Vienna was the center of this entity, not a part of "Austria". Stefan Zweig, being Jewish, also wasn't connected to the native Austrian population - just like most the persons mentioned in the article. Vienna was an unaligned entity, what New York became later.
The backlash against this amalgam fueled WW1 and WW2. It's still reverberating, as can be seen in various European issues today. Bolshevism and its reaction, fascism, geared up to eradicate the old Christian/Aristocratic structures across Europe. The Habsburg emperor wasn't just leading Austria/Hungary, but also the Holy Roman Empire (of German Nation). Christian god-given authority, verbatim.
One might argue that fascism is a natural consequence of unfettered rabid capitalism, no need for Bolsheviks at all.
It is arguably as a consequence of this, that these rulers and capitalists supported more or less enthusiastically fascism as a way to contain the masses. Without that (implicit) support, it's hard to say whether fascism would have been anything more than a bizarre cult.
They brought it off. In an era when most of Europe was ruled by weak, aging monarchs.[1] In 1917, most of Europe except for France and Portugal still had a monarch, most with real power.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_last_monarchs_in_E...
Tell me you are American without telling me you are American!
Or would you like to claim that a large part of Europe was "cured" of fascism after WWII by Stalin's USSR and its system, or that Nationalist China was cured of its (essentially) fascistic government by the liberating beauty of Maoism?
The socially democratic, largely western capitalist model of mostly free markets has indeed been fairly good at resisting the kind of extreme governments and despotic states that most of history endured. It's not perfect, and authoritarian regimes do develop capitalist economies, but compared to any alternative we've seen so far, it's a winner hands down.
Such an argument is far removed from any simplistic bullshit about deriding Americans for their cultural values (which happen to be essentially not bad despite the nose sniffing they get from so many people in so many countries with their own bloody, turbulent histories of despotic and revolutionary violence.) For example, given most of Europe's history well into the 20th century, it's laughable to see Europeans in particular feeling superior to Americans.
Bolshevism and Fascism were both about hyper centralized governance. Essentially they were an extension of European monarchy.
Free markets (“unfettered rabid capitalism”) is about decentralization of power on to individuals (market participants). It’s the opposite of centralized governance, it’s the lack of governance.
Facists like Hitler and Mussolini were not the outcome of “unfettered capitalism.” If they were, both would have come to power by being wealthy industrialists. Neither did, and the fascist movement was only supported by certain industrialists at the time in the pragmatic sense (turns out if the fascist guy in power likes you, he’ll let you keep selling your stuff).
As for your second point: One could indeed argue in turn that they were. In both countries WW2 was preceeded by extremely harsh economic conditions for most of the population, while industrialists prospered, leading to extremist voting shares previously unheard of. Big Industry in turn directly sponsored the NSDAP in many ways, big and small, to get them into power. Hitler especially preached terror to the masses and met with Krupp, Bormann et al. in the backrooms to talk policy. So the previous comment had a point, yours not so much I am afraid. one particular item of interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler_Fund_of_German_Tr...
That guy, a former Marxist, who invented fascism might be a more credible source than other opinions.
Fascism is as revolutionary as communism, focused on the collective vs. the individual. The only real difference is that fascism keeps capitalism intact.
Both are at odds with the aristocracy and liberal democracy.
I suspect I am missing either an in-joke or a revision to geopolitical terminology.
As for Rome, it was never a Nation in the modern sense. It started as a city state and became an empire.
My understanding is that nation states (where the rule and the border were defined nationality of the population) were born as a reaction against empire. Starting with the French Revolution, where the desire for the French to be ruled by French in France was new concept.
The original comment remarked on nation-states, and that they have existed in the past. They are not new as far as I am aware.
I'm only about 1/3 in but as far as I can tell Zweig only claimed Vienna to be this "enlightened" place. He's still writing quite a lot of critique of the rest of Austria. He's also fully aware of how fragile that Viennese subculture is.
Also: we're not on the cusp of WW3.
Kinda reminds of EU right now...
To give you one idea: soldiers could never be out of uniform. Officers could strike soldier at any time and routinely did. Soldiers were paid roughly 50 kopeks a month while officers go 50-1000 rubles (100k = 1r).
Europe was also 60 years into the emergence of Communism at this point because there was very little upward mobility from general populace to the higher classes. Sounds more like author bias and wishful thinking but I will add this book to my list to see if I am wrong.
But it was the same process of purging the same old system, purging of serfdom and of people being property
However where feudal land ownership is entrenched revolution may be necessary.
