Readable, enjoyable and useful general history of the 20th Century, but be warned: it's 800 pages.
It is of supreme value to know history well if you wish to understand what's going on right now. Most things run in cycles, and while history rarely repeats, it typically "rhymes" from era to era. Thus you can map events today to analogous events in the past, and often predict with surprising accuracy what's going to happen. I came away from this book with a far better mental matrix for the century.
[Warning: the notes here are appallingly long, and the reading list at the bottom of this post is so long I got discouraged halfway through just from formatting the titles. Do not read!]
Ch 1: A Relativistic World
* The 1919 solar eclipse reveals Mercury to be in a slightly different location than Newtonian physics predicts, supporting Einstein's special theory of relativity. Reconfirmed during the 1922 eclipse, later further supported by the red shift test. Also heavily influencing the young philosopher Karl Popper at Vienna University: the idea of abandoning a theory if it failed certain tests, an attitude "utterly different from the dogmatism of Marx, Freud, Adler and even more so that of their followers."
* "Relativity" as a metaphoric unsettling of the greater culture, nothing was absolute anymore. "Relativity became confused with relativism." Even Einstein, so much as he was bewildered by the metaphoric expansion of his theory into cultural terms, was rattled by the true relativity of quantum mechanics which he found abhorrent.
* Freud's ideas begin to circulate as common currency at the end of WWI, although The Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1900.
* Note the appalling cruelties at Austrian military hospitals, especially the psychiatric division of the Vienna General Hospital during WWI, producing a commission of inquiry which called in Freud. This started his popularity and then his works and ideas were discovered and adopted by intellectuals and artists in the 1920s.
* Freud having an attitude to scientific proof very unlike Einstein's and more akin to Marx's. Difficult to test, theories not well-suited for empirical testing and refutation, and when evidence did turn up which appeared to refute his theories, he would modify the theory to accommodate it. Thus the Freudian belief set "was subject to continual expansion and osmosis, like a religious system in its formative period." [In Freud's case, he could conveniently deem "dissent" from his theory a type of mental sickness: "you're in denial!"...this worked even better in the "theory" of Marxism].
* Freud's gift for the neologism and "the striking slogan" as part of his popularity in literary circles. Freudianism "seemed to have a new and exciting explanation for everything."
* Freudianism appearing in other domains in different forms: see Cubist painting, Expressionist painting, see Proust and Joyce, Stravinsky; even T.S. Eliot wrote that Freud's concepts had "destroyed the whole of the 19th century." Replacing the 19th century notion of personal responsibility and accountability with ideas of the antihero, the destruction of individual heroism, contemptuous lack of interest in free will: see Marxism, see WWI, of the world not being what it seemed.
* Marx describing people appearing to exercise free will, but in reality just being flotsam hurled by economic forces, powerless against class patterns.
* Far greater State intervention in every aspect of the economy. Initiated by WWI but sustained thereafter permanently.
* Within a year or two of WWI ending the multi-ethnic empires all across Europe all blew apart.
* Wilson bungling the organization of the peace treaty which evolved into extracting maximum pain from Germany; John Maynard Keynes one of the few who saw the mistake right away and understood the economic implications. Keynes warned Wilson, but Wilson tuned him out.
* President Wilson has a series of strokes, his wife and private secretary essentially run the presidency for 17 months (!), a bizarre episode in American history with all kinds of rumors spreading, while his wife Edith--who had few years of education--forged his signature on bills.
* Ethnic wars among mixed ethnic minorities across multiple countries in Central/Eastern Europe.
Ch 2: The First Despotic Utopias
* The Germans used Lenin "like a typhoid bacillus" to spread revolution in Russia and Ireland.
* Lenin, as bourgeois intelligentsia, but also a sort of "privileged priesthood, endowed with a special gnosis" (read: socialism was a system of knowledge specially revealed to him). Lenin's idea of the party was essentially Louis XIV's idea of the state--"L'etat c'est moi!"
* "An oppressed class which does not strive to gain a knowledge of weapons, to be drilled in the use of weapons, to possess weapons, an oppressed class of this kind deserves only to be oppressed, maltreated and regarded as slaves." --Lenin. [Of course, you want your people to have weapons until you achieve your revolution, but after that you most certainly don't want an armed oppressed class anymore! People in the modern era really struggle with the second order consequences of disarming a populace.]
* Lenin's takeover is a collection of incredible ironies: he had no idea what the motivation for the peasants were (he was an intellectual), the proletariat class in Russia had absolutely no interest in socialism; he stepped in with a small cadre of disciples and got very lucky.
* The Bolshevizing "process" is worth reading and rereading... also worth running the thought experiment of imagining this being attempted in a well-armed American state like Texas, and what would happen there versus what happened across Russia, it is worth pursuing. In Russia the people "wanted to know what was permitted and what was forbidden." The rest was inspired by Robespierre and Nietzsche.
* "We shall not enter into the kingdom of socialism in white gloves on a polished floor" Trotsky rationalizing violence, terror. He got his, ultimately.
* The Cheka system quickly created and scaled up as a secret police secret tribunal and secret prison system, a state-within-a-state used to wipe out counter-revolutionary opposition. Killing people collectively rather than individually. "We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class."
* Germany had an interest in keeping Lenin in power in 1918, it kept Russia in a state of chaos and allowed Germany "to tear off as many provinces from the former Russian empire as she wishes."
* No one seem to understand the extent or the implications of this new type of totalitarian dictatorship. Winston Churchill as one of the very few leaders to see what was happening.
* More ironies of history: Germany maintained contact with Russia right up until 1941, helping them with arms technology, helping them build their own arms industry; also by coaching the Bolsheviks in arms-making they maintained their own country's continuity of skills. Even more ironically, German specialists taught Soviet communists how to make excellent tanks, which they later used overwhelm Germany at the end of World War II. Even deeper irony was a marriage of what should have been "class enemies" between these two countries: Prussian generals and Bolshevik communists.
* Lenin's stages of autocracy become a grim model to many other regimes in the rest of the 20th century.
* A good example of the circular logic of Leninism: "In a classless society, the individual was the state, so how could they be in conflict, unless of course the individual were a state enemy?"
* Stalin as the ultimate Cantillon insider, Lenin's top bureaucrat, he was thus a source of good party jobs and good connections, etc.
* Lennon has his first stroke and 1922, having constructed "the most carefully engineered apparatus of state tyranny the world had yet seen." A breach with Stalin, then he was dead by 1924.
* Mussolini, differences of Italian socialism with Russian. Mussolini not quite as fond of violence but forced into it to some extent.
* "I want the train to leave exactly on time. From now on, everything has got to function perfectly." A metaphor for many improvements under Fascism, it gave Germany a "third way."
Ch 3: Waiting for Hitler
* Germany expanded tremendously throughout the east in WWI, throughout Eastern Europe, through Ukraine into Crimea even, the Baltics, etc., even as they were losing/stalemated on the western front. Thus the allies in simply did not understand how much of shock that Germany's unconditional surrender was to the German people and its soldiers... from their perspective, they were (mostly) winning!
