The Twentieth Century West

By Geoffrey Gibson

Five revolutions made the West in the modern world. We will look at the completion of the industrial revolution and the current onset of the technological revolution (which is destroying minds, manners, and jobs); the horror of peoples’ wars and nuclear weapons; a world depression and the threat of a recurrence of economic collapse; the popular sterility of modernism in the arts apart from jazz; the claimed death of God, the complete absence of any alternative, and the humiliation of a world church; the rise of professional sport as a business and as the new opium of the masses; the appalling moral collapse of three entirely ‘civilized’ nations (Italy, Germany, and Spain); the depravity of three of the most evil people in history (Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler – Mao is outside our field); the way that Einstein and computers can leave us feeling powerless in a world that we now have to take on trust; wins and losses on racism; the challenges of what will be the dominant religion, Islam, the faith of the East, and what will be the strongest economic power, China; the mediocrity and possible seizing up of democracy; the extinction of the aristocracy, and the movement of wealth from land to capital; the growing divide between rich and poor; and what some see as the closing of the western mind, the emptiness of its art, and the failure of its pillars and institutions.
We shall look at these questions while looking at the lives of Kaiser Wilhelm, Henrik Ibsen, Henry Ford, Lloyd George, Edith Cavell, Albert Einstein, James Joyce, John Maynard Keynes, Sigmund Freud, Joseph Stalin, Louis Armstrong, Francisco Franco, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Pablo Picasso Charles de Gaulle, Harry Truman, Walt Disney, Elvis Presley, John Kennedy, Maria Callas, Muhammad Ali, Margaret Thatcher, Silvio Berlusconi, Bill Gates, and Angela Merkel. The American weighting is not surprising in what we now call the American century. We shall additionally look separately at the following issues: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; Two Economic Crashes; The Rule of Law and Racism; The Technological Revolution; Annihilation; and, The Death of God, Sport, and Manners?
The book is 95,000 words. It is fully annotated.
This is volume 5 in A History of the West.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Geoffrey Gibson
• Release date: Jun 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311002518

Geoffrey Gibson

Geoffrey Gibson is an Australian writer living with the Wolf - his dog - in a kind of rural peace one hour out of Melbourne, the home of his football team, the Melbourne Storm. He has practised law as either a member of the Bar or a major international law firm. He has presided over at least one statutory tribunal for nearly thirty years and he has conducted arbitrations or mediations in Australia and the U S. He has published five books before on the theory and practice of the law, A Journalist's Companion to Australian Law (Melbourne University Press); The Arbitrator's Companion (Federation Press); Law for Directors (Federation Press); The Making of a Lawyer (What They Didn't Teach You at Law School) (Hardie Grant); and The Common Law - A History (Australian Scholarly Publishing)). He is now focussing on writing in general history, philosophy, and literature, fields that he was trained in and that he has pursued over very many Summer Schools at Cambridge, Harvard, and Oxford universities. His twelve eBooks so far published include five volumes of A History of the West - The Ancient West; The Medieval West; The West Awakes; Revolutions in the West; and Twentieth Century West; Confessions of a Babyboomer; Confessions of a Barrister; Parallel Trials, Socrates and Jesus; The English Difference, The Tablets of their Laws; The German Nexus, The Germans in English History; The Humility of Knowledge, Five Geniuses and God; and Windows on Shakespeare. The photo is not great, but at least the Wolf comes out OK.

Book preview

To adopt a famous remark about the French Revolution, it is far too early to tell what might be the lasting legacy of the twentieth century for the West, but it would be fair to say that most of us were happy to see the end of it.

There were two wars called world wars of a kind that were lethal beyond imagination. There was a civilisation-threatening depression that played its part in the birth of the attempt by Nazi Germany to put an end to civilisation. The second war was ended by a bomb that could just about wipe out the peoples of the earth. The great experiment of Communism, which seduced so many intelligent people in the West, caused untold misery, and then it failed and sputtered out – although it still rules in name in China, which is on course to becoming the most prosperous nation on earth, and the one that all stock Exchanges in the West look to most. Man for man, Stalin murdered more people than Hitler. The Russian peasant stopped Hitler with his blood, as he had done to Napoleon. America put a man on the moon. We can now cure just about any disease except cancer, and an aging population could bankrupt the planet. The decline in art and religion goes on, and differences in wealth are now festering and may erupt. It was the American century, but the U S looks tired and despondent, and its political machine is dated and very cracked. It is at best even money whether the present European Union will hold together. We are no closer to coming to terms with racism. Islam is not in decline and its proponents do not often know how vital is the separation of church and state in the West. Although most people in the West are better off than they were, we are taking more tablets for depression than ever before.