Yeah, the old system was purged alright, but calling it a liberation is disrespectful to the lives of millions of common Soviet people driven to hungry death, being forcefully moved around the country, killed in internal squabbles or purges or otherwise "collectivised".
And it all happened despite the fact they hadn't exactly been property for more than 50 years by the time tsarism was overthrown.
Tsatism was indisputably a tyrannical system, and many peasants were still not free until they paid for their freedom
‘Most former serfs had to pay a land redemption fee (redemption payments were not abolished until 1907’
Russia is not on the brink of three revolutions and a civil war in the span of a year. It isn’t a good place but it is very different than how it was 100 years ago.
What I am saying is that 2024 Russia is very different from 1917 Russia:
1917: weak government, 2024: strong government
1917: lots of protests, 2024: no protests
1917: class system (if you are born a peasant, you remain a peasant), 2024: you can sell hotdogs then become a billionaire, then have a mercenary force, then be shot out of the sky
1917: widespread income inequality, 2024: billionaires but a Lieutenant doesn’t make 1000x what a soldier in his command does.
1917: mercenary groups are a normal part of life, 2024: they are officially outlawed and unofficially there are only a few.
There are lots of other differences. Again, this isn’t to say that Russia is good or doing good things. They aren’t. But you can’t say nothing changed. That is simply ignoring history. There are similarities in that Russia is still a shitty place to live.
If you want a perspective, check out Antony Beever’s Russia for a history of the 1918 revolution.
How could you know that? Are you a time traveller? It is unlikely in any specific year, but over 100 years a 1% chance is likely to happen and the risks seem elevated right now. There isn't anything in particular stopping WW3 and there are lots of ways it could happen (open war with Russia, China or Iran spring to mind, civil war in the US spiralling globally is thinkable, the EU is re-arming and something absurd might happen there for a 3rd time). The US doesn't have the economic sway it used to either, it appears unable to just dictate military terms to its competitors right now which has been a major factor for the last 70 years.
Even a good argument isn't comforting. There were really good arguments why WW1 and WW2 wouldn't break out. In the case of WW2 for example, it was pretty foreseeable what could happen - devastation of Europe, probable defeat of the Germans by a large coalition and a roughly century-long occupation. No real upside for them. Happened anyway. And famously before WWI there was that book that correctly argued that the economic interconnections between European powers was so great that war could only bring economic ruin - which also happened to be right in hindsight, WWI set up some of the most catastrophic economic conditions ever seen and was also the death knell of Europe's long term economic dominance.
>> How could you know that?
We're rather close. All it would take is a major blowup in the Ukraine war. The war has stepped up a notch in the last two days. Ukraine has been attacking Moscow with drones.[1] What if they stop hitting apartment buildings and level the Kremlin? Or Russia steps up attacks on Latvia, a member of NATO.[2]
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/10/europe/ukraine-drone-strikes-...
[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russian-drone-crashes-i...
That's not new, see this from a year ago:
[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/us-uk-discuss-lifting-m...
[1] EDIT - Fun fact for the day, the shockwave from Tsar Bomba circled the globe thrice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba#Test_results
The US has launched invasions of multiple countries with less of a pretext than even the Russians and nobody pretended that bombing Washington was clever. Or even particularly justified.
Save for Osama Bin Laden who not only "bombed" the Pentagon in Washington he also took out the twin towers in NYC and tried for other targets.
Further back the Canadians firebombed multiple targets in Washington, including the Whitehouse, in retaliation for similar US actions in Canadian territory.
And it isn't even obvious how linked the war was to Bin Laden or Al Qaeda, when he was eventually killed it wasn't in Afghanistan and it didn't take an invasion of Pakistan to achieve. The Taliban controlling Afghanistan obviously wasn't a problem because they still do. In hindsight the whole thing looks like a futile dick waving exercise to keep the military industrial complex profitable.
Provoking the Russians in a similar way is not clever.
OBL was a self-propelled force. There's no indication that the US supported him, or even knew about him until 1996. To suggest that the US operation in Afghanistan up through 1989 (make of it what you will) "led to 9/11" seems quite specious indeed.
The guy listed many grievances in his justification for the 9/11 attacks, but (AFAIK) the prior US support for the Muj (i.e. the very people he was fighting with), or any aspect of it doesn't seem to have been one of them. Rather, it was all that stuff about the Holy Sites, US presence in the gulf (on behalf of regimes he didn't like), and last but not least the fact of Clinton going after him directly (and trying to kill him in fact) which seem to have lit his flame.
