In a world burdened by an abundance of information, it is imperative that one has the tools to ma... more In a world burdened by an abundance of information, it is imperative that one has the tools to make sense of it. All communications or information come with an agenda, seeking to have the reader re...
God’s Spies: The Stasi’s Cold War Espionage Campaign Inside the Church
The RUSI Journal, 2020
tyranny in another’ (p. 145). ‘A universal monarchy’ of this kind, Gentz believed, would result i... more tyranny in another’ (p. 145). ‘A universal monarchy’ of this kind, Gentz believed, would result in a growing resentment among its constitutive members leading to conspiracies, insurgencies and eventual disintegration, creating ultimately the very anarchy that the project was meant to prevent. Moreover, even if Europe were to succeed in its unification, how would a perpetual peace be secured in the absence of a world government that ‘would be even less workable than a European super-state’ (p. 146)? Gentz thus foreshadowed the very arguments of Brexiters, which Heuser finds lacking in credibility.
Leningrad: Siege and Symphony. By Brian Moynahan. NY: Grove Atlantic, 2013. 542pp (hardcover). Dr... more Leningrad: Siege and Symphony. By Brian Moynahan. NY: Grove Atlantic, 2013. 542pp (hardcover). Dramatis Personae, Maps, Notes, Bibliography, Index. ISBN 978-08021-2316-9. $30 Seventy years after its bitter end, World War II still remains fresh in the minds of Russians and inhabitants of former Soviet Republics. No country suffered more casualties than the Soviet Union, and as such the hard won victory has been elevated to a sacred status. The 900-day Siege of Leningrad--during which Nazi troops surrounded modernday St. Petersburg and subjected its denizens to constant bombardment and systematic starvation, never actually to set foot in the city--has become one of the most mythologized and memorialized occurrences of the war. It is under such intimidating precedent that Brian Moynahan attempts to remember and rediscover the siege in his monograph, Leningrad: Siege and Symphony. Using Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony (1941), written during and dedicated to the siege, Moynahan crafts a Brobdingnagian narrative that encompasses Hitler's genocide, Stalin's terror, and Shostakovich's triumph over trauma. Primarily a journalist and editor, Moynahan tells a story that is part theatre, part journalistic investigation, and part historical survey. The result is an engaging contribution to popular studies of the siege and Shostakovich that, while not without its fair share of problems, will please lovers of military and Soviet history. The connection to Shostakovich proves particularly compelling when crafting a history of the Eastern Front. Begun in Leningrad preceding the siege and finished in the provinces, the Seventh Symphony became an iconic example of aesthetic resistance against the Nazis around the world, with Time magazine even featuring the composer dressed in firefighter gear on its cover in 1942. The work's magnitude (scored for a very large orchestra and over 70 minutes long) and intensity became a testimony to human greatness in the face of terror, and to many continues to embody feelings of the sublime. Thus, Moynahan propagates this narrative--art over war, the heroic sublime--even before a word of text, by featuring a photo of the composer hard at work reigning above destruction and suffering of Leningraders on the book's cover. While this trope is by no means unique to Moynahan's work, he conveys it with engaging detail and dramatic nuance, and it never feels tired or superficial. With all the trauma, history, and national identity still associated with World War II in the former Soviet Union, creating a monument to such a significant event presents an author with a number of historiological challenges. How sensitively does one treat the event in regards to its victims and survivors? How much information does one include, and to what narrative ends? What is the line between storytelling and sensationalism? With a few exceptions, Moynahan rises gracefully to this challenge. His book is, in itself, a monument, and he opts for scale over brevity; the work spans a massive 493 pages. Moynahan draws on a dizzying array of sources to fill such a large space, including personal and historical accounts of the Eastern Front, siege, and symphony's Leningrad premiere. …
This book achieves two aims: to locate the Great War in the history of the 20th century, and to s... more This book achieves two aims: to locate the Great War in the history of the 20th century, and to show how, as the 20th century unfolded, our understanding of the meaning and significance of the Great War changed as well. In effect, Reynolds argues that it was the contrast with the Second World War which made the First World War appear to be a futile bloodbath, which is not as it appeared to millions of men and women in Britain and France who believed the war had to be fought and that it had to be fought to the bitter end, which indeed they did. This is what Reynolds means when he says that, as moving as Wilfred Owen's poetry is, we cannot distill history into poetry. I will have more to say about this below, but it is undoubtedly true that we cannot take the war poets as representative of the attitudes of contemporaries about whether the war had to be fought. The intriguing question is why over the course of the 20th century the war poets' view, if there was one, has come to dominate later understandings of the 1914-18 conflict in Britain, and to a certain degree in France.
