Mainstream history these days tends to gloss over the first few years of German history after WW1, skipping ahead to the Nazi Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. This does everyone a disservice, which is why it's important to understand events like the Bolshevik attempts to seize not just Berlin and Bavaria, but other places in Europe as well.
Post-WW I Germany is crucial. But another delicate time that is arguably more important to contemporary events, and has been even more thoroughly memory-holed, is post-WW II Germany, 1945-48 or 49. There's a very interesting rabbit hole there that not many people are aware of.
How and why did interwar right wing dictatorships arise? In large part because of middle class terror of the real threat from communists taking over, and their proven track record of large scale, murderous violence against "class enemies." Lenin unleashed the Red Terror in Russia, and lots of people wanted to do the same in Europe and around the world. Death threats have a way of making people wake up, look for their guns, get organized, and preemptively secure themselves.
I recently read Byline: Ernest Hemingway, a collection of his journalism. A good book. He was in Italy right after World War I. He has one article about that. You can see the hard leftists itching to bring the violence, and the demobilized soldiers and solid citizens who are the targets of the left joining forces and fighting in the streets. Those original disorganized right wing street gangs because Mussolini's boys. Not many people were interested in constitutional democracy. Everyone knew who their enemies were, and wanted to bash their heads in. When it gets to that stage, it is hard to have nice things anymore. The lefties used the tried and true method of starting a fight, then screaming that they are being attacked, to get sympathy in the press, and abroad. Some things never change.
A guy like me grew up before the dawn of the Internet has less facility at finding some of the cool things out there than many of you younger guys! Nonetheless, I will look around …
Hey Niccolo, first time long time. Just wanted to pop in and say that if you would like someone to proofread your entries in the future I'd be happy to do so. Really enjoying the content and looking forward to this book club.
They were reacting to the prospect of a loss of status. The reactionary currents from which the radical right of the 20s emerged began to form during the economic depression if the late 19th c. The impact of cheap grain from America, Canada, Argentina and Australia depressed the rents of the landowning classes and fostered a climate of morbid and hysterical cultural pessimism. The war exposed the realities of politics (the reduction of people into disposable objects) and the disillusionment created by mechanised slaughter undermined the old social order.
The reactionaries were defined by a belief in recovering the past through an act of will applied via a revolution from the right. The revolutionaries of the Left were partially a foil, partly partners in a Girardian exchange of desire via mimesis.
The Bolsheviks were not Jacobins. Nobody reappeared or rose from any grave. The Bolsheviks were inspired by the Jacobins and invoked them constantly. But these comparisons have severe limitations. The differences between the Jacobins and Bolsheviks were significant. The Jacobins pioneered revolution. They did it themselves. The Bolsheviks, however, were professional revolutionaries (whose party membership exploded during the war) who belonged to a much, much, larger controlled opposition over which the Tsarist authorities lost control when a rival government (Imperial Germany) decided that they needed mayhem in Russia. The revolutions in central Europe were something else yet again.
And the erosion of confidence and the anxieties over the imminence of revolution amongst the ruling class had been building for years before WW1. King George V expressed his fears of revolution or civil war in England. Status was integral to the politics of the era and to the reactions to 1917.
As for today, the females in the education racket (both cis and trans) are neither Bolsheviks not Jacobins. They are almost always employees paid to provide indoctrination in an American version of Maoism. What we are seeing in the West is an elite sponsored campaign of destabilisation using the skin-suit of radical traditions to camouflage the consolidation of corporate power in an era of increasing inequality and to justify a social re-ordering to suit a transnational form of capitalism.
Things definitely have the potential to get out of hand, the widespread vogue for making an analogy between the blue-hairs and BLM and genuine revolutionaries of either the Jacobin or Bolshevik type threatens to lead us all astray.
What is remarkable about the SJW/Woke phenomenon, the Great Wokening and the racial reckoning, is its singularity. This is bewildering...it certainly bewilders me and I find historical allusions to Jacobins or Bolsheviks simply deepens my confusion.
I expect that the comments thread on this book will get us all into very detailed (and contested) takes on events. Should be v. interesting.