(And then the idea of 9/11 "leading to" the Afghanistan invasion is a wholy different, and even more convoluted thread -- but which also seems to have been sufficiently addressed by others already).
All you can say is "well this time it's over the line and they'll start using nukes" but that argument applies just as well to literally every action.
The prevailing wisdom at the time was to remove the Taliban from power and to establish a deradicalized, democratic Afghanistan that would hopefully cooperate with the west in fighting terrorism as well as removing the conditions that would cause jihadist movements to flourish. The template for this being the destruction of Axis powers during WWII and their subsequent rebirth as deradicized, prosperous, militarily benign nations.
It took a decade long man hunt to locate Bin Laden which was unanticipated. When he was found in Pakistan he was in hiding, not being intentionally harbored by the government as in Afghanistan.
In hindsight it was probably unrealistic to expect a rebuilt stable Afghanistan free of the Taliban. Perhaps a larger "surge" level of troops for a longer period of time and greater focus on Afghanistan rather than invading Iraq would have achieved a different outcome. Let's not forget that the US was not being entirely rational at the time. The government and the public wanted revenge in a big way.
By all indications, he was being effectively harbored by the Pakistani ISI.
(There's also Hersh's theory that it was a "walk-in" from Pakistani military intelligence who actually tipped them off to, or at least provided strong corroboration as to the existence of Bin Laden's compound -- rather than the CIA sleuthing this out on its own from tracking various couriers. I never got caught up on how that particular theory panned out, as I've never been too obsessed with Bin Laden or the circumstances surrounding his extrajudicial execution anyway).
Let's not forget that the US was not being entirely rational at the time. The government and the public wanted revenge in a big way.
Indeed. My sense is that it wasn't so much a desire for revenge (thought there was certainly a large element of that). But rather fear, and a desire to send a "message". And so bombing the shit out of some dirt-poor country (whose population had generally no awareness of, let alone complicity in any of this) seemed to be the perfect way to do that.
Which almost sounds reasonable until compared to when the US went after Bin Laden in Pakistan they didn't bother asking. I'm no UN level diplomat, but to me maybe 2 months negotiating before launching an invasion would make sense. Maybe even 12 months. A little bit of patience before setting off on a path lined with mountains of corpses.
That really showcases how flimsy the US justification was; the fact that the Afghan government didn't completely overturn their own sovereign system in under 30 days is held up in some sort of weird way as a provocation. And I don't even exactly object to the outrageous hypocrisy on what justifies a US invasion vs a Russian one, I just think that what is happening in Russia is risky, has no upside for the West and a lot of upside for China. I'd like someone to be able to put out a cold hard case for how destabilising large nuclear powers is supposed to lead to a better world. It seems like a hard case to make.
> In hindsight it was probably unrealistic...
Yeah. Maybe in hindsight maybe they didn't think it through. Everyone move on. Broken eggs required for omelettes except we burned the omelette because it turns out we didn't know how to cook. Oops.
You know what? Maybe we should be more thoughtful before invading people. It'd give the West a lot more intellectual credibility when they complain about other armies launching invasions. I have difficulty even pretending to respect the idea that Russia is a bad actor here given the US record we're all expected to look past. The Europe is not somehow more important than the Middle East.
We need an actual case for why we are supporting what is going on in Ukraine. The moral case that people try to hide behind is farcical, we've seen exactly how the US military handles this sort of thing over the last 25 years. There is no material upside for us in this war, and lots of real and potential downsides.
The same people who didn't think that through now think destabilising Russia is a going to work out great. What does that tell us.
The case for me is that I live a few hundred kilometers from Russian border. If Ukraine falls, I'll be next and scenes like this will be happening on my street to people I know: https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1820831971573973385 (as they happened in the past to people I knew).
> The same people who didn't think that through now think destabilising Russia is a going to work out great.
Russia is becoming unstable because Putin launched an unwinnable war, destroyed foreign trade relations, hollowed out civilian economy and sent god knows how many to death while trying his best to keep the true scale hidden. Rest of the world is not "destabilising Russia", but doing what they can to hold the shithouse together while trying to end the war. It is not their fault that Putin is not taking any exit ramps offered to him and instead keeps doubling down on a obvious mistake.
Deserves a mention that overblown concerns about stability are nothing new. As the USSR was falling apart, George Bush Sr made a speech in Kyiv warning Eastern European independence movements about rocking the boat too much. NY Times dubbed it the Chicken Kyiv speech. The fears about nuclear war or weapons falling into terrorists' hands turned out unfounded. Instead, the lasting effect was that 100 million more people in Europe are free now than 35 years ago.
