The Widening Gyre: The Great War and the Remaking of Europe
_We too had many pretty toys when young:
A law indifferent to blame or praise,
To bribe or threat;
habits that made old wrong
Melt down, as it were wax in the sun’s rays;
Public opinion ripening for so long
We thought it would outlive all future days.
O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,
And a great army but a showy thing;
What matter that no cannon had been turned
Into a ploughshare?
Parliament and king
Thought that unless a little powder burned
The trumpeters might burst with trumpeting
And yet it lack all glory; and perchance
The guardsmen’s drowsy chargers would not prance.
Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole._
W.B. Yeats, “1919”
Excerpt from Friedrich Engels’ letter to Friedrich Sorge, January 7, 1888
A world war of never before seen intensity, if the system of mutual outbidding in armament, carried to the extreme, finally bears its natural fruits… eight to ten million soldiers will slaughter each other and strip Europe bare as no swarm of locusts has ever done before. The devastations of the Thirty Years War condensed into three or four years and spread all over the continent: famine, epidemics, general barbarization of armies and masses, provoked by sheer desperation; utter chaos in our trade, industry and commerce, ending in general bankruptcy; collapse of the old states and their traditional wisdom in such a way that the crowns will roll in the gutter by the dozens and there will be nobody to pick them up; absolute impossibility to foresee how all this will end and who will be victors in that struggle; only one result was absolutely certain: general exhaustion and the creation of circumstances for the final victory of the working class.
Excerpt from Chilean Newspaper Column, December 7, 1918
People are killing each other, on all the seas and in all the lands; millions of soldiers are simply out to kill or be killed; it’s raining fire and steel; huge battle cruisers are sinking; cities are burning and fields are being destroyed; everywhere there is murder, immolation, plunder, violence; the only law calls for destruction and death; mankind has stepped aside for the lecherous and savage beast.
Excerpt from The Great Deluge: Europe 1914-1924 , Arthur Schlesinger Sr, Harvard University Press, 1953
…We used to speak of a war and the revolutionary period that followed, but now it has become customary for historians on our side of the pond to write not of two distinct periods, but of a single orgy of violence that engulfed and remade Europe over the course of a decade. The revolutionary period was a direct and likely unavoidable consequence of the fifty-five million European casualties of the Great War. Whatever the excuses and evasions that might be offered by British historiography, it was only the trial of death and hunger which the old states of Europe imposed upon their populations that enabled revolutionary socialism to become a decisive political force.
Excerpt from The End of the Belle Époque , Reginald Bassett, Cambridge University Press, 1952
….Regardless of one’s broader assessment of the Great War, it is utterly ahistorical to claim that the British Government might have reasonably foreseen the disintegration of the old European order from its vantage point in 1914, when it sought to defend its allies from an offensive war provoked by a reactionary German monarch. The suggestion by certain revisionist American scholars that the British government bears responsibility for the revolutionary violence that ensued is quite absurd when the American government was content under Bryan to sit idly behind the wide berth of the Atlantic Ocean doing as much as it could to ignore the affairs of Europe while moralistically haranguing those who did something to avert the collapse of civilizational order.
Excerpt from the Alternatehistory.com thread “Favorite AH Books?”
Allegra555 said:
One thing I haven’t been able to stop reading since I picked it up is The American Century: Wilson’s Presidency and the Triumph of Liberalism. I just got to the end of the “second” world war. I’m really not supposed to like this sort of libwank as an Italian, but the depiction of the incompetent, bumbling leader of Fascist Italy has really sold me on it. The German stuff is a whole lot darker, and even as a red I have a bit of a hard time imagining things going quite as far as they do. Of course all the purges, gulags, and famines in Russia also seem a bit wild, but I guess there’s some plausibility to the Soviets going down a really dark path without the Konigsberg Agreements?
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bigeric said:
I read the whole thing a couple years ago. I actually first thought it was written by a fellow Brit because of all the Germanophobia, but then we got turned into a client state of America. I actually find most of it pretty plausible aside from the Nazi lunatics and the idiot hat he put on France and Britain in the 30s.
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ladfromthenorth said:
I don’t find it plausible at all. Even with a Wilson Presidency, why would America go to war with Germany? I get actually doing more to intervene once revolutionary chaos breaks out, but there just wasn’t a pro-war consensus. And even if America did join up, they probably wouldn’t make too much of a difference in the war aside from some help with the submarine campaign. Do you really think legions of German and Irish Americans are going to be petitioning to fight alongside Britain? I’m a soclib myself but I feel like it’s pretty clear that it’s just another libwank. Especially when Britain just voluntarily gives up most of its colonies.
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Thalmannian said:
I found it a pretty depressing read, though I had a really hard time telling what the real ideological predilections of the author are. Liberals do too much stuff in the timeline that any reasonable person would read as evil: Britain supporting the comically malevolent German fascists through much of the 30s, Ebert and Scheidemann allying with the freekorps, etc. The timeline post-1950 does seem fairly unrealistic to me; it’s hard to imagine how Europe could have thirty years of broad-based growth as peripheral states of an economically exploitative american hyperpower.
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Helmuth von Moltke said:
To me it’s just an anti-german text. Time and again, Germany gets fucked over. I really think the nazis are supposed to be a caricature of the German emigres, but how is that even remotely fair?
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Hampton said:
Read actual German white intellectuals before you judge how “Fair” it is. Imperial Germany perpetrated plenty of ethnic cleansing in its colonies, and most of the white emigres would have been happy to do more of it.
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ladfromthenorth said:
I actually think the liberal states in the timeline mostly behave better than IOTL? There was almost no red scare, which means that reformist socialism can actually develop in liberal societies. Honestly, I know half the folks here are reds from Europe and South Asia, but does this not sound like a much more peaceful world on the whole?
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