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Javier E

How the Civil War Became the Indian Wars - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...vil-war-became-the-indian-wars

civil war reconstruction imperialism American Indian western expansion history

shared by Javier E on 29 May 15 - No Cached
  • On Dec. 21, 1866, a year and a half after Gen. Robert E. Lee and Gen. Ulysses S. Grant ostensibly closed the book on the Civil War’s final chapter at Appomattox Court House, another soldier, Capt. William Fetterman, led cavalrymen from Fort Phil Kearny, a federal outpost in Wyoming, toward the base of the Big Horn range
  • For a moment, it seemed that the federal government could accomplish great things. But in the West, Native Americans would not simply vanish
  • These two conflicts, long segregated in history and memory, were in fact intertwined. They both grew out of the process of establishing an American empire in the West. In 1860, competing visions of expansion transformed the presidential election into a referendum. Members of the Republican Party hearkened back to Jefferson’s dream of an “empire for liberty.” The United States, they said, should move west, leaving slavery behind. This free soil platform stood opposite the splintered Democrats’ insistence that slavery, unfettered by federal regulations, should be allowed to root itself in new soil.
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  • Never ones to let a serious crisis go to waste, leading Republicans seized the ensuing constitutional crisis as an opportunity to remake the nation’s political economy and geography. In the summer of 1862, as Lincoln mulled over the Emancipation Proclamation’s details, officials in his administration created the Department of Agriculture, while Congress passed the Morrill Land Grant Act, the Pacific Railroad Act and the Homestead Act.
  • s a result, federal authorities could offer citizens a deal: Enlist to fight for Lincoln and liberty, and receive, as fair recompense for their patriotic sacrifices, higher education and Western land connected by rail to markets. It seemed possible that liberty and empire might advance in lock step.
  • the project of continental expansion fostered sectional reconciliation. Northerners and Southerners agreed on little at the time except that the Army should pacify Western tribes. Even as they fought over the proper role for the federal government, the rights of the states, and the prerogatives of citizenship, many Americans found rare common ground on the subject of Manifest Destiny.
  • many American soldiers, whether they had fought for the Union or the Confederacy, redeployed to the frontier. They became shock troops of empire. The federal project of demilitarization, paradoxically, accelerated the conquest and colonization of the West.
  • The Indian wars of the Reconstruction era devastated not just Native American nations but also the United States.
  • The Civil War was over, but the Indian wars were just beginning.
  • Red Cloud’s War, then, undermined a utopian moment and blurred the Republican Party’s vision for expansion
  • at least the Grant administration had a plan. After he took office in 1869, President Grant promised that he would pursue a “peace policy” to put an end to violence in the West, opening the region to settlers. By feeding rather than fighting Indians, federal authorities would avoid further bloodshed with the nation’s indigenous peoples. The process of civilizing and acculturating Native nations into the United States could begin.
  • President Grant’s Peace Policy perished in the Modoc War. The horror of that conflict, and the Indian wars more broadly, coupled with an endless array of political scandals and violence in the states of the former Confederacy – including the brutal murder, on Easter Sunday 1873 in Colfax, La., of at least 60 African-Americans – diminished support for the Grant administration’s initiatives in the South and the West.
  • One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War, collective memory casts that conflict as a war of liberation, entirely distinct from the Indian wars.
  • though Reconstruction is typically recalled in the popular imagination as both more convoluted and contested – whether thwarted by intransigent Southerners, doomed to fail by incompetent and overweening federal officials, or perhaps some combination of the two – it was well intended nevertheless, an effort to make good on the nation’s commitment to freedom and equality.
  • But this is only part of the story. The Civil War emerged out of struggles between the North and South over how best to settle the West – struggles, in short, over who would shape an emerging American empire. Reconstruction in the West then devolved into a series of conflicts with Native Americans
  • so, while the Civil War and its aftermath boasted moments of redemption and days of jubilee, the era also featured episodes of subjugation and dispossession, patterns that would repeat themselves in the coming years.
  • When Chief Joseph surrendered, the United States secured its empire in the West. The Indian wars were over, but an era of American imperialism was just beginning.
Javier E

The Dangerous Myth of Appomattox - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...gerous-myth-of-appomattox.html

war civil war reconstruction governance surrender history

shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Not only did fighting continue in pockets for weeks, but in other ways the United States extended the war for more than five years after Appomattox. Using its war powers to create freedom and civil rights in the South, the federal government fought against a white Southern insurgency that relied on murder and intimidation to undo the gains of the war.
  • the “Appomattox myth” persisted, and continues today. By severing the war’s conflict from the Reconstruction that followed, it drains meaning from the Civil War and turns it into a family feud, a fight that ended with regional reconciliation. It also fosters a national amnesia about what wars are and how they end, a lacuna that has undermined American postwar efforts ever since.
  • Southern soldiers continued to fight as insurgents, terrorizing blacks across the region. One congressman estimated that 50,000 African-Americans were murdered by white Southerners in the first quarter-century after emancipation. “It is a fatal mistake, nay a wicked misery to talk of peace or the institutions of peace,” a federal attorney wrote almost two years after Appomattox. “We are in the very vortex of war.”
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  • The military occupation created pockets of stability and moments of order. Excluded from politics before the war, black men won more than 1,500 offices during Reconstruction. By 1880, 20 percent of black families owned farms.
  • But the occupation that helped support these gains could not be sustained. Anxious politicians reduced the Army’s size even as they assigned it more tasks. After Grant used the military to put down the Ku Klux Klan in the Carolinas in 1871, Congress and the public lost the will to pay the human and financial costs of Reconstruction.
  • Once white Southern Democrats overthrew Reconstruction between the 1870s and 1890s, they utilized the Appomattox myth to erase the connection between the popular, neatly concluded Civil War and the continuing battles of Reconstruction.
  • By the 20th century, history textbooks and popular films like “The Birth of a Nation” made the Civil War an honorable conflict among white Americans, and Reconstruction a corrupt racial tyranny of black over white (a judgment since overturned by historians like W. E. B. DuBois and Eric Foner).
  • separating the war and the military from Reconstruction contributes to an enduring American amnesia about the Army’s role in remaking postwar societies.
  • While it is tempting to blame the George W. Bush administration for these recent wars without end, the problem lies deep within Americans’ understanding of what wars are. We wish that wars, like sports, had carefully organized rules that would steer them to a satisfying end. But wars are often political efforts to remake international or domestic orders. They create problems of governance that battles alone cannot resolve.
  • the South “surrendered at Appomattox, and the North has been surrendering ever since.” In so many wars since, the United States won the battlefield fighting but lost ground afterward.
  • Although a nation has a right to decide what conflicts are worth fighting, it does not have the right to forget its history, and in the process to repeat it.
Javier E

The Slaughter Bench of History - Ian Morris - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...360534

war history civilization competition development

shared by Javier E on 13 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • War is mass murder, and yet, in perhaps the greatest paradox in history, war has nevertheless been the undertaker’s worst enemy. Contrary to what the song says, war has been good for something: over the long run, it has made humanity safer and richer.
  • There are four parts to the case I will make.
  • The first is that by fighting wars, people have created larger, more organized societies that have reduced the risk that their members will die violently.
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  • This observation rests on one of the major findings of archaeologists and anthropologists over the last century: that Stone Age societies were typically tiny.
  • People generally worked out their differences peacefully, but if someone decided to use force, there were far fewer constraints on him
  • By most estimates, 10 to 20 percent of all the people who lived in Stone Age societies died at the hands of other humans.
  • My third conclusion is that as well as making people safer, the larger societies created by war have also—again, over the long run—made us richer.
  • the winners of wars incorporated the losers into larger societies. The only way to make these larger societies work was for their rulers to develop stronger governments, and one of the first things these governments had to do, if they wanted to stay in power, was suppress violence within the society.
  • They cracked down on killing because well-behaved subjects were easier to govern and tax than angry, murderous ones. The unintended consequence, though, was that rates of violent death fell by 90 percent between Stone Age times and the twentieth century.
  • ut in 1945, there were about 2.5 billion people on earth, and over the course of the twentieth century roughly 10 billion lives were lived—meaning that the century’s 100–200 million war-related deaths added up to just 1 to 2 percent of our planet’s population. If you were lucky enough to be born in the industrialized twentieth century, you were on average 10 times less likely to die violently (or from violence’s consequences) than if you were born in a Stone Age society.
  • People hardly ever give up their freedom, including their rights to kill and impoverish each other, unless forced to do so, and virtually the only force strong enough to bring this about has been defeat in war or fear that such a defeat is imminent.
  • My second claim is that while war is the worst imaginable way to create larger, more peaceful societies, it is pretty much the only way humans have found.
  • Peace created the conditions for economic growth and rising living standards. This process too has been messy and uneven
  • Ten thousand years ago, there were only about 6 million people on earth. On average they lived about 30 years and supported themselves on the equivalent of less than two modern American dollars per day. Now there are more than a thousand times as many of us (7 billion, in fact), living more than twice as long (the global average is 67 years), and earning more than a dozen times as much (today the global average is $25 per day).
  • my fourth argument is that war is now putting itself out of business. For millennia, war has created peace, and destruction has created wealth, but in our own age humanity has gotten so good at fighting—our weapons so destructive, our organizations so efficient—that war is beginning to make further war of this kind impossible.
  • The next 40 years could be the most dangerous in history.
  • The Second Age, by contrast, is for the moment not quite so scary, because the number of warheads is so much smaller, but it is very far from simple. It has more players than the Cold War, using smaller forces and following few if any agreed-on rules.
  • So far, antimissile defenses and the globocop’s guarantees have kept order. But if the globocop does lose credibility in the 2030s and after, nuclear proliferation, arms races, and even preemptive attacks may start to make sense.
  • If major war comes in the 2040s or ’50s, there is a very good chance that it will begin not with a quarantined, high-tech battle between the great powers’ computers, space stations, and robots but with nuclear wars in South, Southwest, or East Asia that expand to draw in everyone else.
urickni