> I have difficulty even pretending to respect the idea that Russia is a bad actor here given the US record we're all expected to look past.
Hundreds of thousands of people are dead, millions of lives ruined, entire cities flattened, occupied areas littered with mass graves, ground contaminated with millions of mines that will take centuries to remove. And yet you can't even entertain the idea that the perpertrator is a "bad actor"? That shows a disturbing lack of any moral sense. Looting, torture, rape, murder and other crimes are disgusting and reprehensible and deserve a punishment, and if you insist on ranking countries, then Russia has committed these acts at scale uncomparable to the US.
They're controlled by Putin. There is a pretty solid argument that his inner circle is a mafia with nuclear weapons. What ended up happening is only a few shades improved on terrorists; it isn't particularly encouraging to have dictators with weapons that powerful.
> Hundreds of thousands of people are dead, millions of lives ruined, entire cities flattened, occupied areas littered with mass graves...
If anyone had responded to the US invasions by escalating them to proxy wars the US would have the same blood on their hands. That is in fact one of my main points here - the decision to support the Ukrainians and try to bleed the Russians out was when most of the damage was committed to. The precedent here is the UN sends thoughts & prayers, the Ukraine government gets blatted and we all move on a la the Afghan or Iraq invasions. Ugly affairs, morally devastating but not quite the level of destruction that the US engineered in Ukraine.
But not only did the west decided this was a good one to escalate from disaster to bloodbath, but we seem to be pushing the limit to find out if we can make the Russians really angry. There is almost no way that is a good idea, there isn't a limit to how far this can escalate.
Nothing changed then. The USSR was a reckless totalitarian dictatorship too, with the major difference being that the current version has managed to enslave 100 million less people than the previous iteration. Hopefully the next version will be even smaller.
> That is in fact one of my main points here - the decision to support the Ukrainians and try to bleed the Russians out was when most of the damage was committed to. The precedent here is the UN sends thoughts & prayers, the Ukraine government gets blatted and we all move on a la the Afghan or Iraq invasions.
You skipped over the destruction of Ukrainian statehood, eradication of Ukrainian language and culture, physical extermination of entire classes of people (at least several million in total) and a totalitarian dictatorship for the rest, followed by further invasions westwards into Poland, using Ukrainians as cannon fodder like Russians have already decimated the male population of occupied territories by forcing them against Ukrainian Armed Forces.
For Ukraine, the alternative to war is another genocide carried out by Russians. Loss of people and loss of culture. Afghanistan and Iraq are nothing comparable.
> Ugly affairs, morally devastating but not quite the level of destruction that the US engineered in Ukraine.
No more has the US "engineered destruction in Ukraine" than it did when it supported Britain against invaders. Germans intended to use British merchant fleet to deport all European Jews to Madagascar, but they had to abandon the plan after failing to invade Britain. For lack of better options, Jews were burned in ovens instead. If you are inclined to blame anyone but the perpertrators, then this is your opportunity to pin the Holocaust on the Americans, because their aid was vital to British victory.
Russia chose to destabilize itself. The surrounding countries are simply ducking for cover, and doing what they have to do to survive.
Actually they said they would consider the evidence of a request. Bush invaded anyway.
In this he succeeded without a doubt. (NB. I'm absolutely not endorsing his actions).
He delibrately provoked the US and he was extremely clever about it.
> He wasn't even an official representative of Aghanistan ... Pakistan ..
All immaterial from an OG Al Qaeda PoV - they were intent on starting a mass war between the Arab world and the West based on a dislike of the Saudi Royal Family, their corruption of "true" Arab values (for some intepretation of "true arab values"), the US support of the Saudi's, the US actions in Islamic countries and their support and or acceptance of atrocities committed against Muslims.
Very early on there was a teetering point when the US could have capitalised on a global wave of sympathy that included much of the Islamic world.
Then was the time to form a small group with international partners to target and capture the small Al Qaeda and leverage support from Muslims outraged at OBL's actions.
That opportunity was squandered badly with the Bush versioned War on Terror and sideshow invasion of Iraq, the search for non existent WMD's and the Coalition of the Reluctant Few.
The US went down an avoidable 20 year rabbit hole and squandered reputation and relations.
The British Army burned the White House and a few other buildings in Washington, in retaliation, as they said, for the burning of buildings in York (Toronto).
Regular old throwable fire bombs | lanterns | incendiary devices | oil filled clay pots with a wick, etc. work just fine.
It's all a bunch of bluffing and empty threats.
