The Interwar Years- The Weakness of Western Democracies and the Rise of Totalitarianism

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The Interwar Years- The Weakness of Western
Democracies and the Rise of Totalitarianism
Totalitarians
Democracies
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Our Key Question ? Why did the victors of World
War I allow threats to their system of government
and way of life to rise to power in the twenty
years following World War I?
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Reason 1a) Pacifism A Desire for Peace At All
Costs
How does this wood carving help us to understand
the high level of pacifism in 1920s Europe?
Why is this pacifism relevant?
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(No Transcript)
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Reasons 1b) A Loss of Faith in the Virtue of
Western Society

• Pre WWI- Human reason ushered in democracy and
  the Industrial Age. Perhaps it can solve all of
  our problems. Utopianism
• Post WWI- Umm ok scratch that.
• If modern science brought us the slaughter in
  the trenches, what will future progress bring
  us?
• Not totally misguided think about the atom bomb
• Orwells 1984

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This Western Loss of Faith in Progress Was
Aggravated By New Ideas at the Time

• Philosophy
• Existentialism (Nieztsche)
• There is no God and no meaning to life. Humans
  must create their own meaning.
• Physics
• Einsteins Relativity
• Time and space are both curved and are both
  relative to the observer
• Time is relative
• If I were to travel away from the earth on a
  space ship traveling the speed of light and came
  back in a year, 100 years would have passed on
  earth
• Heisenberg uncertainty principle
• If you know exactly where a particle is, you
  cannot know its speed. If you know its exact
  speed, you cannot know exactly where it is.
• Psychiatry
• Human brains are not entirely rational
• Many human actions are motivated by subconscious
  desires

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If a human were to move near the speed of light,
time would slow down for them, relative to the
observer
VS
Which is more comfortable to believe?
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Salvador Dali Soft Construction with Boiled
Beans (Premonition of Civil War), 1936
Surrealism
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Freudian Psychology
Freudian View of the Brain
Pre-Freudian View of the Brain
Output
Output
Input
Input
Logic
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• You Tube- Nietzsche interprets Hitler
• Sharks and nazis

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Reason 1c) The U.S. Returned to Isolationism,
Leaving Europe Deal With Its Problems
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1d) The Looming Menace of Communism

• Russia had become Communist
• Communism advocates a worldwide violent
  revolution to replace world governments
• Rejects wealth inequality
• Connected to Atheism, and ironically at the same
  time, Judaism

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Reason 1e) Economic Difficulties

• In the 1920s, nations struggled economically to
  recover from WWI war debt
• By the end of the 1920s, they started to recover,
  but then
• the Great Depression hit
• It is hard to convince people, especially in a
  democracy, to spend money for military action,
  even if the action is justified, in a time of
  economic crisis
• Shouldnt that money be going to help the poor?
• Interesting Keynesian idea

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Historians Have Dubbed the 1920s The Age of
Anxiety

• There were attempts to deal with this anxiety
• Various Pacts and Treaties
• Locarno Pact
• Kellogg-Briand Pact

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Attempt At An Amazing Metaphor
Technological Gadgets to Ease Life
Pre 1914 World
Shorter Work Hours
Society/ The Age of Anxiety
World War I
Reason
Progress
Stream of Consciousness- distopias
Science
Freud
Peace
Einstein
Industry
Existentialism