How Cold War anxieties still shape our world today - 0 views

theconversation.com/ll-shape-our-world-today-65612

shared by urickni on 04 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • This was total war on a global scale, producing a new sense among nations that their fates were interconnected.
    • urickni
      urickni on 04 Oct 19
       
      How the war shaped global atmosphere...this is relevant today in many ways
  • The sheer scale of the war and the complex administrative and strategic systems required to manage these global operations led to, during the Cold War that followed, a growing interdependency of a network of institutions, attitudes and ways of working.
  • the Cold War redrew geopolitical notions of time, space and scale.
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  • Huge nuclear arsenals made it necessary to consider both the instantaneous and the endless: the decisive moment when mutually assured destruction is potentially set in motion, the frozen stalemate of the superpower stand-off, and the long catastrophe of a post-nuclear future.
  • The power of an individual decision was now outrageously amplified – the finger on the nuclear button – yet, at the same time, radically diminished in the face of unfathomable forces,
  • The world had become too complex and too dangerous
  • During the second half of the 20th century, many fields of enquiry from anthropology, political theory and analytical philosophy to art, music and literature were influenced by the explosion in interdisciplinary thinking that emerged from developments in cybernetics and its relationship with Cold War military research and development.
    • urickni
      urickni on 04 Oct 19
       
      How different domains connect to the relevancy of the war and the ways that it is analyzed today.
  • The practice of engaging with the connections and interactions between disparate elements of a problem or entity conceived as a system, and between such systems, is now commonplace in areas such as corporate strategy, town planning and environmental policy.
  • The pervasiveness of a systems approach also influenced the arts.
  • attempts to grasp the complex interconnectedness of society, and often the effects of technology and progress upon it.
  • Systems thinking offered a means of conceptualising and understanding a world that had grown hugely more complex and dangerous.
  • Nuclear weapons demanded radical new ways of thinking about time, scale, power, death, responsibility and, most of all, control – control of technology, people, information and ideas.
  • We are now accustomed to thinking about the current moment in global terms – globalisation, global warming, global communications, global security.
    • urickni
      urickni on 04 Oct 19
       
      Ultimate idea in terms of the ways that the cold war has shaped society and ways of thinking
  • Everyday life is firewalled and password-protected. We move under a canopy of invisible cameras and sensors, where our personal details and likenesses, our associations, preferences and transactions lie waiting to be called upon – by friends, strangers, employers or snoops. And so what? We all do it – we are already conscripted
  • This is a world produced by the Cold War, by the anxieties and energies that found expression in the laboratories, boardrooms, government offices, think-tanks and universities tasked with managing a permanent state of emergency. The geopolitics may be different, but the technology, infrastructure, and worldview that built up and hardened during the Cold War era are still with us, embodied in the everyday devices we take for granted, and the precarious identities they suggest.
  • Normalised surveillance, generalised anxiety, an obsession with security, nationalised identities, pervasive suspicion and secrecy, spectacular military technology and proxy wars, spies, whistleblowers, and the enemy within.
  • Cold War marked the “end of history” – the great ideological struggles were over and Western liberal democracy had won, according to his thesis.
  • The world we are in is, in many ways, the world the Cold War made for us.
  • New technologies of war, such as heavy bombers and long-range missiles like the V-2 rocket, reduced distances of time and space. In recognition of this new state of affairs, in 1942 the
Javier E

Kirill Rogov on what Russians really think of the war in Ukraine | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...ly-think-of-the-war-in-ukraine

russia support war putin economist

shared by Javier E on 13 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • According to recent opinion polls, conducted by pollsters such as the Levada Centre which has offices in Moscow, 70-75% of respondents in Russia support the war with Ukraine. (These surveys were conducted before Mr Putin announced his mobilisation drive.
  • But these shocking figures are deceptive. Public opposition to the war can result in criminal prosecution, so people who are critical of the war and the regime are less likely to agree to speak to a pollster. This results in skewed samples and inflates the level of support for the war.
  • Two main narratives circulate. One is peddled by the best-known talk-show hosts who tell viewers that the “special operation” is part of Russia’s total and existential war with the West—which is, of course, hell-bent on obliterating Russia.
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  • By analysing some additional questions, taken from a survey by the independent pollster the Russian Field Group, we know that about a third of the Russian population constitutes a solid party of war; some 15% support the war with reservations; another 20% support the war but would have preferred it had the war never happened
  • The pro-war party consists of three main groups: one is in favour of total war and a decisive confrontation with the West; the second believes that Russians are fighting a just war under the banner “responsibility to protect”. The third group mostly supports military action, but they conform possibly because they fear to confront Mr Putin and his supporters.
  • The second narrative, prevalent on news programmes, emphasises that the “special military operation” in Ukraine is being conducted by professionals to liberate the Russian people of Donbas and other regions. It is presented as a “just war” predicated upon Russia’s responsibility to help Russians in need. Conflict with the West is a secondary consideration.
  • The first group passionately supports the way because they feel that the enemy is already on Russia’s doorstep; the other two see the threat as far away.
  • the chaotic nature of the mobilisation is throwing off Mr Putin’s calculations. It has undermined the common man’s confidence in the state machine, its efficiency and its dedication to a common cause. Thus it has undermined the very sense of unity and nationhood that Mr Putin hoped to manipulate. For one thing the mobilisation was announced too late, when Russian troops were already being defeated by Ukrainian ones. For another, it has exposed how the centralised administrative machinery, built by Mr Putin, struggles in an emergency. That is because it is built on corruption and sycophancy, not competence.
  • Overall, the war’s outcome will depend on the mood of the group who support it and on the group of conformists who go along with it. That is because its most avid proponents, and its most intractable opponents, will not change their minds
  • If those who see it as a “just” war start to suspect that it is slipping into an existential conflict with the West, or if conformists change their risk calculations because they face being drafted, the balance of opinion may shift decisively.
Javier E

Opinion | Why Do Russians Still Want to Fight? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ssia-ukraine-war-soldiers.html

russia war support ukraine

shared by Javier E on 31 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • a significant number of Russian men are still keen to fight — more, in fact, than at the war’s outset. What explains the disconnect?
  • One obvious reason is fear. Men called up to the army have no choice but to obey, because opposition to the war has effectively been outlawed.
  • while fear and repression shape responses to the war, that doesn’t explain the readiness — willingness, even — of some Russian men to serve at the front. About 36 percent of Russian men are content to be conscripted, with the most supportive group being men aged 45 and older.
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  • That’s no accident. In the three decades since the end of the Soviet Union, those men have faced industrial collapse, the disappearance of millions of jobs and declining life expectancy. The war promises to change that downward trajectory, transforming the losers of the past three decades into new heroes
  • For many Russian men and their families, the war may be a horror. But it’s also the last opportunity to fix their lives.
  • First, there’s the money. The federal base salary for a soldier is about $2,500 a month, with payment of $39,000 for wounding and up to $65,000 in the case of death. Compared with a median monthly salary of $545, this is a handsome reward — even more so for the approximately 15.3 million Russians living below the poverty line.
  • there’s much more on offer, too. For those coming back from the front, the state promises fast-tracked entry into civil service jobs, health insurance, free public transportation, as well as free university education and free food at school for their children. And for those who were imprisoned and joined the Wagner private military company, the state grants freedom.
  • Today’s soldiers live in the shadows of the generation that won the war against Nazism. In Russian public culture, no honor is higher than to be a veteran of the “Great Patriotic War,” something the regime has capitalized on by framing today’s war as a kind of historical re-enactment of World War II.
  • As one soldier wrote on Telegram in February, the war confers “a sense of belonging to the great male deed, the deed of defending our Motherland.”
  • By allowing men to escape the difficulties of everyday life — with its low pay and routine frustrations — the war offers a restoration of male self-worth. These men, at last, matter.
  • Feelings of inferiority, too, are swept aside in the fraternal atmosphere of the front. “It doesn’t matter who you are, how you look,” as one soldier put it. In the communal life of conflict, many of the distinctions of civilian life dissolve. War is an equalizer.
  • Mistrust of the rich, belief that sanctions actually strengthen the economy and disdain for émigrés all attest to a class-based experience of the conflict. By participating in the war, millions of Russians at the bottom of the social ladder can emerge as the country’s true heroes, ready for the ultimate sacrifice. The risk may be grave and the financial reward uncertain. But the chance to rise in esteem and respect makes the effort worthwhile.
  • The longer the war drags on, bringing more casualties, loss and broken promises, the harder it may become to sustain such levels of acceptance
  • it may not. Collective emotional turmoil could deepen the feeling that the war must be won, no matter what. In the absence of an alternative vision of the future, Vladimir Putin and his war will continue to hold sway.
Javier E

