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Foreign Affairs Summer Reads ... July 24th 2022 ... 6:02 AM
Collage newspaper clippings of historic headlines ... Ginevra Vacalebre
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY (see also #24123)
I was born in 1940. We lived in Surbiton, a near suburb of London during the war. I was too young to understand much of what the war was all about, but my parent knew it all too well.
Foreogn Affairs is a little bit older than me, but essentially all the big stories for Foregn Affairs are ones that I knew about when they happened or soon thereafter. London and/or the UK was in the middle of a lot of the stories depicted above. By the time the stories moved to New York and the USA, I had migrated to New York and experienced these events as they happenned.
When I was about 8 years old (1948) my father delivered a speach at the local Rotary Club ... his subject was 'The Good Old Days' but his theme was quite the oppositie. My father had been a student of history and he was in a good position to contrast the state of society in the UK in 1948 with previous times and point out that while not everything was as good as it could be and should be, the situation in 1948 was a whole lot better for most people in 1949 than in most previous times. Yes ... there were problems and the British Empire was contracting (india's independence was 1947!) but the British Government was much more socially responsible in 1948 than it have ever been in history.
We seem to be in the middle of a replay of the scenario my father talked about 75 years ago. Yes ... the world has a whole host of problems, but the technological progress has been amazing and could be the foundation for a truly better world. Sadly, this is not happening simply because a relatively few people have control of most of the levers of power and the majority of us do not get to share the product of productivity in anything like a fair way. Some people think this will never change ... but I think that this is wrong. The evidence is that the world has become a better place over time, albeit not fast and not in a straight line. For me, the biggest misinformation there is, is that the 'free world' is in decline. We are 'free' to grumble, and modern technology enables the idea of 'decline' to spread without much meaningful debate.
The bad news hits the headlines but not so much the good news. I don't think I am too optimistic ... there are too many good nice people in this world and they are, in fact, winning.
Peter Burgess
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Hitler’s Rise to Power in Germany
Foreign Affairs Summer Reads
July 24th 2022 ... 6:02 AM
The Nazi Party and its leader, Adolf Hitler, rose to power in a Germany wracked by economic and political crisis. Most Foreign Affairs contributors at the time recognized the dangers of the far-right movement, but they could not foresee how total and how devastating Nazi rule would become. In 1931, Erich Koch-Weser, a prominent German liberal politician, identified the Nazis as the chief threat among the groups exploiting the “political radicalism” of the era—but wrote off a power grab as “extremely doubtful.” In 1932, the journalist Paul Scheffer explored Hitler’s “reckless skill” in playing on Germans’ anxieties, hatreds, and hopes—but remained skeptical that the Nazi movement could “be carried over into practical politics.”
After the party’s success in parliamentary elections, Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany in 1933. From there, the country’s social and political transformation was swift. “One by one continue to fall the last possible citadels of defense against uncontradicted Nazi dictatorship,” Foreign Affairs Editor Hamilton Fish Armstrong wrote later that year. Questions remained about how the Nazis would govern at home and how far they would push their “brash” and “impatient” policies abroad. But in those early months, Armstrong noted, “we cannot pretend that as yet there is any real evidence to cause our fears to diminish.”
Even years later, after World War II had begun, the grip of the Nazi regime on German society—which the journalist Dorothy Thompson described in 1940 as a revolution based on “the psychopathy of Hitler”—was difficult to comprehend. Easier to grasp was the magnitude of the threat Nazi Germany posed. As Thompson put it, “the West confronts the greatest danger in her whole history.”
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Radical Forces in Germany
By Erich Koch-Weser (1931)
Link to the article ''Radical Forces in Germany''
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Hitler: Phenomenon and Portent
By Paul Scheffer (1932)
Link to the article ''Hitler: Phenomenon and Portent''
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Hitler’s Reich ... The First Phase
By Hamilton Fish Armstrong (1933)
Link to the article ''Hitler's Reich''
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The Problem Child of Europe
By Dorothy Thompson (1940)
Link to the article ''The Problem Child of Europe''
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This email was sent to peterbnyc@gmail.com.
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