Video 1: Challenges to Capitalism and Collective Security
Challenges to Capitalism
Analyzing guns and money is a great way to start understanding what's happening in a given historical period.
The amount of demand is linked to economic growth as well as the amount of money available.
In a gold standard system, the amount of money is constant because there's only so much gold. This means that demand can't grow unless more gold is found. "Gold fetters".
There are also efforts to raise the amount of money circulating using paper, but that's not our focus.
The following countries are on the gold standard: Britain, the US, France, Germany. China uses silver. By the late 1920s, most of the countries are back on gold.
When gold started running out of a certain country (meaning the country was buying more than it was selling), countries started raising interest rates (on what?) to bring in more gold.
The US, Germany, and England are still recovering from the war economically speaking. Germans create lots of inflation by devaluing their money. There's a "hydraulic loop" that's sustaining the recovery: the US loans to the Germans who pay reparations to Britain and France, who use the cash to pay back the US loans from the war.
The German economy is struggling. The British economy has stabilized but there's lots of worker unrest. The US had a sharp regression after the war and it's starting to come out of it, all except American agriculture. The industry is doing well.
Public investment in stocks is a new thing. In WWI the governments asked people to loan them money -- these were war bonds. This continued after the war. People invested and even borrowed to invest. There is increasingly an investment bubble in the US. It pops in 1929. People rush to sell their stocks. People are worried about whether the banks are still safe.
However, it wasn't this crash that caused the worldwide Great Depression. Economies reset after the crash. This was the first stage. The second stage happens in 1931 in Britain and is rooted in European politics.
Domestically, the conventional wisdom is to get out of the stock market and get into cash. This means that people aren't investing in the market anymore and demand goes down. Experts today say that there should have been lots of public spending to balance this (why? I don't understand). People were afraid to spend more money because that would undermine its value (??). They understood that printing money would chase away the gold to other countries.
Instead, internationally, perhaps several countries could work together to stabilize the world economy via international cooperation. There was a political inability to do this.
In the 1930s the US stops loaning money to the Germans and Europe in general. The Germans have less money, therefore they can't repay the Brits+French, and so on. This weakens the world economy. Eastern Europe depends on Europe so there's an economic chain reaction. The French and Germans can't reach a financial agreement and the financial markets in Europe freeze. "A run on" the Austrian bank in 1931 causes it to "go belly-up".
Britain suspends the gold standard and this causes the stock market to drop way down and that's the result of the second stage.
The Challenge to Collective Security
There was a wildly successful book Erich Maria Remark "All Quiet on the Western Front" about WWI describing the soldiers' experience of the war. It depicted the horrors. The book isn't as popular in Germany. In Germany, there's a different popular book that celebrates comradeship.
Empires are becoming less economically viable and so empires are looking for ways to retreat. Britain is trying to figure out how to retreat from India. They gather a meeting to discuss the terms of Indians' self-government. Who will rule? How will that republic look like? How will the different religions, and the lower castes, be integrated into society as equal members? India arrives at a new tricolor flag featuring the spinning wheel (which makes handmade clothes as opposed to mass-produced clothes in England).
The League of Nations had been working towards an agenda of disarmament. By the beginning of the 1930s, this agenda fails.
There are a series of crises in the Far East. Next time.
Video 2: Escapes from Freedom
1913-1933 is the pivotal second phase in the onset of the world crisis that will dominate the decade. We'll focus on Japan and Germany.
Japan
There are two factions in Japan:
- Liberals - believes in international collaboration
- National Conservatives - emphasize the purity of Japanese traditions, meaning Japan needs to be independent culturally and economically and shed dependence on international factors
The great depression makes the NCs more popular.
Colonel Ishiwara was an NC who believed that Japan needed to be entirely independent. He believes Japan should form a pan-Asian alliance with China and enact imperial expansion. He thinks the government of Japan is too chicken to do what needs to be done: extend a challenge to China to show them who will be the stronger partner in the pan-Asian alliance. He and his friends blow up railroad tracks and point fingers at the Chinese. They decide to avoid the embarrassment of publicizing this transgression. Instead, they promote the dudes who blew up the railroad and annex Manchuria in China. They install a dummy ruler. This violates a bunch of international treaties.