Nuclear weapons only deter the Western powers from simply marching on Moscow to make it stop the war in Ukraine. It is otherwise basically useless because precisely it is the nuclear option.
Ukraine is the defender in this conflict. Every reasonable action it takes to encourage a Russian withdrawal is, by definition, defensive.
The US is publicly signalling that this might not be going far enough to pressure the Russian homeland.
The intent is to put pressure on the regime, not the "homeland".
This attitude floors me. I can't figure out if people legitimately believe that we can just ignore the nuclear war risk [...] or if the plan is to purposefully explore for a limit where Russia snaps.
There shouldn't be any mystery to this. The intent is to help the current regime in Moscow come to the only rational decision available to it, which to stop the war it should have never started in the first place. There is no intent to make it (and certainly not Russia as a country) "snap". That's just your projection.
On the contrary, the intent it is to help the regime come to its senses. Like the US was finally forced to do in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
And in parallel, to save Ukrainian lives, especially civilian lives -- which are being lost daily due to attacks launched from within Russian territory
The decisive US defeats in the aforementioned countries, and the equally compelling Russian/Soviet defeat in Afghanistan provide hopeful models.
> Ukraine is the defender in this conflict. Every reasonable action it takes to encourage a Russian withdrawal is, by definition, defensive.
War is peace etc etc.
I'd like to point out that an attack is the opposite of defense and the scale of the attack does not make it not so. Your argument does not negate the GP statement which btw is true.
If Russia wants to stop these attacks, it can do so at any point. Their government simply has to stop their attacks on Ukraine and retract its troops. Surely, even to a madman like Putin, this humiliation would be preferable to global nuclear armageddon.
I can think of numerous reasons why it wouldn't be preferable, even to a non-madman.
Note that subjective assessment of the situation is sufficient. Putin is dependent on nobody to come to such a conclusion, especially not the west, and why should he care anyway? Western war escalation enthusiasts apparently are willing to take the risk anyway or do not seem to understand this.
It's funny how 'realist' viewpoints, when applied equally from both sides, lead to inevitable nuclear annihilation.
So what you're saying is, if a country has nuclear weapons they can do whatever they want to you and you'll just take it in the ass, is that it?
Im glad that a lot of people choose to stand up and fight.
While surrendering in the first week is an uncomfortable option, I think they'd have been better off exploring that as an option even before nuclear weapons come into the picture. Russia in 2024 is bad but not the USSR. Ukraine'd be putting a brave face on to describe what just happened to them as mere buggery and they don't appear to have achieved much. There is a serious argument that their choice to fight was a mistake.
What Ukrainians choose to do about their situation is up to them. If you think you have constructive advice to offer them -- as someone not facing that situation, yourself -- you're welcome to speak with them directly and see what this effort brings you.
Obviously it was bad advice.
"Victoria Nuland on Russia-NATO relations, peace negotiations with Ukraine, and the U.S. elections"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiS2dg_atfc&t=3192s&ab_chann...
Without articulating what this advice supposedly was, or why it was bad (if it even was).
More to the point: if you think anyone has time to fish through 72 minutes of some interview about anything political on a summer weekend to sift out whatever insinuation it is that you're attempting to posit here -- then your worldview is quite dark and austere, indeed.
In retrospect, the attempt to win the war instead of negotiating was a catastrophic mistake that many people paid for and are paying with their lives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_negotiations_in_the_Russ...
They can decide for themselves whether to bend over and let Putin have his merry way with them is such a fine idea as you seem to think is, or not
Boris didn't make them do anything. That's just a myth, which presumes they are hapless fools with no agency.
Russian propaganda is always "Russia is the victim".
No, Russia made themselves their event.
Suggested reading: "The Fallacy of Unambiguous Warning", from the current issue of Parameters, the U.S. Army War College quarterly. This is a study of what was known and not known just before some past wars started. The point made is that by the time enough people are convinced that there is an unambiguous warning of impending war, it's usually too late.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-says-west-will-be...
[2] https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...
A conventional conflict between Russia and NATO would be short and would end with a Russian defeat. That is clear from the war in Ukraine. Russia would very quickly lose all the territory it has seized in Ukraine and NATO would press no further.
Nuclear conflict? Everyone loses.
China has no incentive to disrupt the status quo, they have already invaded Taiwan culturely and economically. It's only the western simpletons brainwashed by the military industrial complex who think that people somehow want war or that "those Asians" want war (I guess because we are stupid?)
But maybe you would consider them simpletons as well or is that too transparent and close to the colonialism you supposedly despise?
If only.
