Book Description
Grotius, Hugo. The Rights of War and Peace, in Three Books: Wherein are Explained, The Law of Nature and Nations, and The Principal Points Relating to Government. Written in Latin by the Learned Hugo Grotius, And Translated into English. To which are Added, All the Large Notes of Mr. J. Barbeyrac... London: Printed for W. Innys [et al.], 1738. xxxvi, 817 pp. Folio, 9" x 14." Reprinted 2004 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. ISBN-13: 978-1-58477-386-3. ISBN-10: 1-58477-386-3. Cloth. $250.
* With index. The "best edition" of a landmark work on law and government by Hugo Grotius [1535-1645] (Lowndes, Bibliographer's Manual of English Literature, Rev. ed. III, 950). First published in Paris in 1625, it established the system of modern public international law, based on the concept of "droit naturel," a morality-based law that superseded the personalities of individuals or nations. These ideas influenced the American Revolution, whose leaders often cited Grotius. "No legal work ever enjoyed a more widely extended reputation, and none ever exercised such a wonderful influence over the public morals of Europe.": Marvin, Legal Bibliography 353. This edition features the notes of J. Barbeyrac described by Marvin as excellent.
Book Description
The question of the legality of humanitarian intervention is, at first blush, a simple one. The Charter of the United Nations clearly prohibits the use of force, with the only exceptions being self-defence and enforcement actions authorized by the Security Council. There are, however, long-standing arguments that a right of unilateral intervention pre-existed the Charter. This book, which won the ASIL Certificate of Merit in 2002, begins with an examination of the genealogy of that right, and arguments that it might have survived the passage of the Charter, either through a loophole in Article 2(4) or as part of customary international law. It has also been argued that certain `illegitimate' regimes lose the attributes of sovereignty and thereby the protection given by the prohibition of the use of force. None of these arguments is found to have merit, either in principle or in the practice of states. A common justification for a right of unilateral humanitarian intervention concerns the failure of the collective security mechanism created after the Second World War. Chapters 4 and 5, therefore, examine Security Council activism in the 1990s, notable for the plasticity of the circumstances in which the Council was prepared to assert its primary responsibility for international peace and security, and the contingency of its actions on the willingness of states to carry them out. This reduction of the Council's role from substantive to formal partly explains the recourse to unilateralism in that decade, most spectacularly in relation to the situation in Kosovo. Crucially, the book argues that such unilateral enforcement is not a substitute for but the opposite of collective action. Though often presented as the only alternative to inaction, incorporating a `right' of intervention would lead to more such interventions being undertaken in bad faith, it would be incoherent as a principle, and it would be inimical to the emergence of an international rule of law.
Customer Reviews:
a tour de force.......2001-10-31
'Chesterman has written a tour de force that exposes the weaknesses of the arguments supporting a doctrine of unilateral humanitarian intervention in international society ... Chesterman rejects the claim that states have a legal right to act as vigilantes in support of Council resolutions, even if they believe that this is the only means to stop a genocide. The powerfully argued thesis of this scholarly work is that accepting this proposition in law is "a recipe for bad policy, bad law, and a bad international order".' -International Affairs
tightly argued and complex ... riveting.......2001-10-31
'a tightly argued and complex presentation, with numbered, easily referenced topics in the style of a doctoral thesis (which it is). A more textured work [than Christine Gray's International Law and the Use of Force], it is arguably a more interesting read for an audience that does not already have at ready access the historical background or international law perspective to this difficult subject. It is also a more accessible work for students, and decidedly less dry and fragmented than many standard international law texts ... Dr Chesterman gives us a fairly riveting review of the history behind the modern rise of humanitarian intervention.' -Books-on-Law
Humanitarian intervention or inhumanitarian nonintervention?.......2001-07-07
From the author: This book critically examines the right of humanitarian intervention, asserted most spectacularly by NATO during its 1999 air strikes over Kosovo. The UN Charter prohibits the unilateral use of force, but there have long been arguments that such a right might exist as an exception to this rule, or linked to the changing role of the Security Council. Through an analysis of these questions, the book puts NATO's action in Kosovo in its proper legal and historical perspective.
Book Description
How do nations and aggrieved parties, in the wake of heinous crimes and horrible injustices, make amends in a positive way to acknowledge wrong-doings and redefine future interactions? How does the growing practice of making restitution restore a sense of morality and enhance prospects for world peace? Where has restitution worked and where has it not?
Since the end of World War II, the victims of historical injustices and crimes against humanity have increasingly turned to restitution, financial and otherwise, as a means of remedying past suffering. In The Guilt of Nations, Elazar Barkan offers a sweeping look at the idea of restitution and its impact on the concept of human rights and the practice of both national and international politics. Through in-depth explorations of reparation demands for a wide variety of past wrongs -- the Holocaust; Japanese enslavement of "comfort women" in Korea and the Philippines; the internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor; German art in Russian museums and Nazi gold in Swiss banks; the oppression of indigenous peoples in Australia, New Zealand, the U.S. mainland, and Hawaii; and the enduring legacy of slavery and institutional racism among African Americans -- Barkan confronts the difficulties in determining victims and assigning blame in the aftermath of such events, understanding what might justly be restored through restitutions, and assessing how these morally and politically charged acknowledgments of guilt can redefine national histories and identities.
Customer Reviews:
An admirable effort, but not engaging.......2001-11-05
I hesitate to write a review of this book because I am reluctant to critique a very noble and dilligent effort by Barkan to document reparations movements and issues from throughout the world; I can only imagine the time and effort it took to write this. It's very well documented, and I cited it in my research. I just didn't find it very engaging personally, but that doesn't mean that others won't find it meaningful.
