C8| Saturday/Sunday, February 29 - March 1, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
The Goebbels Diaries, 1939-1941
By Joseph Goebbels
Translated and edited by Fred Taylor (1983)
1
In addition to being Hitler’s chief
propagandist, Joseph Goebbels was
a devoted father who loved spending
time with his family. In his diary, he
exults in the Luftwaffe attacks on Britain.
“An entire city literally wiped out,” he
boasts, a few days after the Nov. 14, 1940,
raid on Coventry that destroyed its famed
cathedral and killed more than 500 civilians.
He repeatedly gives vent to his anti-Semitic
passions. “I argue in favor of the rope
for Jews,” he writes. But he also reveals
himself to be an adoring father, as when he
describes how his children greeted him for
his 43rd birthday. “They stand up straight
and pipe up their poems and hand over
their gifts and flowers. Wonderfully sweet!”
The diary ends several years before May 1,
1945, when, as the Russians closed in on
Hitler’s bunker, Goebbels and his wife
poisoned their six young children before
killing themselves.
The Fringes of Power:
Downing Street Diaries,
Vol. 1: 1939-October 1941
By John Colville (1986)
2
The most intimate portrait of life at
10 Downing Street in 1940 and 1941
was produced by John Colville,
one of Churchill’s private secretaries.
A writer of keen lucidity and winning style,
Colville provides a day-by-day glimpse of
Churchill’s tastes and temperament—the
prime minister loathed whistling and the
sound of hammering—as well as his
management of the government.
Smarting from an unpleasant encounter
with Churchill’s wife, Colville notes, “Mrs. C
considers it one of her missions in life to put
people in their place.” He records moments
of hilarity, as when, late at night, Churchill
would march about to martial music played
on a gramophone. When air raids occurred,
Churchill often raced to the nearest roof
to watch, dragging Colville along. By the
spring of 1941, the raids had devastated the
streetscape around 10 Downing Street and
Britain’s survival seemed far from certain.
On April 19, with German aircraft clouding
the night sky, Colville takes stock. “Certainly
as I walk through the streets,” he writes,
“I look at London’s landmarks more
carefully now, with a feeling that it
may be the last time I shall see them.”
TheWarYears,1939–1945
By Harold Nicolson
Edited by Nigel Nicolson (1967)
3
Harold Nicolson, parliamentary
secretary for Churchill’s Ministry of
Information, stood witness to critical
moments in the war. This volume
includes both his diary entries and his
letters to and from his wife, the writer
Vita Sackville-West. In one particularly
moving exchange, they conspire to commit
suicide should the Germans invade, which
in May 1940 seemed a near certainty. “I am
not in the least afraid of such sudden and
Erik Larson
The author, most recently, of ‘The Splendid and the Vile:
A Saga of Churchill, Family and Defiance During the Blitz’
Thanks to his success in the oil
business, Rockefeller—who, like most
of the early oilmen, was a devout
Christian—had the means to standard-
ize and regularize American religion
and American philanthropy. His foun-
dations inaugurated the modern era of
organized philanthropy; his religious
contributions supported the rise of
what would become known as “main-
line” Christianity. Increasingly influ-
enced by the “social gospel” thought
of progressive Christian theologians
like Walter Rauschenbusch, Rocke-
feller promoted a less doctrinal, more
ecumenical Christian faith organized
less around emotional encounters with
the divine and individual salvation
than around social progress and in-
stitutional reform. The northeastern
establishment and its core institu-
tions—ranging from Riverside Church,
the temple of modernist, liberal Chris-
tianity, to the Council on Foreign Rela-
tions and the University of Chicago—
all bore the Rockefeller stamp.
The wildcatters and independents
were also interested in Christianity
ContinuedfrompageC7
and politics, and they resisted Rocke-
feller’s attempts to standardize Ameri-
can life in these areas as much as they
did in the oil patch. Lyman Stewart,
who sold out his Pennsylvania hold-
ings to Standard Oil, founded what be-
came Unocal in California, and as his
wealth increased, he used it to counter
Rockefeller’s religious influence. As
Mr. Dochuk reports, Stewart and his
brother funded the writing and pub-
lication of the key “Fundamentals”
pamphlets from which “fundamental-
ist” Christianity would take its name.
Stewart also founded the Bible Insti-
tute of Los Angeles (known today by
its acronym Biola University) as a bea-
con of anti-modernist Christian faith.
The contest between, on the one
hand, the standardizing, establish-
ment, northeastern world of Stan-
dard Oil, the Rockefeller-linked Chase
Manhattan Bank and the Rockefeller
foundations, and, on the other hand,
the foundations and influence of the
mostly southern and western inde-
pendents, would reverberate through
culture and politics and shape the
development of the Republican Party.
