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Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won:Challenges the idea that American resource superiority made victory inevitable, given the barriers that had to be overcome and the need for Britain to survive long enough for the US to enter the war in Europe. (There is, I think, no mention of India in the book.) Russian suffering and persistence was a primary part of what made the world safe for democracy (and also made communism look workable to many).
Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory:A history of Native American expulsion, emphasizing the connections with slavery, including ones less obvious than “white supremacy.” E.g., the existing internal slave trade provided proof of concept for mass forced travel, although the profit motive and the more extended timeframe made for less death in transit. Georgia’s protests against national attempts to control its brutalities were the same secessionist/antifederal arguments that a few decades later started the Civil War. Whites not only appropriated the land to use for slave labor camps, they took homes and possessions as well, and somehow the compensation supposedly due the expelled people never quite showed up, in part because the US government deducted the (padded) expenses of surveying their territory and expelling them from the amount they were supposed to get from land sales (artificially diminished by fraud, violence, and collusion). Then the feds invested the remaining amounts in Southern banks that funded the land grab and the purchases of enslaved people to work the new cotton land. Draw your own modern analogies. The ideology at work is summarized in one quote praising a Georgia politician for protecting “the inalienable rights you possess to your slaves and to your Indian territory!” Saunt emphasizes that there was nothing inevitable here: the tribes were, if not all thriving, surviving rather than disappearing, and at every point the whites could have honored their earlier treaties. Also, very timely in light of Trump’s deportation promises: mass expulsion can’t be done cheaply, noncorruptly, or without massive suffering—but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen, just that certain people will benefit and others will die.
Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed: Revised and Updated: The circumstances (insofar as we know them, with plenty of uncertainty) around the end of the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean, focusing on what is now Egypt, Greece, and Syria. The collapse seems to have been related to the complexity/internationalism of trade relations—when invasions, droughts, and earthquakes disrupted individual areas, the commerce that brought tin and food to places that needed it may have gone away.
Eric H. Cline, After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations: After collapse, people were still around, albeit usually living in smaller communities with less complex political structures—including not having public buildings, an interesting detail. Some civilizations disappeared, like the Minoans, and some retreated, like Egypt (which was never again as great a power and often had multiple rulers in different parts), while some ultimately reconfigured (Greece and Rome).
Dominic Erdozain, One Nation Under Guns: How Gun Culture Distorts Our History and Threatens Our Democracy: Depressing but passionate narrative about how the Supreme Court, and Republicans in general, got it so wrong. The Founders, he argues, had a very clear conception of the militia and of states’ rights to decide who would be armed; but as the militia became outdated, it was possible to reframe the Second Amendment as a personal guarantee, despite the ahistoricity of that concept. He frames a key culprit as being the myth of the innocent gun owner/the myth that there are good guys and bad guys and never the twain shall meet, when—among other things—carrying a gun makes people get in more fights, even aside from the racism that means that the freedom to carry a gun is a white person’s freedom. Thinking of oneself as a morally pure innocent contributes to a willingness to kill when feeling threatened. Not that the racism isn’t also key: Erdozain recounts how William Faulkner—who called himself a critic of segregation—said that if the federal government forced integration, he'd take up arms against it “even if it meant going out on the street and shooting Negroes. After all, I’m not going out to shoot Mississippians.”
Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender: Dense defense of queerness, transness, and gender nonconformity, including a lot of detailed mapping of how right-wing groups are connected across nations and invest in a fantasy that they are under deathly threat. Because they imagine their own gender commitments might be stripped away by force, they decide they have to suppress others. As she points out, this fear depends on the understanding that it would be very wrong to deprive someone of their sexual identity—and yet it’s weaponized to do the very same thing to other people. Butler also explains how “gender critical feminists” ignore a key feminist insight, which is the need to build coalitions, including with people you don’t like—including, as Black feminists like Bernice Johnson Reagon have known, people who could in other circumstances be a threat to your life. TERFs think they lose something when trans women are women too, as if sex were property, but it isn’t and they don’t. Butler has a tough message for Western feminists, which is that conditioning aid on recognizing gender equality in law can frame equality as a Western, therefore bad, concept, while the West’s sanctimony on human rights rings hollow given its disinterest in the right to food, shelter, and so on.