Callous disregard of the vistims.......2001-03-09
"Those who love to feel guilty will applaud the book." How cynical! I'd have let it pass if it weren't for the "17 of 20 people (who) found the following review (by Derek Parker) helpful." Parker, like most white Australians, is totally into denial that the genocide started by invaders 213 years ago is the one and only cause for the abject state of the indigenous peoples who have not ceded sovereignty. Nine out of 10 were wiped out by slaughter, starvation, disease and dispersal from their lands. Massacres were still happening within the life spans of present-day parents and grandparents. Indigenous Australians live 20 years less on average than other people in the country. I could bore you with endless statistics testifying to the continuing devastation of Australia's First Peoples through the ongoing white war on them: deprival of education, health care, jobs, 20 times the normal imprisonment rate, etc., etc. What Parker obviously doesn't like is that the tyranny of distance no longer works and White Australia's crimes are more and more in the world spotlight, including in this book. Australia is getting plenty of stick in international bodies for not living up to human rights agreements it has signed up to. The issue is if not the biggest, then one of the biggest on the national agenda. Parker and his camp would be yelling loudest if present-day Germans were to shirk their responsibility for restitution to the Jews. Yet to him Australian perpetrators are sacrosanct. Parker alleges that "Barkan acts as if there are no difficult questions at all" in regard to the Aborigines, and "Largely, he accepts the claims put forward by the wronged group, dismissing contrary arguments." I would like Parker to back his claims that Barkan's "selection of evidence seems so one-sided as to almost be misleading" and that he's made a "number of straightforward errors." In my view, Barkan, as a non-Australian, has a remarkably accurate take on our country. "He seems to assume that the fact that someone has been wronged makes anything they say automatically correct." - Barkan does not. To speak of a "victim/victimiser methodology" is callous disregard of the pain our indigenous people still suffer and a vicious panning of those who empathize with them. "There are important issues of human dignity here." - You bet! Yet the Australian government is refusing to allow various United Nations human rights sub-bodies into the country to investigate. "How much responsibility can be placed on the shoulders of people who might well have been ignorant, or even born after, the wrongdoing?" - So we don't attone or restitute in any way once our parents and grandparents are no more? Tough luck for those suffering among us if our ancestors wronged theirs? If we're living off the fat of an invasion, and those invaded still suffer the after-effects? "The case he discusses where, in Australia in the 1960s, half-caste Aboriginal children were removed from their families and placed in (white) foster homes is a case in point. It now seems wrong, but at the time was done with benevolent intent." - The stealing of children went on for more than a hundred years. The plan was to "breed the colour out" of the indigenous people, not some benevolent intent. How can removing children from extended families by force ever be benevolent? Merely on the pretext that a traditional lifestyle did not fit in with the growing white settler population's idea of how one had to live? "Historical injustice deserves a great book." - and a better review than Mr. Parker's. "The Guilt of Nations" is good stuff. Hopefully it will reach many readers and put Australia's deniers on notice that more and more of the world is watching.
Not proven.......2000-07-07
Barkan has to be commended, at least, for taking on a huge subject: the attempts of groups, seen increasingly over the past quarter-century, who have been the victims of government policies and wrongdoing to seek recognition and redress. The Guilt of Nations has introductory and concluding sections that thoughtfully discuss the issues involved, trying to establish a general framework. Philosophically and practically, it's a tough subject. There is, in liberal societies, an ongoing tension between individual and group rights, and limits on government resources. The particular circumstances of the wrongdoing also have to be examined. Barkan, as a means of illustrating the problems, looks at the post-war restitution by Germany to Jews; and, in a concluding section, examines the difficulty of compensating Black Americans for slavery. These parts of the book are well-considered and well-argued. The problem of The Guilt of Nations lies with the case studies that make up the middle section of the book, especially in the chapters dealing with indigenous groups. Here, Barkan acts as if there are no difficult questions at all. Largely, he accepts the claims put forward by the wronged group, dismissing contrary arguments. Indeed, in the chapter on Aboriginal issues in Australia ( a subject this reviewer happens to know something about ) his selection of evidence seems so one-sided as to almost be misleading. There is (in this same chapter) a number of straightforward errors that make one wonder whether his agenda is not more important to Barkan (who is an academic historian) than the facts. He seems to assume that the fact that someone has been wronged makes anything they say automatically correct. This is not to say that victims should be blamed for what might have happened to them: it is to say that human events can be much more complicated than a victim/victimiser methodology. This is a great pity, because there are important issues of human dignity here. The cases of the "comfort women" used by the Japanese army in World War II and the internment of Japanese-Americans by the US government in 1942 are undeniably affecting, especially insofar as a recognition of the wrong done to them was more important to those involved than monetary compensation. Yet Barkan, in what seems to be a rush to condemn the perpetrators (as he refers to those he doesn't like) seems to miss a crucial dilemma: how much responsibility can be placed on the shoulders of people who might well have been ignorant, or even born after, the wrongdoing? (Actually, Barkan does mention this question. But he doesn't answer it in a meaningful form; he sort of assumes it away.) There is another question he skips around: to what extent can the morality of 2000 being applied to quite different social circumstances? True, there are cases where evil is so obvious as to have no defence in circumstances; equally, there are cases where what now seems wrong seemed right, even necessary, at the time. The case he discusses where, in Australia in the 1960s, half-caste Aboriginal children were removed from their families and placed in (white) foster homes is a case in point. It now seems wrong, but at the time was done with benevolent intent. It might have been wrong, but it cannot be called evil if evil requires intent. But Barkan fails to makes such a distinction, and does not even seem interested in trying. Historical injustice deserves a great book. The Guilt of Nations isn't it. Parts of it have interesting things to say, but it veers between seriousness and silliness. Those who love to feel guilty will applaud the book. The rest of us will, and should, treat it with caution.
