WEBVTT

NOTE The First World War

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Much more could be said about the intellectuals and their opposition to the market

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and the soft spot they have in their hearts, as we can see even today, for Communism, for Marxism and for Communism.

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And the double standard that they apply to the crimes of Communism vis-a-vis the crimes of National Socialism.

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National Socialism, Nazism, they consider a racist, understandably enough, a racist philosophy, very limited in its application,

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whereas communism is a universal creed, holding out hope for all of mankind, and a kind of successor to the Enlightenment idea,

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or an outgrowth of the Enlightenment idea.

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Here there, what you have is the intellectuals' typical proclivity for replacing actual reality,

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what happens in reality, the crimes, for instance, that are committed in reality,

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and preferring to deal with rhetoric and the way people, different ideologies present themselves.

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But it's not only against the market that we find intellectuals reacting.

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Intellectuals have another proclivity, which in a way is another aspect of their opposition,

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the opposition they tend to show to the market, and that is that they are pro-power.

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Intellectuals are drawn to power.

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This is very easily demonstrated.

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One of the best things that Jeff Tucker ever published in the free market,

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and there have been very many very good pieces in the free market and continue to be,

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but you can check it on the archive for the free market.

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It's by Robert Higgs.

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And I believe you can look up his archive or look under Robert Higgs in the free market.

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I think it's called No More Great Presidents.

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What Professor Higgs, those of you who are going to be privileged to hear him next week,

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will find much more of this kind of analysis. What Professor Higgs was objecting to was the

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lists of great presidents or neogrates that American historians come up with every once in a while.

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I think you've probably come across that at one time or another. American historians declare such

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Such and Such are the American Great Presidents, and the Great Presidents, with the exception

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of Washington, who was not a war president in his own day, previously had been a war

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hero, Washington is listed, but aside from that they are the war presidents, and it's

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in war really that presidents seem to show their greatness.

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All together, the great presidents are the ones who tend to decentralize power in Washington,

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increase the power of the state.

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And Bob Higgs analyzes this, why should this be that historians, an important subset of

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academic intellectuals, tend to glorify presidential power.

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I recommend that essay of his to you. I suggest you print it out either here or at home. He has a lot of interesting things to say.

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The tendency of intellectuals to identify with power will be evident in the subject I'm going to be discussing today, which is the First World War.

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Now, I happen to have an essay on the First World War in this book called The Costs of War in the paperback edition, which is the one you should get because it's expanded over the hardcover edition.

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And I think that this is on my Lew Rockwell archive, however, as is my essay on Churchill that appears in this book, however, without the footnotes.

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So, what you want to do is maybe photocopy it from the copy in the library, if you're that interested in the subject,

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because the footnotes are there to substantiate the claims I make, and they're important.

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The Course of War in General is an excellent book.

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There are two essays by Murray Rothbard, there's an essay by Robert Higgs, an essay by Joseph Stromberg,

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and many other important pieces.

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My own opinion is that if you never buy another book for the rest of your life, you should

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buy this book.

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However, another book that you should buy, maybe second tier book, is another, The Coast

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of War was put out by Transaction.

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Look at this big book.

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Isn't that gorgeous?

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Both books are $35, but don't go by just the size of the book in deciding which one

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you want to buy.

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You should buy both.

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This is called Re-Assessing the Presidency, and I have an essay there on Harry Truman,

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which discusses, among other things, the Cold War that Truman got us into and that lasted

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for 50 years, but also other aspects of the Truman administration.

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And Truman has become an icon of conservatives now. I mean, I can't believe it. I remember

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quite well, I got into politics when I was, political affairs when I was very young, how

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conservatives despised Truman, as finally most Americans came to despise him, and despised

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He helped him for a number of separate things that he had done, decisions he had made, and now he is becoming another icon, together with Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, conservatives love him.

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This book originated in a conference at the Mises Institute held near Warm Springs, Georgia.

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You may know that that was the summer home of Franklin Delano Roosevelt

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and we thought in that kind of way we would be showing our reverence and honor for him.

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So, what I'm going to be saying about the First World War, you can find much more detail in the essay in Costs of War.

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The First World War was indeed a turning point, which is a subtitle of my essay there.

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If you can imagine, if you can imagine a 20th century without communists, without Nazis,

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that's very probably what we would have had without the First World War.

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It eventuated in a vast extension of state power, in every country, in the United States in particular,

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and a great retreat for social power, the civil society.

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I've mentioned before Robert Higgs's book, Crisis and Leviathan.

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I'm not saying it's in the same category as the books that contain my essays.

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However, it's a very important book, very important book, again in paperback, you can get it here.

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And there's so much in it. Remember, I talked about his analysis of the role of ideology in general.

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But as far as the specifics of the growth of American power, as far as the specifics of what took place in America during the First World War,

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it's extremely valuable. And I'll talk about the repercussions in America and the American economy, civil liberties to the extent I can afterwards.

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The First World War also produced in all the belligerent countries a psychological trauma.

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There was a break in the Western psyche, you might say, such that things that were generally

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accepted and that people believed in before could not be accepted and believed in anymore.

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The idea of progress, the idea of the basic goodness of human beings, the idea that general

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optimism that had been produced by, well, close to a cent, with a few exceptions, close

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to a century of peace in Europe at least, and this optimism also fostered by the tremendous

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the success of science and technology, the great growth and living standards of people.

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Well, there was a more somber mood after the First World War.

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Now, it happens that I have been keeping up with modern technology

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so that I'm able to show you an overhead using this.

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And you see how this works, I just will have to do this.

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Voila!

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And to add to the scientific expertise, I also have this, whatever it's called.

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I know, I know. You see, you don't have to be a kid to keep up with these things, is what I'm trying to say.

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Now, this is a map of Europe in 1914, and of course in the previous decades there had been some changes, mainly in the area of the Balkans.

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I hope that I don't have to admonish you, as I have to admonish my students, not to confuse the Balkans with the Baltic.

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Now, the single most important fact about this Europe is the existence of a powerful, unified Germany from the French border to Lithuania here, from the Baltic Sea to the Alps, and from the Baltic Sea to the Baltic Sea to the Baltic Sea.

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A powerful, unified Germany from the French border to Lithuania here, from the Baltic Sea to the Alps.

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And that had come into existence in 1871, mainly through the genius of the Prussian minister

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and subsequently German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck with a C.

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Looking back, we can see that it wasn't the best solution to the German question.

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The German question was this, that Germany was divided at the Congress of Vienna into 39 different states,

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Some states, some larger like Prussia, medium-sized like Bavaria, some just city states, like Frankfurt and Hamburg.

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And it was a confederation. Why this came about has its roots in history with the Holy Roman Empire and so on.

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But many German intellectuals came to the conclusion that the Germans should have their own state also.

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My heavens, the English have had their state for so many centuries, the French, the Spaniards, and then by the 1860s even the Italians had a state of their own and the Germans had to have a state also.

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The difference, let's say between the Germans and the Italians, is that a unified and centralized Germany could very well present, first of all, a temptation to the German leaders and also then a danger to the other countries in Europe, unlike a unified Italy, which was a bad idea anyway, but would not present that kind of double-edged problem.

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Now, Bismarck was a very intelligent man, although this afternoon I'll be talking about

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the origins of the welfare state, and he plays a key role there, and Mises is totally justified

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in saying from the point of view of liberalism, he was the worst disaster of the 19th century

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in Europe.

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However, in creating this German Reich, the Second Reich, as it's called, and Hitler called

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He called his own the Third Reich. The first was the Holy Roman Empire.

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He did create a centralized state, whereas there could have been other possibilities.

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There could have been a stronger confederation of the German states,

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such that they agreed to go to each other's defense in the case of attack by some other power, France or Russia.

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That would have preserved then peace in Central Europe,

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but would have made it very difficult for Germany to engage in an aggressive policy.

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Now there's an interesting book on the American Civil War consisting of Civil War writings

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edited and collected and edited by a famous American literary critic Edmund Wilson

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are called patriotic gore and it's interesting because of its introduction by Edmund Wilson

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and Wilson here very perceptively compares Bismarck to Abraham Lincoln

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as the creators of powerful modern centralized states

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by Lincoln in America, by crushing the South, Bismarck by uniting all of the Germans into one state.

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Once Germany was united, Bismarck remained prime minister of Prussia and chancellor now of the German Empire for another 20 years.

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The story doesn't end with the unification of Germany.

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Bismarck, however, was mainly concerned with preserving a general European peace.

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His idea was, we've just become, for the first time, a united Germany.

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We have to learn to have all the different parts of Germany,

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what the Germans thought of as tribes, Bavarians, Saxons, and so on,

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welded together over time. This does take time.

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So that if a general war broke out, this could disturb this fragile, recently acquired German unity.

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So he tried in every way possible, through a series of alliances, of defensive alliances, to preserve the peace.