* The German people were long lied to by their country about their government's true foreign policy aims and methods; the full truth did not emerge until the 1960s with the publication of Fritz Fisher's book The War of Illusions.
* Structural problems with the Weimar constitution, which was drawn up by the great sociologist Max Weber, it had a cheat code in that the president could use: Article 48, which permitted the president to take emergency powers whenever parliament was not in session. Hitler would later take tremendous advantage of Article 48. But even before that, Hindenburg pulled the same stunt.
* Cultural modernism (which was also politically leftist) as a major component of Weimar Germany. Seen (from Germany's perspective) as cultural Bolshevism or Western decadent art, "as though Lloyd George and Clemenceau could not wait to get to Berlin to ram Cubism down German throats." "Cultural trench warfare... calculated to arouse the atavism" of the German establishment.
* The romanticized German volk movement, where Marx got his concept of alienation. anti-Semitism already had deep roots in German culture long before the 1920s.
* "The tragedy of modern [read: pre WWII] Germany is an object lesson in the dangers of allowing academic life to become politicized and professors to proclaim their 'commitment'. Whether the bias is to the Left or Right the results are equally disastrous for in either case the wells of truth are poisoned." We'd do well to remember this in our culture today... but we don't.
* The German Marxists failed to grasp significance of antisemitism; Marx's system was too holistic, Marx himself dismissed Judaism and assumed that when the revolution came it was doomed to disappear, "there would be no such person as a Jew"... Marxist saw the Jews as a non-problem, and dismissed antisemitism as a non-problem too.
* Hitler as a similar embodiment of Nietzsche's will to power" just as Lenin was. A singularly unfortunate coincidence for 20th century history.
* Hitler's eye for spectacle, his admiration for Wagner, his respect for the value of propaganda and image, built on Germanic traditions. Further, his oratory, and the myth of a mad orator was unfounded, Hitler was always in total control of himself. People like Neville Chamberlain were hugely relieved when they actually met Hitler and found him capable of talking in a sane and reasonable manner; his mad effects were all carefully planned. "The mind reels at what he might have done with television."
* "In a rare moment of frankness, Lenin once said that only a country like Russia could have been captured so easily as he took it. Germany was a different proposition. It could not be raped. It had to be seduced. It took Hitler some time to discover this fact."
Ch 4: Legitimacy in Decadence
* Poincarë and Lord Curzon, the French prime minister and the British foreign secretary, hated each other,
* France had a much longer and (in some ways) more corrosive inflation compared to Germany, although not as spectacular: from 1912 to 1948 prices in French francs increased 105 times! This led to specific demographic disadvantages in France: fewer children, an older population, losing demographic ground to many other countries, etc.
* L'École polytechnique, which produced France's civil servants and technocrats, was called "the only theology faculty which has not been abolished." :))
* France's issues and difficulties with its colonial territories, conflict with England and Germany. Various movements for fascism, communism, etc., in France, but they were all intellectual-driven: meaning they never took action, no one ever rose up to take power and drive the civilization forward, it stayed divided and impotent. The opposite of Italy, Germany and Russia.
* The Hobson-Lenin theory of imperialism and colonialism (basically blaming it on Jews and capitalists, that excess capital was invested abroad for the benefit of specific wealthy people and also in order to expoit the natives, and thus the cause of war suffering in the home country) becomes conventional wisdom in the 20th century, Johnson calls this "crude and implausible theory" one of the central developments of modern times. In reality there was a shortage of capital, it was not systematically invested in colonies, and certainly not very much profit was extracted from colonies either.
* Colonialism as an overbroad term that doesn't describe anything at all, and which gives rise to "grandiose illusions and unspecified grievances." "The concept of a colonial superpower was largely fraudulent." They cost money, resources, etc., and weren't sustainable.
* England's "lost generation" as myth, literary creation. The Bloomsbury group as a group of weak, unproductive writers best known for indecision.
* Naval disarmament and strains between the Japanese and English, who were formerly allies. Churchill in 1924: "war with Japan is not a possibility which any reasonable government need take into account."
Ch 5: An Internal Theocracy, a Celestial Chaos
* "While Winston Churchill was assuring the comatose Baldwin that Japan meant no harm, its economy was growing at a faster rate than any other nation, its population was rising by a million a year and its ruler was a god-king who was also insane."
* Japan: a theocracy, a uniform ethnic set of islands able to change itself by fiat from above. No system of fixed law, just codes of behavior. This made them susceptible to the moral relativism bred in the West, particularly in WWI and after. Japan thus invented a state religion, Shinto, and a ruling code of morality, bushido.
* Frequent assassination as part of Japan's political scene, imitation of the major colonial empires in Asia.
* Japan sought and obtained an alliance with Britain, but the destruction of the anglo-japanese alliance by the US and Canada in 1921-22 was fatal to peace in the Far East. America "assumed the shape of Japan's irreconcilable enemy."
* The idea of countries having a "decay detector" or a "gangrene detector"--in the case of Japan, where a country tends to attack another country in a state of decline or decadence: see Japan destroying the Russian army in the Russo-Japanese war, see Japan colonizing/exploiting China around the same time, etc.
* China: Sun Yat-sen, an early Lleninist-style revolutionary disrupting China in the very early 1900s. Attempts at forming a constitutional monarchy upon Pu Yi's ascension to the emperor's throne at age 2, at which point Dr. Sun set up a republic in Nanking, leaving a power vacuum. Mao took note of this: he was 17 at the time and realized that it was necessary to have an army to achieve anything.
* Sun Yat-Sen's Kuomintang, the People's party, established in 1921 during a period of warlordism across China. Chiang Kai-Shek was his brother-in-law (!) who trained the elite of the Kuomintang's first proper army, with support and materiel from the Soviets in Russia. Chiang Kai-Shek became a sort of warlord of his own in charge of the army, and took over upon Sun Yat-Sen's death in 1925. Basically no difference between this system and the communism that Mao later set up.
* Mao cooperated with the Kuomintang for longer than any other prominent communist, "which meant that after he came to power in the late 1940s he had to 'lose' a year out of his life (1925-1926) in his official biographies." hahahaha :)))
* The banditry and warlordism in China of 1925 to 1930, where it had a net loss of 4 million people and many cities were just ruined with wandering unpaid soldiers and bandits ravishing the population. It gives yet another good indication of by how thin a thread civilization hangs.
Ch 6: The Last Arcadia
* Americans in the early 20th century seeing themselves "as the last Arcadia, an innocent and quasi-Utopian refuge from the cumulative follies and wickedness of the corrupt world beyond her ocean-girded shores."
* USA immigration quotas, struggling with questions of diversity, defining "American values," many of the same things we're grappling with today.
* We also had an intellectual class, an East Coast elite that maneuvered our culture far out of proportion to its number: one intellectual wrote to another in 1919, "never forget that it is we New Yorkers and New Englanders who have the monopoly of whatever oxygen there is in the American continent." Some things never change.
* Prohibition and its primary unintended consequence that it brought about a permanent scale and sophistication of American organized crime. Also interesting parallels with prohibition in the USA and social engineering in Russia or Italy: it was an attempt at cultural homogenization in a country that was far too diverse and decentralized for such a thing. Prohibition was a value of Midwest religious people which was then universally imposed nationwide, what would you expect the reaction to be from Polish/German/Irish immigrants with totally different cultures?