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(En)gendering the War on Terror: War Stories And Camouflaged Politics (Gender in a Global/Local World) (Gender in a Global/Local World) (Gender in a Global/Local World)
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ASIN: 0754644812 |
Book Description
In July 2000, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat refused to negotiate a peace offer made by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at Camp David. At the end of September the Palestinians then launched their second intifada, an outbreak of terrorism in the heart of Israel’s cities that continues to this day. The unprecedented violence drove Barak from office and brought to power the feared hard-liner Ariel Sharon.
In RIGHT TO EXIST, Yaacov Lozowick, an Israeli historian, describes his evolution from a liberal peace activist into a reluctant supporter of Sharon. In making sense of his own political journey, Lozowick rewrites the whole history of Israel, delving into the roots of the Zionist enterprise and tracing the long struggle to establish and defend the Jewish state in the face of implacable Arab resistance and widespread international hostility.
Lozowick examines each of Israel’s wars from the perspective of classical “just war” theory, from the fight for independence to the present day. Subjecting the country’s founders and their descendants to unsparing scrutiny, he concludes that Israel is neither the pristine socialist utopia its founders envisioned, nor the racist colonial enterprise portrayed by its enemies. Refuting dozens of pernicious myths about the conflict—such as the charge that Israel stole the land from its rightful owners, or that Arabs and Jews are locked in a “cycle of violence” for which both bear equal blame—RIGHT TO EXIST is an impassioned moral history of extraordinary resonance and power.
Customer Reviews:
Not what you think..........2007-05-21
i read this book to give myself an education on the Middle East problems and who was to blame for them. i found a book filled with facts and history that enlightened me profoundly. Unfortunately for the author, when i finished the book i didn't hold with the most of the views he expressed in the book. His facts left me more knowledgeable about what happened, although in the end, i could not agree with him in the end on why it was alright that it did happen that way.
After reading his book i feel Lozowick's moral defence falls flat on its face.
What the Arab-Israeli conflict is all about.......2006-12-31
In this phenomenal work, Yaakov Lozowick , the director of the archives at Yad Vashem,Israel's Holocaust Museum and the author of "Hitler's Bureaucrats, The Nazi Security Police and the Banality of Evil, embarks on both a moral evaluation of Israel's wars for survival, as well as an indictment on the bigots of the world, who deny tiny Israel's right to exist.
As Cynthia Ozick describes so eloquently "The title alone - the scandal of calling into question a living nation's existence-ought to shame the prevaricators and defamers, whether they be professors in universities , media distorters, peace activists' who justify terror, morally deformed intellectuals, self-deceiving unconfused haters, or merely the herd of the easily led"
The introduction describes why the author, a lifelong liberal and peace activist, in the wake of the collapse of the Oslo process, and Arafat's launching of war of terror against Israel's populace, voted for Ariel Sharon of the center right Likud Party,traditionallly regarded as a hawk and hardliner(although his record as Prime Minister was to prove the opposite).
Lozowick describes how former Prime Minster, the center left Ehud Barak, at Camp David 2000, offered the Palestinian Authority the whole of Gaza and almost all of the West Bank, (including most of East Jerusalem), and in response Arafat stormed out of the talks and launched a terror war against the Israeli people, in which thousands of Israeli Jews (mainly women and children) have been murdered, maimed, terrorized, widowed and orphaned.
In response to Arab terror war against them, the Israeli people voted for Ariel Sharon, war hero who had been vilified by Israel's enemies around the world as well as by section of Israel's left.
The election of Sharon led to a barrage of intemperate condemnation of Israel by the UN, the international media, world governments and groups like Amnesty International, placing all the blame for the conflict on Israel's shoulders ignoring the fact that Israel had recently chosen peace and been given a war of terror instead.
Lozowick describes some of the Arab terror, such as the shooting of ten month old Jewish infant, Shalevet Pass, in her stroller on a playground, in Hebron, the murder of five month old Yehuda Shoham who had his head smashed in by a rock thrown at his parents car, and the bombing of the Dolphin Disco in Tel Aviv, in which 17 teenagers, mostly girls, were murdered and others cruelly maimed and disfigured.
As a historian and archivist for Yad Vashem memorial, Lozowick describes how he had unearthed snap shots of some Shoah victims. For the first time, a friend of Lozowicks , saw pictures of his father as a young man ,and of his aunts, who did not survive the Shoah. He was astounded by the striking similarity of his own daughter to one of his aunts. "It was almost as if she had been given a second chance at life. For his daughter, the discovery served as a trigger to develop a serious sense of her own particiapation in the flow of Jewish history. Fifteen year old Malki Roth was murdered at the Sbarro pizzeria in the center of Jerusalem. Israel did not react to all of these killings , until in March 2002, an Arab suicide bomber struck at the Park Hotel in Netnaya, killing twenty-nine Jews as they sat down to the Passover Seder table-the most family orientated moment of the year.
Israel reacted by launching a campaign to go after the terrorists in their own lairs , a ground assault to ensure the minimum of Arab civilians were hurt. This led to a worldwide orgy of hatred , directed at Israel, by most of the world. Shrieks of loathing told of a massacre of hundreds of Palestinians in Jenin , an allegation by the media that turned out to be false. The massacre had not taken place. It was a blood libel. The Israelis had ensured that very few civilians had died, which lead to a greater toll of casualties among Israeli soldiers.
When Jews were massacred the world was silent, when Israel decided to act , using ethics higher than any other nation , at time of war , the world erupted into hateful hysteria against Israel and all her people.