> over 100 years a 1% chance is likely to happen
This is extrapolated from two events that occurred 25 years apart?
> the EU is re-arming ...
First, the EU has practically brought peace in Western Europe. And it was disarming, and now sees itself forced to get back to previous levels. While rearming is technically correct, it's a sign of something outside the EU, not the EU being on the war path.
> The US ... appears unable to just dictate military terms to its competitors
I don't see how what that has to do with it. Are you suggesting WW3 didn't break out earlier because of the Cold War?
> Even a good argument isn't comforting.
True, but it doesn't somehow make the opposite true.
> There were really good arguments why WW1 and WW2 wouldn't break out.
And there were many people all over Europe steering towards WW1, and WW2 was famously predicted at the signing of the peace treaty.
But a world war requires more than two local, unrelated conflicts, one of which is not even a real war. It requires large groups of combatants, and one group should have some strategic goal it wants to pursue at all costs. But only Russia wants that, and its goal isn't that great, and it stands alone. So I don't see how it could explode into the next world war.
Anyway, let's hope for the best.
We're on the cusp in the sense that the World War is not yet and might never be recognized (because one or the other side might fall apart without a fight); OTOH, we're not "on the cusp" in that, if the conditions which would cause it to be recognized occur, we're past the point that will likely be looked at as the start date.
The Russo-Ukrainian War, and the war between various Iranian proxies and Israel, are all part of the same global conflict between an axis centered around Russia and Iran and a broader one in the West
and it was far more harrowing and precarious - at least for the continuity of the US - back then
[1] https://www.energy.gov/nnsa/transparency-us-nuclear-weapons-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_nuclear_weapons_sto...
The experience in the Cuban Missile crisis suggests that the number deployed on submarines is probably more of a concern when it comes to miscalculation than the total. And for deliberate attacks the militaries have probably calculated that the number currently deployed is reasonable to wipe out a major power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_submarine_B-59#Nuclear_...
(or of course Dr Strangelove)
yeah and we all know that there would be no more war after ww1.
proxy conflicts between big powers are very dangerous.
> "While not exactly a melting pot, Vienna was its own kind of cultural soup, attracting the ambitious from across the empire," says Dardis McNamee, editor-in-chief of the Vienna Review, Austria's only English-language monthly, who has lived in the city for 17 years. Less than half of the city's two million residents were native born and about a quarter came from Bohemia (now the western Czech Republic) and Moravia (now the eastern Czech Republic), so that Czech was spoken alongside German in many settings.
It’s surprisingly very similar to the attitudes in parents of the 1990’s America and the upbringing many of us who grew up in the 1990’s….
Was interesting. Especially the way it all shattered after world war 1.
Hell the author fled Europe to escape the Nazis. I read in a history book that that author committed suicide in despair because he thought the Nazis would win.
His memoirs of his life are filled with sadness and melancholy. The enormous optimism that his parents had for him in his upbringing during the 1890’s. When his parents and many of their generation believed the march of science would lead to a new century of reason and peace and progress….and then in his lifetime the world descended into a level of brutality and violence and horror that would have been unimaginable in centuries prior…
Poignant stuff
[citation needed] heavily so.
https://web.archive.org/web/20101014145959/http://www.time.c...
> Friends in Brazil said he left a suicide note explaining that he was old, a man without a country, too weary to begin a new life.
James Lindsay has spent a lot of time talking about the Gnostic and Hermetic currents running through these disastrous revolts against liberal ideas that occurred throughout the 20th century.[1] It seems that the ancient Gnostic and Hermetic cult ideologies and their derivatives, imported into the modern world by Marx, Hegel and Rousseau are exploiters of many unfixed security vulnerabilities in the human psyche, especially in large groups, that are used to regularly create all sorts of mayhem, and pointless civilizational self-destruction by promising easy societal transformation in any way imaginable and a forthcoming great vague unspecified utopia where the details of how it actually would work are considered unimportant.
Is this the Popperian "Plato was an enemy of open society"?
Hermeticism, specifically the emerald tablet, says that we can make things become believable by just willing them with our minds. Those who believe the things should be treated preferentially, and those who don't should be persecuted because they stand in the way of the implementation of those things. This applies to Marx's beliefs in the labor theory of value among other totally non-empirically backed beliefs being treated as ideological indisputable truth.
> Those who believe the things should be treated preferentially, and those who don't should be persecuted because they stand in the way of the implementation of those things.
The Gnostics and followers of Hermes were one of the most hounded and persecuted groups throughout history. The Cathars were wiped out, and Giordano Bruno, an early proponent of the Copernican model of the solar system was burnt at the stake by the inquisition. It seems to be the other way around.