Britain entering first world war was 'biggest error in modern history' | World news | T... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...r-biggest-error-niall-ferguson

history UK WWI

shared by Javier E on 22 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • google_ad_client = 'ca-guardian_js'; google_ad_channel = 'worldnews'; google_max_num_ads = '3'; // Comments Click here to join the discussion. We can't load the discussion on theguardian.com because you don't have JavaScript enabled. if (!!window.postMessage) { jQuery.getScript('http://discussion.theguardian.com/embed.js') } else { jQuery('#d2-root').removeClass('hd').html( '' + 'Comments' + 'Click here to join the discussion.We can\'t load the ' + 'discussion on theguardian.com ' + 'because your web browser does not support all the features that we ' + 'need. If you cannot upgrade your browser to a newer version, you can ' + 'access the discussion ' + 'here.' ); } comp
  • Britain could have lived with a German victory in the first world war, and should have stayed out of the conflict in 1914, according to the historian Niall Ferguson, who described the intervention as "the biggest error in modern history".
  • Britain could indeed have lived with a German victory. What's more, it would have been in Britain's interests to stay out in 1914,
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  • "Even if Germany had defeated France and Russia, it would have had a pretty massive challenge on its hands trying to run the new German-dominated Europe and would have remained significantly weaker than the British empire in naval and financial terms. Given the resources that Britain had available in 1914, a better strategy would have been to wait and deal with the German challenge later when Britain could respond on its own terms, taking advantage of its much greater naval and financial capability."
  • "Creating an army more or less from scratch and then sending it into combat against the Germans was a recipe for disastrous losses. And if one asks whether this was the best way for Britain to deal with the challenge posed by imperial Germany, my answer is no.
  • He continued: "The cost, let me emphasise, of the first world war to Britain was catastrophic, and it left the British empire at the end of it all in a much weakened state … It had accumulated a vast debt, the cost of which really limited Britain's military capability throughout the interwar period. Then there was the manpower loss – not just all those aristocratic officers, but the many, many, many skilled workers who died or were permanently incapacitated in the war.
  • He concedes that if Britain had stood back in 1914, it would have reneged on commitments to uphold Belgian neutrality. "But guess what? Realism in foreign policy has a long and distinguished tradition, not least in Britain – otherwise the French would never complain about 'perfidious Albion'. For Britain it would ultimately have been far better to have thought in terms of the national interest rather than in terms of a dated treaty."
manhefnawi

House of Habsburg | European dynasty | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...House-of-Habsburg

Europe's Most Formidable Dynasty the Habsburg Habsburg-Lorraine

shared by manhefnawi on 16 May 18 - No Cached
  • royal German family
  • of Europe from the 15th to the 20th century
  • The name Habsburg is derived from the castle of Habsburg
  • ...41 more annotations...
  • built in 1020 by Werner
  • in the Aargau
  • in what is now Switzerland
  • rebelled against the German king Otto I in 950
  • Rudolf II of Habsburg (died 1232)
  • Rudolf III’s descendants, however, sold their portion, including Laufenburg, to Albert IV’s descendants before dying out in 1408
  • Albert IV’s son Rudolf IV of Habsburg was elected German king as Rudolf I in 1273. It was he who, in 1282, bestowed Austria and Styria on his two sons Albert (the future German king Albert I) and Rudolf (reckoned as Rudolf II of Austria). From that date the agelong identification of the Habsburgs with Austria begins
  • the most formidable dynasty was no longer the Habsburg but the Bourbon. In the War of the Grand Alliance (1689–97) the rising powers that 100 years earlier had been Habsburg Spain’s principal enemies and feeble France’s most fluent encouragers
  • Apart from the Bourbon ascendancy
  • The physical debility of Charles II of Spain was such that no male heir could be expected to be born to him
  • his crowns would pass to the electoral prince of Bavaria, Joseph Ferdinand, son of his niece Maria Antonia, daughter of the emperor Leopold I.
  • Charles II’s next natural heirs were the descendants (1) of his half-sister, who had married Louis XIV of France, and (2) of his father’s two sisters, of whom one had been Louis XIV’s mother and the other the emperor Leopold I’s
  • Critical tension developed: on the one hand neither the imperial Habsburgs nor their British and Dutch friends could consent to their Bourbon enemy’s acquiring the whole Spanish inheritance
  • Charles II in the meantime regarded any partition of his inheritance as a humiliation to Spain: dying in 1700, he named as his sole heir a Bourbon prince, Philip of Anjou, the second of Louis XIV’s grandsons. The War of the Spanish Succession ensued
  • To allay British and Dutch misgivings, Leopold I and his elder son, the future emperor Joseph I, in 1703 renounced their own claims to Spain in favour of Joseph’s brother Charles, so that he might found a second line of Spanish Habsburgs distinct from the imperial
  • Sardinia, however, was exchanged by him in 1717 for Sicily, which the peacemakers of Utrecht had assigned to the House of Savoy.
  • Charles remained technically at war with Bourbon Spain until 1720
  • Meanwhile the extinction of the Spanish Habsburgs’ male line and the death of his brother Joseph left Charles, in 1711, as the last male Habsburg. He had therefore to consider what should happen after his death. No woman could rule the Holy Roman Empire, and furthermore the Habsburg succession in some of the hereditary lands was assured only to the male line
  • he issued his famous Pragmatic Sanction of April 19, 1713, prescribing that, in the event of his dying sonless, the whole inheritance should pass (1) to a daughter of his, according to the rule of primogeniture, and thence to her descendants; next (2) if he himself left no daughter, to his late brother’s daughters, under the same conditions; and finally (3) if his nieces’ line was extinct, to the heirs of his paternal aunts
  • The attempt to win general recognition for his Pragmatic Sanction was Charles VI’s main concern from 1716 onward
  • By 1738, at the end of the War of the Polish Succession (in which he lost both Naples and Sicily to a Spanish Bourbon but got Parma and Piacenza
  • acknowledged the Pragmatic Sanction. His hopes were illusory: less than two months after his death, in 1740, his daughter Maria Theresa had to face a Prussian invasion of Silesia, which unleashed the War of the Austrian Succession
  • Bavaria then promptly challenged the Habsburg position in Germany; and France’s support of Bavaria encouraged Saxony to follow suit and Spain to try to oust the Habsburgs from Lombardy
  • The War of the Austrian Succession cost Maria Theresa most of Silesia, part of Lombardy, and the duchies of Parma and Piacenza (Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, 1748) but left her in possession of the rest of her father’s hereditary lands
  • her husband, Francis Stephen of Lorraine, who in 1737 had become hereditary grand duke of Tuscany, was finally recognized as Holy Roman emperor, with the title of Francis I. He and his descendants, of the House of Habsburg–Lorraine, are the dynastic continuators of the original Habsburgs
  • An Austro-French entente was subsequently maintained until 1792: the marriage of the archduchess Marie-Antoinette to the future Louis XVI of France (1770) was intended to confirm it
  • the Habsburgs exerted themselves to consolidate and to expand their central European bloc of territory
  • when the emperor Francis I died (1765), his eldest son, the emperor Joseph II, became coregent with his mother of the Austrian dominions, but Joseph’s brother Leopold became grand duke of Tuscany
  • The northeastward expansion of Habsburg central Europe, which came about in Joseph II’s time, was a result not so much of Joseph’s initiative as of external events: the First Partition of Poland (1772)
  • The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars brought a kaleidoscopic series of changes
  • On Napoleon’s downfall the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) inaugurated the Restoration, from which the battered House of Habsburg naturally benefitted
  • a brother of the Holy Roman emperors Joseph II and Leopold II, had in 1771 married the heiress of the House of Este; and Napoleon’s Habsburg consort, Marie Louise
  • The history of the House of Habsburg for the century following the Congress of Vienna is inseparable from that of the Austrian Empire
  • German, Italian, Hungarian, Slav, and Romanian—gradually eroded. The first territorial losses came in 1859, when Austria had to cede Lombardy to Sardinia–Piedmont, nucleus of the emergent kingdom of Italy
  • Next, the Seven Weeks’ War of 1866, in which Prussia, exploiting German nationalism, was in alliance with Italy, forced Austria both to renounce its hopes of reviving its ancient hegemony in Germany and to cede Venetia.
  • Franz Joseph took a step intended to consolidate his “multinational empire”
  • he granted to that kingdom equal status with the Austrian Empire in what was henceforth to be the Dual Monarchy of Austria–Hungary.
  • The ardent German nationalists of the Austrian Empire, as opposed to the Germans who were simply loyal to the Habsburgs, took the same attitude as did the Magyars
  • Remote from Austria’s national concerns but still wounding to the House of Habsburg was the fate of Franz Joseph’s brother Maximilian: set up by the French as emperor of Mexico in 1864
  • In 1878 Austro-Hungarian forces had “occupied” Bosnia and Herzegovina, which belonged to declining Turkey
  • World War I led to the dismemberment of the Habsburg Empire. While Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Romanians, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Italians were all claiming their share of the spoil, nothing remained to Charles, the last emperor and king, but “German” Austria and Hungary proper
Javier E

