Prof: Today I'm going to
do a fairly impossible task, which is to talk mostly about
Eastern Europe in the interwar period.
I sent around a rather lengthy
list of terms, so I don't have to write it on
the board and you can't see it anyway.
I'll work from that,
so it'll help you understand. But the big points are clear,
and the maps will help you as well.
Just a couple things at the
beginning, which are perfectly obvious.
In 1914, few people could have
imagined that they would sweep away four empires,
etc., etc. and take the lives of millions
of people. In 1918 and 1919 there was the
Great Illusion. The Great Illusion was held by
Wilson and lots of other people, that wars were started by evil
people in high places, which may often be the case.
But the problems left by the
Treaty of Versailles were basically insoluble.
The 1920s and 1930s are
basically a continuation of the war.
You can look at the entire
period from 1914 to 1945 as a thirty years' war.
Europe was in depression
basically the entire time between the wars,
as we'll see when I talk about Eastern Europe and East Central
Europe. That has a lot to do with the
chronic instability of the period.
Western Europe and the United
States were really not in depression between 1924 and
1929. Then the thunder comes in 1929.
The United States doesn't get
out of the Depression until basically World War II.
The war economy helps them do
that. But Eastern Europe,
in the places where the instability and the lack of
parliamentary traditions was so important,
was in agricultural depression the entire time.
By 1939 in Central and Eastern
Europe, only one state, Czechoslovakia,
remains a parliamentary regime. In all of the others,
the Eastern Europe of little dictators,
and fascist parties, and rightwing agrarian populist
parties--some of them didn't start out rightwing--poisoned
the political atmosphere. The Treaty of Versailles,
when they meet and these delegations meet--including the
former president of Yale, the future president of Yale
then, Charles Seymour,
was in the American delegation there--they were convinced that
they could put an end to all wars.
They would get Germany to sign
on the dotted line saying, "We started it all."
As I'll argue next week,
and it's perfectly clear, that was a catastrophic
mistake. Germany arguably had a greater
role in starting the war than the other places,
but this guaranteed the perpetual hostility of an ever
increasing number of rightwing parties,
of which the most vicious and the most successful would be the
Nazis, opposed the very existence of
the Weimar Republic and became, as I'll explain a minute,
a revisionist state. A revisionist state is one that
wanted to revise the Treaty of Versailles,
because people of their dominant ethnic group had ended
up on the wrong side of the frontier.
If you had fought a war that
was based upon national claims in 1914,
in which aggressive nationalism was one of the root causes of
the war, the successor states that are
created out of these collapsed empires find themselves facing
the reality that you could get all the maps you wanted,
and you could get all the cartographers that you wanted,
and geographers, and bring them all to
Versailles, and bring them all to the
French suburbs, Trianon, and Sèvres,
and Neuilly, and the others,
Saint-Germain-en-Laye, that became named after the
treaties with the individual powers.
But you couldn't draw lines
around national groups that were going to incorporate everybody
within the country of their choice.
You couldn't do it.
That leaves a permanent factor
for instability. If you don't believe me,
look at the Balkans in the 1990s,
which were the worst atrocities since the death camps in World
War II, in which ethnic cleansing and
rape as a means of waging war became a reality again,
and in which those old hatreds had never been extinguished.
So, the Great Illusion was that
there wouldn't be anymore wars. In the case of Germany,
as we'll see, the troops who were
demobilized, who came back,
they kept drilling in their basements, the Freikorps,
the Free Corps in Germany. Lots of people among them,
just one of millions, the young Adolf Hitler--the
view that they held was that the problem wasn't to have fought
the war in the first place, which was a Wilsonian view of
the war, but the problem was not to have
won the war. The problem is,
how do you explain to home that you've lost the war when your
troops are far, far inside Germany?
I'm getting ahead of my story,
but it's just such a complicated subject,
all this. It's a little hard not to.
The other problem was,
if you're punishing losers in World War I,
you're often punishing them in a way that seems to violate the
very principle that you hope to espouse of each people,
more or less their own country. The powers that become the
revisionist powers, almost all were on the losing
side. They're the ones that,
by the very principles espoused at Versailles,
that basically just simply get screwed.