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They were defensive alliances, that is, they obliged both sides to remain neutral in case one of the other partners was attacked.

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did not oblige them to enter into any kind of aggressive alliance with Germany.

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And the first one was between Germany here and Austria-Hungary.

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Let me say something about Austria-Hungary,

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since Austria-Hungary is going to be the immediate scene and cause of the First World War.

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It had been the Austrian Empire up until the time of 1866, 1867,

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1866, when Austria lost the war to Prussia, and then 1867, the Austrians being kicked out of Germany as they'd been kicked out of Italy by the Italians thought that they had to somehow accommodate what they saw to be the major nationality aside from Germans in this empire.

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The great characteristic of Austria-Hungary, and one reason many people have a strong sentimental attachment to it, as I do for instance, is that it was a collection of different nationalities.

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When the last person to sit on the throne of Austria-Hungary, the Empress Zara, died a few years ago.

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There was a great state funeral for her in Vienna, and you can go to Vienna and you can see that there's a big barn type place where they have the different coaches that were used by the Habsburgs.

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A little pure black hearse type coach, driven by six black stallions, brought her body to the great cathedral at St. Stephen's, as a prelude to being buried in the Capuchin Abbey, right in downtown Vienna, you can see all these interesting things and at the St. Stephen's Cathedral, prayers were said for her in the ten major languages of the old empire,

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First of all you had the Germans who were in many ways the dominant nationality, the traditional lands of the Habsburgs, basically Vienna and the Alps around there, then the Germans in the Sudetenland over there, and the Germans spread throughout the empire, those are the major places, then the whole Hungarian nation here in the Great Plain of Hungary on the other side of the Carpathian Mountains,

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We have the Slavic peoples, we have the Czechs, the whole Czech nation here in

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Bohemia and Moravia, we have the Slovaks here, here in Galicia we have the Poles

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and the Ruthenians over here, we have the South Slavs, the Croats over here,

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Serbs also, Slovenes, smaller nation up there, Italians here in Trieste, the Romanians in an area, mainly in an area called Transylvania, and those are the major groups, I think I mentioned Serbs, but also in this area Bosnia,

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Muslims, speaking Slavic Muslims, throughout the Empire, hundreds of thousands of

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Agypses and a couple of million Jews. The Habsburgs favored the Jews very much

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because unlike all these other parts of the Empire, the Jews didn't claim some section of the Empire as maybe their own territory.

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They were very loyal to the Habsburgs as the Habsburgs were to them.

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However, let me point out that by 1914 there is a country called Serbia here,

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while on the other hand there are Serbs living within the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

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So the first treaty that Bismarck brought about was one between Germany and Austria-Hungary.

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And then, in 1882, Italy was very, the Italian government, the vicious, corrupt, unspeakably evil government in Rome,

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with the House of Savoy, must be the stupidest house in ruling family in European history, one loser after another.

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The Italians were looking on this Arab territory here, Tunisia, as a future colony, quite near Sicily,

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and they were now considered themselves one of the great powers.

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So as great powers they had to have a navy, they had to have an army, and above all they had to have an empire.

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Before this time they had managed to, well I'll talk about imperialism in a moment and I'll have a map of the empires of the world later.

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The point is that the Italians were looking on this Arab territory here, Tunisia, as a future colony,

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quite near Sicily when in 1881 the French took it over and in a fit of peak the Italians

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just then turned and entered into the alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary and that

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became the Triple Alliance. You understand the assumption that Bismarck worked on, very

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sensible assumption, there was no way of getting an alliance with France. In fact France had

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and a major reason was that one major mistake of Bismarck's in the 1871 treaty ending the Franco-Prussian War, the Germans annexed Alsace and part of Lorraine here, French provinces and that was not something the French were going to forget.

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So, we have now the Triple Alliance. Bismarck is dismissed by the new Kaiser, William II, Wilhelm II, and Bismarck, of course, had meanwhile made sure that there was an alliance with Russia.

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He always got along well with Russia, he saw no reason for any conflict between Germany and Russia, and England doesn't count at this time because they are in this period of splendid isolation.

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Now, Bismarck of the new Kaiser comes in, Bismarck is dismissed, and the treaty between Germany and Russia when it comes up for renewal is allowed to expire.

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The idea being, how could a still absolutist monarchy like Russia ally with republican France?

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Well, that's exactly what happens, because countries don't go by the ideology of other countries,

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but by what they consider as their own self-interest in aligning with one country against another possible danger.

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So in the 1890s, it comes into existence through a series of political and military treaties, the Franco-Russian alliance, now facing the Triple Alliance.

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It's a fact that of all the boy babies born in France in 1892, one half will die, will be killed or wounded in the First World War.

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Sort of one half will be killed or wounded in the First World War.

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One of the nasty surprises that history has in mind for the western peoples.

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Now, the French and English come to an agreement, although there had been problems between the two of them.

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Still, French diplomacy was brilliant at this time and an entente was formed.

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Not a formal alliance, as between France and Russia, but an entente cordial alliance, an entente cordiale, between England and France.

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Nothing is written, and the British people themselves are not aware how over the next few years, after 1904,

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There are military conversations between the French and the British military and naval leaders.

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And England begins, at least in the minds of the French, to agree to more and more obligations and duties in case of war.

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It entwines itself more and more with the military and naval policy of France.

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France, and then in 1907 England and Russia come to an agreement about the different problems

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that divide the two countries and that comes into existence then what is known to history

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as the Triple Entente, the Triple Entente of Great Britain, France and Russia.

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Now with this, you don't have to just have this one map on it all the time, you can take

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This is a map of the colonial empires in 1914, it's a little hard to make out because some of the colors are quite similar to others.

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Notice that, quite rightly, the Russian Empire is listed here, even though Russia doesn't have any overseas colonies and you might think it's in a different category from the European powers and from the United States.

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But of course it's a tremendous imperialist enterprise, this Tsarist Russian Empire, going through 11 time zones.

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Okay, this is the British Empire, not even at its height, because it will be added to

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after the First World War, but pretty mighty as it stands, one quarter of the land surface

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of the globe, one quarter of the population of the human race.

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America has certain colonies, as you can see by 1914, Alaska, why not, but especially the

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The Philippines here, taken over after the Spanish-American War, where America then becomes

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an Asiatic power.

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And already in the imagination of some Japanese and American military people, America is on

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the collision course to an eventual war with Japan.

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But it's European powers that are most interesting.

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Now you see, Spain is in, you know, there are other colors in the spectrum, Spain is

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Germany, Rio de Oro, South West Africa, Kalahari Desert, Tanganyika, part of the Cameroons,

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Another desert down here, one quarter or less than a quarter of New Guinea, a few islands in the Pacific, the Germans don't have very much of an empire at all, which annoys them very much.

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The French have this vast empire in West Africa, also Madagascar, also this thing called French Indochina of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.

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and there are other smaller empires, the Italians by this time are doing their thing of collecting deserts, here's Somalia, here's Eritrea and Libya.

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Better deserts than nothing at all, I mean, just because it costs money and human lives makes the Italians feel, the Italian leaders feel really good.

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But what we maybe should notice from this map is that this is Germany, here's Austria-Hungary racked with all kinds of nationalistic tensions.

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The minds of most Europeans are about to fall to pieces, really. It's not going to outlast the old Kaiser Franz Josef.

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And here's Italy, which since it entered into the Triple Alliance has been negotiating behind the scenes with France

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or advantages which would enable it to leave the Triple Alliance.

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So essentially what we have is Germany.

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I mean if you're talking about any possible future conflict.

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And the Germans are faced with the one world power, the single world superpower,

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and that's Great Britain, the center of this vast empire, the center of finance.

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And then with France and its empire, the second best army in the world here,

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the vast Russian empire of the largest army in the world by far, and there's Germany.

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So that's the way it looks from Berlin.

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That's the way things look from Berlin.

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The question of imperialism is of importance in a certain way.

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The war, World War I, does not come about because of imperialist conflicts of the European powers

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in the Third World, in Africa or anywhere else.

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The French and British, the Russians and British have more conflicts than the British and the Germans have.

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However, imperialism is in a way at the root of, or one of the roots of the First World War.

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A historian named Neil Ferguson has recently said, has recently written a book about how great the British Empire was

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and saying that the American Empire could be great also.

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The Americans have an empire and they can make it into a great empire, the successor of the British Empire.

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Except the Americans probably don't have the heart for it to go on for years and decades to build up an empire the way the British did.

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Another flaw on the part of the American people.

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However, what Ferguson does not take into consideration is this,

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leaving aside the debits and credits of the British Empire in the Third World,

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one thing the British Empire did was this.

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It gave the impression to all other Europeans that British greatness, British wealth was based on their empire.

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So it encouraged imperialism among other European people, in particular, very much in particular,

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It encouraged imperialism on the part of the German leaders.