The South's Fight for White Supremacy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lost-cause-meacham.html

south white supremacy confederacy Lost Cause ideology racism history

shared by Javier E on 26 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • After the Confederate surrender at Appomattox in April 1865, he turned to a new project, publishing, in 1866, a book titled “The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates.”
  • “No one can read aright the history of America,” Pollard wrote, “unless in the light of a North and a South.” For all its bloodshed, he argued, the Civil War “did not decide negro equality; it did not decide negro suffrage; it did not decide State Rights. … And these things which the war did not decide, the Southern people will still cling to, still claim and still assert them in their rights and views.”
  • Here, then, was the ur-text of the Lost Cause, of the mythology of a South that believed its pro-slavery war aims were just, its fate tragic and its white-supremacist worldview worth defending
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  • To Pollard, the Southern side had fought nobly for noble ends. “The war has left the South its own memories, its own heroes, its own tears, its own dead,” he wrote. “Under these traditions, sons will grow to manhood, and lessons sink deep that are learned from the lips of widowed mothers.” Pollard declared that a “‘war of ideas,’” a new war that “the South wants and insists upon perpetrating,” was now unfolding.
  • The South, Pollard wrote, “must wear the crown of thorns before she can assume that of victory.”
  • in “The Lost Cause Regained,” published in 1868. Pollard wrote that he was “profoundly convinced that the true cause fought for in the late war has not been ‘lost’ immeasurably or irrevocably, but is yet in a condition to be ‘regained’ by the South on ultimate issues of the political contest.” The issue was no longer slavery, but white supremacy, which Pollard described as the “true cause of the war” and the “true hope of the South.”
  • The Civil War, then, was to be fought perennially
  • And in many ways it unfolds still. The defiance of federal will from Reconstruction to our own day, the insistence on states’ rights in the face of the quest for racial justice and the revanchist reverence for Confederate emblems and figures are illuminated by engaging with the ethos of which Pollard so effectively wrote.
  • David W. Blight detailed how a white narrative of the war took hold, North and South, after Appomattox. As early as 1874 the historian William Wells Brown had said, “There is a feeling all over this country that the Negro has got about as much as he ought to have.”
  • In this recasting of reality, the Civil War was a family quarrel in which both sides were doing the best they could according to their lights.
  • White Americans chose to celebrate one another without reference to the actual causes and implications of the war. “The memory of slavery, emancipation and the 14th and 15th Amendments never fit well into a developing narrative in which the Old and New South were romanticized and welcomed back to a new nationalism,” Blight wrote, “and in which devotion alone made everyone right, and no one truly wrong
  • To recall that the war had been about what Lincoln had called a “new birth of freedom” meant acknowledging the nation’s failings on race. So white Americans decided to recall something else.
  • In such a view, it had all been a struggle between two reasonable parties over the nature of the Constitution; slavery was incidental
  • By minimizing race in the story of the war, white Americans felt free to minimize race not only in the past but in the present — leading, as Blight wrote, to “the denigration of Black dignity and the attempted erasure of emancipation from the national narrative of what the war had been about.”
  • in 1965, at a time when white Southerners were still deeply engaged in preserving Pollard’s Lost Cause, the editors of Ebony magazine published a special edition that became a book: “The White Problem in America.
  • “The problem of race in America, insofar as that problem is related to packets of melanin in men’s skins, is a white problem,” not a Black one, Lerone Bennett Jr., a historian and senior editor at Ebony, wrote in the volume’s opening essay. “And in order to solve that problem we must seek its source, not in the Negro but in the white American (in the process by which he was educated, in the needs and complexes he expresses through racism) and in the structure of the white community (in the power arrangements and the illicit uses of racism in the scramble for scarce values: power, prestige, income).”
  • King’s piece, “The Un-Christian Christian,” argued that white religious believers “too often … have responded to Christ emotionally, but they have not responded to His teachings morally.”
  • Baldwin closes the book by imagining the interior monologue of the white American who has been raised on the false history of the Lost Cause. “Do not blame me,” Baldwin wrote of the white “stammering” in his conscience. “I was not there. I did not do it. My history has nothing to do with Europe or the slave trade. Anyway, it was your chiefs who sold you to me.
  • on the same day … in the most private chamber of his heart always, he, the white man, remains proud of that history for which he does not wish to pay, and from which, materially, he has profited so much” — a history manipulated to make the unspeakable palatable.
Javier E

Interview with World War II Historian Andrew Roberts - 0 views

www.historynet.com/i-historian-andrew-roberts.htm

WWII historiography

shared by Javier E on 31 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • You write that Hitler's war aims were impossible—how so? The Germans were trying to win a straightforward conventional war and, at the same time, trying to fight an ideological war: a specifically Nazi war as opposed to a German war. I believe that a true German nationalist—Otto von Bismarck, say, or Helmuth von Moltke—could have won the Second World War, because he wouldn't have made the kind of demands of the German military that Hitler did, which was to win a two-front conventional war while at the same time imposing the policies of the "Aryan master race." Those aims were directly in opposition.
  • Could the Nazis have won, had they done something differently? Absolutely. If they had not invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, and if they had instead thrown at the Allies even a fraction of the 3 million men they eventually unleashed against Russia, they would have chased us out of the Middle East and cut off access to 80 percent of the Allies' oil. We simply would not have been able to continue the struggle.
  • Was Hitler solely responsible for Germany's military blunders? No, there were plenty of people to blame. Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring is a perfect example: He promised Hitler that no Allied bombs would fall on Germany; he promised to destroy the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk solely through airpower; he promised to completely supply the German forces at Stalingrad by air. Yet he could not deliver on any of these promises.
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  • In the end, all of these poor military leaders were appointed or promoted by Hitler, many solely because they were Nazis, and that's no way to fight—or win—a war.
  • Who were the most effective combat generals of the war? The Russian Georgy Zhukov, because he was given every impossible task and succeeded at all of them. For Germany, Erich von Manstein, who came up with the "sickle cut" maneuver that in May 1940 defeated France and was the most effective German general on the Eastern Front.
  • The Germans saw the Japanese as adjuncts to the greater effort they were putting in. The Japanese never trusted the Germans; they didn't even tell Berlin they were going to attack Pearl Harbor. Neither country put in the diplomatic work required to really coordinate their efforts. Essentially, the Second World War was two separate conflicts fought simultaneously.
  • The major problem with the historiography of World War II is the Cold War—it was not in the West's postwar interest to acknowledge that it was the Russians who destroyed the Wehrmacht, at an unbelievable cost to themselves. We are just now beginning to acknowledge the Soviet Union's contribution.
  • Statistically, the Eastern Front was where the war was won—out of every five Germans killed in battlefield combat, four died on the Eastern Front
B Mannke

The War No Image Could Capture - Deborah Cohen - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...354670

shared by B Mannke on 11 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Essay December 2013 The War No Image Could Capture Photography has given us iconic representations of conflict since the Civil War—with a notable exception. Why, during the Great War, the camera failed. 
  • They could not be rescued yet, and so an anonymous official photographer attached to the Royal Engineers did what he could to record the scene. The picture he took, though, tells almost nothing without a caption. The landscape is flat and featureless. The dead and wounded look like dots. “Like a million bloody rugs,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald of the Somme carnage. In fact, you can’t make out blood. You can’t even tell you’re looking at bodies.
  • iconic representations of war
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  • World War I yielded a number of striking and affecting pictures. Some, included in the gallery of 380 presented in The Great War: A Photographic Narrative, are famous: the line of gassed men, blinded and clutching each other’s shoulders as they approach a first-aid station in 1918; the haunting, charred landscapes of the Ypres Salient in 1917. And yet in both cases, the more-renowned versions were their painted successors of 1919: John Singer Sargent’s oil painting Gassed, and Paul Nash’s semi-abstract rendering of the blasted Belgian flatland, The Menin Road. The essence of the Great War lies in the absence of any emblematic photograph.
  • The quest to communicate an unprecedented experience of combat began almost as soon as the war did, and it has continued ever since
  • All Quiet on the Western Front (1929): the war was unimaginable, dehumanizing, the unredeemable sacrifice of a generation. It marked the origin of our ironic sensibility
  • The central conundrum in representing the First World War is a stark one: the staggering statistics of matériel, manpower, and casualties threaten constantly to extinguish the individual. That was what the war poets understood, and why the images they summoned in words have been transmitted down a century. As Wilfred Owen did in “Dulce et Decorum Est” (1917), the poets addressed their readers directly, unsettling them with a vision of the damage suffered by a particular man’s body or mind.
  • Photography, of course, can’t capture sounds or bitter intonations—that devastatingly exact gargling, not gurgling
  • We felt they were mad.”
  • Needless to say, such a move was not repeated.
  • A great deal of the official photography of 1914 and 1915 borders on the risible: stiffly posed pictures that gesture to the heroic war that had been foretold rather than the war that was unfolding. In one picture, a marksman in a neat uniform crouches safely behind a fortification, intent on his quarry. In another, a dugout looks like a stage set, in which the actors have been urged to strike contemplative poses.
  • e Battle of Guillemont, a British and French offensive that was successful but at great cost, this image from September 1916, by the British official photographer John Warwick Brooke, is disorienting at first glance. Are the inert lumps on the ground dead bodies, or parts of dead bodies? They are neither. But the initial relief upon recognizing that they’re inanimate objects evaporates
  • The British prime minister’s own eldest son, Raymond Asquith, was killed a few days later and a few miles away, at the Battle of Flers–Courcelette.
  • . All the way through—as he meticulously documents the laborious mobilization, the pointless charges, the dead and injured marooned in the field—Sacco’s perspective is from the British lines, which means the soldiers are seen mostly from the back. He gets the details of the carts, the guns, and the uniforms exactly right. The faces he draws are deliberately generic.
  • They visited the battlefields to find the small white headstone with their soldier’s name; when there was no grave, they touched the place where a name was engraved on a memorial. They held séances to summon the dead. But inevitably, as the decades roll on, what endures are the fearsome numbers.
aqconces