The Japanese government is torn about the international outcry. They decide to go bold and kill Charlie Chaplin who's visiting and the Prime Minister of Japan who's a patsy when they get together in China. They miss Chaplin but kill the PM. They aren't punished harshly. This shows that nobody can stand up to the army. Japan moves towards a military dictatorship.
Germany
There's mass unemployment in Germany. The results of the German elections show the unrest in the country. Nazis get 38% and there's a really polarized government. The current President is a mere figurehead. The NCs don't want to give the political left a chance to manage the government so they give Hitler, who is right-wing, the opportunity to become chancellor.
Britain
In 1932 Britain, which had been the symbol of free trade, abandons it. Demand plummets as the rest of the world abandons it too. This marks the end of the gold standard, with states increasingly abandoning it. France and Poland are the last ones left.
Commodity exports are hit hard. China and India and Latin America whose survival depended on export of raw commodities are hit the hardest. International cooperation failed: in 1933 there was an attempt at an international conference (The London Economic Conference of 1933) but FDR torpedoed the attempt to focus on national rehabilitation. There is a lot of unemployment worldwide and in the US.
There's only one democracy left in Europe East of the Rhine River: Czechoslovakia. The rest are ruled by the far right or left.
The US and Britain agree not to respond with military power to the Japanese violence in China. The US reprimand Japan and Britain "shrugs". There's a disarmament attempt in Europe and that fails.
Mussolini has already expanded Italy to Libya, and now he wants to avenge the Italian defeat in Ethiopia. The League of Nations makes threats but their ineffective.
The power of the Soviet Union grows.
There are only three possibilities for countries: diplomacy, war, and imperialism.
There are political and economic stories that converge. People are making lots of choices: about appointing Hitler, the Gold Standard, and more. All of these choices converge and people are figuring out the kind of world to live in. We tend to pity people who submitted to totalitarian regimes. Erich Fromm was from the Frankfurt School group in the 1930s who were involved in critical theory. He lists a few freedoms, trying to explain the political situation of the time. His theory is reminiscent of Adams's.
- Negative freedom is the freedom from social dictates in which people have more freedom of choice and fewer choices imposed on them
- Positive freedom is freedom that is imposed on you. For some people, dictatorship and the surrender to the rules of others, having choices made for you can feel like freedom. The individual can sublimate themselves into something greater and larger. The identity is found in the state. Just like Mussolini described.
Video 3: Total Politics
The politics of extremism in the 1930s. There's mass participation in politics. Governments learned a lot from WWI about systematic governance.
The radio becomes popularized, as well as newsreels, broadcast every week before movies in movie theaters. Ideas and information is being broadly communicated.
In some states, citizens are being categorized according to race by formal state authority. Like Jews in Austria, categorized according to parentage. The state also uses its power to categorize people according to mental illness. Germany and America play around with eugenics.
In the Age of Empires, we had nationalist empires. But now for instance we have the Soviet Union which is a group of nations bound by worker ideals.
The shift in the menu of political families
The 1900s and 1920s:
The 1930s:
Social Democrats are new now. Different parties converge into SDs. They flood in from Democratic Socialism: the power of workers. Also liberalism: individual rights and government protection thereof. Finally NCs: the central government is harnessed to protect the people and given lots of power.
There's Roosevelt in the US and in Sweden as well, both of whom create a SD party, drawing in supporters from the various former parties. The US is the epitome of the Social Democratic system of government: big business, big unions, and big governments that mediate between the two.
People who believe in limiting the power of government are more classically liberal.
Social Democratic parties are increasingly looking at citizens as cogs in a machine. A financial, systematic view of the state.
Steel is used as a metaphor -- Superman as well as Stalin.
FDR leads a Social democratic "New Deal" in Chicago.