In Chapter 1 Lozowick outlines the early history of Zionism and Jewish resettlement in Israel, explaining the depths of the ancient roots of the Jews to the Land of Israel, renamed Palestine by the Romans in 70 CE in order to cut off the Jewish historical connection to the land. He refutes hate-moner Edward Said who claims that the early Zionists were not capable as seeing the Arabs as fully human; pointing out that this in fact described rather, Arab attitudes towards the Jews, with much greater justification. He also refutes the revisionist historians, who sprang up in the 1980's with the goal of distorting the history of the Land of Israel to deny any Jewish rights there. Lozowick recounts the bloody Arab pogrom against the Jews in the Old City of Jerusalem in 1920,which started the war against the Jews presence in the Land of Israel, that has continued for the last 86 years, the 1921 attacks on Jews in Jaffa and Petach Tikva, the massacre and destruction of the ancient Jewish community of Hebron in 1929 , together with further pogroms in Jerusalem , and the Nazi-inspired war by the Arabs against the Land of Israel's Jewish population of 1936 to 1939 in which thousands of Jews were butchered.
During the British Mandate over 'Palestine' from 1917-1947, the Jews and Arabs made many of the key decisions regarding each other. The Jews made settlements a central element of their efforts, the Arabs chose violent rejection of Jewish presence and sovereignty as their hallmark. Not much has changed in eight decades, as the author points out.
While people have been emigrating and changing the demographics of their new lands throughout human history (and it is unfair to describe this as 'colonialism'), in human history there has never been a case where a group migrated to a land it had lost for longer than living memory. Indeed very few nations have lasted over two thousand years as the Jews have. "Moreover" Lozowick reminds us, if the Jews are a nation, how can it be moral, to deny them a place of their own, like other nations. At most you can measure the morality of a nations behavior, not its existence."
I would go so far as to say that denying a nation's right to exist is racism, akin to Nazism, hence in the opinion of the reviewer anti-Zionism is Nazism.
From 1920 Jews have been attacked in the Land of Israel because they are Jews because the Arabs did not want Jews in Palestine, hence the fashionable distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is a false one.
The author also describes tow parallel developments during the British Mandate , the immigration of Arabs into 'Palestine' by the hundreds of thousands -too many Arab villages were growing up next to Jewish ones to fast to be explained merely as natural population growth. While the British recorded the statistics of Jewish immigration, they did not count the masses of Arabs crossing into the Palestine Mandate.
Secondly the hundreds of thousands of Jews clamoring to get out of Europe , and into 'Palestine' were blocked from doing so , and were mostly dead by 1945. Every single Jew who wanted to immigrate to Palestine, but was denied the chance by the growing restrictions can be laid to the account of Palestinian violence and British appeasement; the number probably runs to the hundreds of thousands. Even this small fraction of Jewish dead exceeds all of the losses of Palestinian lives in the conflict with Zionism...the Palestinian decision at this time was to join the anti-Jewish camp at it's violent edge. Let this be kept in mind when the Palestinian propagandists decry their victimization by the victims of the Nazis."
The author also points out how although millions of people around the world , have been made into refugees , the only ones not to have been resettled have been the Palestinian Arabs, who have retained their refugee status, in order to use as a weapon against Israel. This in contrast to the 700 000 Jewish refugees expelled, after generations, from Arab countries in 1948, and all were resettled in Israel.
The author, while pointed out that Israeli actions have not always been perfect or praiseworthy, have been of higher moral caliber to all other armies in wartime, regardless of all the sick propaganda to the contrary. He points out that never has a Jew entered a Palestinian home and killed a Palestinian child in her bed, as Arabs have done countless times to Jewish children.
Lozowick still believes that the time may still come for a peace deal leading to two states living side by side, but that first the Arabs must genuinely accept Israel's right to exist, and give up the dream of controlling all of the Land of Israel, which would lead to the entire land being completely emptied of Jews, as most of Europe would be during World War II.
The author believes that this will take many generations, well over a century, before they realize that they cannot drive the Jews out.
It would help of course if they were not encouraged in their genocidal dreams, by far-left bigots in academia, the media, NGO's and politics to name a few of the hotbeds of anti-Israel hate.
The Right of Israel to exist is what the conflict is all about and always has been ,not about 'occupation, 'apartheid', refugees', or any of the other Goebellesque propaganda ploys designed to set up Israel and her people for destruction i.e. to prepare a second holocaust.
The truth about Israel from a moral pooint of view.......2006-12-27
This is a powerful, ethical and honest discussion of Israel's history and the history of her hundreds of millions of Arab neighbors who have done all they can to destroy this tiny country (about the size of Vermont). The author is a historian of the Holocaust who truly believed in the Oslo accords and the possibility of peace with the Palestinians, only to learn that the process was a sham. This book does an excellent job of explaining how the powerful Arab countries of the Middle East exploit the Palestinians to permit the perpetuation of war and why the Palestinians have rejected and will reject any solution that permits Israel to continue to exist as a Jewish state and democracy.
Defending the defenders.......2006-07-13
In a work both impassioned and measured, Yaacov Lozowick, director of the archives at Yad Vashem, Israel's holocaust Museum, offers a moral evaluation of Israel's conduct in successive wars, showing its punctilious regard for the norms of warfare and the aspirations of the liberal democratic state. Lozowick is a man of the Left disabused of the prospects of peace in the wake of the Oslo war's outbreak in September 2000 and the collapse of prospects for a general Arab-Israeli peace. International outcry directed almost exclusively at Israel for both the outbreak of hostilities and its conduct in combating Palestinian terrorism moved Lozowick to enumerate the charges, mostly malicious, levelled at Israel's conduct and ultimately its existence. He accompanies the arguments with a helpful autobiographical element that underscores the evolution of his political views in relation to the events described. To witness through his retelling the collapse of cherished illusions about peace prospects as one event after another undermined them enhances the impact of his case.
Lozowick shows that in one war after another--1948, 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982, plus lesser conflicts--Israel has generally conducted itself with great restraint over and above what has been demonstrated by other states in comparable conflicts. As Lozowick notes of the 1967 war, for example, while it brought nearly one million Arab civilians under Israeli rule, no expulsions or massacres followed, showing that the lessons of earlier Israeli military lapses in which Arab civilians had been killed (Kibiya, Kassem) had been duly learned.
