Part Three: Captive Minds, Girls, Girls, Girls Summary and Analysis

Captive Minds: A few years before the onset of Judt's disease, he visited Krasnogruda, the manor house of famed Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. Milosz was born in 1911 and raised in the interwar Polish republic. He survived the Nazi occupation and moved to Paris. In 1951, he moved to the West and published his seminal essay, "The Captive Mind," which discusses the attraction of intellectuals to the appeal of authority and authoritarianism. Milosz was a believer in "Ketman," or living by the words you preach, without internalized contradiction that plagues most of society (politicians, for example). In Judt's interpretation, he draws on the example of America's enthusiasm to back the war in Iraq post-9/11. Now that the war has been widely viewed as unjust and seemingly unending, many Americans now claim...