Firstly, it certainly does not apply to the Vendee at all, only the radical right in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th c. And status anxieties (no small thing given what we now know about neurochemistry and the endocrine system) played a central role. No ifs or buts. Deference was integral to the way society operated. And the so-called 'Social Question' (what to do with the working classes) was intimately caught up with considerations of the status due to particular classes.
Status is always important because it formalises priority in the allocation of resources (both economic and sexual). And all human behaviour derives from the satisfaction of the need to eat or reproduce.
Secondly, status is integral to the SJW/Woke/DEI phenomenon, just as it was (and remains) to the Civil Rights movement and its institutional legacy. The deprioritisation of the maximally disfavoured is all about conditioning them (you and me included) into a carefully constrained place within the caste system that is being developed at the moment.
The grooming of children and the abusive medical regulation of reproductive and mental health is very much caught up with status. A population that will defer to the expertise of professionals who promote 'gender-affirmative' care for whatever reason are either cowed into submission or are willing to sacrifice their own kids to maintain their position within the system. Here is a link to an article by Rod Dreher that is truly eye-opening and that may make this point clear. It concerns the kids of military families.
In the case of parents resisting the system, they are prioritising their kids over the deference that is required by authority which is precisely why they are problematic for the regime.
Im always fascinated by how IGNORANT historians ( leaning left, always) are about the emergence of fascism.
It has always been clear to me that it was both a REACTION movement against increasingly violent and militant COMMUNISM, and an ALTERNATIVE-DISDAIN for democracy, a political system that at the time was perceived to be super weak to confront the violence from communist movements ( Ebert's reaction towards the 1919 uprisings was the exception) and to be super SLOW and pointless in solving economic issues (well, modern democracy still sucks at this--some things never change :) )
And you're right in point it out that these midwit "historians" (Michael Beschloss stupid face comes to mind) make their surprised pikachu face about the "sudden" emergence of fascism....is it uncomfortable for them to face that THEIR side engaged in all forms of violence (bolshevism, anarchism) from the late 19th century to the interwar period?
The revolutionary violence sweeping across Europe at that time was an extension of the violence unleashed by the cynical, amoral and reckless regimes in power in 1914. Those regimes were monarchies and republics, not peoples' republics. They gambled on war as a means of constraining the energies of their own people, thereby steering people away from revolution. They gambled with the lives of millions upon millions of ordinary people. They lost.
The old regimes (Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns, Romanovs and Ottomans) cheerfully waged ethnic warfare, pogroms, forced migrations, mass imprisonment throughout WW1. They even used the war to reintroduce slave labour in Europe itself. It was the dynastic regimes who used the war to set up the first concentration camps (Theresienstadt in Bohemia was used to confine Austrian civilians of Russian ethnicity from Galicia who were guilty of no crime and convicted by no court, just rounded up and held under brutal conditions that killed many off).
The generals made a mess of the war and looked for scapegoats. In Russia the generals blamed the Jews so the police arranged pogroms. In Germany the general staff wanted to do the same but, being very Germanic, checked out the stats and discovered that Jews were getting too many Iron Crosses for the narrative to work and so were unable to follow the Russian example. The Turks used forced relocation and massacre to inflict a genocide upon the Armenians.
When it all came crashing down the warmongering monarchs of Central Europe ran away like cowards. Not a single one of the German rulers (or the Austrian one) challenged any of the revolutionaries directly. They just fled. Enlisted men doing the same would have been shot for desertion. But cowardice looks different in the commander. He wears a better uniform, after all.
Wars radicalise people. WWI certainly radicalised vast numbers of people. The violence of the Reds speaks for itself. The same is true for the Whites as well.
The left was revolting BEFORE WW1, and freely engaging in violence to achieve tgeir goals
Fun fact: one of the only 3 POTUS that died murdered, was shot by an ANARCHIST ( prez mcKinley)
What else can a movement do when one of the sacred texts of the neo-religion proclaims things like "workers of the world unite" and affirms that the goal is a "diktatorship of the proletariat"... of course that implies certain violence acceptable vs the bourgeoisie, middle classes and nobility !!!
An ideology of HATE, if you will, and as usual, the left projects itself onto others...