He concludes that "the will to murder Jews was never the result of oppression and can never be resolved by removing it" - a neat summary of his view that the conflict between Arab and Jew is not the product of grievances that Israeli policy can assuage.
Some readers might argue with Lozowick's philosophical basis: it is arguable whether just war theory can possess all the clear-cut answers he would like at his disposal to moral dilemmas posed by a war in which even the pretense of a rule book has been discarded by suicide bombers. Others might object to his unapologetic effort to set a higher bar for Israeli conduct than that set for all other states. But problematic or otherwise, the more stringent formula he adopts only makes his ultimate conclusions the more persuasive.
Too passionate for the rational amongst us!.......2005-10-26
This book is indeed passionate. Too passionate for those who really want to learn about and understand the situation in the Middle East. In the first few pages we are told about little Jewish babies slaughtered in their cribs as Arabs from Pakistan to Morocco celebrated! Come on! First, Pakistanis are not Arabs! Neither is their neighbor Afghanistan or its neighbor Iran. The Arab world starts in Iraq. Indeed, the languages of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan are ALL Indo-European -- meaning they are closer to English than to Arabic. It is out of this fantasy of a geography that this book is written to perpetuate myths and calm Zionist guilt about the Palestinian Nakba (dispossession and ethnic cleansing). Second, I am not sure where this new blood libel (killing babies in cribs) against Palestinians is coming from (the ratio of deaths in the current Intifada is still 3 to 1 Palestinian to Israeli civilians with higher percentage of children on the Palestinian side.
This book potentially perpetuates more anti-Semitism than a more historically honest description of the situation of the middle east. Its point about Israel's right to exist is trivial. Israel is a fact of life in the Middle East. It does exist. The question should be does Palestine has a right to exist as a neighbor to Israel, where Palestinians can live in peace without Israeli checkpoints, one-ton bombs and sniping settlers?
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- a short biography of Edward House
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Woodrow Wilson's Right Hand: The Life of Colonel Edward M. House
Godfrey Hodgson
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
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ASIN: 0300092695 |
Book Description
The importance of Colonel Edward M. House in twentieth-century American foreign policy is enormous: from 1913 to 1919 he served not only as intimate friend and chief political adviser to President Woodrow Wilson but also as national security adviser and senior diplomat. Yet the relationship between House and the president ended in a quarrel at the Paris peace conference of 1919—largely because of Mrs. Wilson’s hostility to House—and House has received little sympathetic historical attention since. This extensively researched book reintroduces House and clearly establishes his contributions as one of the greatest American diplomats.
A “kingmaker” in Texas politics, House joined Wilson’s campaign in 1912 and soon was traveling through Europe as the president’s secret agent. He visited Europe repeatedly during World War I and played a major part in drafting Wilson's Fourteen Points and the Covenant of the League of Nations. He tried to stop the war before it began, and to end it by negotiation after it had started. His greatest achievement was to lock both sides into an armistice based on American ideals.
Customer Reviews:
a short biography of Edward House.......2006-09-04
Edward House was one of the most influential diplomats in American history, and has faded into an oblivion inverse to the role he played in shaping the foreign policy of the man HL Mencken described as the "Archangel Woodrow."
If you're still in high school, or perhaps doing undergraduate work, this book will prove to be invaluable and immediately accessible in helping you write a paper. If you're looking sources to do your own research, this book will also be quite helpful. But it's far too short, and lacking in detail and judgements to do justice to House's legacy.
Book Description
Timely and controversial, A Bed for the Night reveals how humanitarian organizations trying to bring relief in an ever more violent and dangerous world are often betrayed and misused, and have increasingly lost sight of their purpose.
Humanitarian relief workers, writes David Rieff, are the last of the just. And in the Bosnias, the Rwandas, and the Afghanistans of this world, humanitarianism remains the vocation of helping people when they most desperately need help, when they have lost or stand at risk of losing everything they have, including their lives.
Although humanitarianism's accomplishments have been tremendous, including saving countless lives, the lesson of the past ten years of civil wars and ethnic cleansing is that it can do only so much to alleviate suffering. Aid workers have discovered that while trying to do good, their efforts may also cause harm.
Drawing on firsthand reporting from hot war zones around the world -- Bosnia, Rwanda, Congo, Kosovo, Sudan, and most recently Afghanistan -- Rieff describes how the International Committee of the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, the International Rescue Committee, CARE, Oxfam, and other humanitarian organizations have moved from their founding principle of political neutrality, which gave them access to victims of wars, to encouraging the international community to take action to stop civil wars and ethnic cleansing.
This advocacy has come at a high price. By calling for intervention -- whether by the United Nations or by "coalitions of the willing" -- humanitarian organizations risk being seen as taking sides in a conflict and thus jeopardizing their access to victims. And by overreaching, the humanitarian movement has allowed itself to be hijacked by the major powers, at times becoming a fig leaf for actions those powers wish to take for their own interests, or for the major powers' inaction. Rieff concludes that if humanitarian organizations are to do what they do best -- alleviate suffering -- they must reclaim their independence.
Except for relief workers themselves, no one has looked at humanitarian action as seriously or as unflinchingly, or has had such unparalleled access to its inner workings, as Rieff, who has traveled and lived with aid workers over many years and four continents.
A cogent, hard-hitting report from the front lines, A Bed for the Night shows what international aid organizations must do if they are to continue to care for the victims of humanitarian disasters.