The British View the War of 1812 Quite Differently Than Americans Do | History | Smiths... - 0 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...erently-americans-do-180951852

british view war of 1812 history

shared by aqconces on 19 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • For people like me, who have got their flags and wars mixed up, I think it should be pointed out that there may have been only one War of 1812, but there are four distinct versions of it—the American, the British, the Canadian and the Native American.
  • During the 20th century, historians recast the war in national terms: as a precondition for the entrenchment of Southern slavery, the jumping-off point for the goal of Manifest Destiny and the opening salvos in the race for industrial-capitalist supremacy
  • As the 19th century progressed, this view changed into a more general story about the “birth of American freedom” and the founding of the Union.
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  • by the end of the century, the historian Henry Adams was depicting the war as an aimless exercise in blunder, arrogance and human folly.
  • In the immediate aftermath of the war, American commentators painted the battles of 1812-15 as part of a glorious “second war for independence.”
  • In this postmodern narrative about American selfhood, the “enemy” in the war—Britain—almost disappeared entirely.
  • Not surprisingly, the Canadian history of the war began with a completely different set of heroes and villains.
  • By contrast, the British historiography of the War of 1812 has generally consisted of short chapters squeezed between the grand sweeping narratives of the Napoleonic Wars. The justification for this begins with the numbers: Roughly 20,000 on all sides died fighting the War of 1812 compared with over 3.5 million in the Napoleonic.
  • The truth is, the British were never happy. In fact, their feelings ranged from disbelief and betrayal at the beginning of the war to outright fury and resentment at the end. They regarded the U.S. protests against Royal Navy impressment of American seamen as exaggerated whining at best, and a transparent pretext for an attempt on Canada at worst.
alexdeltufo

What does World War I mean? A century of answers - The Boston Globe - 0 views

www.bostonglobe.com/...story.html

shared by alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • England, France, and Russia blamed Germany and Austria-Hungary, while the latter blamed the former.
  • A century later, the guns have long been silenced, but the war over the war continues. To an extent that seems amazing for a modern conflict, there is still no consensus over who was responsible for World War I,
  • influencing US foreign policy in different ways with each generation.
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  • it’s World War II, Vietnam, or Iraq that tend to be invoked more often—it remains a point of contention among academic
  • Six months after Wilson was reelected, he asked Congress to declare war against Germany to “make the world safe for democracy.”
  • He Kept Us Out of War.” Two years after shooting began, the prevailing American sentiment was that the war was an uncivilized exercise conducted by savages
  • part of its mission was to stay free of such senseless carnage, which it did—until 1917.
  • American story of WWI may not always tell us much about the war itself, but offers an excellent window into the outlook of the nation at any given time.
  • The 1920s also saw the beginnings of a cultural revolution: flappers, bootleggers, and jazz. There was enough change at home
  • an emerging continental power with a new sense of its role in the world.
  • ith the aftermath of WWI would be an understatement. Immediately following the war, the Versailles Peace Treaty swiftly disintegrated
  • -turn, the idea behind it wasn’t. Europe was still barbaric—but instead of hiding from the old continent, America needed to redeem it
  • America returned to “normalcy,” a word Warren Harding coined in his successful presidential campaign.
  • From this, he drew many lessons, among them that simply showing up and winning isn’t enough:
  • He cultivated Republicans to ensure continued US engagement, acceded to the reality of Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe
  • That’s what President Clinton meant when in 1995, making the case for intervening in the former Yugoslavia,
  • “The Guns of August.” A history of WWI’s origins, the book argued that none of the combatants wanted a war—
  • ‘The Missiles of October,’” JFK told his brother.) Tuchman’s view would become the most popular one among an American public scarred by the futile-seeming war in Vietnam,
  • This wasn’t initially an American idea, however: It came from a 1961 book by the German historian Fritz Fischer, whose work blaming his own country rocked the nation.
  • Fischer’s argument found a sympathetic audience in America, reassuring doubters that US participation in the war, and its ultimate role in stopping Germany, hadn’t been futile after all.
  • In 2011 Sean McMeekin, an American historian who works at a Turkish university, released a book in which he pointed to a new culprit: Russia,
  • raming the war as an Eastern land grab that just happened to lead to the deaths of millions of Europeans might not ever become the standard narrative,
  • alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16
     
    Jordan Michael Smith 
Javier E

Are Trump's Feuds With Tillerson and Corker a Prelude to War? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...542481

trump war korea foreign policy diplomacy

shared by Javier E on 11 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • On face, however, the splits with Tillerson and Corker both center around the same material question of whether the United States will start a shooting war, most likely with North Korea.
  • , Corker told the Times that he worried Trump didn’t understand the stakes of his statements on foreign-policy questions, viewing it as a “reality show of some kind.”
  • “He doesn’t realize that, you know, that we could be heading towards World War III with the kinds of comments that he’s making,” said Corker, who is the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and close to Tillerson, and therefore particularly well-placed to analyze Trump’s foreign-policy choices.
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  • There are two obvious things Corker could be talking about (and one hopes no less-obvious ones): North Korea and Iran.
  • Trump keeps telegraphing a desire to start a war with North Korea.  Having first drawn blood with his missile-strike on Syria, and been pleased with the reaction from the public and press, Trump seems to want more.
  • Although the official U.S. position, as outlined by other officials, is that all options are on the table, the president keeps suggesting that really only one is on the table. Why else would he so publicly slam the door shut on Tillerson’s open channel to Pyongyang? What else might he mean when he promised that the U.S. will “do what has to be done”?
  • There are other indications, too. In August, after a North Korean missile test, he said, “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening beyond a normal statement, and as I said they will be met with fire, fury, and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.” (Aides said the language was improvised, and could not explain what he meant by it.)
  • In mid-September, at the United Nations General Assembly, Trump said that if Pyongyang’s aggression continued, the U.S. “will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” also saying, “The United States is ready, willing and able, but hopefully this will not be necessary.”
  • Of course, Trump could be just talking trash, trying to do the geopolitical dozens with Kim Jong Un, but there’s no way for Kim, or diplomats from other foreign countries, or the American people to know the difference. (North Korea itself claimed Trump’s UN remarks constituted a declaration of war, though the regime has a long history of similar comments.)
  • The impression of a slouch toward war is sharpened by other evidence. Mattis, for example, on Monday told Army generals to be ready to fight a war in Korea. Some of that is standard readiness, but given his own bleak view of a military solution—Mattis said earlier this year that a war against North Korea would be “catastrophic” and “probably the worst kind of fighting in most people's lifetimes”—it could also be an indication of growing probability of a shooting war.
  • Yet the road to a major war is usually a long one. The Bush administration spent months laying the groundwork, both publicly and privately, for the war in Iraq. At this point, the president has demonstrated a pattern of comments that indicate a preference for a military response to North Korea, although it’s not clear that his preference will prevail. That pattern is enough that Trump’s feuds with Tillerson and Corker deserve to be seen not merely as wacky, somewhat disconcerting antics, but as part of a potential move toward a war—whether that’s World War III or not.
g-dragon

French Revolutionary Wars / War of the First Coalition - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/nch-revolutionary-wars-1221703

french revolutionary wars

shared by g-dragon on 19 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • The French Revolution led to much of Europe going to war in the mid-1790s
  • Some belligerents wanted to put Louis XVI back on a throne, many had other agendas like gaining territory or, in the case of some in France, creating a French Republic.
  • But for many months the other states of Europe refused to help. Austria, Prussia, Russia and the Ottoman Empires had been involved in a series of power struggles in Eastern Europe and had been less worried about the French king than their own jostling for positions until Poland, stuck in the middle, followed France by declaring a new constitution.
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  • Austria now tried to form an alliance that would threaten France into submission and stop the eastern rivals from fighting.
  • e Girondins or Brissotins) who wanted to take pre-emptive action, hoping that war would enable them to oust the king and declare a republic: the king’s failure to surrender to constitutional monarchy left the door open for him to be replaced.
  • there was terror in Paris. This was largely due to the fear the Prussian army would flatten Paris and slaughter the residents, a fear caused largely by Brunswick’s promise to do just that if the king or his family were harmed or insulted. Unfortunately, Paris had done exactly that: the crowd had killed their way to the king and taken him prisoner and now feared retribution. Massive paranoia and a fear of traitors also fuelled the panic. It caused a massacre in the prisons and over a thousand dead.
  • First Coalition, which was first between Austria and Prussia but was then joined by Britain and Spain
  • It would take seven coalitions to permanently end the wars now started. The First Coalition was aimed less at ending the revolution and more on gaining territory, and the French less as exporting revolution than getting a republic. More on the Seven Coalitions
  • many of the officers had fled the country.
  • (One opponent of the war was called Robespierre.
  • France began 1793 in a belligerent mood, executing their old king and declaring war on Britain, Spain, Russia, the Holy Roman Empire, most of Italy and The United Provinces, despite roughly 75% of their commissioned officers having left the army.
  • The influx of tens of thousands of passionate volunteers helped strengthen the remains of the royal army. However, the Holy Roman Empire decided to go on the offensive and France was now outnumbered
  • France’s government now declared a ‘Levée en Masse’, which basically mobilised/conscripted all adult males for the defense of the nation. There was uproar, rebellion and a flood of manpower, but both the Committee of Public Safety and the France they ruled had the resources to equip this army, the organization to run it, new tactics to make it effective, and it worked. It also started the first Total War and began the Terror.
  • The French soldiers were constantly boosted by patriotic propaganda and a huge number of texts sent out to them. France was still producing more soldiers and more equipment than its rivals,
  • the revolutionary government didn’t dare disband the armies and let these soldiers flood back into France to destabilize the nation, and neither could the faltering French finances support the armies on French soil. The solution was to carry the war abroad, ostensibly to safeguard the revolution, but also to get the glory and booty the government needed for support
  • However, the success in 1794 had been partly due to war breaking out again in the east, as Austria, Prussia, and Russia sliced up a Poland fighting to survive; it lost, and was taken off the map. Poland had in many ways helped France by distracting and dividing the coalition, and Prussia scaled down war efforts in the west, happy with gains in the east.
  • Britain was sucking up French colonies, the French navy being unable to work at sea with a devastated officer corps.
  • France was now able to capture more of the northwest coastline, and conquered and changed Holland
  • Prussia, satisfied with Polish land, gave up and came to terms, as did a number of other nations, until only Austria and Britain remained at war with France.
  • At the end of the year, the government in France changed to the Directory and a new constitution.
  • all aimed at Austria, the only major enemy left on the mainland
Javier E

