EARLY 20TH CENTURY Confusion and Global War Copyright © 2002 by Miles H. Hodges. All Rights Reserved.

AN OVERVIEW OF THE FIRST HALF OF THE 20TH CENTURY

This period begins (1900) with Western Europe at the height of its global power--and ends (1950) with the widespread loss of this same power. The cause in this dramatic shift in the fortunes of Western Europe was two global wars (World War One: 1914-1918 and World War Two: 1939-1945) of almost unimaginably awful magnitude--and a major industrial/financial collapse (the Great Depression: 1929-1935) that was in part the result of the first of these wars and most certainly was the cause of the second.  These wars and economic depression devastated Europe not only physically but also emotionally and spiritually. World War One World War One came on almost by accident--in the sense that no one truly intended it.  But the nationalistic boast which the Europeans lived by in their contest with each other pointed almost inevitably to such a test of wills and destinies.  It had been going on since the late 1800s in the scramble for colonies in Africa and Asia.  Now with that playing field fully exploited, it was inevitable that the Europeans should test their energies on each other within Europe itself. When the European conflict came in 1914 these Europeans were clueless as to what they had stepped into.  There were no clear war aims, except for the vague but insistent idea of defending national honor--whatever that meant specifically.  It thus easily degenerated into a mindless test of strength in which a little, then a bit more, then even more, then a lot, then finally everything they had was thrown into the contest.  It was not just a contest of armies, it was a contest of whole populations. The devastation that these European nations were willing to hurl against each other was shocking.  Towns in Belgium and Northern France were leveled to the ground, countless farms and villages in Russia were destroyed, and masses of people became war refugees everywhere.  Soldiers were throw as human walls against war machinery which blew human flesh to bits in an instant--and generals looked on uncomprehending how to wage war in the midst of such carnage.  Political regimes began to weaken as war weariness set in among grieving and starving commoners--and in 1917 the great Russian imperial government simply collapsed into chaos. America jumped into the War in late 1917 and provided just enough weight to break a gruesome 3-year stalemate--so that the War mercifully came to an end in late 1918.  America's President Wilson tried to give "victory" some lofty moral qualities--but few people bought the idea, either in Europe or in America.  All Wilson's fine rhetoric at the Peace Conferences could not dismiss the deep cynicism that had come to replace the Westerner's usual optimism. Indeed, the unprecedented devastation of World War One left Western Europe with little moral nerve to face up to the challenges posed to its liberal bourgeois culture/civilization.  For a while liberal "cheerleaders" in Europe and America pretended that the natural goodness of man would be sufficient to restore Western life to its former place of glory.  Their hope was that the "Great War" had been so awful that it hopefully had banished forever anyone's thought of ever pursuing war again as a political policy.  Whatever!  Choosing (as a form of "denial") not to devote any more of their energy to weighty social and political matters, liberal Europeans by and large proceeded to look to personal gain and fortune--hoping to put the horrible memories of the nationalist causes of the "Great War" behind them forever. The Great Depression This "denial" might have succeeded in part except for two problems.  One was the collapse of a very adolescent industrial/financial system that had recently replaced the fundamental agrarian or agricultural foundations that Europe had lived on for countless centuries.  Post-war failures in the declining agricultural sector began to spread to the interlinked American and then European financial or banking sectors by the end of the 1920s, and this in turn pulled down the fast-rising but still fairly new industrial sector throughout the whole industrial West.  Millions of people lost their farms, their industrial jobs, their commercial shops, their banking positions--and with the loss of their gainful employ also their life savings.  The liberal West was devastated. Stalin and Hitler The second problem was the rise in Europe of two powers, Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany, that had no interest in the Western liberal/bourgeois ethic.  Both of these power rose rapidly from the ashes of older imperial systems that had collapsed under the weight of World War One.  Both of these new regimes proposed entirely new political orders--neither built on the public expression of the autonomous and private individual will (as had been the recent legacy of Western culture) but on the basis of a "collective will" imposed by dictators through the process of monopolizing all forms of public expression and the terrorizing or eliminating of any sources of independent thought. These dictators were able to get away with this incredible program by offering ostensibly in exchange for lost personal liberties a growth in public wealth made possible by a tightly organized economic system that had none of the "defects" of the liberal capitalist banking/industrial system--which through its recent collapse supposedly demonstrated liberal capitalism's inherent shortcomings.  (Stalin had a harder time projecting this totalitarian vision of plenty--as he put the country through an incredible time of starvation in the early 1930s when he collectivized the peasant farms of Russia). Once set on the course of the unlimited expansion of their personal political powers, these giants of political will, Hitler and Stalin, inevitably looked to the rest of Western Europe, much as Napoleon had a little over a century before them, to expand their political experiments into:  at first at the periphery of European events (Spain) and then more centrally in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland.  The residue of liberal Western Europe (largely England and France at this point) tried to put up resistance.  But they offered mostly just a bluff, for their war-wearied hearts were really not in such resistance. World War Two In September of 1939 Germany and Russia challenged that bluff--quickly discovering how enfeebled France was and how indecisive England was (until Churchill appeared on the scene after the war had started).  Then in 1941, with liberal Europe either out of the way or on the defensive, Hitler and Stalin inevitably turned their ambitions on each other.  When the giants clashed the heavens shook. When late in 1941 Hitler's ally in Asia, Japan, bombed the American naval station at Pearl Harbor, America awoke like a sleeping giant.  Until then, America had been sitting out this widening European/Asian conflict, having been "burned" by its brief participation in the earlier "Great War."  Now on the counterattack,  America's industrial system swung into full operation--behind the protection of the great walls of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.  While the war demolished the industrial foundations of the two formerly greatest industrial giants, Germany and England, it served in America only to put incredible muscle into the American industrial economy.  America came out of the war not only on the winning side--but so far ahead of any other country industrially and financially that it seemed literally to possess fully half of the world's wealth within its own borders.  The war had made America truly awesome! When World War Two ended in 1945, England was physically devastated, France emotionally devastated, Germany almost non-existent.  The rest of Europe had also been dragged into the war and likewise was physically and emotionally wasted. Russia had come through the war crippled physically--but not emotionally.  Hitler's attack had pushed it into a strange alliance with the American-led liberal democracies, that is, on the side that ultimately emerged as "victors."  In fact at war's end in 1945 Russian troops sat in occupation of the entire Eastern half of Europe--with Stalin still very much in control throughout the whole region.  Stalin's intentions were to rebuild the destroyed industrial base of Russia with the industrial plunder of Eastern Europe, and to hold the area as a "buffer" against any other intruders like Napoleon and Hitler. At the same time troops of the American-led Western alliance were fully in control of life in the Western half of Europe. The On-Set of the Cold War An awkward situation resulted as Russia and America refused to retreat to their corners--fearful that the other might try to take over their war gains.  America, with reduced troop numbers in Europe but with its newly acquired nuclear weapons in hand, defied Russia to come any further West, or to meddle in the affairs of the liberal democratic governments in the West.  Likewise, Russia defied America to intervene as the Russian military occupation replaced the governments in its Eastern sector with Stalinist regimes.  Soon itself armed with its own nuclear weapons, Russia knew that America could not challenge it in its zone of influence--any more than Russia could challenge America in its zone.  By 1950 a stalemate had settled in. At this point, the entire Western World, indeed the whole world, was involved in an on-going test of strength (the "Cold War") between these two military giants.  America claimed to represent the older legacy of European liberal bourgeois Democracy and Capitalism (intermixed with its American Protestantism).  Russia claimed to represent the "new wave" of Marxist "Scientific Socialism" or "Communism" (hierarchically controlled industrialism--a system that Marx would never have recognized!)  As this military standoff became also a moral standoff, the world looked on in horror wondering what might be the outcome. * * * In short, in those 50 years the position of "movers" of Western history had shifted from its old center in Western Europe to its periphery:  to America in the West and to Russia in the East.  Europe proper was caught in the middle, by sheer necessity having to ally with one or the other power--willingly or unwillingly.

