWII was to stop the advancing dictator, and it would’ve ended a lot quicker if a more reasonable tyrant were in charge of Germany’s side of it. Without Adolf Hitler, so goes the story line, there is no second World War, hundreds of thousands do not die in battle, or as a result of battle, and there is no Holocaust. The latter may be truer than either of the former speculations, as the Holocaust appears to be a direct result of Hitler’s insecurities and anti-Semitism. The question that people of my generation have often asked is:

If you could go back in time, would you kill Adolf Hitler?”

Everyone says, “Of course! Think of all the many hundreds of thousands –check that— millions of lives that could’ve been saved, if this one man had been killed.” Just about everyone I know lists killing Hitler as the primary objective involved in building a time machine in the first place.

The first question that has to be asked of this theoretical assassination attempt is what date would you put into your time machine’s database? If you landed on the small farm outside of Linz, Austria to find a young, carefree Adolf, what good would killing that young boy have done? Many have theorized that post-WWI Germany was in such dire straits that it was vulnerable to an Adolf Hitler type that could make them feel proud to be German again amid the devastation that the first World War laid upon their country. It is possible that Hitler’s gifts of persuasion, and overall charisma, were such that he managed to get some people to do some things that may not have done if they weren’t so overwhelmed by his charm, but it’s also possible that someone, or some equally heinous movement, would’ve done the same.

After WWI, Allied leaders ignored the status of the country, believing that a devastated Germany would not have the ability, or the will to fight again. They also considered the country’s devastation a just punishment, and an exclamation mark on their victory. Hitler’s rise to power, amid this devastation, set a precedent for the world to follow regarding war-torn countries. As a result, countries like the United States and Britain, now provide aid, financial and otherwise, to war-torn countries to try to prevent another situation from which a Hitler-like leader would be eagerly accepted by that country’s people.

If the time machine maker were to wait until Hitler took over, to thus deprive the Third Reich of its megalomaniac leader, and hopefully cripple it, it could be said that Hitler may have become a martyr that rallied Germans to unify to greater evil. The point to this is that not only did Hitler shape world history in all the evil ways that have been well documented, but the reaction to the aftermath of all that Hitler did set a number of precedents for how the world was going to act if they hoped to prevent another Hitler.

The Foolish Neville Chamberlain

One of the greatest scapegoats of WWII was Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Chamberlain is historically perceived as naïve for believing that he could trust Hitler’s proclamation, in the Munich Agreement, that if Chamberlain were “to give” the German speaking portions of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, Hitler would go no further. Most historians will concede that there was some naïvete on Chamberlain’s part, in that, as Michael McCarthy writes in The Independent:

“He should have seen then that appeasement would not stop such a power-mad dictator,” that a “A resolute show of force (with the French) might have persuaded Hitler to pull back,” and that “(Chamberlain’s) appeasement actions convinced Hitler of Britain’s weakness and encouraged him to make further demands.”

The historical record also states, however, that Chamberlain was hamstrung by the fact that Britain’s forces were ill-prepared for war in 1938, and that it was far better prepared in 1939. Britain’s government also feared a widespread bombing campaign by the Germans. All of the intel that Chamberlain had at his disposal, according to these sources, said that an attempt at appeasement was the proper course to follow to at the very least slow Hitler’s exploits until Britain was fully ready for the battle. The intel also stated that after WWI, the British citizens were so against any further war that a “Peace in our time” type of proclamation, would go over big in Britain.

Nick Bauman, from Slate, also writes that listed in all of the intel gathered before the Munich Agreement:

“Chamberlain was informed that many of Britain’s WWI allies could not be counted on to join a fight against Germany. Due to the post-war constitutions, and laws, of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S., Britain believed that her ill-equipped forces would be going it alone against Germany’s superior, and better prepared, forces. The Soviet Union was, at that point, something of an enemy of Britain’s, and Chamberlain didn’t think he could count on France holding Germanic forces back for a long period of time.”

One of the many reasons Chamberlain is still regarded as a scapegoat for all that would eventually go down in WWII was the manner in which he characterized his actions in Munich Agreement. Some Czechoslovakians felt that Chamberlain had sacrificed them to appease Hitler. As evidence of this, they pointed to Chamberlain’s statement that Czechoslovakia was “A faraway country of which we know nothing”. His words may not have been politic, but they reflected the worldwide sentiment at the time, as British historian and Chamberlain biographer, David Dutton details:

“People regarded Czechoslovakia as an artificial creation. The perception by the ’30s was there was a problem, it was soluble by negotiation, and we ought to try. (Czechoslovakia) was not the sort of thing that would unite the country (as) an issue to go to war over.”

Ouch! A great deal of scorn was directed at Chamberlain, and the remaining Allies that backed this sentiment, but it was apparently the sentiment that Chamberlain brought to the Munich Agreement.