Its amazing how Marx-Engels talked and wrote about mid-18th century industrial capitalism as something so bad and exploitative,..and ended up offering something even more retarded as a "solution"
Correct me if I am wrong, but German Marxists voted with conservatives, liberals and reactionaries to support the war in 1914 so their presumed hatred of the old order can't have been that intense or problematic.
Nor was it so toxic that they were unwelcome on the think tanks that were responsible for preparing the plans of German gov't and industry for post-war reconstruction of the continent (plans that gave birth to just about every iteration of the policies for European integration ever since). Ultimately it was the mainstream of German Marxism who turned on the radicals making the liberal democratic republic safe for the bourgeoisie in the first place.
The Austro-Hungarian Marxists circa 1914 were so consumed by hatred that they too supported the monarchy and the war effort itself. For well over a generation before that they had vigorously condemned terrorism such as the assassination of the kaiserin.
It is possible that this was all a feint. It is also possible that the compromises and accommodation became less and less viable over time.
The benefit of hindsight is that people forget the awkward stuff, the details that belie the narrative. And they forget that the celebration of violence as a salvific force was already a defining feature of thought across much of the political spectrum by 1914. Militarism was essentially the state ideology of Wilhelmine Germany...to the utter disgust of a certain professor of philology in Basel who had seen the Franco-Prussian war a first-hand and who had a few thoughts on the stupidity and coarseness of both Left and Right and the ruin to which they were dragging Europe.
Forgot to add, the guy who shot McKinley was not a Marxist. He was an anarchist (just like Mussolini at one stage). If McKinley's assassin is to be considered representative of the generic Left, then the killers of Rasputin would have to be considered representative of the well-heeled and well-born.
Furthermore, the value of violence as a routine political tool was accepted across the political system. The use of military force to suppress workers and peasants (during strikes, protests or even standard policing) was taken for granted by just about everyone. The shocking thing about revolutions was that they both amplified and reversed the direction of the violence towards those who had previously enjoyed a monopoly on its use.
Also, I am confused by your remark about mid-18th century capitalism. Capitalism was a 19th century phenomenon.
And precisely because it was so bad and exploitative that just about every serious political thinker of the century regarded it as humanly unsustainable: defenders of private property from Pope Leo XIII through to Bismarck considered capitalism itself as a threat to the established social order and in need of reform.
Could not agree more. That scene explains the human condition better than all the PhDs submitted in several centuries combined. You can't get any better than Kubrick for acuity.
"the first concentration camps." The first concentration camps were somewhat the Spanish in Cuba and the concentrated died in horrific numbers of starvation and thirst, bad water, disease. The next concentration camps were the English locking up the Boers in the 2d Boer war, same results but it's always different when they speak English.
You are perfectly right. I should have qualified that by being specific. The first concentration camps in Europe were established by the Austro-Hungarians.
The Brits in South Africa started it off. Would love to know where they got the idea from.
The variant forms of fascism (very different from each other) were obviously reactions to the challenge posed by the USSR in its early, expansive, stage, when the Soviets were serious about exporting revolution. But they also drew on currents of reaction, some quite radical and extreme, that had been flowing prior to 1917. These currents were radicalised by the war, by 1917 and then further radicalised by the civil conflicts that went on throughout the early to mid 20s.
It is reasonable to hypothesize that without the war the reactionaries of the early 20th c. would have been more benign and vastly less dangerous. Ditto the radicals.
It was Hitler who made the point about the German princes running away. I am not sure if he called them cowards...he probably didn't. He simply pointed out that had even a single one of the eighteen or so monarchs been prepared to risk their lives in 1918 the Weimar Republic would not have been established. Perfectly true. But they did run away and given the militaristic character of the German monarchies since from the early middle ages until 1918 it is a point that is worth making. If you want to be a war-lord you gotta have the chops for it. No ifs or buts.
Blame for WW1 belongs to all sides. Edward VII (responsible for the Triple Entente) and Kaiser Bill (an a-grade misfit, geopolitical moron and all-round p.o.s.) take the largest portions.
The British were confronted by developments that they had never encountered. Since the wars in France and, later, the first treaty of Lisbon (establishing the Anglo-Lusitanian alliance) the English had always sought to support the little guy against the bigger on the continent. It worked brilliantly for centuries. Until it didn't.