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And Kaiser Wilhelm II, the man who dismissed Bismarck

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and is going to be the last German Kaiser,

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undertakes to stir things up, as he says,

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win Germany's place in the sun.

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Most of the world has taken up, but there is still China

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that's being eaten alive by the Europeans, other possible areas.

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But in order to create a worldwide German Empire, what would be necessary?

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What is the sine qua non of a German Empire overseas?

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A German Navy, an ocean-going German Navy.

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And that's what the Kaiser undertakes to build for the first time in German history.

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And that's what, more than anything else, puts Germany on a collision course with England.

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In the British Foreign Office, high officials write memos to the effect,

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the world cannot endure a country which possesses the most powerful army in the world,

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and also an immensely powerful navy.

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This is a threat that will have to be dealt with.

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And there is a British-German rivalry over the Navy that goes on and is a major eventual cause of the war.

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That's one of the aspects of the arms race that's going on among all the major powers.

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You were born into an arms race. I pretty much grew up in an arms race.

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Arms races were not normal in the 19th century.

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You had a certain military capacity, and if war broke out, then you'd have to expand it.

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From 1900 on, all countries are constantly expanding their military and naval capacities.

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And they're using all of the fruits of modern technology, incorporating them into their military arsenal, airplanes, telegraph, but then also new armaments of all kinds, more powerful artillery, more powerful explosives.

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These arms programs are, naturally enough, promoted by the arms industries in all countries.

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Everybody knows about Krupp in Germany, but there was Schneider-Cazot in France, and Vickers in England,

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Skoda in Austria. In America, Bethlehem Steel, more than anything else, built the ocean-going American Navy.

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DuPont was also involved. So there's this arms race, countries becoming more and more ready to go to war.

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There are crises, diplomatic crises that occur between 1900 and 1914, over Morocco, over Bosnia, there's the Balkan Wars.

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You see, you can also go back to a map that you had before.

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This is just amazing, this is mind-boggling.

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Okay, let me remind you this is the Balkans and that is the Baltic.

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Now this is 1914, so the Balkans show a much different configuration than they would have in 1900.

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There were two Balkan Wars between the small Christian powers and the Ottoman Empire, which

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to begin with, had a big chunk of the Balkans in 1900, but these two Balkan Wars then produced

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use this kind of configuration. The Ottomans nearly thrown out of Europe, pretty much what

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they have today. A larger Bulgaria with access to the Aegean, a much larger Serbia just about

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doubled in size. And that was another one of the two first and second wars crises when

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when the crisis of summer of 1914 breaks out.

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Serbia was a particular problem.

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At one time in the 19th century, the Austrians actually possessed Lombardy and Venetia over

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here, and in the course of the unification of Italy, the Italians, mainly with the help

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of the Germans and then afterwards with the help of Bismarck, took those provinces away

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from Austria and added them to United Italy. At one time the Austrians were in charge of

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the German Confederation that had been set up in 1815 and in that sense the major German

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power but Bismarck in unifying Germany threw the Austrians out of Germany. In Belgrade,

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Over here on the Danube, there are leaders, and in Serbian society there are intellectual

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leaders and so on, who say, if it's good for the Italians, if it's good for the Germans,

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why can't it be good for the South Slavs?

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We'll defeat Austria also and create a Greater Serbia.

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What are you, a racist?

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Why can't the Serbs do it if the Germans and the Italians did it?

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They will create a Greater Serbia or maybe even with the Serbs over here and the Serbs in Bosnia

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or maybe even unite them with the Croats in this area here and the Slovenes, the other South Slavs

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and create a South Slav state or a Yugoslavia.

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Now, Serbia itself is not going to be able to do anything. Austria-Hungary is not militarily very powerful. On the other hand, it can handle Serbia.

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But keep in mind by the time of the second, the conclusion of the Second Balkan War in 1913, Serbia is doubled in size and they figure that in case of need they can put 500,000 men in the field.

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But, much beyond that, they have a powerful friend, the big brother of all the Slavic people, except the Poles don't really consider them their big brother, the Russians.

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And pan-Slavism, the idea that there should be a unity among all the Slavic people, who are, in terms of population, the largest group in Europe,

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There should be a union of all the Slavic people, led of course by the major Slavic power, and in fact, aside from Montenegro and Serbia, the only independent Slavic power, Great Russia.

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This is the doctrine of pan-Slavism, so that many of the leaders of Russian society and the government and elsewhere were adherents of this view.

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That there should be such a unity? Well, okay, but unfortunately for Europe, such a movement, such a pan-Slavic movement, or let's say the creation of a Yugoslavia, would mean the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

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In other words, the destruction of one of the great powers, which is a very, very serious thing.

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And if you have the destruction of Austria-Hungary, I mean if the South Slavs are going to secede then the Czechs and the Slovaks are going to demand something and the Romanians probably would take advantage to Transylvanians populated to a degree by Hungarians but mainly by Romanians, it would be the breakup of the empire and among other things militarily speaking it means that the whole southern flank of Germany is now exposed.

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So this is the problem of Austria-Hungary in connection with Serbia.

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Well, there were the crises and the crises were weathered up until the summer of 1914.

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It's a very dramatic story, very interesting story. I tell part of it in this, in my essay in this book, a small part of it.

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I understand there's a new book by Thomas Fleming, not the Chronicles of Thomas Fleming, but the popular historian on the First World War.

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And he writes very well. That might be something to look at.

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Naturally, there have been tensions in Europe for a long time.

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Everybody knows about the two different alliance systems that are facing each other.

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Everybody has contingency plans in the event of war.

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The major, most famous contingency plan is the one that the Germans have.

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And that's called the Schlieffen Plan.

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Von Schlieffen, of course.

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What to do in the event of a war against Russia and France at the same time.

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In other words, what to do in the event of a two-front war.

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The basic idea is that you can't simply divide the German forces in half.

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Half is inferior to the French, the other half would be inferior to Russia.

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So the concentration would be on France.

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You really can't knock Russia out of the war in that kind of way.

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I mean, they have all this territory to retreat to.

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So, the concentration would be on France, to knock France out of the war as quickly as possible.

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Then, while the Russians are laboriously mobilizing, kind of still a backward society in many ways,

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after the French are effectively defeated, then shuttling the German army with the excellent

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system of German railroads to the eastern front, meeting the Russian army probably somewhere

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in East Prussia and defeating them.

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In order to defeat France quickly, well, the area of the Vosges Mountains here is not such

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The Archduke is assassinated in Bosnia at Sarajevo by, well, terrorist freedom fighters,

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depends on which side you're on.

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People who want to strike a blow against Austria-Hungary

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by assassinating the heir to the throne

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that will very quickly become vacant

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because Francis Joseph is so old.

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So Bosnian-Serb students are recruited by a secret society

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inside Serbia to assassinate the Archduke

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The Archduke, which is what they do. The Austrians say this is the last straw, the Serbs have

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been aiming at the destruction of the Austrian Empire for a while, propaganda, previous assassinations

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of lesser officials, and they decide to put an end to the Serbian threat. They get the

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okay and support of Kaiser Wilhelm, and then things start happening very quickly in the

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in the last days of July 1914, we know a lot about it, everybody published their memoirs afterwards, everybody is sending telegrams from one place to another, so those are on the record, many of the secret conferences in the governments have been made public, we know a lot about what happens.

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What happens essentially is that Austria declares war on Serbia after Austria sends an ultimatum to Serbia demanding conditions, demanding concessions that the Serbs couldn't possibly give without giving up their sovereignty, basically.

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The ultimatum is phrased in such a way that the Serbs would turn it down, so that the

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Austrians would have an excuse to invade and to do away with Serbia once and for all, divided up.

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When in St. Petersburg, the Russian Foreign Minister sees the text of the Austrian ultimatum,

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He turns to the Austrian ambassador and says this is the European war, this is the war that we feared for so long and you've just, as he says, you've set fire to Europe.

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The Austrian position is, it's a question of our own survival. If Serbia can get away with this, very soon it will be the end of a very ancient empire.

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and a country, a nation is entitled to fight for its survival.

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What are the Russians fighting for? They're fighting for prestige and for one of their proteges.

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So the Russians begin to mobilize and in Berlin the admirals and the generals approach the Kaiser and say,

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and say, look, the von Schlieffen plan depends on the rapid deployment of German forces

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into France before the Russians can mobilize and then invade from the East.

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So we have to start the army in motion.

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The Kaiser delays as much as possible, sends letters to his cousin, the Tsar, Nicky, signing

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and then Willie, but nonetheless the Russian mobilization goes ahead, the Germans then

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send an ultimatum to Russia and to France.

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To France the ultimatum says, tell us if you will guarantee that you will stay out of this

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war that's looming between us and Russia, and if you're going to guarantee that then

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and would you kindly hand over, pardon me, would you kindly hand over the fortresses

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of Verdun and Toul to our forces to occupy as a warrant of your good faith.