It’s also important to note that not only did Chamberlain receive literal applause in Britain for his actions, but he received proverbial applause from Britain’s allies. War had been averted to most minds, and the diplomatic maneuver by Chamberlain was well received by all but Chamberlain’s fiercest, and most vocal, critic: Winston Churchill.

At this point in history, however, Churchill was largely disregarded based on a history of making poor judgments when it came to military affairs. The historical record is on Churchill’s side, of course, but with the war that tore Europe apart (WWI) only twenty years removed, citizens of Britain, and the world, were eager to dismiss Churchill’s warnings and embrace Chamberlain’s “Peace in our time” proclamation … Even if they suspected that it was a only band aid.

In the subsequent months, of course, and in most popular discourse over this issue, Chamberlain became the “naïve” scapegoat, but “Over time,” Dutton writes, “The weight of the historiography began to shift to a much more sympathetic appreciation” of what Chamberlain had to do at the time.

On his deathbed, Chamberlain remained steadfast that his actions in Munich, in 1938, delayed war, and subsequently allowed for Britain to prepare, and eventually defeat Germany. He further stated that he believed that with the “True inside story” of these years in the hands of historians, that he would receive a favorable verdict.

Churchill, though sympathetic in general to Chamberlain’s goals, characterized Chamberlain as “Well-meaning but weak.” Churchill also stated that he believed that a pre-war grand coalition of European States may have been able to have Adolf Hitler removed. Churchill further countered Chamberlain’s position on Munich and 1938, and the subsequent interpretations provided above by Nick Bauman and Michael McCarthy, stating that “The year’s delay between Munich and war worsened Britain’s position.”

History, it has been said, is merely a story of events, cataloged for future students to learn “So that,” as philosopher George Santayana has said, “They are not doomed to repeat it.” Historians, blessed with the gift of hindsight, have largely called the Munich Agreement, a failure, and they have stated that Churchill was right with his opinions that many of Hitler’s actions, and thus WWII, could’ve been prevented. If Chamberlain had been as gifted with the art of persuasion as Hitler, he could’ve led a grand coalition to remove Hitler, such as the one Churchill prescribed. If Chamberlain had been as charismatic as Hitler, and he was able to persuade Britain’s allies that Hitler provided an urgency that would require them to circumvent their constitutions and laws, for the “one time” emergency of removing the unprecedented threat Hitler posed the world in 1938, all of this could’ve been averted.

There’s also the lesson to be learned from the fact that Chamberlain appeared to believe that the threat Hitler posed was exaggerated, and that he didn’t need to do all that Churchill prescribed, and that threat could be appeased, as current diplomats and current social leaders believe current irrational proponents of evil can be appeased, and are exaggerated. But perhaps the most vital aspect of the historical lesson WWII taught to us existed in the fact that Hitler was able to exploit the desire for “Peace in our time” to restore Germanic pride to the heinous levels he did. Killing Hitler, before he was able to accomplish this, probably wouldn’t have prevented this loophole from occurring in history, as someone, or some group, probably would’ve come along to provide history a lesson they would be doomed to repeat.

To paraphrase Voltaire, if Adolf Hitler had never existed, or someone built a time machine to remove him from the historical record, and the many lessons he taught the world, there would be a need to create him.

Killing Patton: A Review

October 16, 2014January 10, 2016 Rilaly2 Comments

Sometimes you have to pick the gun up to put the Gun down.” ― Malcolm X

The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” ― G.K. Chesterson

“Nobody likes war,” is the old adage. Some do. Some have it coursing in their veins. These types do not seek war, but once it happens, something kicks in that separates them from the rest of us. Something intangible that no one can teach defines them among their peers. Give these types what they deem to be a justifiable and worthy cause and they won’t hesitate to lay down their lives for people they’ve never met. General George Smith Patton Jr. was one of these men. The intro of Patton’s most famous speech expressed as much:

“Men, all this stuff you hear about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the war, is a lot of (BS). Americans love to fight. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big-league ball players and the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. That’s why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war. The very thought of losing is hateful to Americans. Battle is the most significant competition in which a man can indulge. It brings out all that is best and it removes all that is base.”

Patton first saw combat in what has been called the Pancho Villa Expedition, or the Mexican Expedition of 1916, he then saw action in World War I (WWI), and then, of course, in WWII. Like many men of his era, Patton saw war for most of his adult life. Whereas some came to be affected by it in deleterious ways, Patton was emboldened by it.

