Postwar Quotes

Postwar America was a very buttoned-up nation. Radio shows were run by censors, Presidents wore hats, ladies wore girdles. We came straight out of the blue - nobody was expecting anything like Martin and Lewis. A sexy guy and a monkey is how some people saw us.

The Russians obtained a number of plants under Lend-Lease, which had been authorized by Washington, that I thought were not justified for their war effort. They wanted them for postwar use.

In the immediate postwar years, the whole of Europe was in a recession. So first of all, it helped us step out of a recession; it gave a certain amount of speed to the economy. But that was the first step.

If one seeks to analyze experiences and reactions to the first postwar years, I hope one may say without being accused of bias that it is easier for the victor than for the vanquished to advocate peace.

We discussed the history of postwar Japan and how Japan had missed an opportunity to build a more functional democracy because of the focus on fighting communism driven in large part by the American occupation.

Three big assumptions proved wrong: one, that the Iraqi people would welcome us as liberators; two, that oil would soon pay for Iraqi's rebuilding; and, three, that we have plenty of troops, weapons, and equipment for the postwar situation.

I think the day you start building the war plan is the day you start beginning the postwar plan.

It's time for a recovery and reassessment of North American thinkers. Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler and Norman O. Brown are the linked triad I would substitute for Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, whose work belongs to ravaged postwar Europe and whose ideas transfer poorly into the Anglo-American tradition.

The European brand of fascism will probably present its most serious postwar threat to us via Latin America.

The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.

The estimated loss of up to six million dead is founded too much on both emotional, biased testimonies and on exaggerated data in the postwar reckonings of war crimes and on the squaring of accounts with the defeated.