Gary J. Bass, Judgment at Tokyo: The Tokyo war crimes trials followed the Nuremberg trials, but with much less clarity, in part because the US decided to protect the Emperor despite his involvement in the war. Also notable for participation by Indian and Chinese judges, who had opposite views—the Chinese judge wanted to expose and punish crimes against the Chinese, including mass rape, torture, and slaughter. The Indian judge ultimately voted to acquit, reasoning that starting a war wasn’t illegal and condemning the role of colonialism and racism in both the war and the prosecutions (and the lack of any consideration of whether dropping atomic bombs on civilians constituted a war crime). But lest you think that’s simple, he also downplayed the evidence of Japanese war crimes in China and, ultimately, questioned whether the Holocaust was mere war propaganda.
Adam Zamoyski, Phantom Terror: Political Paranoia and the Creation of the Modern State, 1789 – 1848: A history of conservative/reactionary claims about the dangers posed by revolutionaries, or reformers who they saw as revolutionaries. Presents this as a feedback loop, where repression stems from fantasy but, almost inevitably, generates more resistance—or what looks like resistance—as the state strengthens in response.
Edward J Larson, Summer for the Gods:History of the Scopes trial, from its genesis as a collusive lawsuit designed to embarrass the old white South on behalf of the new white South to the fallout and cultural memory. We tend to think of people in the past as more credulous or single-dimensional than we are, but they weren't.
Jill Burke, How To Be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty and Female Creativity: Argues that the 16th century in Europe has resonance for today, with the rise of a newly visual/beauty-focused culture and the dangers and pleasures it had for women in particular. Newly available mirrors, she argues, made it possible for people who had them to reliably see what they looked like to others. Nose surgery was also successfully performed on women who’d been victims of violent attacks and men who’d duelled.
Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: History of the actual Luddites, arguing that they were far from anti-technology; what they were anti- was exploitation, immiseration, and deskilling, which owners of the new machines were forcing on them. For example, the weekly pay of a Lancashire weaver declined from 25 shillings in 1800 to 14 shillings in 1811. This was connected to the rise in cotton production due to enslavement in America. Weavers demanded that existing laws against abuse be enforced—but the wealthy factory owners who actually had parliamentary representation succeeded instead. Merchant draws a lot of parallels between then and now (gig work and big tech play the role of the factory owners). And, he argues, despite the immediate repression and losses suffered by the Luddites due to the fact that the UK denied most people political representation, they built a foundation for later labor protest and protections. A former head of one of Australia’s largest telecom unions also credited Luddites transported from the UK for Australia’s union tradition.
Jennifer M. Black, Branding Trust: Advertising and Trademarks in Nineteenth-Century America: Some interesting details here, emphasizing continuity rather than a radical shift to the advertising-driven 20th century, but ultimately a little less than was promised, in part because the book sometimes asserts things about what “worked” without defining what “working” meant. E.g., discussing a striking use of typography that involved buying most of a newspaper front page: “Like a modern-day flash sale, the Smiths’ promotion likely caused quite a stir within the city, prompting interested patrons (and perhaps even spectators) to flock to the Smiths’ brewery …. Regardless of its outcome, the promotional sale certainly had the potential to bring in massive profits … a promise that likely justified the added expense of placing such a large front-page ad in the Herald.” But did it? How would we know? It’s an axiom of advertising that half of all ad spend is wasted; the trouble is we don’t know which half. Black’s statement that “[t]hough printers had observed and calculated supposedly proven techniques for decades, advertising still remained a somewhat hit-or-miss business” is hardly confined to the 19th century. It’s interesting and useful to know that advertisers were persuaded that certain techniques worked, but that’s different from being connected to increased sales—especially when advertisers face consumers who have resource constraints and lots of offers from other advertisers who are also taking advantage of putatively successful techniques.
Black identifies testimonials as important for 19th century advertisers, just as they are today via influencers, and also links them to commercial letters of reference as well as religious conversion narratives, both popular at the time. The “then-common cultural tendencies to grant authority to even anonymous printed materials” seems to me just as common today, given the effectiveness of social proof. Using testimonials from ordinary people “implied a leveling of authority where any user’s personal experience could be as important for validating the product as the professional recommendation of doctors or other experts,” again something that is still true. But: “While celebrities might be compensated for their testaments, it was generally assumed [by whom? How do we know?] that average men and women were not.” Black later acknowledges that we don’t actually know how consumers responded to testimonials, though we do know that patent medicines were very profitable, suggesting they were good enough to engender hope.