As the Hungarians put it,
"No, no, never."
That was their response,
"No, no, never."
These powers,
of which the most dangerous, ultimately, is Germany,
are far more powerful in defeat than France is in victory,
basically vow to get even. Not the Weimar Republic,
but those people who wanted to destroy the republic.
Then Eastern Europe will be
full of little Hitlers, little racist dictators who are
also convinced that "in the next one,
we'll get it back." "We'll get it all back and
we'll bring it back with a percentage of interest as
well." Increasingly,
a point that I'd better make in a while, they begin to look at,
in the Europe of extremes, Germany as a very compelling
model. The Eastern European states
that had certainly reasons to increasingly fear Germany,
they begin to see Germany as a rather successful model.
The Europe of the extremes,
as Eric Hobsbawm has called it, is basically,
if you exclude the Soviet Union,
which is another kind of totalitarian state,
and if you exclude the role of the Communist parties as a
destabilizing force in many of these countries,
is a Europe of fascism. They just keep right on
marching, because fascists are better at
describing how they will take power--marching,
violence--and whom they hate, than what they will construct
afterward. What they will construct
afterward in all of these places will be a totalitarian,
fascist state that is based upon the principle of totally
over-the-top, aggressive nationalism and
anti-whatever the minorities are,
particularly the Jews. Anti-Semitism becomes an
important part of all of this. So, the guys with the maps,
and the pencils, and trying to draw the little
squiggly lines--it doesn't really work out very well.
Wilson comes back in utter
defeat and the American congress doesn't approve the Treaty of
Versailles anyway, and America enters,
as you know, a period of isolationism,
at least until the next time around.
That was a rather lengthy
introduction to what I was going to talk about.
Let's try to be more specific
now. What are the big-time
revisionist states? First, let me just start out
with one that didn't lose, but is one in which,
as you'll see when you read the chapter,
where fascism is first saluted and then takes power.
That is Italy.
Italy wins.
They're open to offers,
open to the highest bidder, and they join in 1915 because
the Allies can promise them more.
They promise them part of the
Tyrol between Austria and Italy, and they promise them much of
the Dalmatian Coast. Italy went to war for that
reason, but also because in a country
in which a sense of national unity basically didn't exist,
there was a strong feeling that war will make Italians out of
all these different people. That's not real good reason to
go to war, but they do go to war.
Of course, they were being
systematically denigrated by the other Allied leaders for woeful
aspects of their army, which also took huge losses
fighting the Austro-Hungarian forces.
So, when they come to
Versailles, Orlando, who is their representative,
he's a junior partner in this. They don't pay a lot of
attention to him. Wilson says,
"You can't give them the Tyrol,
because they don't have Italian majorities there and they
certainly don't have Italian majorities in the Dalmatian
Coast," which is populated by,
logically enough, by Croats. So, they don't get what they
want. Mussolini,
who began his career as a socialist,
he was the editor of Avanti!,
"Forward," which was the socialist paper,
he becomes one of the originators of fascism,
and he appeared, as you'll see in the book,
on the cover of Time magazine eight times.
He's the guy that got the
railroads to run on time in Italy, but only the ones to the
ski resorts. Anyway, I don't have time to
talk about him now. So, they're kind of a
revisionist power. Mussolini's discourse about how
he's going to turn the Mediterranean into an Italian
lake, revive the Roman Empire,
and all that has to be seen in that context.
Italy was not "a
loser" in World War I, but rather an aggrieved winner.
I guess that's a good way of
putting it. The revisionist powers are
those that lost. Revisionist powers,
of course, no one was more revisionist than Germany,
and the German Empire is destroyed.
Germany, again it's hard to
summarize all of this, but Germany from the very
beginning says, "If you're going to argue
that national ethnic groups and where they live should determine
the drawing of boundaries, then what the Allies did to
Germany seemed extremely unfair,"
and not only to the far right in Germany.
This leaves aside the question
that I'll come to next week. John Maynard Keynes,
who was a brilliant, brilliant guy,
he's the one who saw that this is recipe for disaster,
the Treaty of Versailles. He's the one who said,
"This is just a truce. It's not the end of the war.