* Marx, confused why the United States "showed no sign whatever of producing the conditions for the proletarian revolution which he claimed mature capitalism made inevitable."
* Warren Harding, mischaracterized as a corrupt politician: the basic mythology of the "Ohio gang" was that Harding was part of a long-term conspiracy to hand the country over to Big Business.... Verrrry interesting to see the collective received opinion on Harding totally belied by the facts. Not the first (or last) time that would happen.
* Calvin Coolidge, likewise misunderstood and mischaracterized. [Coolidge] didn't do anything, but that's what the people wanted done." --Will Rogers hahaha :) Or: "The things I never say never get me into trouble." --Calvin Coolidge
* Likewise history has mischaracterized the 1920s as a drunken spree of wealth and prosperity shared by only a few, seen retrospectively (especially by writers and intellectuals) as grossly materialistic, philistine, and ephemeral, when in reality prosperity was widespread.
* Rapid adoption of automobiles, electricity, even air travel by a wide range of classes
* The author is highly optimistic and positive about the influence the 1920s, probably justified, but I can't help but see his optimism about this era and at the same time see what a weird parody of it we have in the postmodern era: with a runaway consumerism, incredible number of hours worked, all the manufactured sources of leisure we have at our fingertips, etc. It's as if today we have a grotesque version of what this author is celebrating about the 1920s.
* American culture maturing, and dispensing with its "umbilical source" (great phrase) in Europe: the USA develops its own domestic cinema, radio broadcasting, the New York musical as art form, jazz and vaudeville, etc.
* Coolidge getting out of the presidency when the getting out was good, declining to run in 1928, saying "it is a pretty good idea to get out when they still want you." Coolidge also had a dim view of Herbert Hoover: "That man has offered me unsolicited advice for six years, all of it bad."
* Coolidge "left the stage without a word, pulling down the curtain on Arcadia."
Ch 7: Dégringolade [had to look this one up: a tumble; a rapid decline or descent]
* The standard narrative of the 1929 crash, or of any stock market boom and bust is "largely moralistic: hubris followed by nemesis, wicked greed by salutary retribution." This moralizing also fits well with Marxism which "is a form of moral, not economic, analysis."
* Expansion of the money supply across the 1920s: a 62% increase in 8 years from 1921 to 1929. The author is surprisingly sophisticated in his understanding of Central Bank policy, describing it as a "deliberate interference in the supply and cost of money."
* Interesting parallel between the 1920s and right now: during the 1920s output per worker (at least in manufacturing) rose 43%, which should have been reflected in lower prices. In other words there was inflation, it just was compensated for by productivity. Today (well, at least until recently) we've had stable prices for many, many years while we've also had underlying inflation, except our era's inflation has been offset by global cost reduction from offshoring work and continued mass immigration (both of which depress wages) and also from sourcing products from China and other low cost nations. Once these offsetting effects play out of course inflation will return.
* Use of leverage, excessive trading, investment trusts that themselves were over leveraged, etc., followed by anger and a tremendous witch hunt.
* "One of the uses of depression is to expose what the auditors fail to find." J.K. Galbraith
* "Hoover is presented as the symbol of the dead, discredited past, Roosevelt is the harbinger of the future" as we move beyond old style free market economics and move to a benevolent new managed economics, this was the "historical matrix" manufactured by two generations of liberal-democrat historians.
* Hoover as a sort of tragic figure. Also, Hoover intervening much more in the economy than I ever knew, none of it worked, and by 1932 is advisors were telling him to "keep off the front page."
* Ironically there was virtually no difference back then between the parties and how to handle intervention during the depression: both were planners, both were inflationists. Just like our era, both parties do the same foolish things.
* On Roosevelt becoming president just in time to take credit for the recovery in 1932: "The historian hates to admit it, but luck is very important."
* "If interventionism worked [to end the depression], it took nine years and a world war to demonstrate the fact." Johnson has an excellent turn of phrase and a knack for a smirking comment.
* Clerisy: the intellectual class
* "America was and is a millennarian society where overweening expectations can easily oscillate into catastrophic loss of faith." In the 1930s there was net emigration from the United States (!) and many intellectuals were proclaiming things like "All roads in our day lead to Moscow." (Lincoln Steffens), or "To travel from the capitalist world into Soviet territory is to pass from death to birth." (John Strachey), followed by Paul Johnson, in another good turn of phrase: "We must now explore the gruesome and unconscious irony of these remarks."
Ch 8: The Devils
* By the time John Strachey wrote of fleeing capitalist death to find Soviet birth, Stalin had completed his gruesome feet of the forced collectivization of Russia's peasantry at a cost of 5 million dead (at least), and far more wealth destroyed than anything lost in the stock market during the depression.
* Stalin having his portrait painters shot.
* Stalin having a great gift for using power politics: hiving off his lieutenants into left and right (totally arbitrary categories in Soviet politics if you think about it) to produce division, they would weaken and destroy each other, and thus Stalin would consolidate his own power.
* Stalin perfecting the art of divide and conquer, perfecting the art of the show trial, and then perfecting the art of creating a cult of personality.
* Trotsky as potentially even less moral and more bloodthirsty than Stalin, although they "graduated in the same slaughterhouse," but Trotsky lacked Stalin's "skills of survival."
* "There is no point of stability in a state which is socializing itself. It must go either forward or back.... [To Stalin] there was no stable point of rest between a return to capitalism and the use of unlimited force."
* While forming his plan to crush the peasantry he first removed some of his lieutenants who argued for that very same thing (Zinoviev and Kamenev), removing them using the argument that they planned to "plunder the peasantry" (!!)
* Selling off priceless works of art from the Leningrad Hermitage to raise hard capital. One of the biggest buyers was Andrew Mellon, later these works went into the Washington National Gallery. One of the many incredible ironies of this period. "The dollar value of Mellon's art purchases alone came to one third of all officially recorded Soviet exports to the USA in 1930."
* "Liquidate the kulaks as a class!" Stalin, twelve years before Hitler's final solution. Tens of millions of peasants executed, killed in battle, sent off to Siberia or used as slave labor; those who survived were stripped of all property, stripped of a right to move or change residence, basically collectivized and forced into neo-serfdom no different from the feudal age. "The system was more stringent than in the blackest periods of the Tsarist autocracy, and was not relaxed until the 1970s."
* The case of "an energy expert who, over eighteen months, was arrested, sentenced to death, pardoned, sent to a camp, released, rehabilitated and finally given a medal, all for no apparent reason."
* Western intellectuals were totally fooled by the system, they had no idea what was going on while they lionized it back in their own home countries. See George Bernard Shaw, H.G. wells (who famously said "no one is afraid of [Stalin] and everybody trusts him"), Lady Astor, Pablo Neruda (who called Stalin "a good-natured man of principle") and many others, totally, totally fooled by Stalin, while millions perished.