Customer Reviews:
A must read for proponents of foreign aid/UN or otherwise.......2007-03-31
I read this book years ago and it opened my eyes about the realities of sending money and food aid and aid workers to countries in crisis. Not to say that we shouldn't but frankly many many times it isn't foreign aid that these countries really need it is government that isn't corrupt or even military action that will stop the immediate killing as in Rawanda. The author knows his stuff and the book is a thoughtful analysis of what works and what doesn't and what CAUSES MORE PROBLEMS even though the donors want to feel good by giving aid. All of these aid programs should be renewed or not renewed on a basis of 'change for the better'. But alas we just keep sending more money & aid and the corrupt people continue to benifit the most. And in the case of Rawanda, by mandating help without prejudice to either side we caused the killers to get aid so they could survive & kill more. A MUST read for proponents of foreign aid. FIRST DO NO HARM.
barb
... my thoughts exactly........2007-01-13
For me, disenchantment came in the form of Kofi Annan, the former Secretary General for the United Nations. When I was a child, on Halloween, I walked around with my happy little UNICEF box collecting money instead of candy, and through school I learned that the UN was this wonderful organisation that had the intention of creating a perfect utopia of a world in which there was peace and no famine. This, of course, was before Kosovo and Annan's Oil For Food scandal. True, Kosovo was but a blurred memory from middle school, but I was wide awake for the Oil For Food fiasco. The more I read about the United Nations in high school and college, the more I came to abhor the institution.
I'm no stranger to charity and humanitarianism -- I'm spending my summer in Ghana with an aid organisation, will be doing two years in the Peace Corps after getting my Nurse Practitioner license, and after that plan to work for Médecins Sans Frontières as a full-time job. Africa is my passion, one could say, and I'd like nothing more than to be there all the time.
That said, humanitarianism has become bogged down in the mire of politics and utopianism. In A Bed for the Night, author David Rieff not only outlines the beginnings of modern humanitarianism in Biafra in the late 1960s, but also highlights the key flaws in specific cases of humanitarianism in the last decade such as Bosnia and Rwanda. No Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) is left untouched -- he explains the failings of every NGO from the umbrella of the UN to the seemingly infallible Red Cross to Oxfam. Both sides of the issue are covered through interviews with such varied people as Rony Brauman of Médecins Sans Frontières and Jean-François Vidal of Action Contre la Faim. His arguments are absolutely supported in every way; he leaves no stone left unturned, and every reference from his ten years of research in preparation for writing the book are listed in a bibliography for fact checking. Also added after the first publish date is an afterward on Iraq which I found very interesting because it was written before Saddam Hussein was captured -- Rieff even says things like "two weeks after the war was finished" when we all know now, three years later, that Iraq is nowhere near being finished.
Basically though, the book is about how NGOs have made themselves bitches to world governments, something which, you know, basically defeats the point of the 'N' in the front of the acronym. Through this inability to stand up for themselves and be independent organisations, they've lost the neutrality that once made it easy for them to go into war zones and help those who needed to be helped.
This book most definitely is for a limited audience. It reads much like a doctoral thesis, which is something that I love, but most people would probably tire of the vocabulary or perhaps even not know what words mean. I read some passages to my younger sister, a junior in high school with all As, and she had no idea what I was even saying a good chunk of the time. For one to understand this book, one must have experience in reading research papers and theses, I would say. It has a lot of information to delve through and one has to be able to absorb the information from it as if he or she were doing research for his or her own project. Knowledge of history is also very important, though Rieff does generally explain the history behind each humanitarian tragedy. Because I'm familiar with most of the organisations in the book, I'm not completely sure if it would be important to know them beforehand, though I did find it helpful, because Rieff does include a handy little reference in the back of all of the organisations mentioned.
If you have some sort of undying affection for the UN, I'd recommend you stay as far away from this book as possible, honestly. Because of my nearly psychotic hate of the UN, I enjoyed every poke and prod at both the organisation and Kofi Annan. On the other hand, if you're a big fan of Médecins Sans Frontières, dive right on in -- Rieff basically states that it's the only aid organisation that's worth a damn in this day and age. Additionally, if you're one of the people who thinks that humanitarianism is the panacea for all the world's problems, the thing that will bring utopia to earth, get away from this book and get the hell away from me.
There are two quotes from this book that I think basically sum it up, the first from Rory Brauman:
'It can not be an accident that the one thing tyrants and aid workers have in common is their liking for being posed next to children.'
And David Rieff on the topics of 'The Responsibility to Protect' and human rights getting mixed into humanitarianism:
'A few dissenting figures, notably in certain French humanitarian circles, have argued that humanitarianism as a vocation needs to separate itself from this project [The Responsibility to Protect], no matter how worthy the larger goals of human rights, conflict resolutions, and the creation of the conditions for peace and development in the poor world may seem to aid workers, and no matter how fervently, as citizens, they hope for the success of such efforts. Where other NGOs, particularly those issuing from the British and American aid traditions, often assume aid groups could play a useful role if only they could develop further their human rights and peace-building "capacities," many of the most influential figures within MSF [Médecins Sans Frontières] and like-minded agencies such as ACF [Action Contre la Faim] continue to insist that such projects take humanitarianism far beyond any role it is suited for.'
Basically, for humanitarianism to survive, aid workers have to realise that they can't change the world on a grand scale, they can't bring peace, they can't make utopia -- they need to accept that their aid is on a local scale and that despite the fact that the world isn't going to know each thing they do, it's going to make a diffence in someone's life. There must be a return to neutrality so that the work that needs to be done can be done one person at a time.
Required reading.......2005-04-12
A credible analysis of the fig-leaf for endless state inaction that these abused, heroic organizations have become. Credible because the author obviously reached his conclusions with great anguish at the fact. Credible because, Rieff is the same author who wrote the Nov NYT 2003 piece, "Blueprint for a Mess" excoriating the administration for its Iraq policy. This is not a Wilsonian / Wolfowitz interventionist itching to let the ship of state set sail, and because of that, his pained conclusions about the reasons for state inaction/ineffective action in the face of pressing needs to act are credible.