If you make Germany pay for the
whole war, based on that they've signed
the war guilt clause, you're going to so destabilize
this country that eventually the right will take over."
That's exactly what happened.
That's exactly what happened.
From the point of view of
Germany, the most egregious loss that they suffered was the
Polish Corridor. If you go to Gdansk,
which is a wonderful city, which was destroyed during the
war like most every city in Poland except for Krakow,
which really got lucky. I can remember going to Warsaw,
au temps des camarades, when it was still into the
communist regime, when I was a kid.
You could see where there once
had been boulevards. The whole place was just
absolutely razed. Krakow was very lucky because
it survived. What they do is Gdansk gets
rebuilt. Gdansk was a German city.
The Polish population was
extremely small. You may know of Gdansk because
that's where Solidarity began in 1979 and 1980.
There's an important port
there, and that's where Lech Walesa
got his start, and the whole Solidarity
movement, including some of my friends,
historians, who were young printers for
Solidarity in those days. As I've said a couple of times,
I go to Poland all the time, in the last couple of years
five times or something like that.
Anyway, Gdansk,
from the point of view of the Germans, was German.
The vast majority of the
population was German. What the Germans called
"the Polish Corridor" divided the rest of Germany
from Pomerania in East Prussia. It was resented by the Germans
because there was a strong German population that remained.
Of course the Poles,
when they look at Gdansk, they look back to when Gdansk
was an important port then, too, in the Polish-Lithuanian
commonwealth. In fact, Poles are quite
insistent. Polish historians--and the
whole concept of sovereignty that emerged in the Netherlands
and in England in early-modern times was also being constructed
in and around Gdansk. The other big wound for the
Germans was Czechoslovakia. The second largest ethnic group
in the newly one of the successor states,
along with Poland and Yugoslavia,
and I have the statistics in what I sent around to you,
the first were Czechs at about fifty percent.
Germans, if I remember
correctly, were twenty-three percent, and Slovaks were
sixteen percent. The others are other minorities.
They're Ukrainians,
and Poles, and all sorts of things.
The majority of Germans were
concentrated in Prague, though there weren't as many of
them as before. Above all, the whole region of
Bohemia and in that region called Sudetenland,
the Sudetenland Germans. When the allies capitulate to
Hitler's demands that that part of Czechoslovakia--then of
course he launched the whole thing--;be passed into Germany.
One of the reasons that they
appease is they said, "Maybe he's got a point.
In 1918, we couldn't really put
the people where they were supposed to be.
There are German majorities in
a good percentage of Bohemia, within Czechoslovakia.
Maybe he's got a point."
That was an excuse.
That was the rationale for
appeasing him, but at a time when he might
have been stopped. His generals were just scared
to death that the Allies were going to fight them,
because they weren't ready for war.
Germany is, above all,
the big revisionist power. More about this when we talk
about Adolf Hitler next week. The other big one--I can't find
it but it's in there--is Hungary.
Hungary loses--I've got to
remember these statistics. I might have put it around.
I think I can remember them.
They lose twenty-five percent
of the Hungarian population to other states.
They lose about between a half
and two-thirds, I should remember but I don't,
of the land of the old Hungarian domains when they were
in Austria-Hungary, when they were,
supposedly after 1867, the equal partner of Austria.
They lose the greatest
percentage of that Hungarian population to Romania.
The tensions between the
Romanians and the Hungarians were extremely great.
The linguistic differences are
enormous, because Hungarian is such a difficult language.
It's an isolated language.
I have a friend who retired
here many years ago from Russian and East European languages and
literatures who knows eighteen languages.