WORLD WAR ONE (1914 to 1918)

The Versailles Treaty: The Failure of Diplomacy As a "war to end all wars" it gave the Great War a moral quality that it otherwise lacked.  But this ideological foolishness did not last long--before the realities of national honor, economic interest, and the greed of power in victory asserted themselves in what was supposed to be a "reasoned" Armistice ending the war.  Supposedly all parties had agreed to stop the fighting without any conditions attaching themselves to the peace.  They simply had agreed to lay down their arms to stop the madness. But then France proceeded to take advantage of a very confused Germany.  The Germans had ousted their own "autocratic" government as a Wilsonian precondition to coming to the negotiating table. The French then took advantage of this situation to exact from a very weak German government the turnover of the vital Alsace-Lorraine industrial valley--and the agreement that Germany should pay France vast sums of "indemnity" for war damage done by Germany to France during the conflict, and should receive French occupational troops in the vital Saar coal mining district in Germany until full repayment of the indemnity had taken place. This was not only in violation of every principle by which the warring parties had agreed to end the conflict--it also set up the likelihood of German vindictiveness for this "stab in the back" of Germany by the Liberal Democracies.  Germany had not only been "raped" by France, but England--and even America--seemed to have stood by in approval of this crime.  Or so it seemed to Germany. Wilson actually had been appalled at the behavior of the "fellow democracies" in their treatment of Germany and left Europe disillusioned.  And Americans in general were shocked that their soldiers had died in Europe for such shady dealings.  They thus backed away from further involvement in European "diplomacy," vowing never to get caught up again in European diplomacy--not even in the high-minded League of Nations (that Wilson still hoped would correct the venality of the Armistice outcome).  Americans retreated behind the walls of "Fortress America," determined not to come out again for any cause.