* The Soviet/communist model of totalitarianism bred a fearful totalitarianism of the right and reaction: "Communism and fascism were the hammer and the anvil on which liberalism was broken to pieces." Johnson makes the (common) category error/false paradigm error of assuming that Italian and German fascism were on the political right.
* In Germany, street fighting between communists and fascists benefited Hitler and his movement as it drew the entire country towards a desire for more authoritarian-based stability; the Weimar Republic could not control its own people, keep the streets safe, etc. It seems to rhyme with today's violence in the United states.
* Hitler sets up a Lenin-style political machinery even more quickly than Lenin ever did, and then scales it up throughout the society; uses Goering who destroyed the Communist party in a few weeks by a policy of murder.
* Installing a lawless government beneath a thin veneer of legal forms. "Hitler worked entirely through decrees and ordinances, as opposed to law, here again resembling Lenin.
* Hitler was very good at setting up redundant agencies, and setting competing lieutenants beneath him so that they had to come to Hitler to resolve their differences. These guys also tapped each other's phones, spied on each other, kept little treasures of blackmail on each other, etc.
* The 1934 Roehm purge, "the night of the long knives" where Hitler ordered the execution of about 150 leaders throughout the government and country to consolidate total power... He totally got away with it, and declared himself not just president but also Chancellor upon Hindenburg's death--this went to a plebiscite which he won with 84.6% of the vote. Stalin observed this and used similar techniques to consolidate his personal dictatorship.
* Stalin took his terrorism to a significantly higher degree, killing up to a million in total, first killing many of his own leaders, party members, military officers who might be a threat, and killing those he had assigned to do those killings, etc. He also had murdered most foreign communists who had sought asylum in Moscow too, people from many countries including Germany. European Communists would have been "safer in their own fascist homelands than in the 'socialist mother country.'"
* Then the teaching went in the other direction as the German SS learned all about the Soviet camp system while they were acting as advisors to Russia.
Ch 9: The High Noon of Aggression
* Japan angered and economically pressured by the USA's Smoot-Hawley tariffs, then in 1934 abandons the London naval treaty which reduced US, UK and Japanese naval forces by agreement. 1935: Hitler repudiates the Versailles treaty, and then Japan and Germany both begin unrestricted rearmament.
* 1935-36: increased assassinations in Japan, culminating in a 1936 attempted putsch, probably supported by the Soviets, which failed.
* 1934-36: in China, the near victory of Chang's Kuomintang forces over the communists, followed by the Long March (October 34 to December 36th), during which Mao gained total control over the communist forces. China then unifies against Japanese aggression, a war was pretty much initiated by the Chinese and also likely encouraged by Russian communists, since they stood to benefit from a Sino-Japanese war.
* Italy: Mussolini's handling of the Abyssinian crisis, which caused him to become estranged from England and France (and also caused the League of Nations to collapse as it failed to unite behind a wish to defend the borders of some primitive and (geopolitically irrelevant) African monarchy (sounds a little like today's EU and its lack of unity over Ukraine). The League of Nations put sanctions on Italy (again, sounds familiar), which then turned Mussolini into an "enemy" who would then be courted by the Germans.
* Mussolini initially thought Hitler was a psychopath, but was later converted into an admirer.
* Italy then annexes Albania, and then Mussolini and Hitler collaborate in a proxy war in Spain. Basically, Germany and Italy supported the nationalists under Franco, and Russia and France supporting the left (the "republican" side) of the conflict.
* Franco as an unloved, disciplined, very forward thinking man with a philosophy far different from the prevailing currents of age. Kind of like a Wellington. A soldier-statesman.
* Russia basically controlled the "Republican" (left) side of the Spanish civil war against the Francoists. See also the atrocities and assassinations ordered by Stalin of his own people in Spain (as he was doing a purge of his own army and bureaucracy back home). Despite all this the Republicans/leftists "won" the propaganda war, also in part due to the publicity about bombing of Guernica, skillful propaganda, while effectively keeping out of the public eye the left's mass slaughters/executions happening in Barcelona.
* See also the cynicism, gullibility and opportunism of leftist intellectuals supporting "our Spain"... Even Hemingway was naive and easily duped. Again, it reminds a modern of the hysterical propaganda surrounding the Ukraine/Russia situation: we are all "told" who the bad guys are just like they were told back then.
* Spain's left splits and is poorly unified, while Franco waits, takes his time and wins control of the country. In 1939 he then seals it off from the rest of Europe, foreseeing that a European war was inevitable and imminent. A sort of repeat of the Spanish (counter-)Reformation in some ways, which enabled Spain to avoid Europe's continent-wide horrors and religious wars during/after the Protestant Reformation.
Ch 10: The End of Old Europe
* Hitler, 1933, in a secret briefing of his service chiefs: "The most dangerous period is that of rearmament. Then we shall see whether France has statesmen."
* After making Germany the dominant power in Europe, with France and Italy as satellite states, Hitler expected a decisive struggle between Germany and the United States for world domination, a generation after his death. "No one since Napoleon had thought in such audacious terms."
* The USA and England were trying to disarm France as late as the early 30s, considering it to be the most bellicose of the European countries. (!) [Predictions are hard, especially about the future.]
* England made decadent by its leftist intelligentsia, which supported communism and Soviet Union, while the Soviet Union sought to keep England as disarmed as possible, a policy Stalin maintained until Hitler actually attacked him in 1941.
* Hitler literally flawless in all of his maneuvers up until 1938, completely in control of his country, rearming, handling the acquisition of territory thereafter, etc.
* England also had judged Hitler in the context of Soviet Russia: for example, if Hitler were overthrown England would have been more concerned about communism taking over there. England also much more aware of Stalin's aggression than they were of the coming aggression of Germany. Thus to some extent making concessions to Germany in the face of their invasion of Czechoslovakia made sense because of the Russian threat beyond them. A type of second order thinking.
* Would the Allies really have been better advised to fight in 1938 over Czechoslovakia, or in 1939 over Poland?
* The "appeasement" over Czechoslovakia led to a bunch of things: first of all, it shifted something like 40 divisions of Czech forces to Germany (plus the Czech armament industry), plus it allowed German forces to be moved from that region elsewhere. This was a delta equivalent to the size of the entire French army. (!) Second, Hungary and Poland were able to carve up the Slovakian portion of Czech territory, and other countries throughout Eastern Europe fell off from France's system of alliances in the east. The Nazis were now courted by many governments and fascism actually swelled in popularity throughout the region. By the end of 1938, once could consider Hitler the most successful German statesman since Bismarck.
* German deals with Russia to split Poland, then Germany invades Poland while Russia invades Finland; then Germany invades France, then is at a standstill with England, with any chance for detente now lost.
Ch 11: The Watershed Year
* Hitler and Stalin as exemplars of "individual will" in history, "the very opposite of historical determinism."
* Operation Barbarossa, followed by SS death squads; Japan attacks USA. Both are grievous, catastrophic oversteps.
Ch 12: Superpower and Genocide
* Informational asymmetry of USA and UK vs Japan and Germany, particularly in codes/codebreaking.
* Astonishing acceleration of US wartime economic production: by the end of the first year of the war America had raised army production to the total of all three Axis powers together, and then doubled it again by 1944.