He knows mostly every Central
European language. I said, "Do you know
Hungarian?" He said, "No,
it's too hard." That accentuates this isolation
from the Romanians. Again, in 1989 the great
groundswell against Ceausescu and his horrendous wife,
the dictators in Romania, began with Hungarian dissidents
whose families had been generations since World War I
stuck, from their point of view,
in Romania. When you're trying to look at
each of these countries and trying to figure out why does
some rightwing maggot, some rightwing dictator,
take power? It's because,
as in the case of Adolf Hitler, if you say the same thing over
and over and over again, pretty soon you get people to
believe you. Admiral Horthy,
who was an admiral in the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
he becomes an extraordinarily vicious dictator and egregious
collaborator during World War II,
sort of an admiring junior partner of Hitler and the Nazis,
and the frenetic, aggressive Hungarian
nationalism. You can go to Budapest,
go along the Danube River in Budapest and see where they've
made a sad monument out of the shoes of Jews who were shot or
just simply pushed into the swirling waters of the Danube by
the Hungarian fascists in 1944. I'm not saying Hungarians as a
people, obviously not. I have Hungarian friends and I
love Hungary. Budapest is my third favorite
city. But the damages done by
revisionist claims in Hungary were simply amazing.
Of all of the--after the
Germans, arguably even more than
Germans, they had the most to be
aggrieved about, because of losing so much of
their country awarded--because they had lost--to other places.
Now, the case of Austria, also.
If you go to Vienna,
it's such a wonderful, huge, musical place full of
baroque, baroque, baroque.
It's really a great city.
You think, "Oh,
this is an enormous city for such a little country."
What happens when the
Austrian-Hungarian Empire is dismembered, Austria becomes a
small and overwhelmingly German-speaking state.
There are, comparatively,
very few ethnic minorities living in what became Austria
after World War I. It's an imperial city.
It's an imperial city not
reduced in size, but reduced in importance.
So, Hungary has huge reasons to
be extraordinarily angry by the whole thing.
Yugoslavia.
Yugoslavia loses some land that
they wish that they would have gotten, but again,
in Yugoslavia you have this tremendous ethnic complexity.
In a way, the successor state
of Yugoslavia--maybe some of you have or will take Ivo Banac's
course. He's a great Balkan historian.
The ethnic complexity,
of course, is sort of a mini version of
the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, where Serbs were something like
forty percent of the population of Yugoslavia between the wars.
That would be really about the
percentage until the whole thing collapses in the early 1990s.
The Croats were the next
largest percentage, followed by Slovenes,
who were the wealthiest region and remained that until the end.
The standard of living in
Slovenia in the 1980s was about that of Italy,
where if you went far, far down to Kosovo,
where I've been, about where so much has been
going on, and which now has been
proclaimed independent, it was absolutely impoverished.
So, the ethnic complexity is,
in itself, going to be a factor for destabilization.
What about Poland?
Poland had not been independent
since 1795, since the Third Partition.
You had, as I've already
discussed in other contexts, you've got Polish
intellectuals. You've got political militants
in the 1830s and again in the 1860s who don't want to be part
of congress Russia. They don't want to be congress
Poland. They don't want to be part of
the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. They don't want to be part of
Prussia. They want and dream of the
independent Poland. They get their independence in
1918, immediately. But the complexity is enormous
there. You've already got these ethnic
minorities who are there. The Germans are there.
You've got huge numbers of
Ukrainians. In fact, in Eastern Poland the
cities like Zamosc, where Rosa Luxemburg was born,
which is a beautiful city, these are Polish cities,
but the vast majority of the rural population are Ukrainian.
They are Ukrainian.
This was a force of
"instability." They will be killing each other
off during World War II. The other minority is the Jews.
How many Jews were there in
Poland in 1918-1919? Poland was considered to be,
before Israel, Poland was really the cultural
heart of Judaism. There are three million Jews
living in Poland. In the east,
mostly Orthodox and Labavitcher.
By the way, just as an aside
but it's a telling aside. When I was in Zamosc we were
taken to a synagogue which had been turned into a place where
high school students and middle school students exhibited their
paintings. I asked the guide,
who was taking these academics around, and press editors,
and all this stuff. I said, "Look,
what was the population of Zamosc in 1939?"
He said, "The population
of Zamosc in 1939 was 39,000."
I said, "How many Jews
were living in Zamosc who had been coming to this synagogue in
1939?" He said, "12,000."
I said, "How many Jews
live in Zamosc now?" "Zero.
Zero."
The others, if they were lucky
enough not to have been killed in the death camps--and I just
reviewed a book for the Globe about the ghetto in
Lodz, -they were likely to get out.