Black argues that advertisers used gendered and racialized codes to create trustworthy “character,” from an epistolary format to signatures and images of a founder, along with testimonials providing the same evidence from third parties. New printing techniques also enabled these as handwriting-like fonts or even images of handwriting became possible. Black concludes that “novelty” and “character” merged to lead to the rise of the branded character, whether a founder (Lydia Pinkham) or a fictional entity (I’d never heard of Phoebe Snow, but she was a railroad mascot and had a huge cultural presence).
It was interesting to read that pre-Civil War resistance to a federal trademark law was linked to sectional conflict, through the argument that the federal government shouldn’t have any power over commerce. But then, after the Supreme Court struck down Congress’s first attempt in 1879, Black says that despite legislative support, “Congress was able to pass only limited trademark protections” (for foreigners)—how and why was it so limited? What were the arguments against breadth? Why were congressional backers of more protection unsuccessful for the next twenty years? Black links the next revision, in 1905, to Progressive efforts to protect (white) consumers, but business owners were often the biggest supporters of trademark laws. Although protecting consumers was a good thing, “the historian cannot forget the exclusionary roots of respectability politics, … nor should we ignore the ways in which Progressive concerns about food purity and public sanitation dovetailed easily into arguments for racial purity and empire…. Conversations about preserving authenticity and reputation in the market must have resonated loudly with reform-minded individuals who were also interested in eugenics and racial integrity.”
Possibly the most interesting point: the idea of a trademark as crystallizing goodwill—a shorthand for the business—was ideologically consistent with the rise of Taylorism: it was efficient! I also learned more about the ways that printers helped advertisers (try to) attract attention before the rise of ad agencies, including through visual strategies, and how newspapers—especially in New York—insisted for a long time on single column formats against which new visual codes strained. Black also argues that the rise of print culture, in the form of printed cards and large public ads as well as periodicals, assisted the rise of branding because they allowed and encouraged producers to develop a single visual identity that would appear in multiple ways and places. And consumers appropriated trade cards with appealing images printed on them for their own scrapbooks, repurposing them (but also accepting them as “gifts” from the advertiser, which is indeed a proven way of making consumers feel that some reciprocity is owed).
Finally, shame on whoever sought or required, in the caption showing the 1914 Uneeda Biscuit box and the competing Abetta Biscuit (complete with swastika instead of Nabisco’s logo), the “permission” of Mondelez International—no permission is required for this kind of use, even if something shown in the image is still a valid trademark.
Joyce Appleby, Shores of Knowledge: New World Discoveries and the Scientific Imagination: Argues that European “discoveries” were what ultimately broke the stranglehold of the ancients and drove the rise of the scientific method in Europe, as Europeans were increasingly confronted with plants, animals, and people not provided for in ancient texts. I’m not sure I totally buy the causal story, but there certainly is correlation.
Kate Manne, Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia: Manne uses a lot of studies, which you’ve probably seen if you’ve seen fat acceptance writing, to argue that diets and shame are harmful rather than helpful; in particular, discrimination against fat people (including children) harms them much more than the “biological” consequences of weight. Example: “parents in the 1990s were less willing to offer financial support to their fat daughters to attend college, compared with their thinner ones.” We’re in the midst of a trans panic where states are banning the use of puberty blockers for trans kids, but doctors encourage life-altering bariatric surgery for kids as young as 13. She’s a good writer for a summary of a lot of work on the harms of dieting.
She further argues that it’s not accidental that being thin has become much harder in recent decades at the same time that anti-fat discrimination has increased. The effort—and resources—required to eat “healthy” foods, work out a lot, etc.—are seen as morally worthy. As she points out, though, we accept or at least tolerate lots of other choices that increase the risk of morbidity and death (riding motorcycles, rock climbing, cheerleading, etc.). She argues for “body reflexivity” or body autonomy—you don’t “have” to love or accept your body, because that’s another instruction doomed to cause shame and feelings of failure; instead, you should consider your body to be for you, not for pleasing others. As she concludes: “I hence hold out hope for a future in which our current relentless beauty pageant has no more judges—and not a single entrant. It is not that everybody wins or gets a participation trophy in the form of our collective studied neutrality. There should be nothing in its place. There ought to be no contest. And that there is no contest, no judgment, does not mean there can be no appreciation. Go for a walk sometime: you can appreciate a leaf, a sunset, a dog, without ranking it against others or pronouncing it superior.”
Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory:A history of Native American expulsion, emphasizing the connections with slavery, including ones less obvious than “white supremacy.” E.g., the existing internal slave trade provided proof of concept for mass forced travel, although the profit motive and the more extended timeframe made for less death in transit. Georgia’s protests against national attempts to control its brutalities were the same secessionist/antifederal arguments that a few decades later started the Civil War. Whites not only appropriated the land to use for slave labor camps, they took homes and possessions as well, and somehow the compensation supposedly due the expelled people never quite showed up, in part because the US government deducted the (padded) expenses of surveying their territory and expelling them from the amount they were supposed to get from land sales (artificially diminished by fraud, violence, and collusion). Then the feds invested the remaining amounts in Southern banks that funded the land grab and the purchases of enslaved people to work the new cotton land. Draw your own modern analogies. The ideology at work is summarized in one quote praising a Georgia politician for protecting “the inalienable rights you possess to your slaves and to your Indian territory!” Saunt emphasizes that there was nothing inevitable here: the tribes were, if not all thriving, surviving rather than disappearing, and at every point the whites could have honored their earlier treaties. Also, very timely in light of Trump’s deportation promises: mass expulsion can’t be done cheaply, noncorruptly, or without massive suffering—but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen, just that certain people will benefit and others will die.
Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed: Revised and Updated: The circumstances (insofar as we know them, with plenty of uncertainty) around the end of the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean, focusing on what is now Egypt, Greece, and Syria. The collapse seems to have been related to the complexity/internationalism of trade relations—when invasions, droughts, and earthquakes disrupted individual areas, the commerce that brought tin and food to places that needed it may have gone away.
Eric H. Cline, After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations: After collapse, people were still around, albeit usually living in smaller communities with less complex political structures—including not having public buildings, an interesting detail. Some civilizations disappeared, like the Minoans, and some retreated, like Egypt (which was never again as great a power and often had multiple rulers in different parts), while some ultimately reconfigured (Greece and Rome).
Dominic Erdozain, One Nation Under Guns: How Gun Culture Distorts Our History and Threatens Our Democracy: Depressing but passionate narrative about how the Supreme Court, and Republicans in general, got it so wrong. The Founders, he argues, had a very clear conception of the militia and of states’ rights to decide who would be armed; but as the militia became outdated, it was possible to reframe the Second Amendment as a personal guarantee, despite the ahistoricity of that concept. He frames a key culprit as being the myth of the innocent gun owner/the myth that there are good guys and bad guys and never the twain shall meet, when—among other things—carrying a gun makes people get in more fights, even aside from the racism that means that the freedom to carry a gun is a white person’s freedom. Thinking of oneself as a morally pure innocent contributes to a willingness to kill when feeling threatened. Not that the racism isn’t also key: Erdozain recounts how William Faulkner—who called himself a critic of segregation—said that if the federal government forced integration, he'd take up arms against it “even if it meant going out on the street and shooting Negroes. After all, I’m not going out to shoot Mississippians.”
Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender: Dense defense of queerness, transness, and gender nonconformity, including a lot of detailed mapping of how right-wing groups are connected across nations and invest in a fantasy that they are under deathly threat. Because they imagine their own gender commitments might be stripped away by force, they decide they have to suppress others. As she points out, this fear depends on the understanding that it would be very wrong to deprive someone of their sexual identity—and yet it’s weaponized to do the very same thing to other people. Butler also explains how “gender critical feminists” ignore a key feminist insight, which is the need to build coalitions, including with people you don’t like—including, as Black feminists like Bernice Johnson Reagon have known, people who could in other circumstances be a threat to your life. TERFs think they lose something when trans women are women too, as if sex were property, but it isn’t and they don’t. Butler has a tough message for Western feminists, which is that conditioning aid on recognizing gender equality in law can frame equality as a Western, therefore bad, concept, while the West’s sanctimony on human rights rings hollow given its disinterest in the right to food, shelter, and so on.
Gary J. Bass, Judgment at Tokyo: The Tokyo war crimes trials followed the Nuremberg trials, but with much less clarity, in part because the US decided to protect the Emperor despite his involvement in the war. Also notable for participation by Indian and Chinese judges, who had opposite views—the Chinese judge wanted to expose and punish crimes against the Chinese, including mass rape, torture, and slaughter. The Indian judge ultimately voted to acquit, reasoning that starting a war wasn’t illegal and condemning the role of colonialism and racism in both the war and the prosecutions (and the lack of any consideration of whether dropping atomic bombs on civilians constituted a war crime). But lest you think that’s simple, he also downplayed the evidence of Japanese war crimes in China and, ultimately, questioned whether the Holocaust was mere war propaganda.