> Hermeticism, specifically the emerald tablet, says that we can make things become believable by just willing them with our minds.
I don't think this is correct, but I can't prove a negative.
And for good reason, as we later found out in the 20th century.
Wikipedia: Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word "genocide" in the 20th century,[110] referred to the Albigensian Crusade as "one of the most conclusive cases of genocide in religious history".[111]
Whether the truth is found in Sophia or quintessence, I think transcendent claims are the real problem. This applies to both the orthodox traditions in the west as well as the esoteric traditions.
> Capitalism
Interestingly enough, another Iranian gnostic school derivative of Zoroastrianism - that of Mazdak [2] - shared everything, including "women".
In general, one should be careful to be quite specific as to what metaphysical school of thought they are referencing when using the currently ambiguous term "Gnosticism". ~
Mani's metaphysical vision is rather wild. I was just reading up on it the other day - apparently he even resorted to diagrams to make things clear.
The fascists have the same gnostic and hermetic beliefs as the communists. For example, the Nazi belief in the control of the world by the inferior and evil races, representing the demiurge and all that garbage.
Liberalism, on the other hand, is based on the idea that there are no special people. No enlightened people with the true knowledge of the world, or special truths that would become true if only everyone started believing them.
Yes but in classical liberal states, when the minority interests subvert established norms, it very rarely leads down a path of mass bloodshed and wanton destruction. In heavily authoritarian communist revolutions, one mistake of letting the "more extreme" (because even the less extreme figures in these kinds of regimes tend to also be fanatics) reach power gives you a regime like Mao's or Stalin's. Even in less extreme examples, few people would call a government like Castro's preferable, or claim that if Trotsky had come to power, then repression and mass shooting would have ended in the USSR.
Beyond just ideology, the type of state institutions and their fundamental tendencies of respect for the rule of law (or a lack of this respect) are important factors in deciding how far the unscrupulous can go even if they do come to power.
This is why in a country like the U.S. with very stable liberal traditions and strong state institutions built with these traditions in mind (if imperfectly), having someone like a Nixon or Trump get into power gives results that are nowhere near as bad as they are when a Hitler, Castro, Mao or Lenin comes to power in a country with much weaker bulwarks of liberal history.
The reason we don't talk like that is because it turned out to encourage wholesale murder. It's not that you're "wrong", it's that you're not singling out the responsible individuals when you could just do that. It comes across as intentionally painting with too broad a brush.
France is not experiencing a genocide FFS
"We don't talk like that" because being that absurdly catastrophizing, that disingenuous about a situation, is called being a liar.
Imagine calling Al Capone's violence a genocide.
I doubt that people in conquered territories felt the same way about the Empire.
Much more so than under the occupation of the Soviets...
The Austrian part (Cisleithania) was okayish place to live, relatively industrially developed (less than Prussia or England), but it had a massive problem with political dysfunction. The Babel of nations was unable to agree on pretty basic things, resulting in paralysis of local and central parliaments and frequent governmental crises. There also was visible, very nasty anti-Semitic resentment. Hitler learnt to hate the Jews from certain Georg Schönerer [0], a rabid Austrian Jew-hater who came up with the idea of a "Final Solution".
The Hungarian part was outright backward and oppressive towards non-Hungarians, who constituted at least half of its population.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Ritter_von_Sch%C3%B6nere...
Also you claimed Schönerer is the origin of the Final Solution but the Wikipedia page doesn't say that, so where did that come from?
I honestly wonder if Wikipedia should cite books. It's too hard to check those references so people don't and that lets un-evidenced claims get treated as "reliably sourced". Putting something in a book doesn't magically make it more reliable than putting something in a blog, yet Wikipedia's policy strongly assumes that it does.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_von_Sch%C3%B6nerer
I was probably wrong about the Final Solution, though. It was first used during Sch\onerer's youth, but not attributed to him:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endl%C3%B6sung_der_Judenfrage#...
The world isn't pre-WW1. Russia stands alone in its conflict with Ukraine, and Palestine's neighbors don't give a shit. The only thing that could turn it into a wide scale war, is use of nuclear weapons. It would be a madman's hubris, not geopolitical games of a fading elite that drives the process.
I wouldn't say that, they just can't do anything about it or whatever they do is emotionally triggered retaliation without thought or strategy such as firing rockets into Israel of which very few explode on land or nor cause any real casualties to Israel.