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The fortresses that control the eastern approaches to Paris.

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The French, c'est quoi monsieur, c'est pas, and really don't provide any answer.

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And the Russians, there was a short ultimatum, stop general mobilization.

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And the Russians don't.

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On August 1st, Germany declares war on Russia and on the 3rd on France and the Great War

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started.

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Ailin gets in in this way, it cannot be emphasized too much.

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The British public knows nothing about any obligations or guarantees to France.

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The British Parliament knows nothing about that.

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The majority of the British cabinet knows nothing about that.

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But the French now go to the English and say, look, all these years, you've made it very

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clear to us that if we got into war with Germany, you were going to come to our aid.

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You told us that you would take over the protection of the English Channel so that we could concentrate

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our forces in the Mediterranean against a possible war with Italy.

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You said that you were going to be landing an expeditionary force, where's your declaration

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of war against Germany?

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The British government, a very small elite, for all practical purposes have been Nazi

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Germany or any dictatorship at this moment.

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The public had no say in whether they were going to go to war, they knew nothing about

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the situation, parliament knew nothing about the situation, the cabinet was only told now

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that they were about to go to war. Well, the Germans came to the aid of Britain, and marched

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into Belgium, and that was the excuse the British government used. That Britain has

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always fought for the rights of small peoples. In the House of Commons, there was somebody

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in the back who said, what about Ireland? And he was arrested and shot. This is the,

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You know, I have to say something about this, you know the word can't, it's untranslatable

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really into any other language. It's Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-American. You know, you talk as if not

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only is God on your side, but he's whispering into your ear, you know. Everything that's

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good, everything that's virtuous, that's what you stand for. The enemy stands for the opposite

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of that. And it's an old tradition in England, taken over then by the American governments

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and the American, you know, continually through the 20th century. This can't, this talking

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in this self-righteous kind of way. And so England sends an ultimatum to Germany now they're

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in the war. There are a lot of things that happen that would be interesting to get into

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But I don't really feel that I can justify most of it.

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However, one thing is quite interesting and important,

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and that is that in these days, war

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was greeted with jubilation by the people.

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Eyewitness accounts tell of these huge crowds in Berlin,

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in St. Petersburg, in Vienna, in Paris, in London.

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wild with enthusiasm because war is broken out.

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All of this namby-pamby piece that

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had been going on so long, that capitalism flourished

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under, all of these tens of millions and hundreds

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of millions of new people, new human beings that

389
00:49:44.460 --> 00:49:49.060
came into existence because of the development of the market

390
00:49:49.060 --> 00:49:54.060
and capitalism, well, that's really kind of boring,

391
00:49:54.060 --> 00:50:06.060
Bertrand Russell, when war was about to be declared, wandered around the streets of London looking into people's faces.

392
00:50:06.060 --> 00:50:10.060
He couldn't believe it, how happy they were that war was going to come.

393
00:50:10.060 --> 00:50:19.060
A million Englishmen are going to die, and on and on.

394
00:50:19.060 --> 00:50:26.660
But connecting with what I was talking about yesterday, the intellectuals were rapturous about war.

395
00:50:26.660 --> 00:50:31.760
There were a few who were very skeptical and saddened by the war.

396
00:50:31.760 --> 00:50:38.860
Bertrand Russell, for instance, Einstein, who was in Switzerland at the time, others.

397
00:50:38.860 --> 00:50:45.660
But even Freud in Vienna at first was enthusiastic for the war.

398
00:50:45.660 --> 00:50:56.660
Well Mises said, I don't know his personal opinion about the war, afterwards he thought that the Germans had been responsible for pushing the Austrians into it, but he served in the Austrian army.

399
00:50:56.660 --> 00:51:26.300
But there's a very interesting book by Roland Stromberg, not in relation to our own Joseph, but a historian of this period, called Redemption by War, and it's particularly about the intellectuals of the European countries and also the United States.

400
00:51:26.300 --> 00:51:47.300
And it's interesting to read these few pages because we're talking about the most famous intellectuals of the time in France, in Belgium, Henri Perrin, one of the great pioneers of the idea of the European miracle, great economic historian, savagely anti-German.

401
00:51:47.300 --> 00:52:01.300
In England, R.H. Taney, these are, believe me, famous people, Arnold Toynbee, afterwards regretted that he had written atrocity propaganda against the Germans just to help the British war effort.

402
00:52:01.300 --> 00:52:13.300
In Germany, Friedrich Ternes, the most famous sociologist of his time, Durkheim in France, another very, very, maybe as famous as a sociologist,

403
00:52:13.300 --> 00:52:20.300
each bitterly hurling insults at the other side, talking in favor of their own government.

404
00:52:20.300 --> 00:52:28.300
In Paris, the two great historians of the French Revolution, Mathieu, whose hero was Robespierre,

405
00:52:28.300 --> 00:52:35.300
and Hollard, whose hero was Danton, both of course in favor of the war.

406
00:52:35.300 --> 00:52:51.300
and Robert Higgs talks about the Americans and Murray talks about the Americans in this intellectuals in this book, in his essay in this book on costs of war.

407
00:52:51.300 --> 00:52:59.300
Now Stromberg has some interesting comments on this phenomenon.

408
00:52:59.300 --> 00:53:08.980
He said that what war did when it came was enabling the intellectual to feel powerfully

409
00:53:08.980 --> 00:53:14.200
and to articulate his feeling in powerful and aggressive ways.

410
00:53:14.200 --> 00:53:20.580
He could now identify totally with his community and with his government now and marching armies

411
00:53:20.580 --> 00:53:23.820
and fighting navies and so on.

412
00:53:23.820 --> 00:53:31.740
gave him a great personal sense of power which intellectuals generally don't have.

413
00:53:31.740 --> 00:53:38.860
But this held not only for intellectuals but for people in general.

414
00:53:38.860 --> 00:53:44.020
Stromberg talks about these exciting expressions in an age of unparalleled expansion of individual

415
00:53:44.020 --> 00:53:46.860
consciousness reduced to the same thing.

416
00:53:46.860 --> 00:53:51.700
The effort of this individual consciousness to come to terms with the collective mentality

417
00:53:51.700 --> 00:53:58.660
from which it was being separated. The most basic factor was the resurrection of community.

418
00:53:58.660 --> 00:54:08.740
The book was published last year by a man named Chris Hedges on war. I think the subtitle

419
00:54:08.740 --> 00:54:17.300
is That Which Gives Meaning to Our Lives. Hedges is a war correspondent. He's been

420
00:54:17.300 --> 00:54:23.820
all over the world, and it's not that he says that some have not been terrible aggressors

421
00:54:23.820 --> 00:54:30.020
who had to be put down by war, but he also notices the psychological effect of war.

422
00:54:30.020 --> 00:54:39.420
As we perhaps are noticing ourselves, nobody could have missed the millions and millions

423
00:54:39.420 --> 00:54:45.580
of flapping flags, couldn't get anywhere without seeing them amassed in any American

424
00:54:45.580 --> 00:54:53.500
City anyway. Now the average individual was able to identify with something higher and

425
00:54:53.500 --> 00:55:02.500
feel the power of all the other individuals with their flapping flags from their car antennas.

426
00:55:02.500 --> 00:55:08.180
And also with the might of the American government that was going to smash to smithereens these

427
00:55:08.180 --> 00:55:15.940
enemies of the United States. So that this sense of community,

428
00:55:15.940 --> 00:55:24.340
fostered by military might, becomes quite evident at the time of the First World War.

429
00:55:25.460 --> 00:55:34.340
Okay. Now, the German, the Schlieffen Plan doesn't work. The French is decadent and

430
00:55:34.340 --> 00:55:51.340
and worthless as they are, the eyes of the Germans were able to knock the heads of the Germans together at the first battle of the Moran and stop the Germans, but then created the Western Front, the trench warfare that went on for three and a half years.

431
00:55:51.340 --> 00:56:02.340
The British of course used their unsurpassed Navy and declared a blockade of Germany.

432
00:56:02.340 --> 00:56:13.340
The problem was, one of many problems was that by international law, blockade has to be close in, by surface ships, close into the coast.

433
00:56:13.340 --> 00:56:24.340
What the British did instead was to lay mines, the entrance to the North Sea over here, and also the entrance to the English Channel over here,

434
00:56:24.340 --> 00:56:37.340
The semi-permanent or pretty permanent minds, which they had maps, so that if you were on their side, you could get your ship through, they would tell you how to get it through, but it would stop anybody that the English wanted to stop.

435
00:56:37.340 --> 00:56:52.340
They also declared a whole list of things to be contraband, that could not reach Germany or even reach neutral Dutch ports, because the British said from there they could easily get to Germany, so we're going to stop them from getting to Rotterdam also.