The Bankrupt Colonialist - Comment is Freed - 0 views

samf.substack.com/...the-bankrupt-colonialist

crisis economics ukraine russia putin negotiations

shared by Javier E on 15 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • Up to now the main question has been about whether sanctions and the pressure on the Russian economy will force Putin to abandon his aggression. There is, however, also a post-war issue, which is the cost of reconstruction. Estimates of the impact of the war on Ukraine are already well over $100 billion
  • Understandably Kyiv wants compensation. This is raised in the kommersant story. According to Podolyak:  “compensatory mechanisms should be clearly spelled out: at the expense of what and from what budget all this will be restored.
  • Yet reparations of this sort - a more than reasonable request - would not only amount to an admission of guilt for the damage caused (Russia ludicrously claims only military targets have been hit) but will be beyond the capacity of the Russian economy, in its enfeebled state, to support.  
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  • Looking forward the most worrying issue for the Kremlin is the isolation of the country’s economy. Since the start of the war the Russian stock market has closed, interest rates have doubled, inflation has shot up, and the value of the rouble has plummeted. One recent estimate suggests that Russia faces a drop of from 7 to 15% in GDP in 2022. It risks defaulting on it’s debts.
  • it is hard to see how Russia is going to have much spare capacity to compensate Ukraine for the damage it has inflicted upon it, even in the unlikely event it was prepared to offer to do so as part of an agreement.  
  • Second, given what has happened over the past few weeks to the population of these territories, those remaining will be more hostile to Russia and will likely resist an imposed government.
  • At the very least Moscow will want the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in their entirety, and not just the previous separatist enclaves, to be annexed or given some independent status. This was, after all, the demand with which Russia entered the war.  
  • It is, however, by no means straightforward even from a Russian perspective.  
  • First, if Ukraine has not otherwise been defeated and so “demilitarised” then this will be a frontier that will require defending for the indefinite future.
  • There is a further issue here even if there is no agreement. The cities and towns that have suffered the worst as a result of Putin’s war are those that were once claimed to be pro-Russian and so required “liberation” from Ukrainian “genocide”.
  • So the cost of occupying even this limited part of the country will be considerable and that is before even thinking about the expense required to render those horribly damaged towns and cities at all habitable, with effective infrastructure and accommodation.
  • Their economies were in decline before 2014 and that process has since accelerated. They are now poorer than other parts of Ukraine and prone to criminality.
  • The capital Grozny was rebuilt but the economy functioned thereafter at barely a fraction of pre-war levels. Despite efforts to make the economy more productive, in 2017 it was estimated that Chechnya required 80% of the government budget to be subsidised.
  • The other implication is that while economic sanctions have not yet given the West much leverage over Putin’s war strategy they do offer it leverage over his peace strategy.
  • Attempts to turn the situation around have not been helped by Chechnya’s rampant corruption. So this relatively small territory is already costing Moscow close to $3 billion a year. Crimea, annexed in 2014, may be costing a similar amount.  
  • Or take Syria. Here Russian air power was also used in a  brutal way, this time against rebel populations and in support of the Assad regime. That campaign succeeded in keeping Assad in power but Russia lacks the resources to reconstruct Syria
  • “Now moving into its eleventh year, the conflict in Syria has inflicted an almost unimaginable degree of devastation and loss on the Syrian people and their economy. Over 350,000 verifiable deaths have been directly attributed to the conflict so far, but the number of unaccounted lethal and non-lethal casualties is almost certainly far higher
  • More than half the country’s pre-conflict population (of almost 21 million) has been displaced—one of the largest displacements of people since World War II—and, partly as a result, by 2019, economic activity in Syria had shrunk by more than 50% compared to what it had been in 2010.”   
  • Syria was a far cheaper war for Russia to wage, probably in the low billions of dollars, in fuel, ordnance, and personnel cost. Far less has gone into economic assistance and much of that has been returned to Russia as arms sales and gas and infrastructure contracts
  • The strains on the Russian war effort are already evident, from the army’s hesitation about trying to fight their way into cities and the recruitment of mercenaries, to the reported appeal to China for help with supplies of military equipment and Putin’s fury with his intelligence agencies for misleading assessments and wasting roubles on Ukrainian agents who turned out to be useless
  • He is now having to choose between a range of poor outcomes, which the US suggests may include escalation to chemical use (which would be both militarily pointless and test further Western determination not to get directly involved).
  • War is rarely a good investment. Putin has acted for reasons of political and not economic opportunism. The prospects for any territory “liberated” by Russia is bleak. They will not prosper and will remain cut off from the international economy. To the extent that people stay they will have to be subsidised for all their needs while there will be little economic activity.  
  • Because of the destruction the short-term prospects will be bleak even if these territories are fully returned to Ukraine. But over the longer-term they will be much better off because of the amount of economic assistance Ukraine will receive and its integration into the international economy.
  • as Germany and Japan showed after 1945 even shattered economies can be rebuilt to even greater levels of efficiency with sufficient resilience and resources. That is another reason why Western financial assistance and investment will be especially vital - Ukraine’s full recovery will serve as a testament to Putin’s failure.
  •  it is worth keeping this analysis in mind when considering prospective peace deals. The Russians may have underestimated the costs of conquest from the start but their approach to war has raised those costs considerably, especially in those parts of Ukraine close to Russia.
  • Third, these territories will be economically wrecked and with no prospect of recovery so long as they are separated from Ukraine. 
  • The question of the future of sanctions and how they might be unwound is not one to be discussed separately from any peace talks. They are a vital part of the negotiations. As there can be no Western-led peace talks without Ukraine, it should be made clear to Moscow that for now this is a card for Zelensky to play.
  • The future of the Russian economy can then be in his hands. Should a moment come to start to ease sanctions, some leverage will be required to ensure that any agreement is being honoured. There could be a link  to reparations for the terrible damage caused.
  • As his original war plans failed Putin has insisted his forces follow a disruptive and cruel strategy that has put his original aims even more out of reach and Ukraine with a say over the future of the Russian economy.
peterconnelly

Ukraine Tells Story of War in Museum Show - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ukraine-war-museum.html

new york times ukraine

shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • KYIV, Ukraine — Just days after Russian troops retreated from the suburbs surrounding Kyiv, Yuriy Savchuk, director of a World War II museum in the city, joined the police and prosecutors who were investigating the full extent of the suffering inflicted there by enemy soldiers.
  • Over the next month, Mr. Savchuk and his colleagues meticulously documented what they saw, taking more than 3,000 photographs.
  • The sign, and everything else in the basement, was taken from a bomb shelter in a Kyiv suburb, Hostomel, the site of an airport that Russian soldiers tried to take in the first days of the war.
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  • The exhibition is one of several ways that Ukraine’s government is highlighting the devastation its people have endured even as new suffering is inflicted every day.
  • And Ukraine has taken the rare step of prosecuting Russian soldiers for war crimes just months after they were allegedly committed, greatly accelerating the normal judicial timetable.
  • “It is necessary to explain to our children what is happening in Ukraine now,” Mr. Spodinskiy said, as other visitors took photographs of the debris. “We cannot speak with our children as if nothing is happening,” he added, “because they clearly understand everything, and they see what happens in our country.”
  • “The history of our country is being created, and now this is an opportunity to get in touch with it,” said another visitor, Serhiy Pashchukov, a 31-year-old from Luhansk, which was occupied by Russia in 2014.
  • Those discoveries and many others have become items in an exhibition called “Crucified Ukraine” that opened on May 8 at Mr. Savchuk’s museum, an unusual effort to chronicle the war even as battles continue to rage in Ukraine’s east and south.
  • The rooms are dank and cold, but the most striking thing, many visitors said, was that it smells as if the people who sheltered with their belongings there — including onions, blankets, and toys — had just left.
  • “We had a similar basement in Bucha in a newly built apartment building,” said Evgeniya Skrypnyk, a 32-year-old from a suburb of Kyiv where Russian soldiers killed and terrorized civilians.
  • The one historical inaccuracy in the shelter was the absence of the five buckets that stood in the hallway where the people who lived underground for more than a month relieved themselves.
  • Remembrance of World War II has become more complex since the war started. In Russia, the Kremlin has sought to glorify the Soviet victory — to which millions of Ukrainians contributed — as a source of national pride. But it has also called upon memories of that war to justify and build support for the invasion of Ukraine, with Mr. Putin seeking to falsely portray Ukrainian leaders as “Nazis.”
  • Mr. Savchuk said that in light of the current war, people were talking about a “complete reconstruction” of the museum complex, whose architecture is intended to awe visitors with the memory of the Soviet victory in World War II, to de-emphasize the fight against Nazi Germany.
  • “This war changed everything,” he said. “A museum is not only an exhibition, it is a territory, it is its monuments, it is a place of memory. We are thinking about changing not only the ideology, but also the architecture, the emphasis.”
Javier E