THE POST-WAR MORAL-EMOTIONAL SHIFT

Emotional Reaction "Liberalism" had supposedly been the victor of the Great War.  The War supposedly had cleared the Western political field of the last residue of the Old Order and released Western destiny to the greatness that supposedly awaited full democracy.  Now the common people had a chance to show their true greatness.  For such Liberals as the American philosopher and educator John Dewey--this should have been Western culture's finest hour. The "Return to Normalcy" in America But it wasn't.  What the people demonstrated was that their deepest interests had not changed much over time--no matter what kind of a political system they were under, no matter what kind of an ideology supposedly directed them.  Given a chance to chose freely, they chose for jobs, home, sex, status and wealth--young and old alike, men and women alike, rich and poor alike.  The loftier issues (which the war had supposedly been about) left them cold. Indeed, it was disillusionment and follie--not Liberalism--that set in on the West during the next decade (the 1920s).  Sigmund Freud rather than John Dewey proved to be the true prophet of the times.  In fact Freud made a lot of sense to people.  According to Freud, what drove people was not high-minded philosophical ideals--but deep, dark undercurrents of human urges:  primitive and sex-laden.  The Great War had demonstrated the power of these dark urges, hadn't it?  Indeed it was easy to perceive "rationality" as being merely the self-delusion of over-educated intellectuals. This was not much of a foundation to build a bright new Liberal world on.

DEPRESSION (1930s)

Stalin's Collectivization In Russia, the glorious revolution which had ended centuries of Tsarist--almost Byzantine--rule there turned to the advantage not of the Liberals but to the Bolsheviks.  These were the secretive spokesmen for the almost pre-literate "proletariat" of Europe--whose supposed destiny was to overthrow not only the Old Order but also "hypocritical" Liberal democracy.  Further this was to be done not by cool reason and the exercise of open democracy--but through conspiracy and violence. When Joseph Stalin succeeded in the late 1920s in taking over the Bolshevik Revolution--and in the early 1930s putting to death millions of Russians in an effort to make himself the sole source of any kind of thinking for all the people, the Liberal world drew back in horror.  But there was little it seemed it could do except to stand by in dismay and hope somehow the whole Russian or "Soviet" venture would collapse under its self-destructive urges.  But it didn't happen--not for a while anyway

LIBERAL DEMOCRACY VERSUS AUTHORITARIANISM

Hitler Comes to Power Into this same confusion and dismay then stepped Adolf Hitler--with all the answers (for Germans at least).  "Foreign capitalists, Bolsheviks--but most important of all, Jews--had been responsible" for Germany's economic plight and national humiliation.  Hitler proposed to get rid of all these elements from Germany--and restore Germany to the glory that had eluded it (through the treachery of Liberal diplomats at the Armistice), a glory which was its supposed natural entitlement in history.  Germans bought this line--with wild enthusiasm.

WORLD WAR TWO (1939 - 1945)

Steps Leading Up to the War Japan's War on China Hitler's Anschluss with Austria The Dismemberment of Czechoslovakia The Russian War with Finland The Secret Rusian-German Treaty Blitzkrieg:  The Invasion of Poland Sitzkrieg:  The Quiet Winter of 1939-1940 Hitler's Attack on the West (April-May 1940) Belgium and France Denmark and Norway The Battle of Britain Hitler's Attack on the East The Barbarossa Plan Deay in Yugoslavia Greece and Crete The Invasion of Russia America Enters the War Anti-War Sentiments The Destroyer Deal A Toughening Stance against Japan Pearl Harbor--and War Gearing Up. The War in Africa and Italy The Russians Take to the Counter-Offensive The Allied Invasion of France Americans Island-Hop across the Pacific Collapse of the German Reich The Bomb--and Japan's Surrender

THE ON-SET OF THE COLD WAR (Late 1940s)

Truman Hangs Tough In the meantime, President Truman had seen a problem emerging with post-war Russia long before the rest of the American nation.  Since 1947 he had been moving ahead to buffer Soviet expansion in Europe with economic--and then military--assistance and guarantees of protection to various countries in Western Europe.  Thus an "American" zone emerged--in counterbalance to the Russian Soviet or Communist Zone.  Europe was divided--deeply--by an "Iron Curtain" which ran right through the middle of Europe, separating East from West--politically, economically, culturally and emotionally.  This division was to last for 40 years. The United Nations The Marshall Plan Dismantling the British Empire India Palestine The Berlain Bockade and Airlift The Stalinization of Eastern Europe NATO The Nuclear Arms Race Begins The Chinese Civil War