436
00:56:52.340 --> 00:57:00.100
and among the items on this on the list of contraband was food. The beginning of

437
00:57:00.100 --> 00:57:04.840
the British hunger blockade of the Germans, to which the Germans retaliated,

438
00:57:04.840 --> 00:57:12.860
the surface ships were swept away pretty quickly, they retaliated by with U-boats

439
00:57:12.860 --> 00:57:21.460
and the sinking of British ships. This brings America into the into the issue.

440
00:57:21.460 --> 00:57:31.700
Now, you know, other people, other historians have lists of great presidents.

441
00:57:31.700 --> 00:57:38.420
Josh Stromberg and Bob Higgs and I and Don Livingston and others have our lists of the

442
00:57:38.420 --> 00:57:40.420
The World's Worst Presidents

443
00:58:08.420 --> 00:58:15.600
Part of Wilson, he, I'm afraid, pretty much heads my list.

444
00:58:15.600 --> 00:58:31.540
There was a great American writer of the time and afterwards, you've probably heard of, H.L. Mencken,

445
00:58:31.540 --> 00:58:43.740
who really is worth reading, even now, who said that Woodrow Wilson had a very high opinion

446
00:58:43.740 --> 00:58:48.900
of himself. He thought, in fact, that he was the natural candidate for the first vacancy

447
00:58:48.900 --> 00:58:58.900
in the Trinity. And that really is not really too far from the truth. The son of a Presbyterian

448
00:58:58.900 --> 00:59:05.380
and Minister, and a person who always thought himself right.

449
00:59:05.380 --> 00:59:12.540
You can read about Wilson and references to literature on Wilson in my essay, a very good

450
00:59:12.540 --> 00:59:19.540
book by, not by a professional historian, but by a scholar who is also a journalist

451
00:59:19.540 --> 00:59:26.840
by Walter Karp, I think must be out of print by now, but you can find it I'm sure in almost

452
00:59:26.840 --> 00:59:30.840
and the politics of war.

453
00:59:30.840 --> 00:59:34.840
And what Carp does in a really very enjoyable style,

454
00:59:34.840 --> 00:59:38.840
much more enjoyable than most academic historian style, discusses first

455
00:59:38.840 --> 00:59:42.840
McKinley and the Spanish-American War, but mainly concentrates

456
00:59:42.840 --> 00:59:46.840
on Wilson and how we got into this war.

457
00:59:46.840 --> 00:59:50.840
Because Wilson from the start says, this is

458
00:59:50.840 --> 00:59:54.840
terrible, this is so terrible. This is a compassionate humanitarian liberal

459
00:59:54.840 --> 01:00:02.840
and the liberal in this new sense of new liberal, so he hates war, as Roosevelt said, I hate war, I despise war.

460
01:00:02.840 --> 01:00:10.840
Karp shows how by his actual actions, what he said privately, behind the scenes, to his confidants and so on,

461
01:00:10.840 --> 01:00:14.840
Wilson was moving steadily to war with Germany.

462
01:00:14.840 --> 01:00:24.840
An excuse for, not war, but the framework for inevitable war came in May of 1915 with the sinking of the Lusitania.

463
01:00:24.840 --> 01:00:30.840
I say we didn't get into war right then, it's just the policy the American government took.

464
01:00:30.840 --> 01:00:41.840
The Lusitania was a British liner, a passenger liner, happened to be carrying munitions of war at the time and sunk by a German submarine.

465
01:00:41.840 --> 01:00:46.480
About 128 Americans died in that incident.

466
01:00:46.480 --> 01:00:53.480
The American government's position immediately was that the Germans would be held strictly accountable for any loss of life

467
01:00:53.480 --> 01:00:58.600
by Americans on the high seas due to the action of German forces.

468
01:00:58.600 --> 01:01:06.240
Regardless of any other consideration, the American Secretary of State at the time resigned in protest.

469
01:01:06.240 --> 01:01:08.520
That was William Jennings Bryan.

470
01:01:08.520 --> 01:01:13.520
He said, it's the British who are mixing together babies and bullets.

471
01:01:13.520 --> 01:01:18.520
We can't have this one-sided attitude towards Germany.

472
01:01:18.520 --> 01:01:25.520
And Wilson and his advisors and confidants took a different line.

473
01:01:25.520 --> 01:01:28.520
The Germans said, okay, we're going to try not to do that,

474
01:01:28.520 --> 01:01:33.520
but you have to tell the British to do something about their hunger blockade

475
01:01:33.520 --> 01:01:43.520
Also stopping neutral ships that are bringing food to us, and other interferences with neutral rights.

476
01:01:43.520 --> 01:01:48.200
And from time to time, the American government did send notes to the British, saying you

477
01:01:48.200 --> 01:01:53.920
should stop doing this because international law, doing one thing or another, because in

478
01:01:53.920 --> 01:01:58.280
international law you are violating the rights of neutral countries.

479
01:01:58.280 --> 01:02:03.120
But Wilson had very much of a hidden agenda.

480
01:02:03.120 --> 01:02:07.760
This was the Great War. People who lived through it called it the Great War and it was called

481
01:02:07.760 --> 01:02:15.620
the Great War for a long time to come. And he understood that if the Great War was settled

482
01:02:15.620 --> 01:02:21.400
in one way or another without the United States being part of it, America would have no say

483
01:02:21.400 --> 01:02:26.340
in the creation of the New World Order. And he had very definite ideas about what the

484
01:02:26.340 --> 01:02:32.880
New World Order would entail. They were the ideas of the so-called liberal, now we could

485
01:02:32.880 --> 01:02:55.880
so-called liberal, ideologists of the time, writers of the time that Murray deals with, the progressive, he used the term progressive very often, progressive writers around the New Republic and so on, basically to bring democracy to the world, to impose democracy on the rest of the world, to make the world safe for democracy.

486
01:02:55.880 --> 01:03:05.880
So that's why when we talk about, let's say, at least the announced policy of the Bush administration, we talk about neo-Wilsonianism.

487
01:03:05.880 --> 01:03:21.880
It's a revival of this idea that it is the duty, it is the duty, and certainly the right, of the American government to remake the whole world and bring democracy to all peoples.

488
01:03:21.880 --> 01:03:31.640
Well, you know, eventually we did. We helped bring down the German monarchy by insisting

489
01:03:31.640 --> 01:03:38.760
that we were not going to make peace with the Germans. When 1918 came, we were not going

490
01:03:38.760 --> 01:03:42.640
to make peace with the German militarists. We insisted that the Germans get rid of the

491
01:03:42.640 --> 01:03:52.880
the monarchy and also spread democracy, of course, not to the British and French colonies,

492
01:03:52.880 --> 01:03:59.240
not to Egypt or Palestine or Iraq and so on.

493
01:03:59.240 --> 01:04:09.240
So the German monarchy, the Kaiser would have been one of his successors since the Kaiser

494
01:04:09.240 --> 01:04:14.520
wasn't popular by the end of the war, but the dynasty, the Hohenzollern dynasty was

495
01:04:14.520 --> 01:04:23.520
gotten rid of, Germany became a republic, the Weimar Republic didn't last very long,

496
01:04:23.520 --> 01:04:36.280
1919 to 1933, and in 1933 a very evil man, a very evil politician, through constitutional

497
01:04:36.280 --> 01:04:45.280
by all means, in accordance with the Weimar Constitution, became the Chancellor of Germany.

498
01:04:45.280 --> 01:04:50.280
Now in Italy, Mussolini became the Prime Minister.

499
01:04:50.280 --> 01:04:59.280
However, by 1943, when it was obvious Mussolini was destroying Italy, the Allies had just landed in Sicily,

500
01:04:59.280 --> 01:05:02.280
there was still a king in Italy.

501
01:05:02.280 --> 01:05:09.640
So, it was possible for the king to dismiss Mussolini as prime minister.

502
01:05:09.640 --> 01:05:15.840
In Germany, there was no one higher than Hitler, because the monarchy had been done away with.

503
01:05:15.840 --> 01:05:23.640
If a monarchy had remained in effect in Germany, it would have been a very different situation.

504
01:05:23.640 --> 01:05:27.180
That is, Hitler would have had a superior.

505
01:05:27.180 --> 01:05:34.180
It's impossible to believe that any Hohenzollern would have put up with the policies that Hitler finally instituted.

506
01:05:34.180 --> 01:05:43.180
And in any case, when it was clear that Hitler had lost the war for Germany, he could have been gotten rid of in the same way that Mussolini had been.

507
01:05:43.180 --> 01:05:46.180
But no, German democracy, right?

508
01:05:46.180 --> 01:05:50.180
Monarchy bad, except if it's a British monarchy.

509
01:05:50.180 --> 01:05:53.180
Republic good.

510
01:05:53.180 --> 01:05:56.180
German monarchy very bad.