The rise of Barry Goldwater, whose
campaign was supported by inde-
pendent oilmen like J. Howard Pew,
challenged and ultimately broke the
power of the liberal wing of the
Republican Party and its champion,
John D. Rockefeller’s grandson
Nelson. As Mr. Dochuk suggests, the
libertarian philanthropy of the Kochbelieved that philanthropy and self-
regulation by business were necessary
to safeguard the capitalism that, they
believed, made America great. Both
saw Christianity as an essential ele-
ment of American life and believed
that American democracy and social
cohesion depended on the health of
American Christianity. At times, as
when President Eisenhower invoked
an ecumenical vision of American civil
religion as a national and even global
bond in the fight against Communism,
the two sides of the oil world worked
together in a common cause.
As the Middle East became more
important to world oil markets, the oil
establishment and the wildcatters
pursued different approaches to the
region, Mr. Dochuk argues. The estab-
lishment, hoping to stave off national-
ization while maintaining its lucrative
concessions in the region, sought to
build common ground with Arab re-
gimes and opposed any American sup-
port for Israel. The wildcatters saw
events in the Middle East through the
apocalyptic lens of the “dispensation-
alist” theology taught at schools like
Biola and increasingly popular among
evangelicals and fundamentalists. For
them, the rise of Israel and its place in
the divine plan often mattered more
than any difficulties that the U.S.-
Israel relationship created with the
Gulf petro-states.
Mr. Dochuk sympathizes with nei-
ther the Rockefeller mainline estab-lishment nor the religious and political
wildcatters in the Sunbelt. He notes
how from the early days of the indus-
try a third group of critics appeared:
people who warned of the environ-
mental devastation associated with
the petroleum industry and saw both
the organized capitalism of Standard
Oil and the more laissez-faire ideology
of the wildcatters as threats to core
American values. These critics, the
author suggests, may have the last
laugh.
Mr. Dochuk’s obituary for the oil
industry gives the book’s close a
somewhat dated feel. The shale revo-
lution, which he does not analyze, has
once again shaken up the American oil
industry. Not only has that revolution
made the United States once again the
world’s largest oil producer; the devel-
opment of the industry saw a replay of
the rivalries between the wildcat pros-
pectors and the established oil compa-
nies. One wants to know what connec-
tions if any Mr. Dochuk sees between
the rise of shale and the rise of the oil-
friendly, evangelical-friendly Trump
administration. In any case, what Mr.
Dochuk has given us, even with the
loose ends, is a major step forward in
our understanding of the American
past and of the ways that energy, busi-
ness, faith and politics intertwined to
shape the country we live in today.Mr. Mead is the Global View
columnist at the Journal.Crude Oil
And Manifest
Destiny
FIVE BESTDIARIES FROM THE BLITZ
BOOKS
‘A ton danced over the Thames and filled/A thousand panes with stars,/And the splinters leapt on the Surrey shore/To the tune of a thousand scars.’—MERVYN PEAKE
But in an era of religious disagreement, and
with the authority of competing churches increas-
ingly resented, more brazen atheism began to
appear. In Mr. Ryrie’s account, it wasn’t the formal
philosophical atheism of Thomas Hobbes and
Spinoza that shook the faith of the people. Rather,
the weakening religious certainty of the people
cleared the ground for the books and arguments
of godless philosophers.
The entire process, furthermore, did not simply
follow from detached “reason,” as the New Atheist
narrative likes to insist, but was also, and with
greater effect, an emotional response to Christi-
anity’s traumatic internal strife. The central figure
in Mr. Ryrie’s account isn’t some bald-faced
speculative atheist reveling in godlessness like an
early-modern prefiguring of Nietzsche. Rather, it is
an unwillingly tormented skeptic: the atheist “who
could think of little else but God, and who feared
he did not exist.” Radical Protestants were “trained
not to ignore or suppress their doubts, but lean
into them in the hope and expectation that this was
the road to a firmer, more mature, post-atheistic
religion.” Many indeed did solidify their faith, but
a growing number cracked under the strain.
“Unbelievers” is an elegant and canny book.
Fixed within the era of the Renaissance and
Reformation, its commentary has a distinctly
modern relevance. It offers a salutary reminder
that most of us adopt many beliefs out of intuition,
habit or deference to our social environment. It is
common nowadays to dismiss religious belief as
conventional in this manner, but atheism itself is
often just as surely produced by a lifeless and
unreasoned conformity. It is disconcerting to
recognize that our dearest beliefs can be (at least
partly) rationalizations of our feelings and desires.
Mr. Ryrie doesn’t intend this point to justify a
chaotic relativism but to suggest that our own
ideas, and not just those of our ideological
opposites, can be more visceral than rational.
“In early modern times,” he writes, “atheism and
unbelief were active stances. They required some
commitment, given that custom, habit, society and
law all made a quiet religious conformity the path
of least resistance.” In modern times, it increas-
ingly appears that the opposite conditions prevail,
and that religiosity is now a dogged counterculture
in a world of disbelief and indifferentism. In
particular historical circumstances, either of
these two perspectives might appear “intuitively
obvious,” but neither really is. Nor is religious
belief or disbelief likely to evaporate entirely
under the withering sun of pure reason.