British Policy in the Far East 1933–1936: Treasury and Foreign Office
Modern Asian Studies, 1992
The nature of British interests in the Far East in the 1930s meant that both the Treasury and the... more The nature of British interests in the Far East in the 1930s meant that both the Treasury and the Board of Trade were necessarily closely involved with the making of foreign policy. While Foreign Office officials resented this intrusion into their domain, they were themselves disdainful of so-called ‘technical’ considerations connected with tariffs or currency reform, and were willing to leave them to the specialists. Under the dynamic impetus of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, and the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, Sir Warren Fisher, the Treasury, encouraged by the apparent abnegation of the Foreign Office, made a bold and aggressive foray between 1933 and 1936 into realms of foreign policy-making hitherto regarded as the exclusive sphere of the professional diplomat.
Declassification and release policies of the UK's intelligence agencies
Intelligence and National Security, 2002
This study sets out the declassification and release policies of the three principal UK intellige... more This study sets out the declassification and release policies of the three principal UK intelligence bodies – the Security Service (MI5), the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) – in regard to their archives. It sets out the legislative and administrative framework for the release or retention of Intelligence records, and explains that the agencies' declassification and release policies are all based on the imperative of protecting sources and methods. Where their policies differ – for example, both MI5 and GCHQ release records to the Public Record Office, while SIS does not – the reason can be found in the differing nature of their functions and operating methods.
K. Macrakis, Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi's Spy-Tech World
Diplomacy & Statecraft, 2009
... In the case of the Stasi, its domestic activities, particularly its pervasive network of spie... more ... In the case of the Stasi, its domestic activities, particularly its pervasive network of spies and informants, have tended to dominate the literature, inspiring studies like Timothy Garton Ash's The File (1997) and Anna Funder's Stasiland (2003), and the successful film Das Leben ...
Everyone should read this book. Its messages are even more relevant in 2012 than they were when i... more Everyone should read this book. Its messages are even more relevant in 2012 than they were when it was first published. It is a practical guide at a time when all of us are subject to what seems like a permanent state of threat to our personal and national security. It employs and explains large concepts such as liberty, security, and resilience that are sometimes hijacked by special interest groups to justify their own policies and actions. It emphasizes what we all know, but may be encouraged to forget: that there are limits to what governments can do to protect the public; that it is impossible to avoid all risks; and that “since there is no absolute security to be had at an acceptable financial or moral cost in this world, at every stage a balance must be maintained within the framework of human rights based on the time-honoured principles of proportionality and necessity.” The authority of Securing the State is impressive. It is written by a man whose credentials are unmatched in British public life on this subject: the first UK Security and Intelligence Coordinator, former Director of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Permanent Secretary to the Home Office, senior official in the Ministry of Defence and now a visiting Professor in the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London. But the messages of the book are applicable far more widely than to Britain alone: indeed, they are relevant to almost every country, whatever its state of development. Every government in the world faces security threats, whether from terrorism, crime, climate change, global instability, poverty or, indeed, armed aggression by another state. All these threats, and more, were listed by Peter Hennessy in The Secret State, an updated version of which was also published in 2010; his subtitle, “Preparing for the Worst 1945–2010” gives a pretty clear idea of Hennessy’s view of how governments tackle the often terrifying threats with which they are faced. Omand’s analysis, in many ways complementary to Hennessy’s account, takes an approach that is no less realistic, but which is slightly more cheerful in tone. In Omand’s view, pre-emptive security, adopting an all-risks approach and a “disciplined culture” within an effective intelligence and security machinery can all provide a solid foundation for the protection
Churchill's man of mystery: Desmond Morton and the world of intelligence
Page 1. Churchill's Man of Mystery Desmond Morton and the World of Intel... more Page 1. Churchill's Man of Mystery Desmond Morton and the World of Intelligence V Gill Bennett Page 2. CHURCHILL'S ... Bennett Page 4. CHURCHILL'S MAN OF MYSTERYDesmond Morton and the world of Intelligence Gill Bennett Page 5. ...
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