Plowshares Into Swords

An in-depth look at how the ideas formulated by the interwar League of Nations shaped American thinking on the modern global order. In Plowshares into Swords, David Ekbladh recaptures the power of knowledge and information developed between World War I and World War II by an international society of institutions and individuals committed to liberal international order and given focus by the League of Nations in Geneva. That information and analysis revolutionized critical debates in a world in crisis. In doing so, Ekbladh transforms conventional understandings of the United States’ postwar hegemony, showing that important elements of it were profoundly influenced by ideas that emerged from international exchanges. The League’s work was one part of a larger transnational movement that included the United States and which saw the emergence of concepts like national income, gross domestic product, and other attempts to define and improve the standards of living, as well as new approaches to old questions about the role of government. Forged as tools for peace these ideas were beaten into weapons as World War II threatened. Ekbladh recounts how, though the US had never been a member of the organization, vital parts of the League were rescued after the fall of France in 1940 and given asylum at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. However, this presence in the US is just one reason its already well-regarded economic analyses and example were readily mobilized by influential American and international figures for an Allied “war of ideas,” plans for a postwar world, and even blueprints for the new United Nations. How did this body of information become so valuable? As Ekbladh makes clear, the answer is that information and analysis themselves became crucial currencies in global affairs: to sustain a modern, liberal global order, a steady stream of information about economics, politics, and society was, and remains, indispensable.

“The terrible bow was drawn taut. Men had let their powers be taken captive and had become the stooges of governments, they had become drinkers of the blood that fuelled their rage, they had become angels of evil, devils who spilled blood like water. A raven with shreds of corpses still stuck to its claws was perched on their shoulder and yet they saw nothing and understood nothing. The orders of platoon commanders were their reasoning and a ghastly rough and tumble was their home, each such home perishing piecemeal as bayonets made mincemeat of arms rising to take aim. Death was a day that had no dusk and horrors became the wont of armies.” Ploughshares into Swords is an expressionist anti-war novel in which Vančura tells the story of the denizens of the Ouhrov estate in language as baroque as the manor that ties them all together. The fragmented narrative introduces the reader to such characters as the Baron Danowitz, his sons, his French concubine, the farmhand František Horá, and the half-wit murderer Řeka in the autumn of 1913, before revealing their fates during the First World War. Spanning an area that stretches from the peaceful farmlands of Bohemia to the battlefields of Galicia, taking in the pubs of Budapest and the hospitals of Cracow, the novel constitutes an unsentimental and naturalistic approach to the war that created Czechoslovakia through a conscious subversion of the prophet Isaiah’s injunction that nations should beat their swords into ploughshares. Ploughshares into Swords is a stunning novel by one of Czech literature’s most important writers. This modernist masterpiece, akin to the work of Isaac Babel and William Faulkner, is now available in English for the very first time.

A critical history of Israel and the Arab–Israeli conflict Eminent historian Arno J. Mayer traces the thinkers, leaders, and shifting geopolitical contexts that shaped the founding and development of the Israeli state. He recovers for posterity internal critics such as the philosopher Martin Buber, who argued for peaceful coexistence with the Palestinian Arabs. “A sense of limits is the better part of valour,” Mayer insists. Plowshares into Swords explores Israel’s indefinite deferral of the “Arab Question,” the strategic thinking behind the building of settlements and border walls, and the endurance of Palestinian resistance.

Sidbury focuses on the history and perspectives of enslaved blacks to develop 'Gabriel's Virginia' as a counterpoint to 'Jeffersonian Virginia.'

Brings together contributions analyzing some pressing issues in the world, and suggests ways and methods to manage these problems. This book covers topics such as the decision-making in the UN Security Council; the position of the United States vis-a-vis the United Nations; human rights and economic and social development; and others.

