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

Totalitarians

Democracies

Our Key Question Why did the victors of World War I allow threats to their system of government and way of life to rise to power in the twenty years following World War I?

Reason 1a) Pacifism A Desire for Peace At All Costs

How does this wood carving help us to understand the high level of pacifism in 1920s Europe?

Why is this pacifism relevant?

Reasons 1b) A Loss of Faith in the Virtue of Western Society

• Pre WWI- “Human reason ushered in democracy and the Industrial Age. Perhaps it can solve all of our problems…”. Utopianism

• Post WWI- “Umm… ok… scratch that.”

• “If modern science brought us the slaughter in the trenches, what will future ‘progress’ bring us? – Not totally misguided…

think about the atom bomb – Orwell’s 1984

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

• Philosophy– Existentialism (Nieztsche)– There is no God and no meaning to life. Humans must create their own

meaning. • Physics

– Einstein’s Relativity– Time and space are both curved and are both relative to the observer– Time is relative

• If I were to travel away from the earth on a space ship traveling the speed of light and came back in a year, 100 years would have passed on earth

– Heisenberg uncertainty principle• If you know exactly where a particle is, you cannot know its speed. If

you know its exact speed, you cannot know exactly where it is. • Psychiatry

– Human brains are not entirely rational– Many human actions are motivated by subconscious desires

VS

If a human were to move near the speed of light, time would slow down for them,

relative to the observer…

Which is more comfortable to believe?

Salvador Dali: Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War),

1936

Salvador Dali: Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War),

1936Surrealis

m

Freudian Psychology

Pre-Freudian View of the Brain

Input

Logic

Output

Freudian View of the Brain

InputOutput

You Tube- Nietzsche interprets Hitler You Tube- Nietzsche interprets Hitler Sharks and nazisSharks and nazis

Reason 1c) The U.S. Returned to

Isolationism, Leaving Europe

Deal With Its Problems

1d) The Looming Menace of Communism

• Russia had become Communist

• Communism advocates a worldwide violent revolution to replace world governments

• Rejects wealth inequality • Connected to Atheism, and

ironically at the same time, Judaism

Reason 1e) Economic Difficulties

• In the 1920s, nations struggled economically to recover from WWI war debt

• By the end of the 1920s, they started to recover, but then…

• …the Great Depression hit• It is hard to convince people, especially in

a democracy, to spend money for military action, even if the action is justified, in a time of economic crisis– Shouldn’t that money be going to help

the poor? – Interesting Keynesian idea

Historians Have Dubbed the 1920s The Age of Anxiety

• There were attempts to deal with this anxiety

• Various Pacts and Treaties – Locarno Pact – Kellogg-Briand Pact

Attempt At An Amazing Metaphor

Reason

Science

Industry

Shorter Work Hours

Technological Gadgets to Ease Life

Peace

World War I

Einstein

Existentialism

FreudStream of Consciousness- distopias

Progress

Society/ The Age of Anxiety

Pre 1914 World