Adam Zamoyski, Phantom Terror: Political Paranoia and the Creation of the Modern State, 1789 – 1848: A history of conservative/reactionary claims about the dangers posed by revolutionaries, or reformers who they saw as revolutionaries. Presents this as a feedback loop, where repression stems from fantasy but, almost inevitably, generates more resistance—or what looks like resistance—as the state strengthens in response.
Edward J Larson, Summer for the Gods:History of the Scopes trial, from its genesis as a collusive lawsuit designed to embarrass the old white South on behalf of the new white South to the fallout and cultural memory. We tend to think of people in the past as more credulous or single-dimensional than we are, but they weren't.
Jill Burke, How To Be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty and Female Creativity: Argues that the 16th century in Europe has resonance for today, with the rise of a newly visual/beauty-focused culture and the dangers and pleasures it had for women in particular. Newly available mirrors, she argues, made it possible for people who had them to reliably see what they looked like to others. Nose surgery was also successfully performed on women who’d been victims of violent attacks and men who’d duelled.
Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: History of the actual Luddites, arguing that they were far from anti-technology; what they were anti- was exploitation, immiseration, and deskilling, which owners of the new machines were forcing on them. For example, the weekly pay of a Lancashire weaver declined from 25 shillings in 1800 to 14 shillings in 1811. This was connected to the rise in cotton production due to enslavement in America. Weavers demanded that existing laws against abuse be enforced—but the wealthy factory owners who actually had parliamentary representation succeeded instead. Merchant draws a lot of parallels between then and now (gig work and big tech play the role of the factory owners). And, he argues, despite the immediate repression and losses suffered by the Luddites due to the fact that the UK denied most people political representation, they built a foundation for later labor protest and protections. A former head of one of Australia’s largest telecom unions also credited Luddites transported from the UK for Australia’s union tradition.
Jennifer M. Black, Branding Trust: Advertising and Trademarks in Nineteenth-Century America: Some interesting details here, emphasizing continuity rather than a radical shift to the advertising-driven 20th century, but ultimately a little less than was promised, in part because the book sometimes asserts things about what “worked” without defining what “working” meant. E.g., discussing a striking use of typography that involved buying most of a newspaper front page: “Like a modern-day flash sale, the Smiths’ promotion likely caused quite a stir within the city, prompting interested patrons (and perhaps even spectators) to flock to the Smiths’ brewery …. Regardless of its outcome, the promotional sale certainly had the potential to bring in massive profits … a promise that likely justified the added expense of placing such a large front-page ad in the Herald.” But did it? How would we know? It’s an axiom of advertising that half of all ad spend is wasted; the trouble is we don’t know which half. Black’s statement that “[t]hough printers had observed and calculated supposedly proven techniques for decades, advertising still remained a somewhat hit-or-miss business” is hardly confined to the 19th century. It’s interesting and useful to know that advertisers were persuaded that certain techniques worked, but that’s different from being connected to increased sales—especially when advertisers face consumers who have resource constraints and lots of offers from other advertisers who are also taking advantage of putatively successful techniques.
Black identifies testimonials as important for 19th century advertisers, just as they are today via influencers, and also links them to commercial letters of reference as well as religious conversion narratives, both popular at the time. The “then-common cultural tendencies to grant authority to even anonymous printed materials” seems to me just as common today, given the effectiveness of social proof. Using testimonials from ordinary people “implied a leveling of authority where any user’s personal experience could be as important for validating the product as the professional recommendation of doctors or other experts,” again something that is still true. But: “While celebrities might be compensated for their testaments, it was generally assumed [by whom? How do we know?] that average men and women were not.” Black later acknowledges that we don’t actually know how consumers responded to testimonials, though we do know that patent medicines were very profitable, suggesting they were good enough to engender hope.
Black argues that advertisers used gendered and racialized codes to create trustworthy “character,” from an epistolary format to signatures and images of a founder, along with testimonials providing the same evidence from third parties. New printing techniques also enabled these as handwriting-like fonts or even images of handwriting became possible. Black concludes that “novelty” and “character” merged to lead to the rise of the branded character, whether a founder (Lydia Pinkham) or a fictional entity (I’d never heard of Phoebe Snow, but she was a railroad mascot and had a huge cultural presence).