What worries me is that Turbo America appears to be following the English in applying precisely this strategy (Ukraine vs Russia, Taiwan vs China). As an Aussie I do not like the idea of living in Novy Ukraina.
this sounds quite interesting (paperback on the way). while i am thoroughly enjoying the book clubs, the weekend reading, and the bongland diaries, can we please get some more gay sex?
Post WW1 is well summarized by Churchill "The World Crisis: Aftermath" the last in a series.
He was of course still deeply involved in post war affairs.
He was not at Versailles but well informed.
>Part of the problems that occurred after WW1 was Wilson insisted on a Full Academic Review and completion of the American Survey of the various nations *as they descended into chaos* instead of giving clear simple directions and the vision of the future they could expect.
So Germany, Greece-Turkey and the Balkans, Russia burned while the academics gathered information.
In the end the Big 5* decided the future, in the interim Wilson blew it at home by insulting the entire Republican party including the voters, never mind the elected Senate and the USA withdrew.
WW's review...sounds like make-work for would-be philosopher-kings...vastly more attractive for WW than merely accepting the world as it is and just stopping it from burning to the ground. Of course, if people died as a consequence that is just proof that the review process was warranted in the first place and that the recommendations superior to any choices made by the dead. Simple. And people wonder why the conquering barbarians of old now look good by comparison.
Still WW compares favourably to vampiric grifters like the Clintons or brain-damaged hyenas like Nuland, Blinken and Sullivan. Colonel House...come back...all is forgiven.
Of the Big 5 USA and Japan still big, but Japan much diminished.
In a rare win for "things in the US that still actually work", my copy has arrived via inter-library loan. It has been withdrawn from its university library, hundreds of miles away, a grand total of 13 times since its 1965 arrival, and from the proximity of the dates I'm fairly sure that four of the withdrawals were from the same individual. (What must it be like to devote years of your life to toiling away on obscure political subjects, only for nobody at all to read your output? Couldn't be me!) In any case, for just $3 the book is mine for two weeks.
I thought this might be quite a dry read but, being just one chapters in, I am enjoying not just the historical lesson of an era (19th century Bavaria; we are still scene-setting) of which I'm almost totally ignorant, but Mitchell's economy of language. On Emperor Ludwig, between the descriptions of the genius of his autarkic rule, a moment of measured, faint praise: "He was successful insofar as he may be credited with the fact that Bavaria had scarcely any social element by 1948 which could be described as a proletariat."
Next chapter: the introduction of Eisner into this Bavaria - the post-monarchial, newly-industrial, newly-party political, whose sweeping away of the old world for the new happened in less than a century... looking forward to seeing what happens.
Maybe you've explained this somewhere, but does one have to be a paid subscriber to join the book club? It looks like some good books are sprinkled in here!
Hi Cory! Yeah, it's for paying subscribers as it's a bonus feature that takes a lot of work on my part. Hopefully you can join us. If you choose to do so and need a copy of the book, I can lend one to you.
Just look in the comments here.
Mainstream history these days tends to gloss over the first few years of German history after WW1, skipping ahead to the Nazi Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. This does everyone a disservice, which is why it's important to understand events like the Bolshevik attempts to seize not just Berlin and Bavaria, but other places in Europe as well.
Join us and subscribe!
Post-WW I Germany is crucial. But another delicate time that is arguably more important to contemporary events, and has been even more thoroughly memory-holed, is post-WW II Germany, 1945-48 or 49. There's a very interesting rabbit hole there that not many people are aware of.
How and why did interwar right wing dictatorships arise? In large part because of middle class terror of the real threat from communists taking over, and their proven track record of large scale, murderous violence against "class enemies." Lenin unleashed the Red Terror in Russia, and lots of people wanted to do the same in Europe and around the world. Death threats have a way of making people wake up, look for their guns, get organized, and preemptively secure themselves.
