The Character Factory: Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts and the Imperatives of Empire by MichaelRosenthalReview by: Fritz SternForeign Affairs, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Winter, 1986), p. 404Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20043030 .

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404 FOREIGN AFFAIRS

THE CHARACTER FACTORY: BADEN-POWELL'S BOY SCOUTS AND THE IMPERATIVES OF EMPIRE. By Michael Rosenthal. New York: Pantheon, 1986, 335 pp. $22.95.

Ending the "immunity from critical scrutiny" that the Boy Scout move ment and its founder had previously enjoyed, Michael Rosenthal provides a brilliant account of the presuppositions of the movement, an analysis of its conscious and unconscious aims, its much-touted virile values and prej

udices. Baden-Powell had fashioned himself a hero of the Boer War, the war that for many Britons intensified their fears of imperial decline and internal degeneracy. Rosenthal is less concerned with the innocent trappings

of a uniformed youth movement than with its historic meaning, its class and imperial aspects. Scouting was to teach the lower-class children the austere and patriotic virtues that their betters acquired in British public schools. A scholarly work, felicitously written and broadly conceived, that tells us much about a particular strain in British and European culture? and does so with wit, irony and just a trace of excessive, merry revisionism.

SINK THE RAINBOW!: AN ENQUIRY INTO THE GREENPEACE AFFAIR. By John Dyson. London: Gollancz, 1986, 192 pp. (North Pom

fret, Vt.: David & Charles, distributors, $19.95). A popular account by a New Zealand writer, assisted by a Paris reporter

for the International Herald Tribune. French agents conspired to sink the Rainbow Warrior in order to prevent the Greenpeace boat from observing and reporting on scheduled nuclear tests in the Pacific. A dramatic tale, told without identifying sources, of what came to be called France's Under

watergate. A sympathetic picture of Greenpeace with its continuous efforts to stop nuclear testing and protect the threatened environment. A good

mystery story, with the villains the inept agents of the French secret service.

LE CHOIX DE MARIANNE: LES RELATIONS FRANCO-AMERI CAINES, 1944-1948. By Annie Lacroix-Ris. Paris: Messidor, 1985, 222

pp. A tendentious analysis of Franco-American relations from Liberation to

the Marshall Plan, with the theme that the United States forced France into submission and also consistently favored German over French interests.

A crude picture of American "imperialism," of European countries being reduced to states approximating banana republics. Allegedly based on new

archival sources, the book does not identify them; the reader is referred to

the author's these d'etat for the sources. Abundant secondary literature is used selectively. A caricature of revisionism, but enough to suggest that a

serious new look at political-economic relations in that period might be

useful.

THE NAZI DOCTORS: MEDICAL KILLING AND THE PSYCHOL OGY OF GENOCIDE. By Robert Jay Lifton. New York: Basic Books,

1986, 561 pp. $19.95. A major work on the role of doctors in the death camps, largely based

on interviews with Nazi doctors who participated in mass killing or ghastly experiments and with surviving victims. A well-known psychiatrist and writer examines the psychic process?he calls it doubling?by which "banal men" performed "demonic acts." He acknowledges the few resisters and

emphasizes the conduct of "decent Nazis," who were "idealistic" and who

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