* After losing the Battle of Guadalcanal, Hirohito asked the Japanese Navy chief of staff, "Why was it that it took the Americans only a few days to build an air base and the Japanese more than a month?"
* Firebombing, attacking civilian centers, V1 and V2 rockets, nuclear weapons.
* Holocaust, atrocities by Germany, use of firebombing and A-bombs on Japan, forcible repatriation of millions of Germans into Russia to be shot or used as slave labor.
Ch 13: Peace by Terror
* Russia starts making moves, everywhere post WWII: England unable to defend places like Turkey, Greece, the Near East, as well as support Continental Europe too; asks for US help, thus begins the Truman doctrine.
* Truman asks for money for Greece and Turkey plus civil and military experts to start, "and got it with two-to-one majorities in both houses. Thus isolationism died." Two months later the US launched the Marshall Plan.
* Chinese civil war: Mao versus Chiang. Much of it fought with American weapons given to Chiang from Pacific war surplus, but then sold to Mal's army because Chiang couldn't pay his own soldiers. A multi-year battle between two warlords.
* Tito in Yugoslavia as a rare example of how to outmaneuver Stalin.
* The Korean war, which postponed the China Soviet break for a decade, and "was a characteristic 20th-century tragedy" full of unintended consequences, including "elevating the presidency into a supra-constitutional war-making executive" later catastrophic effects in vietnam.
* Stalin became paranoically anti-Jew in his last years, also re-rewriting his own encyclopedia entries (hmmm see also Wikipedia's edit wars today?), the final purges of Stalin's era before he died of a stroke.
* The rise of McCarthyism in the US after there were legitimate discoveries of Soviet spies throughout the US government. (!) Paul Johnson alleges this was declining as a problem at the time, but McCarthy took advantage of it as an issue. Eisenhower worked behind the scenes to bring him down.
* Interesting point on presidents of the 20th century: there's an illustrative contrast between Democratic and Republican presidents: Wilson won in 1916 on a promise to keep America out of the war, but the next year we were at war. Roosevelt did the same thing with the same result. Lyndon Johnson won in 1964 on a peace platform and promptly turned Vietnam into a major war. In stark contrast, Eisenhower and Nixon, both Republicans, were the only two presidents of the 20th century who carried out their peace promises. Why do Democrats love war so much?
* Interesting contrasting assessments of President Eisenhower: Ike gave the impression of leaving the country on autopilot, playing a lot of golf, etc., and his presidency was judged as unskillful. He let people see him as intellectually limited. The reality was quite different: Richard Nixon saw him as complex and devious, always applying multiple lines of reasoning to a single problem and using indirect approaches. It turned out that Eisenhower worked much harder than anyone even close colleagues supposed once the secret files of his personal secretary were released. Very interesting.
Ch 14: The Bandung Generation
* This is a great chapter on IYIs, and how intellectuals have a peculiar talent for screwing up civilizations.
* India as a metaphor for the transfer of power from colonialist empires to the colonies themselves via giving colonial elites power directly to a small class of local elites. Ordinary people didn't come into play "except as a walk-on crowd in the background" while political power went literally from colonial elites to local elites. India was a collection of a gazillion different ethnic groups, religions, peoples etc; likewise many other colonies in Africa Middle East and Asia were the same, but they were basically force-unified under the "new boss"--these local politician/elites.
* Gandhi and Nehru as textbook examples of these types of politicians, not competent in economics, borderline Lysenkoist with their agricultural policies, development policies, military policies, etc. Worst of all, neither guy was anywhere remotely prepared for the exploding sectarian problems that happened in the subcontinent in the years following the departure of the British. Nehru blundering into war with the Chinese in 1962 and being defeated badly, then literally begging for American military aid.
* Indonesia pulling the same stunt under Sukarno, a corrupt sloganeer. Likewise Nasser in Egypt and other leaders throughout the third world who remained non-aligned with either capitalist or communist countries, thereby playing them off against each other for arms and money so they could stay in power themselves.
* Israel basically started the terrorist activity in Palestine before Israel was created as a state, blowing up hotels, killing Brits etc. They set the standard that the Arab terrorists later picked up.
* The Suez crisis triggered a type of "extinction burst" in international colonialism in both England and France. Both countries were completely losing their international power and empire, and saw this as step towards getting it back. A disaster.
* Algeria and its conflict with colonial France: note the technique of Algerians to assassinate innocent French, which then triggered increasing brutality in militarism of the French colonials, which escalated the whole situation and resulted in wiping out or sidelining of all moderates on both sides. The more the situation escalated the better it was for Algerian extremists who wanted independence. This model would be used by Islamic terrorists in decades to follow.
Ch 15: Caliban's Kingdoms
* Creating a post-colonial political class in each of the former colonies, a type of professional politician that had nothing to do with the people that they were ruling, replacing one bureaucrat with another, and widening the gap between the "real" nation and the "political" nation. Basically political entities without the underlying foundation or rule of law.
* The Bandung theory that colonialism literally caused, or even forced, colonies to be underdeveloped, and also that this underdevelopment could be reversed by politically motivated investment programs. Overestimating the power of political means to solve poverty and economic problems.
* Ghana under Nkrumah becomes a repressive dictatorship, Nigeria fractures into multiple states and civil war.
* South Africa tries a different experiment and goes deeper under white control under the apartheid system.
* Many countries literally copying Leninism as they begin one-party states post-colonialism. Tanzania in the 1960s under its leader Julius Nyerere as a perfect example: see his concept of "ujamaa" or familyhood, which was a device used to maintain distributed surveillance across the country to make sure the government maintained control. What's disturbing to me is my university had a dorm (right across from my dorm) named Ujama, to celebrate this concept! Pure Orwell.
* Other examples of Leninism in practice in Africa: Use of movement control, work permits, internal and external passports for any sort of regional traveling, residence permits, shifting of entire peoples from place to place, being always "at war" (against poverty, disease, political enemies, former colonial powers--the enemy doesn't matter, the point is to use "war on x" to justify restrictions and suspensions of rights), with militaristic imagery and sloganizing.
* The stories about these dictators range from hilarious to disturbing: some of them setting up nationwide prison camps (see Equatorial Guinea under Macias Nguema), or truly abominable regimes like the Central African Republic's Emperor Bokassa, and of course Uganda and Idi Amin, an instructive example of how easy it is to take a successful country and destroy it with populist demagoguery.
* Also very interesting (and telling) to see how easy it is for a historian to document all of the atrocities composed by someone like Idi Amin, and then say with a straight face "Britain bore a heavy responsibility" as if Britain actually did this. No, uh-uh: Idi Amin did this, not the British. Also, think about how condescending it is to assume so little agency for Africans running their own countries: is it not condescending (and quite frankly, racist) to assume a person, a people or a country is not responsible for their own actions, as if they were a child without agency?
* African in general devolves into a total shitshow of coups, wars, executions, displaced refugees and rapidly declining living conditions in the 70s and 80s. An embarrassment.