It is January of 1965 and without warning the North Vietnamese launch their Tet Offensive against the South, routing the American supported army and rolling over territory without a fight. In a matter of days it appears as if the Communists are about to score their biggest victory in the Cold War since Stalin's armies rolled over Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, while the West is on the verge of an unprecedented defeat. In Washington, President Lyndon B. Johnson cleans house at the Pentagon and reaches across the political divide to a man who has built a career out of being tough on the Reds: former Vice President M. Richard Nixon, a man in the wilderness of politics after a career ending defeat. With Nixon as Secretary of Defense, the United States sends more than a million men to South Vietnam and proceeds to bomb the North back to the Stone Age, but it is not enough, as the North Vietnamese refuse to give up and beg for terms of peace. Is it time to think about the unthinkable? Told in the form of an oral history by the men and women who fought, protested and profited from the Vietnam War, Beating Plowshares into Swords is a look at the history that never was, but might have been, and a very different 1960's than the one we remember. For years I've heard historians and armchair warriors claim that America fought the war in Vietnam with our hands tied behind our backs; that we really could have won if only North Vietnam had been bombed into to a waste land; if only the Ho Chi Minh Trail had been cut; if only a million more men had been sent in country; if only we had wanted to win. In this short novel, I attempt to construct a scenario where the United States military put the hammer down on the North Vietnamese and what the consequences of such a policy would have been for America, Indochina and the wider world. At the same time I constructed different fates for such historical personages as LBJ and Nixon, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, as seen thought the eyes of fictional characters: a young man fighting in the jungles of Southeast Asia, a General working in the halls of the Pentagon and the Oval Office, and an idealistic school teacher marching in the streets of America's cities. History is a great Leviathan, driven by ego and ambition, fear and avarice, ignorance and insight, brute instinct and sheer brilliance, and most of all by forces far beyond the control of any one person no matter how much power they possess. It is full of fascinating What Ifs and Beating Plowshares into Swords is but one of them.

In September 1980, eight Catholic activists made their way into a Pennsylvania General Electric plant housing parts for nuclear missiles. Evading security guards, these activists pounded on missile nose cones with hammers and then covered the cones in their own blood. This act of nonviolent resistance was their answer to calls for prophetic witness in the Old Testament: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not take up sword against nation; they shall never again know war.” Plowshares explores the closely interwoven religious and social significance of the group’s use of performance to achieve its goals. It looks at the group’s acts of civil disobedience, such as that undertaken at the GE plant in 1980, and the Plowshares’ behavior at the legal trials that result from these protests. Interpreting the Bible as a mandate to enact God’s kingdom through political resistance, the Plowshares work toward “symbolic disarmament,” with the aim of eradicating nuclear weapons. Plowshares activists continue to carry out such “divine obediences” against facilities where equipment used in the production or deployment of nuclear weapons is manufactured or stored. Whether one agrees or disagrees with their actions, this volume helps us better understand their motivations, logic, identity, and ultimate goal.

General Maxwell D. Taylor was one of the great military heroes of recent American history. During World War II, Taylor fought in Sicily and Italy before parachuting into France as head of the 101st Airborne Division on Dday, 1944. Later he commanded the Division in the Arnhem drop in Holland and in the defense of Basting in the Bulge. After the war, Taylor served as superintendent of West Point, U.S. Commander in Berlin, Commander of the Eighth Army in Korea, and Army Chief of Staff under President Eisenhower. John F. Kennedy named him chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and sent him to Vietnam in 1961; he returned to that country as Ambassador in 1965, and served as a key advisor to President Johnson until 1969. In Swords and Plowshares, Taylor tells the firsthand story of a life of action, courage, strategy, and dedication. Offering candid and controversial views of such central figures as Dwight Eisenhower, John Dulles, the Kennedy's, and General Westmoreland, Taylor contrasts their varying views of the role of air power in modern warfare, and presents his own approach to the problems of winning wars and making peace. These memoirs ably illustrate why General Maxwell Taylor deserves to rank among Marshall, Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Patton as one of the great American military geniuses of our time.