Thinking History, Fighting Evil: Neoconservatives and the Perils of Analogy in American Politics

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Thinking History, Fighting Evil presents the most thorough exploration to date of how World War II analogies, particularly those focused on the Holocaust, have colored American foreign policy-making after 9/11. In particular, this book highlights how influential neoconservatives inside and outside the Bush administration used analogies of the "Good War" to reinterpret domestic and international events, often with disastrous consequences. On the surface, World War II promotes a simple but compelling range of images and symbols: valiant Roosevelts and Churchills, appeasing Chamberlains, evil Hitlers, Jewish victims, European bystanders, and American liberators. However, the simplistic use of analogies was precisely what doomed the neoconservative project to failure. This book explores the misuse of ten key analogies arising from World War II and charts their problematic deployment after the 9/11 attacks.

Divided into eight chapters, Thinking History, Fighting Evil engages with timely issues such as the moral legacies of the civil rights era, identity politics movements, the representation of the Holocaust in American life, the rise of victim politics on the neoconservative right, the instrumentalization of anti-American and anti-Semitic discourses, the trans-Atlantic rift between Europe and the United States, and the war on terror. While the book focuses on the post-9/11 security environment, it also explores the history of negative exceptionalism in U.S. history and politics, tracing back Manichean conceptions of good and evil to the foundation of the early colonies.

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Combining conceptual rigor and detailed empirical application, this outstanding book shows how the lessons of history continue to shape the perceptions of policies of American decision-makers. In particular, Thinking History, Fighting Evil provides some timely insight into the strategic miscalculations of the American neo-Conservatives during the Bush era. -- Robert Patman, University of Ontago

Author Bio

David B. MacDonald is a well-known scholar in the fields of international relations, genocide studies, and American politics. He taught at the Graduate School of Management Paris and was a senior lecturer in political studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, before taking up his current appointment in the Political Science Department at the University of Guelph. He is the author of Identity Politics in the Age of Genocide: The Holocaust and Historical Representation and Balkan holocausts Serbian and Croatian Propaganda and the War in Yugoslavia. He is also co-editor of and contributor to The Ethics of Foreign Policy.