Ch 16: Experimenting with Half Mankind
* China and India screwing their countries up even worse than they were before, and effortlessly fooling Western elites and intellectuals like Simone de Beauvoir, who famously said: "life in [Maoist revolution] China today is exceptionally pleasant." These intellectuals forgot, of course, the lessons of Stalin-era Russia, and worse, assumed that the lessons of Soviet mistakes had been learned thanks to the "genius" of Mao.
* "Let 100 flowers bloom" was a sneaky move to convince people they could openly share their views, they were then "dealt with" once they came out into the open.
* The Great Leap Forward, which produced famine; the Cultural revolution, which was a vehicle for political terror.
* Deng "to get rich is glorious" Xiaoping takes over after Mao's death, and creates a law-and-order regime without any of the foolish Maoist romanticism of politics and struggle sessions.
* India has a string of corrupt, incompetent governments, and even worse economic policies; Nehru dies, Indira Gandhi takes over, Bangladesh and Pakistan partition, leading to a war between all three countries, etc. Stench-ridden, sewerless Calcutta as a fitting metaphor for a complete mess of a country.
Ch 17: The European Lazarus
* Sartre and existentialism; Camus, who "gallicized" Nietzsche for a generation of French youth; both became a nucleus for post-World War II French intellectual culture.
* Konrad Adenauer and Alcide de Gasperi, post-World War II leaders who are basically opposites of Hitler and Mussolini.
* "[Adenauer] had taken to heart Churchill's saying, 'The Germans are always either at one's throat or one's feet'; he was neither."
* England structured West Germany's union system with all of its advantages and none of its weaknesses, which turned out to be an act of suicidal generosity, giving Germany various industrial advantages against England. A wage policy based on productivity agreements. As a result the class war in West Germany died.
* General de Gaulle and the recovery of France in the 1960s and 70s. The failed Fourth Republic, run by the communist and socialist parties of France with a really bad constitution.
* de Gaulle as a very interesting dude: post-monarchist, pre-totalitarian. His advice to Queen Elizabeth II when she asked him about her role in modern society: "In that station to which God has called you, be who you are, Madam!"
* De Gaulle and Adenauer become a good team together. Likewise France and Germany become an economic team as a power axis, in a sort of semi-opposition to Britain, creating in continetental Europe "an alternative center of power to the USA and Soviet Russia."
* In the UK, economic growth was much poorer compared to France and Germany post-World War II, largely due to the strength of UK unions (both politically and legally), as well as significant growth in government as a percent of the economy.
* Scandinavia is kind of a middle ground politically, but those countries recovered well also, see also Switzerland which had a very distributed and conservative political establishment ("conservative" in the sense of not doing much, not making changes).
* Spain as an interesting exception too, with excellent economic growth and continuity politically because of Franco.
Ch 18: America's Suicide Attempt
* Interesting discussion of improprieties and mis-counting votes in the Kennedy/Nixon election, it's not implausible that Nixon won that election and Kennedy's side stole it. (!)
* "Like FDR, [Kennedy] turned Washington into a city of hope; that is to say, a place where middle-class intellectuals flocked for employment." Holy cow, ouch.
* Kennedy unknowingly repeats Britain's mistake by producing a post-colonialist empire that got the United States involved in quagmires everywhere that could only be defended and stabilized by force.
* 80 successful military coups in 18 Latin American countries between 1920 and 1966. Ecuador and Bolivia led with nine each. (!)
* Juan Perón in Argentina, taking pages from Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Franco and Stalin, taking over Argentina by basically bribing the entire labor movement. A new kind of Latin American dictator who gave a classic demonstration of how to wreck an economy. He was thrown out by the army, but left Argentina with a huge, parasitical government, showing that once a state is allowed to expand it is almost impossible to get it to contract. Argentina had what should have been a first-rate economy and condemned itself to backwardness.
* Cuba with a similar arc: it should have been an American territory after the Spanish-American War, but it devolved into Perón-like leaders subject to graft and craving power.
* Kennedy's bunglings left and right:
+ he didn't press his advantage sufficiently with Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis,
+ he really dropped the ball with Cuba in general because he could have easily invaded it, not just instigated the The Bay of Pigs and suddenly bagging the whole thing
+ then wasting tremendous resources on the space program,
+ persuaded by his advisors that Vietnam would be an "easy victory" against communism (although note it was really Eisenhower who initially got us involved there, by describing Vietnam as one of "falling dominoes.")
* The Gulf of Tonkin event happens, Congress votes to authorize the use of force by an overwhelming majority, only two senators vote against it. (!) And then Johnson, who campaigned on a peace and anti-escalation platform, then pulled a Wilson ("he kept us out of the war!") and quickly went to war.
* The growth of the intellectual class in the United States, Schumpeter's discovery that capitalism tended to promote its own self-destruction, getting as many people at university education just seemed to produce more competition for high-paying jobs.
* It's also very clear that the media in the United States has moved substantially to the left in the past four generations. Substantially. When you see The New York times *supporting* Eisenhower for stonewalling and not sharing information about the Un-American activities committee... This is the exact opposite of what that paper would do today.
* Media then became overly anti-president. The covert support it gave to FDR and JFK, covering up unattractive and inconvenient information on their behalf, morphed into overt antipathy toward whoever was president: starting with Johnson, worsening with Nixon. "Breaking a president is, like most feats, easier to accomplish the second time around."
* Nixon skillfully extricates the United States from Vietnam, and even more skillfully recognizes the importance of detente with China: "we could have total detente with the Soviet union, but that would be nothing if the Chinese are outside the international community."
* Regarding Watergate: "America seems peculiarly prone to these spasms of self-righteous political emotion in which all sense of perspective and the national interest is lost."
* The East Coast media establishment's revulsion with Nixon and its efforts to destroy him (even at the cost of national security: see the release of the Pentagon Papers for example) is very reminiscent of the media elite response to Trump's presidency.
Ch 19: The Collectivist Seventies
* Increasing regulatory burdens, environmental burdens, tax burdens, regulatory controls on business, plus rampant inflation, start to drag down the US economy in the 1970s. The stock market peaks in 1968, then declines 40+% in real terms over the decade.
* Birth of the eurodollar market, by which the US exports its inflation, and also a mechanism to fractionally reserve and create still more dollars abroad, creating still more inflation.
* 1973 Nixon officially cuts the link between gold and dollars, the dollar weekends 40% against the deutschemark in 1973, then the oil shock happens.
* Brezhnev: Soviet union imposing more and more controls on ideological wrongthink, including systematized psychiatric punishment. Russia expands navy and military power generally, uses Cuba as a surrogate in places like Africa and Latin America. Diminution of American power and prestige, "anti-Americanism" the most ubiquitous form of racism globally, etc.
Ch 20: The Recovery of Freedom
* The 80s as a period of resumption of market forces, rising living standards.
* "As Marxism was being progressively abandoned by the governments which had once ardently propagated it, it continued to be upheld and taught only in that traditional home of lost causes, the university campus."
* One thing that was expected to die but absolutely didn't by the 90s was religion: see Russia, Poland, Catholic growth in developing world, the spread of Protestant evangelism, also Islam; there were more atheists proportionately in 1890 than in 1990. (!)