I recently read Byline: Ernest Hemingway, a collection of his journalism. A good book. He was in Italy right after World War I. He has one article about that. You can see the hard leftists itching to bring the violence, and the demobilized soldiers and solid citizens who are the targets of the left joining forces and fighting in the streets. Those original disorganized right wing street gangs because Mussolini's boys. Not many people were interested in constitutional democracy. Everyone knew who their enemies were, and wanted to bash their heads in. When it gets to that stage, it is hard to have nice things anymore. The lefties used the tried and true method of starting a fight, then screaming that they are being attacked, to get sympathy in the press, and abroad. Some things never change.
This looks like a good book. Yeah, pricey.
Good comment. As for the book, I'm sure a guy like you can find it online.
A guy like me grew up before the dawn of the Internet has less facility at finding some of the cool things out there than many of you younger guys! Nonetheless, I will look around …
<cough, cough>
https://es.annas-archive.org/md5/8395bcf3777ef061c68360d2f50b46ef
Stanley Payne's recent writings on the Spanish Republic come to mind on that theme
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/01/the-road-to-revolution
Hey Niccolo, first time long time. Just wanted to pop in and say that if you would like someone to proofread your entries in the future I'd be happy to do so. Really enjoying the content and looking forward to this book club.
Thanks, I appreciate the offer.
So the Bolsheviks were behind it ! Those damn meddling Russians ! What next, meddling in (democratic) elections ?
It really bothers me when people say that right wingers are more violent than leftists. History has so successfully been re-written.
Everyone likes to sneer at 'reactionaries'. No one likes to follow the thought to the end and question what they were reacting to.
They were reacting to the prospect of a loss of status. The reactionary currents from which the radical right of the 20s emerged began to form during the economic depression if the late 19th c. The impact of cheap grain from America, Canada, Argentina and Australia depressed the rents of the landowning classes and fostered a climate of morbid and hysterical cultural pessimism. The war exposed the realities of politics (the reduction of people into disposable objects) and the disillusionment created by mechanised slaughter undermined the old social order.
The reactionaries were defined by a belief in recovering the past through an act of will applied via a revolution from the right. The revolutionaries of the Left were partially a foil, partly partners in a Girardian exchange of desire via mimesis.
ER, ah....
The reappearance of the Jacobins ala Bolsheviks was plenty, no loss of status needed.
That's today with She that has Master's degree in Education...
The Bolsheviks were not Jacobins. Nobody reappeared or rose from any grave. The Bolsheviks were inspired by the Jacobins and invoked them constantly. But these comparisons have severe limitations. The differences between the Jacobins and Bolsheviks were significant. The Jacobins pioneered revolution. They did it themselves. The Bolsheviks, however, were professional revolutionaries (whose party membership exploded during the war) who belonged to a much, much, larger controlled opposition over which the Tsarist authorities lost control when a rival government (Imperial Germany) decided that they needed mayhem in Russia. The revolutions in central Europe were something else yet again.
And the erosion of confidence and the anxieties over the imminence of revolution amongst the ruling class had been building for years before WW1. King George V expressed his fears of revolution or civil war in England. Status was integral to the politics of the era and to the reactions to 1917.
As for today, the females in the education racket (both cis and trans) are neither Bolsheviks not Jacobins. They are almost always employees paid to provide indoctrination in an American version of Maoism. What we are seeing in the West is an elite sponsored campaign of destabilisation using the skin-suit of radical traditions to camouflage the consolidation of corporate power in an era of increasing inequality and to justify a social re-ordering to suit a transnational form of capitalism.
Things definitely have the potential to get out of hand, the widespread vogue for making an analogy between the blue-hairs and BLM and genuine revolutionaries of either the Jacobin or Bolshevik type threatens to lead us all astray.
What is remarkable about the SJW/Woke phenomenon, the Great Wokening and the racial reckoning, is its singularity. This is bewildering...it certainly bewilders me and I find historical allusions to Jacobins or Bolsheviks simply deepens my confusion.
I expect that the comments thread on this book will get us all into very detailed (and contested) takes on events. Should be v. interesting.
Does this new definition of reaction apply to the Vendee?
And present day? >We're presently reacting in the USA to the loss of our children's innocence and possibly genitalia , is that the loss of status too?
There is plenty to unpack.