The West/America/Europe in recent decades, primarily through the mechanism of the UN, has made a great show of doing everything possible right up to but excluding actually doing anything. Compassion on the cheap. 'We're doing everything possible, the UN is on the job, and as long as all parties agree and have invited them, will show up and defend only themselves rudely in front of people desperately needing defense. The NGOs are on site. We're handing out the blankets and the coffee and the bandaids to rapist and victim alike, so nothing more can be done, and we can all go back to reading our papers and tsk-tsk-tsking and sipping our Capuccinos, comfortable in the knowledge that everything that can be done, is being done, short of actually doing soemthing.'
Find out why that's a fig leaf on the UN seal, not an olive branch. We are all the problem; we don't have the good sense our daddies taught us about when to and when not to lift a hand. Read this book.
Asks the right questions.......2004-12-05
The author does point out many of the problems with humanitarian non-governmental organizations. They do plenty of self-promotion. They make deals with a variety of thugs just to be permitted to operate in some regions. In other cases, they make deals with various nations, adopting their political causes. Worst of all, they can be misused by those with truly genocidal plans: they can be assigned to give food and lodging to intended victims, drawing them into camps. When armies show up to murder the victims, the humanitarians obviously get out of the way. But just what service does all this provide?
While I found myself disagreeing with the author on plenty of occasions, I think he's written a good book. He's clearly raised all the main issues with humanitarian aid. These include questions of whether whether neutrality, impartiality, outright support for victims, or none of the above is the most effective way to help people.
In the case of a genuine human rights organization, there's no doubt what the goal is. The charters of such organizations are clear: they never are to support outright opponents of human rights politically. Those charters are often violated, but at least we all know what they are supposed to do. But in the case of humanitarian organizations, there are no such goals. The idea is to provide day-to-day help to the needy, and being misused by people who intend to murder the needy may not even violate their charters.
In any case, Rieff shows how humanitarian efforts failed in a most disheartening way in Bosnia and Rwanda. And perhaps he's at his best when he explains how useless the United Nations has been in protecting anyone from aggressors. He quotes one person as explaining that had the UN existed in the 1930s, all of Europe would now be speaking German.
Rieff is pessimistic about the effectiveness of humanitarian aid in many areas. And I have to agree with him about this. Perhaps the worst aspect of it is that such failures, by giving humanitarianism a bad name, will encourage many people who truly want to help others to do something else instead.
An important book about an important problem.......2004-06-18
Pulling no punches, Rieff has written a damning insight into the current humanitarian care industry (and it has become an industry) has lost its way in the modern day. While showing great admiration for people who believe they are doing the right thing, Rieff exposes the problems with the current methods and thinking behind humanitarian intervention and aid, especially the loss of neutrality and the growth of advocacy for military intervention.
This is a fascinating book, and one that should be read by those who hold beliefs on either side of the humanitarian intervention debate. While this reader came to this book in the context of studying International Security, including the issue of humanitarian intervention, it would be of interest to anyone who has thought about the continuing humanitarian crises throughout the world and what should be done about them. Occasionally Rieff comes across as hyperbolic, and he almost loses the reader's sympathies, but he has the facts and experiences to back up what he is saying. Covering a breadth of organizations, situations and viewpoints, this is a powerful book that at the very least will make you think next time you hear calls for peacekeepers to intervene or are asked to donate to one of the multitude of relief organizations at work today.
Book Description
With an introduction by David J. Hill. Translated by A.C. Campbell. This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1901 edition by M. Walter Dunne, Washington & London.
Customer Reviews:
A timeless classic on the moral basis of Civilization.......2001-09-23
"Those who write treatises of natural law, can only declare what their own moral sense and reason dictate in the several cases they state. Such of them as happen to have feelings and a reason coincident with those of the wise and honest part of mankind, are respected and quoted as witnesses of what is morally right or wrong in particular cases. Grotius, Puffendorf, Wolf, and Vattel are of this number." - Thomas Jefferson.
Better known under his latin name, Grotius, Hugo de Groot (1583-1645), a Dutch protestant jurist, is generally considered the "father of international law". Another great father, that of the U.S. Constitution, praised his "genius and erudition", while U.S. historian George Bancroft saw in "the admirable Grotius" "the first political writer of his age", though he was a contemporary of the more widely known Thomas Hobbes. And yet here am I, writing the first Amazon review of his masterpiece, *The Rights of War and Peace*, published in 1625.
In his introduction to this first volume of the beautiful collection, "Universal Classics" , published in 1901 by Walter Dunne, David J. Hill provides a fascinating portrait of this precocious genius : "At eight he wrote Latin verses which betrayed poetic talent ; at twelve he entered the University... and at fifteen he defended ýwith he greatest applauseý Latin theses in philosophy and jurisprudence... at the age of seventeen he was admitted to the bar". As for the present treatise, a document discovered in 1868 revealed that "the entire plan and even the arrangement of the *De Jure Belli ac Pacis* were in the mind of Grotius when he was only twenty-one years of age."
To summarize the main thrust of his argument, Grotius believed, in Hillýs apt words, that "war is never to be undertaken except to assert rights, and when undertaken is never to be carried on except within the limits of rights." These two fundamental requirements, without which no war can be called just, organize the two major sections of this three-book work : Book II, which articulates the just causes of war, namely "the defense of person and property" ; and Book III, which describes the just prosecution of war, by identifying "what is lawful in war." (The two quotes in this sentence are the titles of the first chapters of each book.)
