John Lukacs
John Adalbert Lukacs (/ˈluːkəs/;[1] Hungarian: Lukács János Albert; January 31, 1924 – May 6, 2019) was a Hungarian-born American historian and author of more than thirty books.
Lukacs attended a classical gymnasium, had an English language tutor, and spent two summers at a private school in England.
[6] During the Second World War, when German troops occupied Hungary (Operation Margarethe) in 1944, Lukacs was forced to serve in a Hungarian labour battalion for Jews.
[11] Defunct Newspapers Journals TV channels Websites Other Congressional caucuses Economics Gun rights Identity politics Nativist Religion Watchdog groups Youth/student groups Miscellaneous Other Being an ardent anti-Communist, Lukacs nevertheless wrote in the early 1950s several articles in Commonweal criticizing the approach taken by Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom he described as a vulgar demagogue.
[7] He identified populism as the essence of both Nazism and Communism, denying the existence of generic fascism and asserted that the differences between the political regimes of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were greater than their similarities.
Lukacs defends traditional Western civilization against what he sees as the leveling and debasing effects of mass culture.
Their moral struggle, which Lukacs sees as a conflict between the archetypical reactionary and the archetypical revolutionary, is the major theme of The Last European War (1976), The Duel (1991), Five Days in London (1999) and 2008's Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat, a book which features Churchill's first major speech as Prime Minister.
Lukacs argues that Great Britain and by extension the British Empire could not defeat Germany by itself, and that winning required the entry of the United States and the Soviet Union.
He observes that by inspiring the British people to resist German air attacks and to "never surrender" during the Battle of Britain in 1940, Churchill laid the groundwork for the subsequent victory of the Allies.
[15] Lukacs argued that the Soviet Union was a feeble power on the verge of collapse and thus contended that the Cold War was an unnecessary waste of American treasure and life.
In his book George F. Kennan and the Origins of Containment, 1944-1946 (1997), a collection of letters exchanged between Lukacs and his close friend George F. Kennan during 1994–1995, Lukacs and Kennan criticized the claim of the New Left that the Cold War was caused by the United States; however, Lukacs argued that while Joseph Stalin was largely responsible for the beginning of the Cold War, the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower missed a chance for ending the Cold War in 1953 after Stalin's death, which kept it on for many more decades.
Instead, Lukacs dates Hitler's turn to antisemitism to 1919 in Munich, in particular to the events surrounding the Bavarian Soviet Republic and its defeat by the right-wing Freikorps.
Citing the critique of National Socialism developed by German conservative historians such as Hans Rothfels and Gerhard Ritter, Lukacs describes the Nazi movement as the culmination of the dark forces which lurk within modern civilization.
In Lukacs's view, Operation Barbarossa was not inspired by anti-Communism or any long-term plan to conquer the Soviet Union as suggested by historians such as Andreas Hillgruber, who claims that Hitler had a Stufenplan (stage-by-stage plan), but it was rather an ad hoc reaction forced on Hitler in 1940–1941 by Britain's refusal to surrender.
He argues that Hitler's statement in August 1939 to the League of Nations High Commissioner for Danzig, the Swiss diplomat Carl Jacob Burckhardt ("Everything I undertake is directed against Russia"), which Hillgruber cited as evidence of Hitler's anti-Soviet intentions, was part of an effort to intimidate Britain and France into abandoning Poland.
In the same book, Lukacs criticizes legalized abortion, pornography, cloning, and sexual permissiveness as marking what he sees as the increasing decadence, depravity, corruption, and amorality of modern American society.
