Antony Beevor
Antony Beevor
Antony James Beevor, FRSLis an English military historian. He has published several popular histories on the Second World War and the 20th century in general...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth14 December 1946
historical memory misleading parallels point second war
The memory of the Second World War hangs over Europe, an inescapable and irresistible point of reference. Historical parallels are usually misleading and dangerous.
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I was in Estonia when a professor asked me if I was aware that making any criticism of the Red Army during the war was now an imprisonable offence. I was quite shaken.
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Every country has its own perspective on the Second World War. This is not surprising when experiences and memories are so different.
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School-leavers unfortunately will come away thinking the First World War consisted simply of 'going over the top' on the Western Front to slaughter in no-man's-land, when the conflict extended so much further, to the collapse of four empires and numerous civil wars.
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In the Iraq war, for instance, so much of the information is digitized and can easily be wiped out. That will make it very hard to write accurate histories. Also, there's a much greater opportunity for suppression of information before it can even be archived.
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When we dwell on the enormity of the Second World War and its victims, we try to absorb all those statistics of national and ethnic tragedy. But, as a result, there is a tendency to overlook the way the war changed even the survivors' lives in ways impossible to predict.
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At the beginning of June 1944, the war was reaching a climax. German troops had been brutalised by the savagery of the ongoing fighting in Russia, where the Red Army was secretly preparing its vast encirclement of the Germans' Army Group Centre.
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It is important to understand the continuing, confused fascination with the Second World War. For most of us, the great unspoken question is how would we have behaved in the face of danger and when forced to make major moral choices.
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I think one of the great disasters (in military history) is the way that the Second World War has become the defining reference point for every crisis and every conflict.
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The British bombing of Caen beginning on D-Day in particular was stupid, counter-productive and above all very close to a war crime.
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The British bombing of Caen beginning on D-Day in particular was stupid, counter-productive and above all very close to a war crime.
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Without an understanding of history, we are politically, culturally and socially impoverished. If we sacrifice history to economic pressures or to budget cuts, we will lose a part of who we are.
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There are one or two very good women military historians who use imagination, great study and research; they can put themselves in the boots of the soldier.
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One has this image of the Soviet state and the Red Army as being extremely disciplined but in the first four months of 1945 their soldiers were completely out of control.