But to reduce this treatise to these two questions would be unfair to the scope of Grotiusýs intellect. For the Dutch jurist digs deep, not only philosophically, as when he discusses the foundation of property rights, the moral nature of oaths or the relationship between the law of nature, Godýs commandments and positive law ; but culturally, offering a magisterial survey of mankindýs treasuries of knowledge and wisdom, from Scripture to Homer, Aristotle, Thucydides, Livy, Ulpian, Justinian, Cicero and Seneca, among others.
*The Rights of War and Peace* should be on the reading list of all American patriots, who cannot ignore such a landmark in the Natural Law tradition. Grotiusýs discussion of the right of self-defense is strong ammunition for a libertarian interpretation of the Second Amendment. And his treatment of "pirates and robbers" applies perfectly to modern terrorists, those "atrocious malefactors... [whose] calling... is to extort terms by fear." Reading this book in the week that followed the destruction of the World Trade Center, I was fascinated by its relevance to the whole situation, and how its clarity can help refute the whitewashing of bin Ladenýs acts by some perverted muslim intellectuals, preying on a West disarmed by moral relativism, ignorance and confusion.
Of course, Grotius is not "modern" in all his opinions. He does not seem to recognize a peopleýs right to rebel against an unjust monarch, for instance, though a James Otis managed to quote him in support of American independence. But Russell Kirk, in a passage of his *The Roots of American Order* praising Montesquieu, went too far in reducing him to the idea "that a conqueror has the right to slaughter or perpetually enslave a whole people whose armies he has defeated." Doesnýt Grotius write that "No one can be justly killed by design, except by way of legal punishment, or to defend our lives, and preserve our property, when it cannot be effected without his destruction"? Doesnýt he beautifully affirm that "it is the characteristic of bravery to esteem our opponents as enemies, while contending with victory, and to treat them as men, when conquered"?
Let us not distort the thinking of this prodigious individual by dropping the context and putting an undue emphasis on the errors he shared with his time. Let us rather concur with James Madisonýs assessment : "Grotius is not unjustly considered, as in some respects, the father of the modern code of nations. Great, however, as his authority deservedly may be, it yields, in a variety of instances, to that of later jurists; who, to all the lights furnished by this luminary, have added those derived from their own sources, and from the improvements made in the intercourse and happiness of nations."
(Note : The editor, A. C. Campbell, made a few cuts in the original text, mostly of what he considered to be redundant or too technical or obscure paragraphs, but included a certain number of interesting footnotes drawing parallels between some of Grotius's points and the writings of Vattel and Blackstone, through whom, when not directly, Grotius influenced the Founding Fathers.)
Book Description
This stunning, hilarious, and politically incendiary full-color poster book by U.S. Airborne Ranger-turned-dissident-comic-book-artist Micah Wright reworks classic American World War I and II propaganda into biting commentaries on war and pariotism for the post-September 11 era.
Customer Reviews:
Hilarious, timely, incisive.......2007-04-14
First, yes he lied. Wake up, the author is just another reader, as is said in postmodernism. It doesn't matter whether Micah lied, or whether he is a murderous demon or another incarnation of Hitler.
It's the book that matters.
It's very funny and well taken.
The followup book is decent as well, but round 3 is getting a little repetitive and uninspired.
It's all made up... fiction.......2007-01-04
Those of you who are in the "don't shoot the messenger" camp, wake up! He made the whole thing up, he never served in the Rangers, and now has made up another book. He could have presented it as fiction, but he tried to pass it of as fact.
I don't take cooking tips from Jeffery Dahmer.
I don't turn to Brittney Spears for parenting advice.
I don't look to Dr. Phil on how to lose weight.
I don't rely on George Bush for advice on how to govern.
I don't turn to a Kennedy for driving lessons.
I don't look to OJ Simpson for relationship advice.
I don't look to Micah Wright for lessons on the military.
It's fiction, folks. And it's offensive to those who really served in the military to try to pass it off as fact, seeking to gain from their hard lives.
These made me laugh.......2006-08-25
You know what? These posters made me laugh. I have posted them around my desk at work. They make statements with which I agree.
Lighten up, all of you reviewers who have written screeds about whether or not the author was an army ranger. Who cares?
Some people don't have enough to do, apparently.
A LIAR! A FILTHY HYPOCRIT!.......2006-05-23
This guy Wright lied about being an army ranger, kinda like lying about one's air national guard service. how can these disgusting commies keep supporting this guy's work when he isn't even running for office (then it'd be okay).
I Don't Like The Message So I'm Attacking The Messenger!.......2006-01-14
What Micah Ian Wright expected to gain from lying about being a ranger in Panama I don't know. All he's done is give people something to attack other than the actual book itself. Well done, chief.
Yes, Wright lied. He did a stupid thing. However his message is still valid. And most of the people giving it 1 star know it, which is why they didn't even mention it.
Don't trust reviews that attack the messenger over the message.
Book Description
Women are usually seen as victims of wars, as indeed they are. But they are also peacemakers, so that the riches of their land may be invested in their children's education and health services and in agriculture and industry. In this book, Liberian women and men who were caught in the civil war between 1989 and 2003, tell their own stories of assisting the afflicted, feeding the hungry, pleading with trigger-happy young soldiers to stop the killing, seeking to heal trauma, taking to the streets in protest, and storming peace conferences "to speak plainly and forcefully about the destruction of families, communities and the nation." This book celebrates them.
"This powerful and moving account of the work of Liberian women in trying to bring about peace during Liberia's protracted civil war is a testimony to their great determination and courage. Liberian Women Peacemakers is both a fascinating history of Liberian women's struggle to influence their country's future and a case study of the critical role women can play in conflict resolution and peace-building worldwide. The voices of these committed women must be heard if we are to have sustainable peace. "
--Noeleen Heyzer, Executive Director, UNIFEM
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- Win Your Child Custody War: Child Custody Help Source Book--A How-To System for People Serious About the Welfare of Their Child (11th Edition)
- Women, Law, and Social Control (2nd Edition)
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