511
01:05:56.180 --> 01:06:07.180
A little sempliced, perhaps. Why? He was a professor at Princeton, right? President of Princeton. American genius.

512
01:06:07.180 --> 01:06:20.180
Now, so we finally get into the war. By the end of 1916, the hunger blockade is really hurting Germany.

513
01:06:20.180 --> 01:06:24.180
and the Germans decide they have to break it one way or another.

514
01:06:24.180 --> 01:06:31.980
They declare unrestricted submarine warfare around the British Isles and America,

515
01:06:31.980 --> 01:06:38.380
and then America finally gets into war in April of 1917.

516
01:06:38.380 --> 01:06:42.080
What the war does in America, well, I'll mention in a moment.

517
01:06:42.080 --> 01:06:45.680
Let me mention this though.

518
01:06:45.680 --> 01:06:52.480
This is one of many gems that can be found in my essay.

519
01:06:52.480 --> 01:07:02.980
Public opinion had been concentrated on our problems before we got into the war,

520
01:07:02.980 --> 01:07:06.480
our problems with Germany, but also our problems with England,

521
01:07:06.480 --> 01:07:10.680
because England was in many ways interfering with our neutral rights.

522
01:07:10.680 --> 01:07:16.880
American ships carrying even food would have been allowed under international law,

523
01:07:16.880 --> 01:07:22.580
but carrying anything between New York and Rotterdam, where are we?

524
01:07:22.580 --> 01:07:33.180
New York and Rotterdam, okay, two neutral ports, was stopped by the British, prevented from going on.

525
01:07:33.180 --> 01:07:40.920
Mail was taken off American ships because in some way it would be helping the German war effort.

526
01:07:40.920 --> 01:07:46.680
So in many ways that had been traditionally understood, Britain was violating American neutral rights.

527
01:07:46.680 --> 01:07:49.320
And the Americans from time to time complained about it.

528
01:07:49.320 --> 01:07:56.180
So the public saw, well, okay, Germany is doing bad things, we're dealing with that.

529
01:07:56.180 --> 01:08:01.920
The British are doing illegal things also, we're dealing with that.

530
01:08:01.920 --> 01:08:18.160
After the war was over, the man who replaces Brian as Secretary of State is Robert Lansing,

531
01:08:18.160 --> 01:08:21.920
another Wall Street lawyer.

532
01:08:21.920 --> 01:08:30.680
After the war, Lansing wrote his memoirs, and this is what he wrote.

533
01:08:30.680 --> 01:08:34.760
In dealing with the British government, there was always in my mind the conviction that

534
01:08:34.760 --> 01:08:40.720
we would ultimately become an ally of Great Britain and that it would not do, therefore,

535
01:08:40.720 --> 01:08:48.000
to let our controversies reach a point where diplomatic correspondence gave way to action.

536
01:08:48.000 --> 01:08:53.440
Once we joined the British, we would presumably wish to adopt some of the policies and practices

537
01:08:53.440 --> 01:08:58.800
which the British adopted, because our aim also would be to destroy the morale of the

538
01:08:58.800 --> 01:09:04.800
by the German people, by economic isolation, which would cause them to lack the very necessaries of life.

539
01:09:04.800 --> 01:09:10.800
Admitting that the point of the British blockade was to starve the civilian population and to surrender.

540
01:09:10.800 --> 01:09:18.800
And this is what Lansing, the former Secretary of State, the man who was Wilson's Secretary of State

541
01:09:18.800 --> 01:09:21.800
when we entered the war and at the Paris Peace Conference said.

542
01:09:21.800 --> 01:09:27.800
Everything we did was submerged in verbiage. It was done with deliberate purpose.

543
01:09:27.800 --> 01:09:33.800
It ensured the continuance of the controversies and left the questions between America and Britain unsettled,

544
01:09:33.800 --> 01:09:45.800
which was necessary in order to leave this country free to act and even act illegally when it entered the war.

545
01:09:45.800 --> 01:09:49.800
That's a pretty candid, stunning admission.

546
01:09:49.800 --> 01:09:55.800
But then when you read that the American people had become terrible isolationists,

547
01:09:55.800 --> 01:10:02.800
xenophobic, hiding their head in the sand, wanting not to have anything to do with the world, and so on.

548
01:10:02.800 --> 01:10:10.800
Well, that's overstating it, but this is what their leaders had admitted that they had done to them in the First World War.

549
01:10:10.800 --> 01:10:24.800
We lied to you, the equivalent now of them admitting we lied about the weapons of mass destruction.

550
01:10:24.800 --> 01:10:28.800
Don't you understand? We had to have some kind of excuse like that.

551
01:10:28.800 --> 01:10:34.800
We just lied about it. What are you going to do to us?

552
01:10:34.800 --> 01:10:46.300
And anyway, so I want you to maybe think about that, that the Secretary of State had himself openly admitted what had been done.

553
01:10:46.300 --> 01:10:57.300
So it was maybe natural that the American people were suspicious about another crusade in Europe on the part of another liberal democratic president.

554
01:10:57.300 --> 01:11:05.300
Now, in the course of the war, you can read in Higgs' book much of what happened to the American economy.

555
01:11:05.300 --> 01:11:11.300
The American economy, well, the railroads were nationalized. Price and wage controls were the first time.

556
01:11:11.300 --> 01:11:18.300
Rent controls were put in in Washington, D.C., the first time in American history.

557
01:11:18.300 --> 01:11:25.300
War Industries Board was set up that controlled most of the production of the United States under Bernard Baruch.

558
01:11:25.300 --> 01:11:48.300
Conscription, of course, a mass conscription. Joe Stromberg mentioned that the First World War was worse from the point of view of civil liberties than the Second World War with the exception, of course, of the internment of the Japanese Americans in the Second World War, which is an interesting story all in itself.

559
01:11:48.300 --> 01:12:03.300
To my mind, these humanitarian liberals are, in fact, very humane and compassionate, until you get in their way, and then there's no stopping them, there's nothing they're not going to do to you.

560
01:12:03.300 --> 01:12:14.300
Here, 120,000 Japanese Americans, well, some of them were resident aliens just because they weren't born here, they wanted to become citizens, but Japanese were not permitted.

561
01:12:14.300 --> 01:12:19.820
Japanese born in Japan not permitted to become citizens, but 80,000 Japanese born in America

562
01:12:19.820 --> 01:12:24.700
put into concentration camps, not death camps, but they were concentration camps in the traditional

563
01:12:24.700 --> 01:12:30.940
understanding of concentration camps. Why? On suspicion that they might

564
01:12:33.100 --> 01:12:41.340
provoke, might commit acts of espionage and sabotage. The Supreme Court upheld us,

565
01:12:41.340 --> 01:12:46.340
All the liberals, Frankfurter, Black, and so on in the Supreme Court thought they were perfectly okay.

566
01:12:46.340 --> 01:12:52.340
You know, you look through the Constitution, where does the Constitution say that you cannot take 80,000 American citizens

567
01:12:52.340 --> 01:13:02.340
because of their ethnic background, citizens accused of no crime, not even suspected of any crime, individually speaking?

568
01:13:02.340 --> 01:13:07.340
What does it in the Constitution say that you can't take them and put them into concentration camps?

569
01:13:07.340 --> 01:13:11.340
That's ridiculous. Of course the Constitution allows something like that.

570
01:13:11.340 --> 01:13:19.340
Right? The Constitution is not a... the Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact, as they say nowadays.

571
01:13:19.340 --> 01:13:33.340
If you want to throw all these Japanese grocers and florists and fishermen and fishmongers into camps in Arizona and Arkansas, you have the perfect right to do it.

572
01:13:33.340 --> 01:13:36.340
Well, that was the worst thing that happened in the Second World War.

573
01:13:36.340 --> 01:13:42.840
The general suppression of civil liberties was not as bad as in the First World War.

574
01:13:42.840 --> 01:13:56.340
The First World War, thousands were arrested for violating the espionage and sedition acts on the basis of nothing.

575
01:13:56.340 --> 01:14:00.340
As I'll mention it, I'll talk about it in a moment in the case of Eugene Debs.

576
01:14:00.340 --> 01:14:06.500
But the reason why it was relatively mild, relatively mild in the Second World War, I

577
01:14:06.500 --> 01:14:12.580
think is this, that in the First World War, the men who got us into the war were really

578
01:14:12.580 --> 01:14:17.620
afraid of what might happen at home. We'd never sent a conscript army overseas. The

579
01:14:17.620 --> 01:14:22.780
army in the Philippines was a volunteer army. We'd never sent a mass army to Europe. The

580
01:14:22.780 --> 01:14:29.860
Germans were a very large part of the American population and relatively recent immigrants.

581
01:14:29.860 --> 01:14:35.860
There were towns like Cincinnati, there were mainly German towns like Cincinnati and St. Louis and Milwaukee.