Firstly, it certainly does not apply to the Vendee at all, only the radical right in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th c. And status anxieties (no small thing given what we now know about neurochemistry and the endocrine system) played a central role. No ifs or buts. Deference was integral to the way society operated. And the so-called 'Social Question' (what to do with the working classes) was intimately caught up with considerations of the status due to particular classes.
Status is always important because it formalises priority in the allocation of resources (both economic and sexual). And all human behaviour derives from the satisfaction of the need to eat or reproduce.
Secondly, status is integral to the SJW/Woke/DEI phenomenon, just as it was (and remains) to the Civil Rights movement and its institutional legacy. The deprioritisation of the maximally disfavoured is all about conditioning them (you and me included) into a carefully constrained place within the caste system that is being developed at the moment.
The grooming of children and the abusive medical regulation of reproductive and mental health is very much caught up with status. A population that will defer to the expertise of professionals who promote 'gender-affirmative' care for whatever reason are either cowed into submission or are willing to sacrifice their own kids to maintain their position within the system. Here is a link to an article by Rod Dreher that is truly eye-opening and that may make this point clear. It concerns the kids of military families.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/families-of-the-woke-military/
In the case of parents resisting the system, they are prioritising their kids over the deference that is required by authority which is precisely why they are problematic for the regime.
No argument, people who submit their kids to this worthless cowards
Im always fascinated by how IGNORANT historians ( leaning left, always) are about the emergence of fascism.
It has always been clear to me that it was both a REACTION movement against increasingly violent and militant COMMUNISM, and an ALTERNATIVE-DISDAIN for democracy, a political system that at the time was perceived to be super weak to confront the violence from communist movements ( Ebert's reaction towards the 1919 uprisings was the exception) and to be super SLOW and pointless in solving economic issues (well, modern democracy still sucks at this--some things never change :) )
And you're right in point it out that these midwit "historians" (Michael Beschloss stupid face comes to mind) make their surprised pikachu face about the "sudden" emergence of fascism....is it uncomfortable for them to face that THEIR side engaged in all forms of violence (bolshevism, anarchism) from the late 19th century to the interwar period?
The revolutionary violence sweeping across Europe at that time was an extension of the violence unleashed by the cynical, amoral and reckless regimes in power in 1914. Those regimes were monarchies and republics, not peoples' republics. They gambled on war as a means of constraining the energies of their own people, thereby steering people away from revolution. They gambled with the lives of millions upon millions of ordinary people. They lost.
The old regimes (Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns, Romanovs and Ottomans) cheerfully waged ethnic warfare, pogroms, forced migrations, mass imprisonment throughout WW1. They even used the war to reintroduce slave labour in Europe itself. It was the dynastic regimes who used the war to set up the first concentration camps (Theresienstadt in Bohemia was used to confine Austrian civilians of Russian ethnicity from Galicia who were guilty of no crime and convicted by no court, just rounded up and held under brutal conditions that killed many off).
The generals made a mess of the war and looked for scapegoats. In Russia the generals blamed the Jews so the police arranged pogroms. In Germany the general staff wanted to do the same but, being very Germanic, checked out the stats and discovered that Jews were getting too many Iron Crosses for the narrative to work and so were unable to follow the Russian example. The Turks used forced relocation and massacre to inflict a genocide upon the Armenians.
When it all came crashing down the warmongering monarchs of Central Europe ran away like cowards. Not a single one of the German rulers (or the Austrian one) challenged any of the revolutionaries directly. They just fled. Enlisted men doing the same would have been shot for desertion. But cowardice looks different in the commander. He wears a better uniform, after all.
Wars radicalise people. WWI certainly radicalised vast numbers of people. The violence of the Reds speaks for itself. The same is true for the Whites as well.
Really?
except thaaat...
The left was revolting BEFORE WW1, and freely engaging in violence to achieve tgeir goals
Fun fact: one of the only 3 POTUS that died murdered, was shot by an ANARCHIST ( prez mcKinley)
What else can a movement do when one of the sacred texts of the neo-religion proclaims things like "workers of the world unite" and affirms that the goal is a "diktatorship of the proletariat"... of course that implies certain violence acceptable vs the bourgeoisie, middle classes and nobility !!!
An ideology of HATE, if you will, and as usual, the left projects itself onto others...