In an intelligent conclusion, Mr. Ryrie observes
that the “humanist-materialist argument against
Christianity” has arguably weakened over the past
century. In 1900, an educated European might have
believed that “the universe is infinitely old and
entirely deterministic, that humanity’s ‘races’ are
fundamentally different from one another; that
the process of evolution is governed by some
sort of progressive life force.” But scientific break-
throughs, such as the Big Bang and the tracing of
common human ancestry, might be taken to
accord with allegorical readings of Genesis.
It is thus not really the case that a slow
accumulation of scientific discovery is inexorably
crushing the life out of theism. And if modern
atheism is not simply the triumph of the scientific
mind, perhaps, like its early-modern cousin, it
springs partly from emotions such as anxiety and
anger. Our ancestors doubted and despaired in the
face of moral disagreement and institutional failure.
There is no reason that we moderns shouldn’t
react similarly to the same conditions. In these
respects, the New Atheism may not be so new.Mr. Collins is a professor of history at Queen’s
University in Kingston, Ontario.ContinuedfrompageC7The Terror
In the Breast
Of the Unbeliever
walks at night, even as guns fire and bombs
fall. It’s clear, however, that he understands
that something ineffable has shifted in
the universe. “If there was ever a time
when one should wear life like a loose
garment,” he writes on Sept. 15, 1940,
after a week of heavy nightly bombing,
“this is it.”Love and War in London
By Olivia Cockett
Edited by Robert Malcolmson (2008)5
Mass-Observation, a social-science
organization established before the
war to study ordinary British life,
recruited hundreds of citizens to
submit daily diaries. One of the best of these
was kept by Olivia Cockett, a police clerk,
whose entries during the war describe not
only the trauma of bombing but her own
transformation from terrified victim to
defiant civilian warrior. She also writes
with a racy candor, revealing a life full of
exploding bombs and sex, the first provided
by the Luftwaffe, the second by her lover,
a married man named Bill Hole. As the
bombing intensifies, Bill becomes fearful,
which angers Olivia, “and I cannot disguise
the fact from either of us.” Her trans-
formative moment comes when she
extinguishes an incendiary bomb that
lands near her home. Thrilled by her own
courageous act, she becomes positively
fearless. One night during a stroll with Bill,
two high-explosive bombs fall nearby.
He shouts for her to get down. By now,
however, she has other priorities.
“I thought, ‘Not in my new coat.’ ”honorable death,” Nicolson writes on May 26.
“What I dread is being tortured and
humiliated.” He offers vivid glimpses of
London under aerial attack. The drone of
German aircraft sounds like a “dentist’s drill.”
Throughout his diary, Nicolson expresses
a confidence that Britain will prevail, but
acknowledges that his belief is groundless.
“If only we could show people some glimmer
of light at the end of the tunnel, we could
count upon their enduring any ordeal,” he
writes in March 1941. “But the danger is that
there is no light beyond the light of faith.”The London Observer:
The Journal of Gen. Raymond E. Lee,
1940-1941
Edited by James Leutze (1972)4
Raymond Lee was an American
military attaché to the U.S. embassy
in London. The day after the first
big attack on the city, he inspects
the damage, including that to Victoria
station, which had been struck by a bomb.
There he finds a message posted on the
door. “The sign said, with true British
restraint, ‘Closed on account of
obstructions.’ ” He speculates that the
Luftwaffe chose weekends to launch its
raids because that’s when “the British
automatically forsake their posts.” He warns
that unless something is done to counter
this tendency, “the British weekend...
would ultimately prove to be the downfall
of the Empire.” For Lee ordinary life
continues with little interruption. He sleeps
in his own bed, despite bombs detonating
nearby; he watches movies and takesANTHONY POTTER COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
UNDERGROUNDBritons take shelter during the Blitz.brothers continues this political tra-
dition today.
Mr. Dochuk traces the links be-
tween religion and oil beyond the
United States. Rockefeller philan-
thropy played an extensive role in
shifting the weight of American mis-
sionary activity from religious pros-
elytization to the provision of educa-
tional and medical services in bothChina and the Middle East. The inde-
pendents supported the activities of
conservative Christian missionaries in
Latin America, both helping them
secure a foothold in the emerging oil
industry of the region and setting the
stage for the extraordinary growth of
evangelical and charismatic Christi-
anity that is currently reshaping the
politics and culture of countries from
Guatemala to Brazil.
The opposition between the Rocke-
feller and wildcatter worlds was never
total. Both visions saw oil as the fuel
that would propel the United States to
world power while transforming living
standards around the world. BothFrom the day it was first
refined, oil has been seen
by many Christians as
one of God’s blessings
on America.