582
01:14:35.860 --> 01:14:44.860
And people who were proud and understandably proud of their culture, their heritage, attachments to Germany.

583
01:14:44.860 --> 01:14:50.860
No way of knowing what was going to happen in America in this war.

584
01:14:50.860 --> 01:14:56.860
So they came down as hard as they possibly could, as severely as they possibly could.

585
01:14:56.860 --> 01:15:00.860
And you can read about it, some of the things are laughable.

586
01:15:00.860 --> 01:15:06.860
There were also the volunteer patriots.

587
01:15:06.860 --> 01:15:11.860
That is not the official paid patriots of the government agencies, but the volunteer patriots.

588
01:15:11.860 --> 01:15:17.860
Among historians, I mean to talk about that again, Mencken talked about George Creel,

589
01:15:17.860 --> 01:15:23.860
who was the head of the major government propaganda agency, the first American government propaganda agency,

590
01:15:23.860 --> 01:15:36.860
who hired historians to write the propagandistic accounts of the whole history of Germany and how the war began and so on.

591
01:15:36.860 --> 01:15:48.620
Mencken referred to George Creel and his herd of 2,000 historians, which is a good way of putting it.

592
01:15:48.620 --> 01:15:56.620
So the people who got us into the war were very uncertain about what the reaction of the Americans would be.

593
01:15:56.620 --> 01:16:03.620
But then I'd say there were the volunteer patriots, like the directors of symphony orchestras in New York and Philadelphia and elsewhere,

594
01:16:03.620 --> 01:16:11.620
that declared that they would not play any work by any German composer for the duration of the war.

595
01:16:11.620 --> 01:16:18.620
Now, wait a minute. You see, that's already verging on espionage and sabotage.

596
01:16:18.620 --> 01:16:25.620
Yeah, well, it occurs to me also, I mean, how many times can you hear Bolero and March Slav?

597
01:16:25.620 --> 01:16:32.620
Speaking of German in public was prohibited in whole states like Iowa.

598
01:16:32.620 --> 01:16:38.620
In other states, using German on the phone was prohibited. Just craziness.

599
01:16:38.620 --> 01:16:52.420
The case of Eugene V. Debs is particularly interesting.

600
01:16:52.420 --> 01:16:56.540
We all know that Woodrow Wilson was a humane and compassionate man, and a saint, and a

601
01:16:56.540 --> 01:16:59.340
martyr, and all kinds of things.

602
01:16:59.340 --> 01:17:02.260
We know that, don't we?

603
01:17:02.260 --> 01:17:07.820
However, there was this interesting case, besides the thousands of other people who

604
01:17:07.820 --> 01:17:18.820
The case of Eugene Debs was particularly interesting because he was a very prominent figure.

605
01:17:18.820 --> 01:17:20.820
He was the head of the American Socialist Party.

606
01:17:20.820 --> 01:17:24.820
The Socialist Party had gotten hundreds of thousands of votes in elections.

607
01:17:24.820 --> 01:17:30.820
It was a very big factor in the West especially.

608
01:17:30.820 --> 01:17:41.220
and in the speech in Ohio, Debs told a convention of socialists that the reason

609
01:17:41.220 --> 01:17:45.940
we got into this war was because of the bankers. What he had in mind was that as

610
01:17:45.940 --> 01:17:52.100
soon as the European war broke out, J.P. Morgan, the House of Morgan, became the

611
01:17:52.100 --> 01:18:00.380
suppliers of the British and arrangers for finance of British needs in the war.

612
01:18:00.380 --> 01:18:07.300
and as one of the vice presidents of the House of Morgan testified after the war

613
01:18:07.300 --> 01:18:12.060
we we felt ourselves to be agents of Britain from the beginning well whether

614
01:18:12.060 --> 01:18:14.820
that was the major reason we got into war in any case that's what the

615
01:18:14.820 --> 01:18:19.820
socialist leader Deb said that it's the bankers who got us into war somebody in

616
01:18:19.820 --> 01:18:23.540
the audience took down what he said brought it to the federal authorities

617
01:18:23.540 --> 01:18:27.820
who said that Deb's violated this the Espionage and Sedition Act which

618
01:18:27.820 --> 01:18:33.820
which prohibited interfering with recruitment for the armed forces.

619
01:18:33.820 --> 01:18:38.820
He had said nothing about violence in his, nothing provoking violence in his talk.

620
01:18:38.820 --> 01:18:41.820
I don't think he'd said anything about conscription one way or the other.

621
01:18:41.820 --> 01:18:50.820
In any case, there were no young men of eligible age in the audience who complained about it

622
01:18:50.820 --> 01:18:56.820
or were pointed to as people whose patriotism was possibly subverted by this talk.

623
01:18:56.820 --> 01:19:07.820
He was a political talk. He was put on trial, sentenced to 10 years in a federal penitentiary in Georgia.

624
01:19:07.820 --> 01:19:16.820
Now, the war is over. There have been prisoners of conscience in every country, dissidents who were arrested.

625
01:19:16.820 --> 01:19:25.820
One by one, they are pardoned in other countries, but not in America.

626
01:19:25.820 --> 01:19:39.820
Wilson was sick at this time and people came to him and said, you know, Debs is ailing, he might die in federal prison, why don't you pardon him and pardon some of the others as well?

627
01:19:39.820 --> 01:19:53.820
And it's clear as anything, we have the testimony from his Attorney General Palmer, who was a fanatic trampler on civil rights, the famous Palmer raids, but Palmer said, why don't you pardon Debs?

628
01:19:53.820 --> 01:19:57.820
and Wilson said, I will never pardon Debs.

629
01:19:57.820 --> 01:20:01.820
He stabbed our soldiers in the back by his speech

630
01:20:01.820 --> 01:20:05.820
and Debs was not pardoned by Wilson.

631
01:20:05.820 --> 01:20:09.820
He was pardoned by Warren Harding.

632
01:20:09.820 --> 01:20:13.820
As Warren Harding, a great president,

633
01:20:13.820 --> 01:20:16.820
is he considered a great president by historians?

634
01:20:16.820 --> 01:20:19.820
Or a near great president as Wilson is? No.

635
01:20:19.820 --> 01:20:24.820
He's considered maybe next to Nixon the worst president or something, I don't know.

636
01:20:24.820 --> 01:20:34.820
But Harding was not the vindictive, self-righteous, cant, spouting type of person that Wilson was.

637
01:20:34.820 --> 01:20:46.820
And Warren Harding afterwards pardoned Debs and other people who were in prison saying they didn't mean any harm, they were pretty good guys.

638
01:20:46.820 --> 01:20:58.180
So, if you hear or read of Woodrow Wilson being praised as a great liberal, as a compassionate,

639
01:20:58.180 --> 01:21:05.380
humane individual, that's something maybe to keep in mind, the case of Eugene Debs.

640
01:21:05.380 --> 01:21:15.140
Well, we have a few minutes left, I wanted to touch, pardon me, on another couple of

641
01:21:15.140 --> 01:21:21.180
issues, but why not in the next few minutes, that we do have left, any comments or questions

642
01:21:21.180 --> 01:21:23.420
you might have would be welcome.

643
01:21:23.420 --> 01:21:29.940
We'll shut this off, you see it just, shuts off, yes.

644
01:21:29.940 --> 01:21:35.940
What do you know about the book Paris 1919, is that an advertisement?

645
01:21:35.940 --> 01:21:36.940
By Nicholson?

646
01:21:36.940 --> 01:21:40.580
No, I believe it's from Macmillan.

647
01:21:40.580 --> 01:21:41.580
Macmillan is the author?

648
01:21:41.580 --> 01:21:42.580
Yes.

649
01:21:42.580 --> 01:21:43.580
I don't know.

650
01:21:43.580 --> 01:21:57.580
I don't know, I don't know who that might be, since the Paris Peace Conference, many people wrote books about it, one was written by Harold Nicholson, who was part of the British delegation.

651
01:21:57.580 --> 01:22:06.580
Interesting insights into what was being done there. I think it was called, or maybe Paris Peacekeeping 1919, but there have been other books.

652
01:22:06.580 --> 01:22:13.300
John Maynard Keynes was, at Paris, part of the British delegation, and I think his best

653
01:22:13.300 --> 01:22:17.900
book was The Economic Consequences of the Peace, the vindictive peace that was imposed

654
01:22:17.900 --> 01:22:24.500
on Germany, so distressed him that he resigned from the British delegation, as did some others.

655
01:22:24.500 --> 01:22:25.500
Yes?

656
01:22:25.500 --> 01:22:39.500
I wanted to ask about how the American democratic ideology, World War I, affected America's relation with Russia, which of course had had a two-day bar that it was on. How did those two things...

657
01:22:39.500 --> 01:22:43.500
Of course the American government was against the Leninist regime from the beginning.

658
01:22:43.500 --> 01:22:53.500
The United States sent troops to help the anti-communist side in the Civil War.