Its amazing how Marx-Engels talked and wrote about mid-18th century industrial capitalism as something so bad and exploitative,..and ended up offering something even more retarded as a "solution"
Correct me if I am wrong, but German Marxists voted with conservatives, liberals and reactionaries to support the war in 1914 so their presumed hatred of the old order can't have been that intense or problematic.
Nor was it so toxic that they were unwelcome on the think tanks that were responsible for preparing the plans of German gov't and industry for post-war reconstruction of the continent (plans that gave birth to just about every iteration of the policies for European integration ever since). Ultimately it was the mainstream of German Marxism who turned on the radicals making the liberal democratic republic safe for the bourgeoisie in the first place.
The Austro-Hungarian Marxists circa 1914 were so consumed by hatred that they too supported the monarchy and the war effort itself. For well over a generation before that they had vigorously condemned terrorism such as the assassination of the kaiserin.
It is possible that this was all a feint. It is also possible that the compromises and accommodation became less and less viable over time.
The benefit of hindsight is that people forget the awkward stuff, the details that belie the narrative. And they forget that the celebration of violence as a salvific force was already a defining feature of thought across much of the political spectrum by 1914. Militarism was essentially the state ideology of Wilhelmine Germany...to the utter disgust of a certain professor of philology in Basel who had seen the Franco-Prussian war a first-hand and who had a few thoughts on the stupidity and coarseness of both Left and Right and the ruin to which they were dragging Europe.
Forgot to add, the guy who shot McKinley was not a Marxist. He was an anarchist (just like Mussolini at one stage). If McKinley's assassin is to be considered representative of the generic Left, then the killers of Rasputin would have to be considered representative of the well-heeled and well-born.
Furthermore, the value of violence as a routine political tool was accepted across the political system. The use of military force to suppress workers and peasants (during strikes, protests or even standard policing) was taken for granted by just about everyone. The shocking thing about revolutions was that they both amplified and reversed the direction of the violence towards those who had previously enjoyed a monopoly on its use.
Also, I am confused by your remark about mid-18th century capitalism. Capitalism was a 19th century phenomenon.
And precisely because it was so bad and exploitative that just about every serious political thinker of the century regarded it as humanly unsustainable: defenders of private property from Pope Leo XIII through to Bismarck considered capitalism itself as a threat to the established social order and in need of reform.
"the value of violence as a routine political tool was accepted across the political system."
Since the first hunters and gatherers were fighting over the water hole.
That's eternal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wstIBq2H0z8
Could not agree more. That scene explains the human condition better than all the PhDs submitted in several centuries combined. You can't get any better than Kubrick for acuity.
"the first concentration camps." The first concentration camps were somewhat the Spanish in Cuba and the concentrated died in horrific numbers of starvation and thirst, bad water, disease. The next concentration camps were the English locking up the Boers in the 2d Boer war, same results but it's always different when they speak English.
You are perfectly right. I should have qualified that by being specific. The first concentration camps in Europe were established by the Austro-Hungarians.
The Brits in South Africa started it off. Would love to know where they got the idea from.
Fascism was always a reaction to the New Jacobins aka the Communists and Anarchists.
Your point Philip about the Crowned Heads of Europe being cowards is well taken.
With the exception of the Tsar.
With the partial excusal of the Hapsburgs monarchs.
The English however are not without blame in WW1, nor were their motives pure.
Germany was a commercial and scientific competitor they could not keep pace with...
...it would have helped the world if the Kaiser were less of a boy and more of a man.
The variant forms of fascism (very different from each other) were obviously reactions to the challenge posed by the USSR in its early, expansive, stage, when the Soviets were serious about exporting revolution. But they also drew on currents of reaction, some quite radical and extreme, that had been flowing prior to 1917. These currents were radicalised by the war, by 1917 and then further radicalised by the civil conflicts that went on throughout the early to mid 20s.
It is reasonable to hypothesize that without the war the reactionaries of the early 20th c. would have been more benign and vastly less dangerous. Ditto the radicals.