Not to jump ahead,
but the number of Jews who survived out of three million
was about 300,000 Polish Jews who, I think,
came back to Poland after the war or who had managed somehow
to survive. The point of this is that these
ethnic tensions, particularly in a part of
Europe where anti-Semitism had been just replete.
It's a Thirty Years' War.
How can you not leap ahead into
World War II? Some of the massacres of Jews,
for example, during this horrible period
were done by Ukrainians in Ukraine, Lithuanians in
Lithuania. Many of you have seen just
horrific pictures. I can't remember.
We have this awful picture that
used to be in the first edition--I don't even know if
it's in the second edition--who were beaten to death.
A former colleague here whom I
don't really know, Jan Gross,
wrote an important book called Neighbors about how Jews
and Poles who lived in Poland in the 1920s and 1930s lived very
peacefully in one village, and how,
without apparent instigation from the Nazis who would have
been happy to kill them all and planned to kill them all,
just simply one day started killing them all.
They shot them all dead,
beat them to death, put them in barns and burned
the barns. These tensions,
which are aggressive nationalism.
I go to Poland all the time.
It's amazing.
There still is this
undercurrent of anti-Semitism. I hope, since this is being
filmed, I sometimes forget, they may get letters,
but it's really incredible. I was being interviewed on
Polish TV with this other guy and it was a pleasure to
denounce our president. Anyway, I don't speak Polish.
Another time we were all being
interviewed and they said, this guy said,
"What do you think of the Jew problem in Poland?"
I was about to kill him.
I shouldn't say that,
but take him out. Not really, but I was pretty
mad. Then this woman who was there,
who represents the Jewish community, such as it remains,
in Israel, she said, "No, no,
no. It's a question of
language." But when we went to one of the
Polish museums, which is the Museum of the
Warsaw Uprising--they don't have a Museum of the Ghetto
Uprising--we had to complain about how they depicted Jews in
the 1920s and 1930s. This is not to dump on
Polish--well, it is to dump on Polish
anti-Semitism, but not as Poland as a state.
These tensions are exacerbated
between the wars. If you've got these frenetic
right wing leaders who are aggressive nationalists in all
of these places, who are they denouncing?
They're denouncing what?
The Treaty of Versailles and
the other treaties in conjunction with it.
Who?
Romanians, if they are
Hungarians, etc., etc.
You pick the nationality,
and Jews most anywhere. It was there.
These folks are often--like
Horthy, they are preaching to the converted.
They're preaching to the
converted. It's an obvious, sad story.
In these revisionist powers,
all this stuff is going on. I know less about and don't
have much time to talk about Bulgaria, which lost,
but you have these same kind of tensions.
Turkey was just
completely--that's arguably the harshest treaty,
that with Turkey. They lose most of what's left,
really in the Middle East, of Turkey.
This gets transformed into
mandates under British and French control.
As a losing power,
they lose land to their bitter archenemy, Greece.
Then this enormous exchange of
populations begins, forced exchange of populations,
as followed by voluntary exchange between Turkey and
Greece. But the case of Turkey is
special because Attaturk, whom you can read about,
becomes the visionary president of a new Turkey,
of a secularized Turkey, and does not go the way,
for all occasional stridency, of this sort of Europe of
little dictators, the Eastern and Central Europe
of little dictators. Even as I said--where are we?
I kind of left my lecture
behind, but that's all right. I'm doing the themes that we
should be doing anyway. You can read about the rest.
Even in Czechoslovakia--one can
say, "There was a democracy that really truly
functioned." But there are enormous tensions
in Czechoslovakia as well. You've got your Czechs.
Your Czechs are the dominant
population in Czechoslovakia, but they are basically
Protestant, mostly Protestant. The Czech part or what would
become the Czech Republic is, as you already know,
largely Bohemia, or much of it is Bohemia.
There's Moravia also,
which is poorer, but it is very industrial.
It is much more prosperous.