It was interesting to read that pre-Civil War resistance to a federal trademark law was linked to sectional conflict, through the argument that the federal government shouldn’t have any power over commerce. But then, after the Supreme Court struck down Congress’s first attempt in 1879, Black says that despite legislative support, “Congress was able to pass only limited trademark protections” (for foreigners)—how and why was it so limited? What were the arguments against breadth? Why were congressional backers of more protection unsuccessful for the next twenty years? Black links the next revision, in 1905, to Progressive efforts to protect (white) consumers, but business owners were often the biggest supporters of trademark laws. Although protecting consumers was a good thing, “the historian cannot forget the exclusionary roots of respectability politics, … nor should we ignore the ways in which Progressive concerns about food purity and public sanitation dovetailed easily into arguments for racial purity and empire…. Conversations about preserving authenticity and reputation in the market must have resonated loudly with reform-minded individuals who were also interested in eugenics and racial integrity.”
Possibly the most interesting point: the idea of a trademark as crystallizing goodwill—a shorthand for the business—was ideologically consistent with the rise of Taylorism: it was efficient! I also learned more about the ways that printers helped advertisers (try to) attract attention before the rise of ad agencies, including through visual strategies, and how newspapers—especially in New York—insisted for a long time on single column formats against which new visual codes strained. Black also argues that the rise of print culture, in the form of printed cards and large public ads as well as periodicals, assisted the rise of branding because they allowed and encouraged producers to develop a single visual identity that would appear in multiple ways and places. And consumers appropriated trade cards with appealing images printed on them for their own scrapbooks, repurposing them (but also accepting them as “gifts” from the advertiser, which is indeed a proven way of making consumers feel that some reciprocity is owed).
Finally, shame on whoever sought or required, in the caption showing the 1914 Uneeda Biscuit box and the competing Abetta Biscuit (complete with swastika instead of Nabisco’s logo), the “permission” of Mondelez International—no permission is required for this kind of use, even if something shown in the image is still a valid trademark.
Joyce Appleby, Shores of Knowledge: New World Discoveries and the Scientific Imagination: Argues that European “discoveries” were what ultimately broke the stranglehold of the ancients and drove the rise of the scientific method in Europe, as Europeans were increasingly confronted with plants, animals, and people not provided for in ancient texts. I’m not sure I totally buy the causal story, but there certainly is correlation.
Kate Manne, Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia: Manne uses a lot of studies, which you’ve probably seen if you’ve seen fat acceptance writing, to argue that diets and shame are harmful rather than helpful; in particular, discrimination against fat people (including children) harms them much more than the “biological” consequences of weight. Example: “parents in the 1990s were less willing to offer financial support to their fat daughters to attend college, compared with their thinner ones.” We’re in the midst of a trans panic where states are banning the use of puberty blockers for trans kids, but doctors encourage life-altering bariatric surgery for kids as young as 13. She’s a good writer for a summary of a lot of work on the harms of dieting.
She further argues that it’s not accidental that being thin has become much harder in recent decades at the same time that anti-fat discrimination has increased. The effort—and resources—required to eat “healthy” foods, work out a lot, etc.—are seen as morally worthy. As she points out, though, we accept or at least tolerate lots of other choices that increase the risk of morbidity and death (riding motorcycles, rock climbing, cheerleading, etc.). She argues for “body reflexivity” or body autonomy—you don’t “have” to love or accept your body, because that’s another instruction doomed to cause shame and feelings of failure; instead, you should consider your body to be for you, not for pleasing others. As she concludes: “I hence hold out hope for a future in which our current relentless beauty pageant has no more judges—and not a single entrant. It is not that everybody wins or gets a participation trophy in the form of our collective studied neutrality. There should be nothing in its place. There ought to be no contest. And that there is no contest, no judgment, does not mean there can be no appreciation. Go for a walk sometime: you can appreciate a leaf, a sunset, a dog, without ranking it against others or pronouncing it superior.”
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And I don't think you should overlook the extent to which the Axis actively *lost*. As Brett Devereaux argues, fascists are bad at war--even though being Good At War is supposed to be one of fascism's selling points!
And it's not even just fascism, narrowly defined. The German Army showed terrible logistic & supply planning in WW2, but also in WW1 and in East Africa in the late 19th C. The Japanese Imperial Army also kept making war plans with terrible logistic/supply gaps, gaps that were supposed to be made up for by the Samurai Spirit.