The Interwar Years- The Weakness of Western Democracies and the Rise of Totalitarianism...
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Transcript of The Interwar Years- The Weakness of Western Democracies and the Rise of Totalitarianism...
The Interwar Years- The Weakness of Western Democracies and the Rise of Totalitarianism
Totalitarians
Democracies
Our Key Question Why did the victors of World War I allow threats to their system of government and way of life to rise to power in the twenty years following World War I?
Reason 1a) Pacifism A Desire for Peace At All Costs
How does this wood carving help us to understand the high level of pacifism in 1920s Europe?
Why is this pacifism relevant?
Reasons 1b) A Loss of Faith in the Virtue of Western Society
• Pre WWI- “Human reason ushered in democracy and the Industrial Age. Perhaps it can solve all of our problems…”. Utopianism
• Post WWI- “Umm… ok… scratch that.”
• “If modern science brought us the slaughter in the trenches, what will future ‘progress’ bring us? – Not totally misguided…
think about the atom bomb – Orwell’s 1984
This Western Loss of Faith in Progress Was Aggravated By New Ideas at the Time
• Philosophy– Existentialism (Nieztsche)– There is no God and no meaning to life. Humans must create their own
meaning. • Physics
– Einstein’s Relativity– Time and space are both curved and are both relative to the observer– Time is relative
• If I were to travel away from the earth on a space ship traveling the speed of light and came back in a year, 100 years would have passed on earth
– Heisenberg uncertainty principle• If you know exactly where a particle is, you cannot know its speed. If
you know its exact speed, you cannot know exactly where it is. • Psychiatry
– Human brains are not entirely rational– Many human actions are motivated by subconscious desires
VS
If a human were to move near the speed of light, time would slow down for them,
relative to the observer…
Which is more comfortable to believe?
Salvador Dali: Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War),
1936
Salvador Dali: Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War),
1936Surrealis
m
Freudian Psychology
Pre-Freudian View of the Brain
Input
Logic
Output
Freudian View of the Brain
InputOutput
You Tube- Nietzsche interprets Hitler You Tube- Nietzsche interprets Hitler Sharks and nazisSharks and nazis
Reason 1c) The U.S. Returned to
Isolationism, Leaving Europe
Deal With Its Problems
1d) The Looming Menace of Communism
• Russia had become Communist
• Communism advocates a worldwide violent revolution to replace world governments
• Rejects wealth inequality • Connected to Atheism, and
ironically at the same time, Judaism
Reason 1e) Economic Difficulties
• In the 1920s, nations struggled economically to recover from WWI war debt
• By the end of the 1920s, they started to recover, but then…
• …the Great Depression hit• It is hard to convince people, especially in
a democracy, to spend money for military action, even if the action is justified, in a time of economic crisis– Shouldn’t that money be going to help
the poor? – Interesting Keynesian idea
Historians Have Dubbed the 1920s The Age of Anxiety
• There were attempts to deal with this anxiety
• Various Pacts and Treaties – Locarno Pact – Kellogg-Briand Pact
Attempt At An Amazing Metaphor
Reason
Science
Industry
Shorter Work Hours
Technological Gadgets to Ease Life
Peace
World War I
Einstein
Existentialism
FreudStream of Consciousness- distopias
Progress
Society/ The Age of Anxiety
Pre 1914 World