* British had fought three failed Afghan wars, 1838-1842, 1878-1880, and 1919; none established any stability in this unruly country or solved the "Afghan problem." The Soviet Union did the same thing and tried to impose a Marxist party there, failing miserably in their own quagmire of a war. Ironic that the United States repeated the same errors, although since we never know our history we keep repeating it.
* At the time people likened Russia's involvement in Afghanistan to the United States' involvement in Vietnam. One key difference between Russian occupation of Afghanistan and United States actions in Vietnam was that the Russians were extraordinarily more brutal on the Afghans. Russia exits after some 10 years, unable to control anything other than major cities and major strategic roads, while experiencing greater and greater unrest in their own Muslim populations Soviet states. And then Gorbachev takes over.
* Neither Marxism nor Soviet state theory had any clear answer to dealing with Islamic fundamentalism, Trotsky completely underestimated it, soon demographic trends really started a signal the decline of Russia's power on many levels, rising Muslim populations relative to the Russian population. (This demographic transition of course is happening in many countries right now: c.f.; France, Sweden, Germany, etc.)
* This chapter has led me to an interesting insight re population growth and developing countries right now: See first the demographic transition as a phenomenon of modern developing societies: between the 1st and 2nd phases infant mortality drops, high birth rates continue, thus population radically increases... but then birth rates start to fall with increased living standars and thus population growth slows, eventually coming into balance. Note Europe's transition from phase 1 to phase 2 brought about a huge cycle of colonization globally, then followed by decolonization. Now, the third world is colonizing the first world via mass immigration. What is the next step? Will developing countries "de-colonize" themselves by ejecting immigrants, in much the same way many colonized societies ejected colonists?
* "No Marxist ever seems to have held sensible views on agriculture, perhaps because neither Marx nor Lenin was really interested in it. Marxism is an essentially urban religion." Hahahaha ouch.
* 1989, South Africa moves decisively away from apartheid. South Africa as a microcosm for the world: majority non-white, many languages, no uniform tribe or language, under white domination, similar mal-distribution of income (white versus everyone else), etc.
* Significant increase in living standards in major Asian countries and city-states, starting with Japan under the MacArthur's benevolent dictatorship, and then a capitalist system thereafter. See also Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, all emulating Japan.
* Yoshida Shigeru, important prime minister for nine years in post-World War II Japan, a political genius who brought the new Japanese system "from adolescence to maturity." Japan then went on to average 9.7% GDP growth for the next 20 years.
* The irony of how well corporate propaganda and collectivized production propaganda worked so well in Japan when it failed so spectacularly in Russia and China.
* Lee Kuan Yew leading Singapore in a system of authoritarian capitalism; considered by many to be the most successful of all post-war statesman in terms of the benefits he brought to his people.
* Chile: Eduardo Frei giving rise to significant inflation through the 50s, 60s and early 70s, Salvador Allende winning against a divided right to snag the presidency and then being caught between an increasingly militaristic and guerilla far left that tried to Leninize parts of the country; finally Pinochet led coup with the support of all three armed forces. Opposition to Pinochet came chiefly from abroad and was cleverly orchestrated from Moscow, athough Russia had flatly refused to bail out Allende with credits: "[Allende] was more use to them dead than alive."
* Pinochet installs a free market capitalism economic backdrop and Chile has a tremendous recovery, such that in a September 1980 a referendum 69% of Chileans voted to extend his term for eight more years.
* It become fashionable in academic circles to talk about "late-stage capitalism" or even "post-capitalism" to describe the low growth, "moribund" improvement in living standards, stagflation, etc.
* 1979 was Margaret Thatcher's victory in England; see also the failure of the "Scargill strike" of 1984-85, which broke a long streak of unions essentially controlling (or destroying) various governments in England. Thatcher won this one. The strike was undemocratic, certain mine unions resisted and went to work, and the national mining union was weakened irretrievably.
* Also interesting to learn that Gaddafi's Libyan government supported Scargill's strike funds, a fact denied by the union at the time but subsequently proven beyond doubt.
* Thatcher also privatizing many nationalized industries: BT/Cable & Wireless, British Steel, British Airways, British Gas, etc., put into private ownership via stock offerings on the stock exchange which encouraged small savers to invest in them as well. These companies typically went from putting up huge losses (and thus being a burden on taxpayers) to becoming profitable companies; giving rise to the idea of democratic capitalism, as shares were democratized. Privatization was a great success story of England in the 1980s and found many imitators abroad, especially in Europe, Latin America. Thatcher went on to a tremendous victory in 1983, then won again by landslide in 1987. No British prime minister had ever won three general elections in a row since 1832.
* The political center of gravity in the United States moves from the Northeast to the South and West, people moving from the frost belt to the Sunbelt, and also moving west.
* Reagan being one aspect of this change in voting blocks and change in demography. Carter was the first sitting president to be defeated since Herbert Hoover in 1932; Reagan won by a huge popular margin and then four years later crushed Mondale in the 1984 election. "America, as a nation, began to recover its self-confidence, lost during the 1970s' suicide attempt."
* British actions in the Falklands, United States actions in both Grenada against Libya, also against Noriega in Panama, these mini-military actions served to deter and stop many third world dictators from antisocial behavior. A change of events from the Vietnam era.
* Reagan doing some interesting strategic things with his rearmament program in the in 1980s, producing a calculated impact on Soviet policy. Especially during a time when they were involved in Afghanistan and running into economic turbulence.
* Various indications of a general breakdown in the Soviet Union: Chernobyl, a nuclear sub disappeared in 1986 as well, an earthquake in Transcaucasia, other incidents.
* Reagan turned the screw by raising the cost for Russia to keep up militarily, thereby putting pressure on the overall economy there. Thus Russia had to decide whether it was prepared to match US military spending at the expense of the civilian economy. Reagan and Gorbachev had a series of summit meetings to discuss arms reduction.
* "I have to tell you if it's an arms race, you must know it's an arms race you can't win." Reagan to Gorbachev.
* Then there was a further decision in Moscow do not use the Red army to prop up failing communist regimes in Eastern Europe, as they had in 1953, 1956 and 1968. "Once this decision was taken, events moved swiftly."
* Not all of these revolutions were successful, Tibet attempted to resist Chinese occupation and was put down with savage force, the Tiananmen Square movement in 1987 was obliterated by Red soldiers drawn from the peasantry, most of whom saw "those city-dwelling students" as parasites. In Europe, however, most of the authoritarian regimes quickly fell.
* Hungary removed its much-hated leader Janos Kadar, and then the Hungarian Communist party voted itself out of existence in October of 1989, replacing itself with a multi-party system. Hungary also dismantled its own iron curtain, rolling up its border fence with Austria and opening the frontier to East-West traffic while also opening its border to East Germany. Thus East Germans could easily leave for the West by this route. A non-communist government took over in Warsaw that same year.
* Once the Hungary-East Germany border opened, East Germans began to pour across it en route to West Germany: the iron curtain had a big hole. Erich Honecker, the regime leader of East Germany, asked Gorbachev to send in troops and tanks, Gorbachev refused.
* Shortly thereafter Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria fell.