It was Hitler who made the point about the German princes running away. I am not sure if he called them cowards...he probably didn't. He simply pointed out that had even a single one of the eighteen or so monarchs been prepared to risk their lives in 1918 the Weimar Republic would not have been established. Perfectly true. But they did run away and given the militaristic character of the German monarchies since from the early middle ages until 1918 it is a point that is worth making. If you want to be a war-lord you gotta have the chops for it. No ifs or buts.
Blame for WW1 belongs to all sides. Edward VII (responsible for the Triple Entente) and Kaiser Bill (an a-grade misfit, geopolitical moron and all-round p.o.s.) take the largest portions.
The British were confronted by developments that they had never encountered. Since the wars in France and, later, the first treaty of Lisbon (establishing the Anglo-Lusitanian alliance) the English had always sought to support the little guy against the bigger on the continent. It worked brilliantly for centuries. Until it didn't.
What worries me is that Turbo America appears to be following the English in applying precisely this strategy (Ukraine vs Russia, Taiwan vs China). As an Aussie I do not like the idea of living in Novy Ukraina.
this sounds quite interesting (paperback on the way). while i am thoroughly enjoying the book clubs, the weekend reading, and the bongland diaries, can we please get some more gay sex?
Very neat. Excited to read this!
Post WW1 is well summarized by Churchill "The World Crisis: Aftermath" the last in a series.
He was of course still deeply involved in post war affairs.
He was not at Versailles but well informed.
>Part of the problems that occurred after WW1 was Wilson insisted on a Full Academic Review and completion of the American Survey of the various nations *as they descended into chaos* instead of giving clear simple directions and the vision of the future they could expect.
So Germany, Greece-Turkey and the Balkans, Russia burned while the academics gathered information.
In the end the Big 5* decided the future, in the interim Wilson blew it at home by insulting the entire Republican party including the voters, never mind the elected Senate and the USA withdrew.
Big 5: GB, FR, IT, USA, JP [Japan].
WW's review...sounds like make-work for would-be philosopher-kings...vastly more attractive for WW than merely accepting the world as it is and just stopping it from burning to the ground. Of course, if people died as a consequence that is just proof that the review process was warranted in the first place and that the recommendations superior to any choices made by the dead. Simple. And people wonder why the conquering barbarians of old now look good by comparison.
Still WW compares favourably to vampiric grifters like the Clintons or brain-damaged hyenas like Nuland, Blinken and Sullivan. Colonel House...come back...all is forgiven.
Of the Big 5 USA and Japan still big, but Japan much diminished.
In a rare win for "things in the US that still actually work", my copy has arrived via inter-library loan. It has been withdrawn from its university library, hundreds of miles away, a grand total of 13 times since its 1965 arrival, and from the proximity of the dates I'm fairly sure that four of the withdrawals were from the same individual. (What must it be like to devote years of your life to toiling away on obscure political subjects, only for nobody at all to read your output? Couldn't be me!) In any case, for just $3 the book is mine for two weeks.
I thought this might be quite a dry read but, being just one chapters in, I am enjoying not just the historical lesson of an era (19th century Bavaria; we are still scene-setting) of which I'm almost totally ignorant, but Mitchell's economy of language. On Emperor Ludwig, between the descriptions of the genius of his autarkic rule, a moment of measured, faint praise: "He was successful insofar as he may be credited with the fact that Bavaria had scarcely any social element by 1948 which could be described as a proletariat."
Next chapter: the introduction of Eisner into this Bavaria - the post-monarchial, newly-industrial, newly-party political, whose sweeping away of the old world for the new happened in less than a century... looking forward to seeing what happens.
Good stuff. We'll start this book club once we wrap up the Colour Revolutions series a I don't want to mix up revolutions ;)
Maybe you've explained this somewhere, but does one have to be a paid subscriber to join the book club? It looks like some good books are sprinkled in here!
Hi Cory! Yeah, it's for paying subscribers as it's a bonus feature that takes a lot of work on my part. Hopefully you can join us. If you choose to do so and need a copy of the book, I can lend one to you.
When does the club begin this book?
Aiming for just prior to end of this month. Will update everyone in a few days.
Cool! I'm now a subscriber! Feel free to give me advice on how to find a cheaper copy of the book--the Amazon price is a little much.
Check your email, and thanks for subscribing!