Appomattox and the Ongoing Civil War - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...389847

civil war history historiography GOP government reconstruction

shared by Javier E on 09 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • The great issues of the war were not resolved on that April morning at Appomattox.
  • not only is the Civil War not over; it can still be lost.
  • if the Civil War were fought in the United States today with its ten-fold greater population, 7.5 million soldiers would die.
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • Americans like being “first” with ideas. But as Abraham Lincoln reminded us, more than four-score years later, the nation founded in a revolution against monarchy had to fight a second revolution against itself in order to determine whether the “proposition” of “equality” had a future in any republic
  • In the wake of this war, Americans faced a profound and all but impossible challenge of achieving two deeply contradictory goals—healing and justice. Healing took generations in many families, if it ever came at all. Justice was fiercely contested.
  • the defeated in this civil war eventually came to control large elements of the event’s meaning, legacies, and policy implications, a reality wracked with irony and driven by the nation’s persistence racism.
  • A shooting war between huge formal armies did indeed end in the spring of 1865 after four years of physical, environmental, social, and human devastation.
  • The “Union,” and all that it meant to northerners as a kind of shield for liberal democracy against oligarchy and aristocracy, survived. It was transformed through blood and reimagined for later generations. The first American republic, created out of revolution in the late 18th century, was in effect destroyed. A new, second republic took its place, given a violent birth in the emancipation of four million slaves and the re-crafting of the U. S. Constitution in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Those Amendments—ending legal slavery forever, sanctifying birthright citizenship and establishing “equal protection of the law,” and creating black male suffrage—in effect re-made the United States Constitution. This comprised a second American revolution.  
  • as many as 750,000 American soldiers and sailors may have died in the conflict, the majority from disease. Approximately 1.2 million were wounded
  • There is no reasonable count of civilian deaths, nor of the numbers of freed slaves who perished in the struggle for their own emancipation. Research now suggests that a quarter of all freedmen who made it to contraband camps operated by the Union forces died in the process
  • The Reconstruction era, stretching from 1865 to 1877, was one long referendum on the meaning and memory of the verdicts reached at Appomattox. Differing visions of America’s future were at stake.
  • Perhaps above all, America is a society riven by conflict over federalism, the never-ending debate over the proper relation of federal to state powe
  • In a new book, historian Gregory Downs persuasively argues that a long and persistent “occupation” occurred for at least three years, and perhaps as long as six years, after the end of actual hostilities in spring, 1865
  • As the federal troops receded from view over time, large swaths of the former Confederate states descended into chaos, anarchy and violence, requiring a sustained use of Constitutional “war powers” to maintain any order. Indeed, as Downs shows, a genuine, if inadequate “occupation” was engineered by the U. S. government, almost without precedent, in order to try to bring control to a region that fell into “statelessness,” as it also revolted against defeat and all that it meant. Downs wants his work to speak to the present, and indeed it should. He urges libertarians of today to take notice because this history, as he says, demonstrates that “freedom is only possible within the state.”
  • violence left Reconstruction’s most vexing, twisted legacy. In 1866, bloody massacres of blacks and the destruction of freedmen’s communities wracked the cities of Memphis and New Orleans. In the political violence of Reconstruction, especially in the periods 1868-71 and again in 1875-77, a counter-revolution unfolded
  • Their violence reveals the implications of an unending struggle over race, power, land, and hugely different visions of the ideas of liberty and federalism
  • For a very long time, white Southerners experienced a lethal case of alienation and an explosive sense of grievance, however mythical the origins of those grievances or horrible their outcomes. Since most of the rural South was unpoliced by Union troops, despite the accusations of colonial “occupation” and “bayonet rule,” white Southerners unleashed a bloody fury against blacks and white Republicans born of lost battles, lost mastery, alleged political repression, and the need for “scapegoats” in their scorn for a racial order turned upside down.
  • too much of the political process of Reconstruction became war by other means. By whippings, rapes, the burning of houses, schools and churches, the violent disruption or intimidation of local Republican party meetings, and hundreds of murders and lynchings over a period of less than a decade the Klan and its minions (called variously “Red Shirts” or “white leaguers” and many other names) sought to win back as much of a status quo antebellum as they could achieve. Their victims were teachers, black students, white and black politicians, and uncounted numbers of freedmen and their families who participated in politics or gained some economic autonomy. The record of Reconstruction violence has been clinically detailed, but it is a piece of history that most Americans still prefer to avoid
  • This litany of horror and blood can become almost endless, and it represents the one time in American history when sustained uses of terror successfully worked to transform political regimes. In a process Southerners called “Southern Redemption,” eight of the 11 ex-Confederate states came back under white supremacist, Democratic party control by 1875
  • Much has changed in the fifty years since the crises of 1963—in law, in schooling, in scholarship, in race relations. But whatever the engines of history actually are, what seems apparent is that the legacies of the American Civil War have tended to subside and reemerge in a never-ending succession of revolutions and counter-revolution
  • the presidency of Barack Obama might be seen as a robust new chapter in this story. A significant segment of American society hates the President and cannot seem to abide a black family living in the White House.
  • equality is process of historical change. It forever tacks against the trade winds of individualism, self-interest, material accumulation, and widely varying notions of the idea of “liberty” from which it draws momentum.
  • Yes, the Civil War was rooted in states’ rights, but like any other constitutional doctrine, it significance rests with the issue in whose service it is employed. States’ rights for or to do what? For whom or against whom
  • In 1860 and 1861, some Southerners exercised “state sovereignty” as an act of revolution in the interest, as they said over and over themselves, of preserving a racial order founded on slavery
  • far-right federalists, who dominate the movement called the Tea Party, and who have found a vigorous leadership position at the heart of the Republican Party and on the federal judiciary, have much in common with the secessionists of 1861. Both groups are distinct minorities who have suddenly seized an inordinate degree of power due to congressional districting practices and effective use of conspiracy theories about centralization and the “leviathan” state
  • One acted in revolution to create and save a slaveholders’ republic; the other seems determined to render the modern federal government all but obsolete for any purpose beyond national defense and the protection of private citizens from having to participate in a social contract with their fellow citizens in tax-supported programs such as Social Security, Medicare, public education, environmental protection, or disaster relief
  • Both groups claim their mantle of righteousness in the name of “liberty,” privatization, hyper-individualism and racial supremacy (one openly, the other covertly
  • Both vehemently claim the authority of the “Founders” as though the American Revolution and the creation of the Constitution have no history. Modern-day states’ rightists and sometimes nullifiers embrace versions of federalism that might once have been thought all but buried in the mass slaughter of the Civil War, or in the imperatives of the New Deal’s response to the Great Depression, or in the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts, or in the battle over the Environmental Protection Agency.
  • The radical wing of the conservative movement in America, still ascendant in Congress and dominant in most of the South, seems determined to repeal much of the twentieth-century social legislation, and even tear up its constitutional and social roots in the transformations of the 1860s.
  • History may seem to have its lulls when it slows down and impinges less on our lives; then we are hit with massive crises, often to our utter surprise, and history speeds up beyond human comprehension.
  • It is impossible to grasp a turning point in history until it has happened, and understanding it may take a generation or more
  • “Misunderstanding of the present,” wrote Bloch, “is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past. But a man may wear himself out just as fruitlessly in seeking to understand the past, if he is totally ignorant of the present.”
  • Making “men equal on earth in the sight of other men,” to borrow again from Baldwin, is a long-term proposition, and for that matter, a definition of the meaning of America.
Javier E

The Real Story of How America Became an Economic Superpower - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...384034