Slovakia is almost entirely
Catholic and much more rural. It's basically a peasant
society in which the Catholic Church,
and particularly the very rightwing aspects of the
Catholic Church, as opposed to the case of
Poland, where the Catholic Church has
basically been a force for progress,
except for anti-Semitic currents in some parts of the
clergy. It's not surprising that in
World War II, one of the most horrendous
collaborators and people cheering on the guards of the
Jews as they're packing them onto the trains to be taken away
and killed was a priest. Again, I'm not dissing the
Catholic Church. I was raised at a Jesuit high
school. But there were tensions within
Czechoslovakia also. Even in the triumphant case,
triumphant until the German legions start marching in and
start killing Jews again there. Not again, because there really
hadn't been pogroms and stuff like that there.
Even there it's the complexity
of the whole thing that is simply amazing.
But the big point,
it's not big news, but the big point is that
ethnic contentions contested borders.
Diplomatic problems caused by
or inherent in having these new states--Czechoslovakia,
Poland, and Yugoslavia--will continue
to be very important in a place that had virtually no
parliamentary traditions. There were no democratic
traditions, even in a country like Poland, which had been
divided up between these three empires.
So, it's pretty darn hard to
suddenly say, "Now we are a
republic," and try to make that work.
It's very, very difficult.
Indeed, there's a mistake in
that book, or at least my Polish friends tell me it's a mistake.
I have described Pilsudski,
whose parents and who himself thought he was Lithuanian at the
beginning, but I already talked about that.
He's described as being
rightwing. He began his career as being
kind of leftwing. But he's the first to destroy
the parliamentary regime. He does that in 1926.
Pilsudski's a great hero in
Poland, still. I was taken on almost a forced
march to see his tomb. Why? Because he,
in the miracle of the Vistula River,
the Vistula is this monumentally important river in
Poland, that Trotsky's Red Army is
moving toward Warsaw and imagining that they're going to
move toward Berlin, and assist the revolution in
Germany. They're turned back in the
suburbs of Warsaw. The miracle of the Vistula by
Pilsudski. This gives him a kind of a
prestige and identification with the Polish state that is
obviously important. So, in 1926 he says,
"Look, this is impossible."
He puts an end to the
parliamentary regime, at least in reality.
It's in 1929 or 1930,
he arrests the progressive opposition.
He behaves like these other
dictators, except he's not putting people
against the wall, or having them beaten to death
by iron guards, and all these groups.
That's one of the first to go.
Compounding all of this is
again, to go back to what I said at
the beginning, East Central
Europe--incidentally, the Poles no longer want to see
themselves described as Eastern Europe.
Then it was East Central Europe.
They say, "You should go
through your book and take out all references to Eastern Europe
with regard to Poland. We are Central Europe."
That's how they see themselves.
Again, it's impossible to
overestimate the hatred and still the fear of Russia.
That's why they had this
ridiculous idea of having American bases in Poland,
which is just a crazy idea. Anyway, that's just my personal
opinion, in parentheses. Compounding all of this is that
you've got a peasant society. All of these are peasant
societies. The vast majority of the
population are peasants. I think it's about seventy-five
percent in Poland. In Poland, Warsaw is already
very big. Krakow is very, very big.
I keep talking about Poland,
because that's the one I know the best.
Hungary would be less because
Budapest is such a large city. Also, lots of the rural parts
of Hungary have been amputated. It's a peasant society.
What brings,
and this is the argument of my good friend,
Kim Snyder, what brings peasants into
politics in the 1920s is one thing,
besides hating the people not of the same ethnic group with
them, depending on the place,
and maybe being anti-Semitic because of the tradition of
rural money lenders and all of this who happen to be Jewish,
and Jewish storekeepers in the peasant perception of the world,
is the hope of land reform, of land reform.
Of maybe breaking up the big
estates, but at a minimum helping out poor rural people.
What happens is that in the
1920s and the 1930s is that poor rural people are being screwed,
to put it a bit crudely, by what?
By the agricultural depression.
The price of agricultural
products, which is the economy, is the economy,
plunges to practically nothing, and they can't get by.