* All these countries experienced non-violent revolutions with the exception of Romania. Note that Ceausescu had created a secret police organization that recruited from state orphanages to create a fanatical group of soldiers to support the regime.
* Romania and Bulgaria turned out to have regime changes more of persons than of regimes themselves.
* Next came the breakup of Russia starting with the Baltics, which passed referendums for independence in 1991 which were endorsed by overwhelming majorities.
* There was a contested election in 1989 in the Soviet province of the Russian Republic, Boris Yeltsin won it, which set the stage for a constitutional crisis or perhaps a civil war. There was a brief recovery of the communist hardliners in the army and KGB in 1990-1991, there were no clear lines of authority in Soviet Russia by the spring of 1991.
* Tallyrand's dictum from the 19th century: "Russia is never as strong as it looks; Russia is never as weak as it looks."
* Iraq invades Kuwait, leading to surprising cooperation among world powers (including Russia which helped the United States with various technical information about the military weapon systems they had supplied to Saddam Hussein). The first example of a new relationship between the former Cold War enemies. [Ironic to think, right now, that Russia is the "enemy" again--it's like the Baby Boomer's recurring wet dream.]
* The last several pages of the book leave the reader a little disappointed, it is literally a "one damn thing after another" summary of what happened without any real thematic organizing thread or any way for the reader to hold it all in the mind. Everything from the increase in drug use, to leftism in the universities, to evolutionary psychology, to the environmental movement (and concerns about deforestation chlorofluorocarbon use and fossil fuel use), to new technology, the spread of AIDS. What this really leaves the reader with is the conclusion that history needs to recede into the past--time has to pass to give a chain of historical events both context and narrative coherence--before it can be well apprehended.
* "...whereas at the time of the Versailles treaty in 1919, most intelligent people believed that an enlarged State could increase the sum total of human happiness, by the 1990s this view was held by no one outside a small, diminishing and dispirited band of zealots, most of them academics." The 20th century tested Rousseauist thinking to destruction.
To read:
Ernest Jones: The Life and work of Sigmund Freud
*Karl Popper: Conjectures and Refutations
James Frazer: The Golden Bough
Walter Laqueur: Weimar: A Cultural History
Aldous Huxley: Crome Yellow
Karl Marx: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
Sigmund Freud: Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Four novels by Joseph Conrad: Nostromo, The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, Victory
Foster Rhea Dulles: The United States Since 1865
Arthur Schlesinger: The Crisis of the Old Order
Henry Kissinger: A World Restored: Castlereagh, Metternich and the Restoration of Peace
Harold Nicolson: Peacemaking, 1919
John Maynard Keynes: The Economic Consequences of the Peace
Etienne Mantoux: The Carthaginian Peace, or the Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes
Gene Smith: When the Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson
R.L. Schuettinger and E.F. Butler: 40 Centuries of Wage and Price Controls
Jawaharlal Nehru: Autobiography
David Shub: Lenin: A Biography
Ernst Nolte: Three Faces of Fascism
John Reed: Ten Days that Shook the World
Hajo Holborn: A History of Modern Germany
Dostoevsky: House of the Dead
Benito Mussolini: Opera Omnia, My Rise and Fall, The Doctrine of Fascism
Walter L. Adamson: Hegemony and Revolution: Antonio Gramsci's Political and Cultural Theory
Antonio Gramsci: Letters from Prison
Fritz Fischer: The War of Illusions: German Policies from 1911 to 1914
Fritz Stern: The Politics of Cultural Despair
Hermann Lons: The Warwolf: A Peasant Chronicle of the Thirty Years War
Theodor Fritsch: Riddle of the Jew's Success
Oswald Spengler: The Decline of the West
Heinrich von Trietschke: History of Germany in the 19th Century
Istavan Meszaros: Marx's Theory of Alienation
Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf
William Carr: Hitler: A Study in Personality and Politics
Pierre Miquel: Poincare
Harold Nicolson: Curzon
Joseph de Maistre: St. Petersburg Dialogues (Les Soirées de Saint-Petersbourg)
J.L. Hymans: Leopold Sedar Senghor: An Intellectual Biography
Claudio G. Segrè: Fourth Shore: The Italian Colonization of Libya
Ronald Clark: The Life of Bertrand Russell
Leonard Mosley: Hirohito: Emperor of Japan
David James: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Empire
Stuart Schram: Mao Tse-Tung
Joseph R. Levenson: Confucian China and its Modern Fate: A Trilogy
J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur: Letters from an American Farmer
Robert Murray: The Harding Era
William Allen White: A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge
Charles Beard: The Rise of American Civilization
Walter Bagehot: Lombard Street
Edward Angle: Oh Yeah?
Thomas Wolfe: You Can't Go Home Again
Edmund Wilson: The American Jitters
James MacGregor Burns: Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox
Arthur M. Schlesinger: The Crisis of the Old Order 1919-1933
Lincoln Steffens: Autobiography
John Strachey: The Coming Struggle for Power
Dimitri Shostakovich: Memoirs
Leszek Kolakowski: Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, the Golden Age, the Breakdown (3 vols)
Victor Serge: Memoirs of a Revolutionary
Alan Bullock: Hitler: A Study in Tyranny
Joseph Nyomarkay: Charisma and Factionalism in the Nazi Party
Antoni Ekart: Vanished Without Trace: The Story of Seven Years in Soviet Russia
Hugh Byas: Government by Assassination
Salvador de Madariaga: Spain: A Modern History
Paul Preston: The Coming of the Spanish Civil War
Max Gallo: Spain Under Franco
Daniel Yergin: Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State
Marc Bloch: Strange Defeat
Boris Pasternak: Doctor Zhivago
Donald Irving: The Destruction of Dresden
Freeman Dyson: Disturbing the Universe
Dean Acheson: Present at the Creation
Chiang Kai-Shek: China's Destiny
Noel Barber: The Fall of Shanghai
Duncan Wilson: Tito's Yugoslavia
Richard Rovere: Senator Joe McCarthy
Douglas Kinnaird: President Eisenhower and Strategic Management
Ved Mehta: Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles
George Orwell: Collected Essays
Richard Hough: Mountbatten
Dom Moraes: Mrs. Gandhi
James Freeman: Untouchable: An Indian Life History
Albert Camus: The Stranger
Albert Camus: The Plague
Karl Popper: Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge
Terence Prettie: Konrad Adenauer, 1876-1967
Elisa Carrillo: Alcide De Gasperi: The Long Apprenticeship
Aiden Crowley: The Rise of Western Germany 1945-1972
Albert Sorel: Europe and the French Revolution
Richard Clogg: A Short History of Modern Greece
Hugh Thomas: Cuba, Or the Pursuit of Freedom
Daniel P. Moynihan: Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding
Henry Kissinger: Years of Upheaval
Anthony Sampson: The Money Lenders
Valery Tarsis: Ward 7
David C. Smith: H.G. Wells: Desperately Mortal
Karl Popper: Unended Quest: An Intellectual Biography
John Bullock: Death of a Country: Civil War in Lebanon
William Forbis: Fall of the Peacock Throne: The Story of Iran
Hugo Young: The Iron Lady: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher
David Lehman: Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man