economic history WWI WWII international financial US relations foreign policy

shared by Javier E on 26 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • a new history of the 20th century: the American century, which according to Tooze began not in 1945 but in 1916, the year U.S. output overtook that of the entire British empire.
  • The two books narrate the arc of American economic supremacy from its beginning to its apogee. It is both ominous and fitting that the second volume of the story was published in 2014, the year in which—at least by one economic measure—that supremacy came to an end.
  • “Britain has the earth, and Germany wants it.” Such was Woodrow Wilson’s analysis of the First World War in the summer of 1916,
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  • what about the United States? Before the 1914 war, the great economic potential of the U.S. was suppressed by its ineffective political system, dysfunctional financial system, and uniquely violent racial and labor conflicts. “America was a byword for urban graft, mismanagement and greed-fuelled politics, as much as for growth, production, and profit,”
  • as World War I entered its third year—and the first year of Tooze’s story—the balance of power was visibly tilting from Europe to America. The belligerents could no longer sustain the costs of offensive war. Cut off from world trade, Germany hunkered into a defensive siege, concentrating its attacks on weak enemies like Romania. The Western allies, and especially Britain, outfitted their forces by placing larger and larger war orders with the United States
  • His Wilson is no dreamy idealist. The president’s animating idea was an American exceptionalism of a now-familiar but then-startling kind.
  • That staggering quantity of Allied purchases called forth something like a war mobilization in the United States. American factories switched from civilian to military production; American farmers planted food and fiber to feed and clothe the combatants of Europe
  • But unlike in 1940-41, the decision to commit so much to one side’s victory in a European war was not a political decision by the U.S. government. Quite the contrary: President Wilson wished to stay out of the war entirely. He famously preferred a “peace without victory.” The trouble was that by 1916, the U.S. commitment to Britain and France had grown—to borrow a phrase from the future—too big to fail.
  • His Republican opponents—men like Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Elihu Root—wished to see America take its place among the powers of the earth. They wanted a navy, an army, a central bank, and all the other instrumentalities of power possessed by Britain, France, and Germany. These political rivals are commonly derided as “isolationists” because they mistrusted the Wilson’s League of Nations project. That’s a big mistake. They doubted the League because they feared it would encroach on American sovereignty.
  • Grant presents this story as a laissez-faire triumph. Wartime inflation was halted. Borrowing and spending gave way to saving and investing. Recovery then occurred naturally, without any need for government stimulus. “The hero of my narrative is the price mechanism, Adam Smith’s invisible hand,
  • It was Wilson who wished to remain aloof from the Entente, who feared that too close an association with Britain and France would limit American options.
  • Wilson was guided by a different vision: Rather than join the struggle of imperial rivalries, the United States could use its emerging power to suppress those rivalries altogether. Wilson was the first American statesman to perceive that the United States had grown, in Tooze’s words, into “a power unlike any other. It had emerged, quite suddenly, as a novel kind of ‘super-state,’ exercising a veto over the financial and security concerns of the other major states of the world.”
  • Wilson hoped to deploy this emerging super-power to enforce an enduring peace. His own mistakes and those of his successors doomed the project,
  • What went wrong? “When all is said and done,” Tooze writes, “the answer must be sought in the failure of the United States to cooperate with the efforts of the French, British, Germans and the Japanese [leaders of the early 1920s] to stabilize a viable world economy and to establish new institutions of collective security. … Given the violence they had already experienced and the risk of even greater future devastation, France, Germany, Japan, and Britain could all see this. But what was no less obvious was that only the US could anchor such a new order.”
  • And that was what Americans of the 1920s and 1930s declined to do—because doing so implied too much change at home for them: “At the hub of the rapidly evolving, American-centered world system there was a polity wedded to a conservative vision of its own future.”
  • The Forgotten Depression is a polemic embedded within a narrative, an argument against the Obama stimulus joined to an account of the depression of 1920-21. As Grant correctly observes, that depression was one of the sharpest and most painful in American history.
  • Then, after 18 months of extremely hard times, the economy lurched into recovery. By 1923, the U.S. had returned to full employment.
  • “By the end of 1916, American investors had wagered two billion dollars on an Entente victory,” computes Tooze (relative to America’s estimated GDP of $50 billion in 1916, the equivalent of $560 billion in today’s money).
  • the central assumption of his version of events is the same one captured in Rothbard’s title half a century ago: that America’s economic history constitutes a story unto itself.
  • Americans, meanwhile, were preoccupied with the problem of German recovery. How could Germany achieve political stability if it had to pay so much to France and Belgium? The Americans pressed the French to relent when it came to Germany, but insisted that their own claims be paid in full by both France and Britain.
  • Germany, for its part, could only pay if it could export, and especially to the world’s biggest and richest consumer market, the United States. The depression of 1920 killed those export hopes. Most immediately, the economic crisis sliced American consumer demand precisely when Europe needed it most.
  • But the gravest harm done by the depression to postwar recovery lasted long past 1921. To appreciate that, you have to understand the reasons why U.S. monetary authorities plunged the country into depression in 1920.
  • Monetary authorities, worried that inflation would revive and accelerate, made the fateful decision to slam the credit brakes, hard. Unlike the 1918 recession, that of 1920 was deliberately engineered. There was nothing invisible about it. Nor did the depression “cure itself.” U.S. officials cut interest rates and relaxed credit, and the economy predictably recovered
  • But 1920-21 was an inflation-stopper with a difference. In post-World War II America, anti-inflationists have been content to stop prices from rising. In 1920-21, monetary authorities actually sought to drive prices back to their pre-war levels
  • James Grant hails this accomplishment. Adam Tooze forces us to reckon with its consequences for the rest of the planet.
  • When the U.S. opted for massive deflation, it thrust upon every country that wished to return to the gold standard (and what respectable country would not?) an agonizing dilemma. Return to gold at 1913 values, and you would have to match U.S. deflation with an even steeper deflation of your own, accepting increased unemployment along the way. Alternatively, you could re-peg your currency to gold at a diminished rate. But that amounted to an admission that your money had permanently lost value—and that your own people, who had trusted their government with loans in local money, would receive a weaker return on their bonds than American creditors who had lent in dollars.
  • Britain chose the former course; pretty much everybody else chose the latter.
  • The consequences of these choices fill much of the second half of The Deluge. For Europeans, they were uniformly grim, and worse.
  • But one important effect ultimately rebounded on Americans. America’s determination to restore a dollar “as good as gold” not only imposed terrible hardship on war-ravaged Europe, it also threatened to flood American markets with low-cost European imports. The flip side of the Lost Generation enjoying cheap European travel with their strong dollars was German steelmakers and shipyards underpricing their American competitors with weak marks.
  • American leaders of the 1920s weren’t willing to accept this outcome. In 1921 and 1923, they raised tariffs, terminating a brief experiment with freer trade undertaken after the election of 1912. The world owed the United States billions of dollars, but the world was going to have to find another way of earning that money than selling goods to the United States.
  • Between 1924 and 1930, world financial flows could be simplified into a daisy chain of debt. Germans borrowed from Americans, and used the proceeds to pay reparations to the Belgians and French. The French and Belgians, in turn, repaid war debts to the British and Americans. The British then used their French and Italian debt payments to repay the United States, who set the whole crazy contraption in motion again. Everybody could see the system was crazy. Only the United States could fix it. It never did.
  • The reckless desperation of Hitler’s war provides context for the horrific crimes of his regime. Hitler’s empire could not feed itself, so his invasion plan for the Soviet Union contemplated the death by starvation of 20 to 30 million Soviet urban dwellers after the invaders stole all foodstuffs for their own use. Germany lacked workers, so it plundered the labor of its conquered peoples. By 1944, foreigners constituted 20 percent of the German workforce and 33 percent of armaments workers
  • “If man accumulates enough combustible material, God will provide the spark.” So it happened in 1929. The Deluge that had inundated the rest of the developed world roared back upon the United States.
  • From the start, the United States was Hitler’s ultimate target. “In seeking to explain the urgency of Hitler’s aggression, historians have underestimated his acute awareness of the threat posed to Germany, along with the rest of the European powers, by the emergence of the United States as the dominant global superpower,” Tooze writes. “The originality of National Socialism was that, rather than meekly accepting a place for Germany within a global economic order dominated by the affluent English-speaking countries, Hitler sought to mobilize the pent-up frustrations of his population to mount an epic challenge to this order.”
  • Germany was a weaker and poorer country in 1939 than it had been in 1914. Compared with Britain, let alone the United States, it lacked the basic elements of modernity: There were just 486,000 automobiles in Germany in 1932, and one-quarter of all Germans still worked as farmers as of 1925. Yet this backward land, with an income per capita comparable to contemporary “South Africa, Iran and Tunisia,” wagered on a second world war even more audacious than the first.
  • That way was found: more debt, especially more German debt. The 1923 hyper-inflation that wiped out Germany’s savers also tidied up the country’s balance sheet. Post-inflation Germany looked like a very creditworthy borrower.
  • On paper, the Nazi empire of 1942 represented a substantial economic bloc. But pillage and slavery are not workable bases for an industrial economy. Under German rule, the output of conquered Europe collapsed. The Hitlerian vision of a united German-led Eurasia equaling the Anglo-American bloc proved a crazed and genocidal fantasy.
  • The foundation of this order was America’s rise to unique economic predominance a century ago. That predominance is now coming to an end as China does what the Soviet Union and Imperial Germany never could: rise toward economic parity with the United States.
  • t is coming, and when it does, the fundamental basis of world-power politics over the past 100 years will have been removed. Just how big and dangerous a change that will be is the deepest theme of Adam Tooze's profound and brilliant grand narrative
alexdeltufo

The War to End All Wars? Hardly. But It Did Change Them Forever. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ntal-changes-to-the-world.html

shared by alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • World War I, which began 100 years ago, has moved from memory to history
  • In Europe’s first total war, called the Great War until the second one came along, seven million civilians also died.
  • World War I also began a tradition of memorializing ordinary soldiers by name and burying them alongside their officers
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • World War I could be said to have begun in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, by a young nationalist seeking a greater Serbia.
  • It also featured the initial step of the United States as a global power. President Woodrow Wilson ultimately failed in his ambitions for a new
  • Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires and the growing strength of Germany and Russia
  • For France the war, however bloody, was a necessary response to invasion.
  • while World War II was an embarrassing collapse, with significant collaboration. Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • In fact, the beginning of the war was mobile and extremely bloody, as were the last few months, when the big offensives of 1918 broke the German Army.
  • he memory of July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme — when 20,000 British soldiers died, 40,000 were wounded and 60 percent of officers were killed
  • “The supreme irony of 1914 is how many of the rulers of Europe grossly overestimated military power and grossly underestimated economic power,”
  • The end of the Cold War was in a sense a return to the end of World War I, restoring sovereignty to the countries of Eastern Europe, one reason they
  • Some question whether the lessons of 1914 or of 1939 are more valid today. Do we heed only the lessons of 1939,
  • Others point to the dangers of declining powers faced with rising ones, considering both China and the Middle East,
  • Even the Balfour Declaration, which threw British support behind the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, was signed during the war, in November 1917.
  • If Tyne Cot is the largest military cemetery for the Commonwealth, this is the smallest American military cemetery.
  • alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16
     
    Steven Erlanger 
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