659
01:22:53.500 --> 01:22:58.500
Everybody knew, and it was public knowledge, of the troops we sent to the Far East,

660
01:22:58.500 --> 01:23:05.500
because there the American claim was the troops were there to stop the Japanese from maybe trying to take over some Russian territory.

661
01:23:05.500 --> 01:23:12.500
But there were also American troops, the presence in Russia of whom was kept secret for a long, long time.

662
01:23:12.500 --> 01:23:27.500
The Soviets take over in October, or the new calendar, November of 1917. The war is still going on, of course, in the rest of Europe, but one reason the Soviets came to power was because they wanted to help the White cause.

663
01:23:27.500 --> 01:23:37.500
The Soviets take over in October, or the new calendar, November of 1917. The war is still going on, of course, in the rest of Europe.

664
01:23:37.500 --> 01:23:49.700
One reason the Soviets came to power was that the people who had overthrown the Tsar refused to get out of the war, refused to make peace with Germany.

665
01:23:49.700 --> 01:23:59.300
So from March or February, depending on the calendar, 1917 to October or November, Russia is still in the war.

666
01:23:59.300 --> 01:24:29.300
The Germans naturally would like to have Russia get out of the war, so very famously, you know history is pretty interesting sometimes anyway, put Lenin and Krupskaya, his common-law wife and other of his friends on a sealed train from Switzerland to the Baltic, sealed train so that Lenin wouldn't think to get out and start revolution in Germany, transporting Lenin then,

667
01:24:29.300 --> 01:24:38.800
via Finland to Petrograd and the Finland station, a famous book by Edmund Wilson is to the Finland station.

668
01:24:38.800 --> 01:24:48.800
Finland station, the station from Helsinki to Petrograd, and then by April 1917, Lenin is in Russia.

669
01:24:48.800 --> 01:24:53.800
And Lenin immediately takes the position, get Russia out of the war.

670
01:24:53.800 --> 01:25:01.960
Now, if Kerensky had gotten Russia out of the war, there's a certain possibility anyway

671
01:25:01.960 --> 01:25:09.080
that Lenin couldn't have come to power because that was his most potent claim and his most potent

672
01:25:09.080 --> 01:25:17.640
promise. We're finally getting out of this stupid war. We're losing it. Millions of Russian soldiers

673
01:25:17.640 --> 01:25:21.720
are simply deserting. Millions, literally millions, the biggest desertion in the history

674
01:25:21.720 --> 01:25:26.120
of Warfare are deserting. Let's get out of the war. But Kerensky never said that.

675
01:25:26.920 --> 01:25:34.200
So Russia remained in the war and then Kerensky lost any kind of support. Lenin came to power.

676
01:25:34.760 --> 01:25:41.400
The first thing that Lenin did was to send a message to the Russian troops,

677
01:25:42.120 --> 01:25:45.080
cease firing on all fronts and fraternize with the enemy.

678
01:25:45.080 --> 01:25:51.440
The war kept on.

679
01:25:51.440 --> 01:25:56.960
The Germans would topple the Bolsheviks as well, fraternize with the enemy, because this

680
01:25:56.960 --> 01:26:02.120
is the start of our attempt to get to the German people, the Hungarian people, all the

681
01:26:02.120 --> 01:26:06.440
other peoples, and start the world revolution.

682
01:26:06.440 --> 01:26:14.520
And then in January, the treaty between Germany and Russia was signed, ending the war, so

683
01:26:14.520 --> 01:26:22.520
so that the Germans were able to move troops over to the Western Front for the last desperate offensive that failed anyway.

684
01:26:22.520 --> 01:26:31.520
But you were talking about the American attitude towards Russia, to the Leninist regime.

685
01:26:31.520 --> 01:26:41.520
Well, the fact that Lenin had withdrawn from the war was enough to condemn him, let alone the fact that now he was trying for world revolution.

686
01:26:41.520 --> 01:27:11.520
so he was he was kind of the what is it the ghost at the banquet or something at the Paris Peace Conference everybody was worried about what Soviet what would happen with Soviet Russia there they set up a communist regime in Hungary for instance it was very quickly toppled they were going to set up a communist regime in Bavaria temporarily I mean there was possibility of communist revolution throughout central and eastern Europe so they were all worried

687
01:27:11.520 --> 01:27:19.160
about Lenin, and that attitude remained for a long time until the communist regime was

688
01:27:19.160 --> 01:27:23.360
finally recognized by the United States, the last of the other powers to recognize it in

689
01:27:23.360 --> 01:27:25.360
1933 by Roosevelt.

690
01:27:25.360 --> 01:27:37.360
Speaking of Russia, Britain and Russia were, you kind of said that Russia was a major colonial rival in the late part of the 1960s, right?

691
01:27:37.360 --> 01:27:51.360
And then Britain does this flip-flop in 1907. I know that they, I know that it was partly due to brilliant print performances as we sort of came to an understanding, but it just, a lot of it just doesn't seem to make sense.

692
01:27:51.360 --> 01:28:06.360
Yeah, but there was rivalry, but it didn't affect vital interest on either side.

693
01:28:06.360 --> 01:28:14.360
What they did was they agreed to both stay out of Tibet, both stay out of Afghanistan, and divide up Persia or Iran.

694
01:28:14.360 --> 01:28:19.360
The Russians would get the northern part, the British would get the southern part as spheres of influence.

695
01:28:19.360 --> 01:28:48.360
Thanks to my homeland, did you say that the house was built in an iron ore?

696
01:28:49.360 --> 01:28:51.360
What kind of land are we talking about?

697
01:28:51.360 --> 01:28:53.360
Austria-Hungary

698
01:28:53.360 --> 01:28:55.360
Oh, okay.

699
01:28:55.360 --> 01:28:57.360
Many people say it doesn't exist anymore, but

700
01:28:57.360 --> 01:28:59.360
I see we can have a meeting of minds.

701
01:28:59.360 --> 01:29:01.360
You're saying Slovakia, right?

702
01:29:01.360 --> 01:29:03.360
Yeah.

703
01:29:03.360 --> 01:29:05.360
The Habsburg dynasty had a positive edge.

704
01:29:05.360 --> 01:29:07.360
They could use two or three years.

705
01:29:07.360 --> 01:29:15.360
How does it square with all this memoir, for example, Mises,

706
01:29:15.360 --> 01:29:30.360
There was a lot of anti-Semitism in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, much more in Vienna for instance than in Budapest, but I was talking about the attitude of the Habsburgs.

707
01:29:30.360 --> 01:29:37.520
Well, yeah, of course, there was a man who was elected mayor of Vienna, for instance,

708
01:29:37.520 --> 01:29:38.520
Karl Lueger.

709
01:29:38.520 --> 01:29:42.600
He was elected three times mayor of Vienna.

710
01:29:42.600 --> 01:29:48.560
Francis Joseph rejected him as mayor, he had the right to do that, then he was elected a

711
01:29:48.560 --> 01:29:53.920
fourth time, and then finally Francis Joseph said, what can I do, I mean, this is supposed

712
01:29:53.920 --> 01:29:58.120
to be some kind of democratic position, the people voted for him, I can't turn him down

713
01:29:58.120 --> 01:29:59.120
forever.

714
01:29:59.120 --> 01:30:13.120
Carl Lueger was a very important politician in a way, because what he preached was anti-Semitism, principally because the Jews were so successful in Vienna,

715
01:30:13.120 --> 01:30:28.120
and also social welfare, public housing, health clinics, programs for recent mothers, a whole slew of social welfare legislation.

716
01:30:28.120 --> 01:30:38.120
Who do you suppose was in Vienna at that time and saw the successful politicking that this Carl Lueger was able to perform?

717
01:30:38.120 --> 01:30:48.120
Right. Just follow my students. Hitler is the answer to virtually any question regarding 20th century history.

718
01:30:48.120 --> 01:30:57.120
Yes, Hitler, beginning to be interested in politics, saw how successful this combination of social welfare on the one hand

719
01:30:57.120 --> 01:31:27.120
on the one hand, and anti-Semitism on the other could be, and that's what national socialism is, national, including anti-Semitism, but also socialism, not nationalization of the means of production, that's not the only possible definition of socialism, but heavy government involvement in the economy and welfare for the people, but the Hapsburgs, to the extent that they could stand above that,

720
01:31:27.120 --> 01:31:36.080
did. And a sign of, of course as you point out, the anti-Semitism, but a sign of the success of their,

721
01:31:37.120 --> 01:31:46.720
the basic Habsburg, late Habsburg, attitude of rule of law, equality of people within our empire,

722
01:31:46.720 --> 01:31:53.840
was the enormous success of the Jews, especially of the Viennese and Budapest Jews. Well, I think

723
01:31:53.840 --> 01:31:56.840
I think it's about all for now and I'll see you this afternoon.