Hywell Williams

Este archivo solo abarca los artículos del autor incorporados a este sitio a partir del 1 de diciembre de 2006. Para fechas anteriores realice una búsqueda entrecomillando su nombre.

Conventional political history, with its story of elections won and lost, struggles to explain what happened to Germany between the unification of 1871 and the nemesis of 1945. Here we are at the furthermost limits of the usefulness of "facts". The consequences of nazism were so catastrophic that there is a gap of historical explanation that might link the possible factual causes with that final Götterdämmerung effect. This remains a mysterious question and it explains why the history of the Third Reich remains big business: a teasing psychodrama as well as a consuming Holocaust. It's at this point that the historian needs an artist's imagination.…  Seguir leyendo »

Of all Europe's nation states refashioned by the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is Russia which lends itself most easily to parody. The cliches mount up as foreigners struggle to understand a country which is almost, but not quite, "European". It is therefore "cowboy capitalists" who have stripped the assets of the nationalised industries in a wave of ill-thought-out privatisation. Chechnya can be used to illustrate the still-ravenous paw of the "Russian bear" bent on oppressing subjugated nationalities, while Vladimir Putin is portrayed as the latest example of a recurrent figure: the "Russian autocrat". In the early 21st century, the heir to the tsars and the old style politburo is surrounded by "oligarchs" rather than priests bearing icons or commissars carrying guns.…  Seguir leyendo »