Putin verteidigt Hitler. Trump hilft Putin. Tucker Carlson: Mord gehört zum Job!

There has been a recent trend among historians and other authors to challenge the standard time frame of the Second World War—one that begins in 1939 and ends in 1945. Other paradigms have been suggested. Author Robert Kaplan, in a recent article written for the Center for a New American Security, refers to the “Long European War,” which he dates from 1914 to 1989, encompassing both world wars as well as the Cold War.1 In his seminal one-volume history of World War II, historian Antony Beevor questions the various time parameters used in the past to frame the war and observes, “History, however, is never tidy.”2 Beevor notes that Western historians tend to neglect Asian roots of World War II, while some Asian historians “argue that the Second World War began in 1931 with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.”3 In a magnificent new single-volume history of the period encompassing the war, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931–1945, British historian Richard Overy examines a wider swath of time as suggested by Beevor. As the title indicates, the author’s perspective is from that of empires, or “nation-empires,” which sets the book apart from other single-volume histories. The title also suggests—with its reference to “blood and ruins”—that the demise of empires is not a peaceful one. Both themes resonate throughout the book, in which Overy makes a singular contribution to our understanding of the roots, conduct, and aftermath of the Second World War. (...) Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931–194 Army University Press