Social Democratic governments are mediating between big businesses and worker unions.
In Shanghai there's a "New Life" movement that's a combination of Fascist elements, Communist elements, and Confucian ideals. There's a Communist center in Yenan, China.
In Brazil there's more extremism, towards Fascism. Vargas becomes an extremist leader there. A "New State".
The Spanish Civil War
In Barcelona, Spain, there's a "Second Republic". Politics are very polarized. In 1931 a new leftist republic comes into being. A right-wing party -- the Nationalists -- revolts in 1936 and soon they control half of Spain. There's a civil war in Spain [George Orwell -- Homage to Catalonia; Hemingway -- For Whom the Bell Tolls]. [Also Communists. Confused. Are the Communists the Republicans or are they a third side of the Civil War?]
The world considered the Spanish Civil War important (why?). The Soviet Union actively supported the Communist effort in Spain.
The Spanish Civil War (Spanish: Guerra Civil Española)[note 2] was a civil war in Spain fought from 1936 to 1939. Republicans loyal to the left-leaning Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic, in alliance with anarchists, of the communist and syndicalist variety, fought against an insurrection by the Nationalists, an alliance of Falangists, monarchists, conservatives and traditionalists, led by a military group among whom General Francisco Franco soon achieved a preponderant role. Due to the international political climate at the time, the war had many facets and was variously viewed as class struggle, a religious struggle, a struggle between dictatorship and republican democracy, between revolution and counterrevolution, and between fascism and communism.[10] According to Claude Bowers, U.S. ambassador to Spain during the war, it was the "dress rehearsal" for World War II.[11] The Nationalists won the war, which ended in early 1939, and ruled Spain until Franco's death in November 1975.
Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany fought on the side of the Nationalists.
Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso are artists depicting the horrors of the war, including bombings.
This war is about reshaping the world according to ideology.
Video 4: New Wars for New Empires
In 1937 some very formative choices are made.
In this period, the dominant empires seem to be thriving.
The dictatorship of the Soviet Union seemed very successful because of propaganda. For instance, there was propaganda showing that the farmers supported the Soviet Union. In fact, they had engaged in a war with the Soviet Union, which had essentially nationalized farmland and equipment and turned farmers into people who worked for the state. Dissent was not well accepted. Millions of people in the Soviet Union, especially Ukraine, starved to death.
Italy, headed by Mussolini, has just recently conquered Ethiopia and seems successful.
Germany, headed by Hitler, also seems to be doing well.
In Japan, the Emperor oversees a military dictatorship essentially. The Japanese control parts of China.
All of these leaders aspire to make their countries self-sufficient global or regional empires, including access to global resources. Their ideologies are characterized by the uniting of workers or of races.
The calculations empires are making
The other leading powers in the world are England, France, and the US. England and France are recovering from the war, becoming stable, and preoccupied with internal strife.
England is led by Neville Chamberlain. He is a strong leader concerned with English domestic affairs and the preservation of the British Empire. His international approach is defensive and diplomatic, fortifying relationships with the big empires to guard the British international status quo.
FDR is reelected in 1938. America is still struggling with recovering from the great depression and FDR is focusing on internal policy. He doesn't like the big dictators.
The Spanish Civil War is finishing up. It exemplified the struggle between the war powers: the Soviet Union on one side and the Germans and Italians on the other.
The Big Empires are counter-imperialist because they want to replace the existing British Empire.
The new empires become engaged in new wars
Soviet Union:
Stalin determines to destroy all remaining internal opposition. Forced collectivization of farms has just happened and millions are starving. There's mass slave labor: millions of people put to work in labor camps (Gulags) clustered in the soviet arctic, in the Soviet Far East, the area of Mongolia and the Central Soviet Union. Stalin begins purging top Soviet leaders. He has 100,000s people shot to create a Soviet Union that's ready to fight an external work.