Pacifists, like the television show M*A*S*H’s character Hawkeye Pierce, have never understood this mentality. The character stated –and I’m paraphrasing— “I never understood how someone that wrote as beautifully as Ernest Hemingway, would choose war as his subject.” The implicit statement in the character’s complaint is that only way Hemingway could write about such things is by never experiencing the true horror of it firsthand. Yet, a cursory glance through Hemingway’s history shows that he was an ambulance driver in WWI, a position that led him to see more carnage than all of the M*A*S*H writers combined, yet unlike the M*A*S*H writers, he continued to write of some of the glory that could be found in war, in many of his most famous books. The complaint that pacifists like Hawkeye Pierce, have of Hemingway is, if he saw the casualties of war how could he focus on the glory, when there is no glory in war, and the only winners are the ones that lose the least. Hemingway agreed, at least in part, saying:

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”
― Ernest Hemingway

For better or worse, most of the men of Hemingway and Patton’s generation were either tacitly, or personally, affected, influenced, and characterized by war. Hemingway’s life was so influenced by the various wars that occurred in his life that for him to write on another subject was difficult. He did it, but many claim that most of his best works chronicled war. As a side note, Hemingway did attempt to enter WWI, but he received a deferment based on poor vision. Patton’s life was as influenced by war, and to write a piece on him without including descriptions of their war time activities he engaged in would be nearly impossible. War defined him, and he defined wars.

Killing Patton

For those not familiar with the process that Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard bring to the discussion of history in their Killing series, Martin Dugard does the research and Bill O’Reilly takes that research and puts it in a readable style that O’Reilly equates to a John Grisham style of writing. The research that Mr. Dugard performed in the eight books written before the Killing series so impressed Bill O’Reilly, that Bill labeled him one of the best researchers in the country.

The benefits of the partnership they formed comes through in the readability that O’Reilly brings to Martin Dugard’s research. I must confess here, that I have never read one of Mr. Dugard’s books, but as a researcher, and writer, I can tell you that it’s very difficult to edit, or delete, large chunks of the work you’ve done in research. A decent writer, knowing the virtues of pace and readability, will remove those large chunks of work that the researcher has unearthed and provide an easy read of the material.

Those of us that love history, love many of the mainstream, history books, but we also know that they have a tendency to get bogged down in detail. Even the best of these books require breaks. There’s just too much information in them for one brain to handle in one setting. Thus, the formula that these two men have laid out is that the writer, Bill O’Reilly, will surf through all of Dugard’s research and use only that which fits what he terms a readable pace.

In the book Killing Patton: The Strange Death of World War II’s Most Audacious General, the two authors uncover a wealth of information. At its best, the book provides details of some of WWII’s most heroic efforts. It provides details of the lives, and the actions of some of WWII’s great leaders Patton, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and some details of Winston Churchill’s actions during the War. It also informs the readers of WWII’s lesser-known heroes, the warriors that carried out the orders of all those listed above. There are moments in the book, a reader will find thrilling, and other moments involving the chilling details of how close this war came to going the other way if not for some crucial German mistakes, some of which were procured through Allied deceptions. Those of us that believed that WWII came to an end soon after the Omaha Beach landing have been corrected by many authors, including the two here.

The most controversial portion of Killing Patton involves the death of General Patton. It provides details of a conspiracy theory that the Premier of the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin, may have ordered Patton killed. Anyone that knows anything about Bill O’Reilly has to suspect that this was his idea. One has to suspect that while sifting through Dugard’s research, Mr. O’Reilly unearthed a sales tactic to separate Killing Patton from the numerous books written on WWII. The latter involves as much speculation on my part, as the conspiracy theory does.

As the theme of a 2003 ABC special, conducted on the assassination of John F. Kennedy suggested, some of the times, it’s difficult to believe that consequential men can die by inconsequential means, or that inconsequential men can take down consequential men … Even by accident, as appears to be the case of Patton. Some of the times, it’s much more interesting to look at all of the circumstantial evidence and wrap it up in a bow for greater sales and easier promotion. While on his promotional tour, Bill has admitted that he doesn’t know exactly what happened, and that he’s speculating with this particular theory, and that the evidence he cites is circumstantial, but he says, “There’s enough there to warrant more investigation.” Some have questioned the latter, and others have outright refuted it. Those that have refuted it have dismissed the entire book on the basis of this theory. Personally, I think this is a mistake, but I would be a hypocrite if I didn’t admit that factual errors, or speculative theories, in other books have rendered those books unreadable by me. With that qualifier out of the way, I must say that this is a great read, and there are numerous, substantiated facts in this book that are fascinating.

Some may also dismiss Killing Patton on the basis that it is but another book that glorifies war, warriors, and the archetypal males that have a lust for violence and war. Some may argue that the very premise of such a book only contributes to the patriarchal, male dominated society that we’ve all been trying to defeat for the last few decades. They would also argue that in our more civilized societies, the warrior mentality is a lot less necessary, as any and all threats we face are greatly exaggerated by political types of the same mind. These men, these warriors, used to be enshrined in their cultures, but some may argue that was based on the fact that those societies were less stable, that needed warriors to help them continue as a culture. They argue from the mentality that our civilization is so much more stable, and permanent, that intellectual diplomats, and social leaders, are far more necessary to continued peace. Yet, those types usually fail when confronted with irrational evil, and it is at that point that warriors, like General George S. Patton, are brought in to clean up the mess and provide the continued illusion of permanence.