One of the factors for the rise
of fascism in all of its guises--it's called fascism in
Italy; it's called National Socialism
in Germany; in France, a part of the
extreme right called it francisme,
in Spain--he's not really a fascist, Franco's a rightwing
authoritarian. He's still a murderer,
but he's a rightwing authoritarian,
but he's still a murderer, period--is the economic
situation. I'll make this clear when I
talk about Germany. That's what drives the middle
class, which is the first class to embrace Hitler.
It's the big crisis of the
great inflation in the early 1920s.
What helps drive peasants in
all these countries, the ones who become politicized
and finally say, "What did parliamentary
regime bring me and my family? Not much.
We still can't get by."
So, there we go.
"These little dictator
guys thundering away, they seem to be telling it like
it is." It's the Jews,
or it's the Bulgarians, or it's the Romanians,
or it's the Hungarians, or it's the Serbs,
or it's the Muslims. It's the Greeks.
It's the Turks.
You name it.
You fill in the national group.
It's a Europe of hatred.
It's a Europe of fear,
an absorbed, integrated fear.
I suppose that's kind of a
silly way of putting it, but not that bad after all.
When they look around,
what do they see? First, these countries are
frightened. These powers,
the new states ally. They say, "We're going to
have to lie together," and some of them join up with
France, and that won't do them much
good in 1939. But there is this model that
seems to be working in Germany. The French, what they do in
this inflation in the 1920s and 1930s, they were loaning money
everywhere before. They pulled in the reins.
They bring in the credit.
Nazi Germany,
particularly after it is Nazi Germany, after January 1933,
they provide this sort of model.
They say, "We'll help you
out. We'll help you out.
The other countries are not
buying your products. We'll buy even more of them.
We'll loan you money.
We'll organize this."
It seems to be an orderly
society. More about that.
It's not just a society of
coercion, without jumping ahead. Hitler seems to be providing
things to the German people that they want.
Work, the armaments factories
are preparing for war. Order, they're arresting petty
criminals. I'll talk more about that.
And racial purity.
They begin thinking,
"Hey, that's a good thing. It's the fault of the Jews and
the Poles. It's the fault of the
Poles." When they invade Poland,
I don't emphasize this as much as I should have in your book,
but they begin right away carrying out genocide.
They begin killing the Polish
intelligentsia right away, and they kill the Polish
generals right away. The Russians are doing the same
thing, actually, the Soviets further on.
It's a permanent source of
instability, this agrarian depression, this economic
depression. What it does,
it's a factor for further destabilization.
Talk about parliamentary
regimes comes pretty cheap, but they disappear one after
another. And in each and every case,
with the fascists and variants, in each and every case the
discourse is, "We, the real people of
this place, do not want these other people
here. We don't want them here."
Of course, not all of these
people carried it to the outcome of the Nazis,
or of the Lithuanians and the Ukrainians who just started
beating Jews to death along the way.
But it wasn't just the Western
states that had great instability.
The willingness,
indeed the eagerness of people like Horthy to collaborate with
Hitler openly, enthusiastically,
all the way through until the bitter end is,
in part, a result of--these rightwing
movements become mass movements in these places,
as they did in Germany. And as they did in eight
percent of the population of the Netherlands votes for a guy
called Musser, who's their little fascist guy,
or in Belgium, which is a town of shopkeepers.
They support their guy who just
died about ten years ago, Degrelle, who died on the Costa
Brava. They all seem to die on the
Costa Brava. They all basically get away
with it and end up going to Spain, and a lot of them
protected by the Franco regime. They all seem to croak on the
Costa Brava. Anyway, I got away from the
text but it doesn't matter. I think I made my points anyway.
The points are that Europe is
in a period of instability. That with the exception of the
big powers in the West between 1924 and 1929,
all these places are in depression and that the sweeping
away of parliamentary regimes in places that had virtually no
parliamentary traditions at all was not all that surprising.
It was compounded by the
outcome of World War I. Again, as I said before at
least twice, the demons of the twentieth century emerged from
the war. Nowhere more tellingly,
more appallingly, with greater costs,
with greater devastation, with humanity sinking to an
all-time low, than that in Nazi Germany.
That's what I'm going to talk
about next Wednesday. Monday, another cheerful
topic--Stalinism. We will go from there.
Have a wonderful weekend.
I'll see you.
