Guenter Lewy
[1] Described by Lewy as a "quasi-Romantic" group, Die Greifen emphasized music, literature, and song, particularly Landsknechtlieder, encouraging the youths to avoid becoming "Spiessbürger" ("philistines").
[10][11][12] Lewy argues, It is the reasoned conclusion of this study ... that the sense of guilt created by the Vietnam war in the minds of many Americans is not warranted and that the charges of officially, condoned illegal and grossly immoral conduct are without substance.
To measure and compare the devastation and loss of human life caused by different war will be objectionable to those who repudiate or resort to military force as an instrument of foreign policy and may be construed as callousness.
I hope that this book may help demonstrate that moral convictions are not the exclusive possession of persons in conscience opposed to war, and that those who in certain circumstances accept the necessity and ethical justification of armed conflict also do care about human suffering.
[14] About the crimes committed by American soldiers, Lewy asserts that "between January 1965 and March 1973, 201 Army personnel in Vietnam were convicted by court-martial of serious offenses against Vietnamese.
Cases of fragging and avoidance of combat may well have been instigated at times by antiwar militants, though no hard evidence of organized subversion was ever discovered.
"[17] The text was praised by Vietnam veteran and United States Senator Jim Webb, Andrew J. Pierre of Foreign Affairs,[18] and by several newspapers, including The Economist, which described it as "in many ways the best history of the war yet to appear".
"[21] America in Vietnam, which appeared seven years after the Winter Soldier Investigation, became controversial in the context of the 2004 United States presidential election.
"I don't think Lewy is interested in presenting any of [the Winter Soldier testimony] as truthful", University of Richmond history professor Ernest Bolt told the Chicago Tribune.
[27] According to Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, "Lewy's account of Nazi measures against the powerless Gypsies is unsurpassed in the English language."
Henriette Asséo, lecturer at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, specialist of Gypsy history, wrote that Lewy's book "requires humility, giving a new, considerable documentation", adding, however, that the rejection of "genocide" label can be "discussed"[28] Hans Mommsen agreed completely with Lewy, including with the rejection of "genocide" qualification.
Yet Lewy wastes considerable intellectual energy in demonstrating that the totality of the disaster that befell the Gypsies cannot be compared to the Jewish Holocaust.
Lewy dismissed as bogus Churchill's assertion that the United States Army intentionally spread smallpox among American Indians by distributing infected blankets in 1837.
[47] According to Joseph Albert Kechichian, writing in the International Journal of Middle East Studies: Lewy has been amply rewarded by Turkish authorities in Ankara and abroad through the launching of a massive campaign to distribute his book free of charge to libraries and to select groups of diplomats.
Equally noteworthy, Lewy has been decorated at a special ceremony in Ankara with, ironically, the İnsanlığa Karşı İşlenen Suçlar Yüksek Ödülü (High Award for Fighting in Opposition to Crimes Against Humanity) ... [by] a well-known organization whose mission includes the systematic denial of the Armenian genocide through propagandistic and partisan research and publications; the organization is sponsored and underwritten by the Turkish government.
The ruling party of the day massacred intellectuals, forced hundreds of thousands of Armenians into what amounted to death marches, and systematically despoiled the victims of their property.
[54] In its statement, the SPLC stated that it had erred in assuming that "any scholar who challenges the Armenian genocide narrative necessarily has been financially compromised by the government of Turkey.
[54] Multiple historians have accused Lewy of having an agenda in his scholarship, to emphasize the uniqueness of the Holocaust and discredit other claims of genocide regardless of the evidence.
[57] In the Journal of Genocide Research, David Stannard called Lewy "one of the last of a disappearing breed: the extreme 'uniqueness' advocate determined to assert—in the face of contrary and increasingly overwhelming fact and logic—that, of all the mass killings that have ever occurred in the history of the world, only the Holocaust ... rose to the level of true 'genocide.