Had Egypt been ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood they'd likely retaliate against Israel. Then there's Turkey, a serious regional power, they seem to do give some shit, they just can't do much about it.
I don't know if Turkey is really that vested in the topic. They had good relations with Israel, and they really don't want to ally with Iran. It seems more of another PR stunt for internal indignation by Erdogan.
The Egyptians people treat their refugees quite badly. The Muslim Brotherhood also doesn't care about Palestine and the Palestinians, it cares about Hamas and Israel. If they ran the country, they could have used it as a pretext for military action, but how likely would they have been to succeed? And it still wouldn't escalate the conflict to extra-regional levels, unless Israel, in a fit of Biblical retaliation, would then invade Egypt as well.
Though unlikely, Trump could (conceivably) win, ditch Ukraine exactly as promised (not in 24 hours but over time), which would of course deeply embolden Putin (and/or lead to a nuclear escalation in itself, particularly if Ukraine does something really desperate). Putin could die (or be assassinated) and easily be replaced with someone way more ideological and/or simply stupid.
Farther afield: though it would irrational in every respect -- China could make its move on Taiwan. And as always, in the Middle East, anything can happen (especially if the current government in Israel stays in power and continues to radicalize and throw oil on the fire).
Any of these could escalate on its own. But it is the prospect of the these three theatres deteriorating rapidly at once that has people up at night. Not so much on WWI or WWII lines, but a different kind of global conflagration altogether.
I'm not a doomer on the prospect, but it's by no means out of the question. These are indeed very unsafe times.
(As an aside, and in line with what the other commenter, it's just not true to say that Palestine's neighbors "don't give a shit". Their interest may not be altruistic, but to many of them the situation there is deeply significant, for a host of geopolitical, ideological, and religious reasons).
True. That would turn the world into chaos pretty quickly.
> it's just not true to say that Palestine's neighbors "don't give a shit".
I agree it was short on nuance, but there's little evidence that they ever cared. I mean: Egypt has kept the border closed, and treats the Palestinian refugees badly.
At present the border is closed because Israel captured it back in May.
As to the rest -- one could delve further into this, but it would start to drift from the subject of the original thread. For the time being would seem best to stick with less controversial topics, like Hitler and Stalin.
With regard to Vienna, Fröhliche Apokalypse(The happy apocalypse) is probably much more accurate than Zweig's cosmopolitan dreams.
I've found Mann to be absolutely insufferable for the exact same reason(although both are very good writers when one only considers literary skills and ignores the actual themes).
Make of that what you will.
I see some similarities between Austria-Hungary and Poland-Lithuania. I think their Catholicism is what permitted the tolerance you saw, because it was tolerance of the authentic sort, not the liberal ersatz: they were both Catholic confessional states that tolerated a variety of religious belief pragmatically, but the parameters were openly and decidedly Catholic. And because Catholicism acknowledges that forced conversion is not only impossible, but immoral, as well as counter to the common good, when accommodation of other religions occurs, it occurs genuinely and according to a clear, realistic, and substantive position.
Liberalism, OTOH, simply pretends to be an impossibly big "neutral" tent, but it practices its jihad in secret. No religion is allowed to dominate or function as the organizing principle of the realm, it claims. But liberalism is itself a worldview rooted in a distinctive anthropology, and it is the worldview that reigns. The result is that:
1) Liberal doctrines become these organizing principles, which are sold as "neutral" and therefore beyond discussion and disagreement, something that leads to their imposition and the undermining of other worldviews. A supposed pragmatic doctrine forces other worldviews into the private sphere, and itself is elevated into an ideology that denies it is one. In a Catholic confessional state, no one is pretending to be "neutral", and so someone of another worldview can accept the Catholic terms of the polity on pragmatic grounds without ever being duped or coerced into thinking these are anything but Catholic terms. They are asserted as true, yes, but toleration is identical to acknowledging and accepting the existence of theoretical disagreement, even if there are pragmatic limits.
2) The public sphere becomes anemic and restricted to "pragmatic" things like economics, which vulgarizes the culture, elevating consumption into the religion of consumerism. This vulgarization not only produces a vulgar public culture for the polity, but it necessarily spreads into the private sphere and suffocates the dynamism, richness, and higher ends offered by other, more substantive worldviews, hence negating the very tolerance that it purported to have. The net effect is decadence.
In correct. This is more recent Neoliberalism, which is an attempt to remove public democratic participation from as many walks of life as possible and to claim that’s ‘freedom’. They play tricks on you, Freedom from democracy is freedom from government intervention, leave it to the capital class / aristocracy to make all these decisions.