07-16-2019, 06:16 PM
I'd love to write it. History is an obscene tale written in the blood of innocent people, but it is one in need of writing.
So where do I start? The ends of Crisis eras here and elsewhere. By elsewhere I include the losing sides. I will pay much attention to Germany and Japan in World War II -- two countries with the most shameful ends of Crisis eras.
A scene that I will use for the culmination of defeat is of German citizens getting guided tours of Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen, and Mauthausen under the direction of American and British soldiers, with Nazi Party members being obliged to bury the bodies. Another will be the horrors of Soviet takeovers, including the massacre at Nemmersdorf (one of the first German towns conquered by the Red Army)... and of course Berlin, with all the rapes. The message to that? Sow the whirlwind, and the whirlwind will reap you. I will contrast Finland, one of the few Axis powers that the Allies would have liked to have had on their side. I am going to speculate that FDR and Churchill urged leniency upon Finland because Finnish leadership was clean of war crimes. Italy? Italian leadership under Mussolini was so vile that the Italians largely saw their conquerors as liberators. Japan? It was far easier for the conscience of American leaders to use the atom bomb because of atrocities by the Japanese Armed Forces. The potential for the atom bomb blasts on Hiroshima and Nagasaki began with the Bataan Death March.
It is far easier to get final, definitive victory if one gives the defeated little cause for striking back. The brutal Axis powers left the conquered people much cause for striking back even in the face of the Gestapo and Kempeitai When the Americans, british, or Free French came to town, the war was over once they advanced out of town.
The scope needs be bigger because the 1T is itself comparatively boring. People pick up the pieces, often literally as in the ruins of cities once vibrant. They start anew on aborted careers or parlay their wartime experience into very different ones. Social roles seemingly well defined before the Crisis as a permanent reality become unthinkable. In America, people of Polish and Italian ancestry were almost invariably poor before the Second World War. Many proved themselves capable of better roles in life than they had before the war. Little can so enhance a career as being a war hero as a commissioned officer, and that is one way to get entry into the American middle class. Even blacks became more assertive about their rights. Heroism in the face of the Nazis and the Japanese militarists is a good habit for facing the Klan, White Citizens' Councils, and similar brutes. .
In view of Russia and China in the early half of the twentieth century I will suggest that the very nasty time better fits a description as an extended Time of Troubles with a series of waves of Crisis that do not resolve themselves until one such wave finally does. Such Times of Trouble shatter a society until the troubles exhaust the society.
So the Crisis ends when the post-Crisis world sets much as does concrete. The world of Europe in 1949 may have been more similar on the surface to that of 1989 than to that of 1946 -- let alone 1939. Political orders of the start of 1989 were still nominally much like those settled by 1949, the most obvious exceptions being the demise of dictatorships from before World War II in Spain and Portugal. But if 1985 (forty years after the end of WWII is still post (WWII) Crisis, 1985 is clearly part of the time building to the next one.
I would start with the depraved time of the latter part of the 3T as a "Degeneracy", a time of bad politics, bad business, bad tendencies in education, and bad mass culture that steadily debases the institutions that make a society work. Speculative booms lead, as usual, to financial panics, and the biggest and most corrupt speculative boom leads to the worst financial panic.
There are other loose ends, including the tendency of people to take better care of themselves and the tendency for youth to start defining their cultural and political lives earlier. Demographics of the electorate matter greatly. I see the pattern of the Millennial Generation in the 2010s very similar to that of the GI Generation in the 1930s -- and something that would have continued, WWIi or not.
So where do I start? The ends of Crisis eras here and elsewhere. By elsewhere I include the losing sides. I will pay much attention to Germany and Japan in World War II -- two countries with the most shameful ends of Crisis eras.
A scene that I will use for the culmination of defeat is of German citizens getting guided tours of Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen, and Mauthausen under the direction of American and British soldiers, with Nazi Party members being obliged to bury the bodies. Another will be the horrors of Soviet takeovers, including the massacre at Nemmersdorf (one of the first German towns conquered by the Red Army)... and of course Berlin, with all the rapes. The message to that? Sow the whirlwind, and the whirlwind will reap you. I will contrast Finland, one of the few Axis powers that the Allies would have liked to have had on their side. I am going to speculate that FDR and Churchill urged leniency upon Finland because Finnish leadership was clean of war crimes. Italy? Italian leadership under Mussolini was so vile that the Italians largely saw their conquerors as liberators. Japan? It was far easier for the conscience of American leaders to use the atom bomb because of atrocities by the Japanese Armed Forces. The potential for the atom bomb blasts on Hiroshima and Nagasaki began with the Bataan Death March.
It is far easier to get final, definitive victory if one gives the defeated little cause for striking back. The brutal Axis powers left the conquered people much cause for striking back even in the face of the Gestapo and Kempeitai When the Americans, british, or Free French came to town, the war was over once they advanced out of town.
The scope needs be bigger because the 1T is itself comparatively boring. People pick up the pieces, often literally as in the ruins of cities once vibrant. They start anew on aborted careers or parlay their wartime experience into very different ones. Social roles seemingly well defined before the Crisis as a permanent reality become unthinkable. In America, people of Polish and Italian ancestry were almost invariably poor before the Second World War. Many proved themselves capable of better roles in life than they had before the war. Little can so enhance a career as being a war hero as a commissioned officer, and that is one way to get entry into the American middle class. Even blacks became more assertive about their rights. Heroism in the face of the Nazis and the Japanese militarists is a good habit for facing the Klan, White Citizens' Councils, and similar brutes. .
In view of Russia and China in the early half of the twentieth century I will suggest that the very nasty time better fits a description as an extended Time of Troubles with a series of waves of Crisis that do not resolve themselves until one such wave finally does. Such Times of Trouble shatter a society until the troubles exhaust the society.
So the Crisis ends when the post-Crisis world sets much as does concrete. The world of Europe in 1949 may have been more similar on the surface to that of 1989 than to that of 1946 -- let alone 1939. Political orders of the start of 1989 were still nominally much like those settled by 1949, the most obvious exceptions being the demise of dictatorships from before World War II in Spain and Portugal. But if 1985 (forty years after the end of WWII is still post (WWII) Crisis, 1985 is clearly part of the time building to the next one.
I would start with the depraved time of the latter part of the 3T as a "Degeneracy", a time of bad politics, bad business, bad tendencies in education, and bad mass culture that steadily debases the institutions that make a society work. Speculative booms lead, as usual, to financial panics, and the biggest and most corrupt speculative boom leads to the worst financial panic.
There are other loose ends, including the tendency of people to take better care of themselves and the tendency for youth to start defining their cultural and political lives earlier. Demographics of the electorate matter greatly. I see the pattern of the Millennial Generation in the 2010s very similar to that of the GI Generation in the 1930s -- and something that would have continued, WWIi or not.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.