Japan:
Japan wants to pick a fight with China, beat China down, and then convince them to join the Japanese empire peacefully. This is to create a Pan-Asian empire ruled by Japan. Most of the Chinese agriculture was in East China and these are the areas Japan is looking to occupy. The Japanese succeed in this expansion, creating thousands of refugees fleeing from Japanese Shanghai to International Safety Zone Shanghai.
[In the picture: Japanese aspirations vs. actual conquests in China. The conquests exceeded the plans.]
Germany:
Hitler called a meeting in November 1937 introducing his racial and spatial plan: Germany needs to conquer more territories so that the Aryan race could expand, mainly to the East. He rejects cooperation with others and concludes that war will have to be waged. In 1936 Germany regained control of Rhineland which had been demilitarized under the treaty of Versailles. France and England didn't make a fuss. The next targets will be the Germanic people in Austria and Czechoslovakia and Poland.
Video 5: Triumph of the New Empires
1937-1940.
Hitler annexes Austria in the summer of 1938 and plans to take over Sudetenland, the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia next under the premise of reuniting the Germanic people. All of the weapon industries of Czechoslovakia are located in Sudetenland.
England and France have to decide how to react. They recognize that a German annexation of Sudetenland will cause a power shift in Europe.
In September 1938 Chamberlain holds three summit conferences where they try to mediate the handing over of Sudetenland to Germany. Hitler refuses, saying that this process would be too slow, and it becomes clear that he wants a war. He is ultimately convinced and it is decided that Sudetenland will be turned over to Germany.
[Third summit. Left to right: Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini, Ciano]
Everybody's super happy with Chamberlain's seeming prevention of war.
But then in March 1939, Hitler takes Czechoslovakia. Britain and France take a stand: they'll help Poland if Hitler attacks. Why take a stand then? There's an ideological consideration here regarding the preservation of European independent states. Also some ego. And a French history of defending Polish independence (hm. Can't recall this). The French and British reach out to Stalin for collaboration, but Stalin makes an astonishing decision: he's siding with the Nazis. This alliance is sealed in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, named after the two countries' foreign ministers. They'll divide Poland between them.
There are tactical lessons learned from WWI on both sides. No footsoldiers against heavier artillery [Germans]. Creation of a blockade to "strangle Germany" [French and British]. Building up an air force for bombing purposes [French and British].
German generals are reluctant to wage war against the Brits and the French. They think they'll probably lose so there's a period of some quiet, regarded as a "phony war". The initial plans of both sides fail: the blockade fails because Germany can get supplies from the Soviet Union. Then a courier carrying the German plans to annex Belgium is captured by the allies.
The strange victory
The Germans, desperate, developed a high-risk plan. They plan to launch a decoy attack against North Belgium which is what the Allies are expecting [top couple of fat light red arrows]. And then they'll send in more troops to Southern Belgium through really difficult terrain where they can be intercepted pretty easily by the French [bottom set of light fat red arrows].
Amazingly, the Germans won. The French intelligence didn't detect the move in time and the Allied military didn't respond in time.
Next, the Germans attack Denmark and Norway, giving them access to materials from neutral Sweden. Then they attack the Netherlands and Belgium. Allied troops had to be sent back from Belgium to Great Britain across the sea. They then invade France and take Paris a few weeks later. A joint French-German government is set up in Vichy and the rest of the country comes under German rule.
The world was shocked by this quick upheaval and the overtaking of France and Britain by the Germans in such a short amount of time.
Britain had to decide how to act next. Chamberlain had resigned and was replaced by the conservative Churchill who had been warning England about the German threat for years. The conservatives align with the British Labor Party: Social Democrats and Socialists led by Clement Attlee. They all think the war should be fought, and it's decided.
Japan, Italy, and Germany form an alliance.
In 1940, the world was parcelled up as follows:
Red = Areas controlled by the Soviet Union
Black = Controlled by Japan, Germany, Italy
Blue = British Empire
Countries in order of strength:
1+2: Germany + Soviet Union
3: England
4: Japan
5: US
Vocabulary: Plebiscite, blitzkrieg,
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