We shall look at a narrative of lives that illustrate the story of the West for our time. Then we shall look at five issues on their own: the evil of Nazi Germany; crashes in the stock market, the hearth of capitalism; the contribution of the rule of law to the lesion of racism; our attempts at our own annihilation; and the uncertain future of art, religion, and sport. The lives that make up the narrative are as follows.

Kaiser Wilhelm and his relatives represent the death throes of the aristocracy and the monarchy, except for those who are still insecure in the colonies, and who hanker after some sash or ribbon to hold the common people at bay. Henrik Ibsen may have been one of the most reactionary men ever born, but he was in his dramas a great emancipator, a model that suggests that action is more valuable than mere words; he was in so many ways so very modern. Henry Ford is a model of his own kind, the American dream, a boy from the back blocks who became a captain of industry, something to look back on for a nation where that kind of industry is now very unwell.

Lloyd George came from the other side of the tracks, too – most people on our list did. He formed an extraordinary partnership with a younger man called Winston Churchill to lead a social revolution of a kind that is now far beyond the dreams or aspirations of all politicians today; Lloyd George led Britain to victory in the first war, and Churchill did it in the second; leadership is something you do not see much of in politics now. Edith Cavell fought and died for her nation, and she left us with a blessing for the ages. She, too, thought that actions counted for more than words.

Einstein was an authentic world-shaking genius, a man to wonder at, a man who put understanding the world beyond all but a few, and whose large thinking on the big questions still enlightens us. James Joyce is also entitled to the word genius, a man who rejected his country and his God, and who redefined the novel in a portrait of humanity that is up there with Don Quixote and War and Peace.

Keynes, too, was a genius, who never stopped giving back to Eton, Cambridge and his nation, and who showed the most astounding courage in calling to account his Prime Minister (Lloyd George) and his nation for the cruelty of their actions at Versailles. (The predictions of Keynes and Hitler of the results of Versailles are looked at later in this book.) Freud is our fourth genius in a row. He went where people had not gone before; he had the courage, tenacity, and insight of Darwin; his work may or may not last, but he at least started to take the voodoo, or taboo, out of sex – as liberators go, he is right up there.

Stalin was an evil fixated killer who preyed on the refuse left by Lenin in his betrayal of Communism, and who may have been sent by God to soak up Hitler with his blood; Stalin has plenty of admirers in Russia now, including Vladimir Putin. Franco was not nearly as evil as Stalin or as clownish as Mussolini, but this God-sent fascist was an appalling reminder of why we like our politics without religion. Dietrich Bonhoeffer came from a distinguished family of the best sort – noblesse oblige – and, like Keynes would in substance do, he gave his life for his country; here was a man who had heard the Sermon on the Mount, and who showed unstoppable private courage and a luminous goodness in the face of raw evil; here truly was a man of God.

Louis Armstrong had a genius and a lovability all his own; he fathered and led a new art form, perhaps the most vibrant of his century. Pablo Picasso was a different kind of man – he was downright nasty – but he too led an artistic movement with unmatched distinction; he also brought the art world into contact with real wealth. Walt Disney was a man of business who came up the hard way; his art – animation - became a solace for the world when it needed it, and for kids forever; as best as we can see, wealth and success did not spoil Walt Disney.

Charles de Gaulle will not be remembered across the Channel or the Atlantic for gratitude, but he helped France out of the gutter, and he got them out of Algeria, an achievement that Americans understand better now. Harry Truman might be our text-book leader now. He came up the hard way; he knew what war, business, and hardship were about; and when in office her did what he had to do – bomb the Japs and fire MacArthur – and then he left office quietly and went back home; he had a sign on his desk that would be meaningless now – ‘The buck stops here.’

Elvis Presley was on any view a revolutionary, a kind of link between black music, rhythm and blues, and what became known as rock; he would give us the nightmare of the screaming insatiable teenager, and he would deliver shiploads of money; it was as if the world needed new theatre, and the system ground him into pap. As ritual and worship passed away from so many, they looked for it in the secular world, and Maria Callas gave it to them in spades; people worshipped her for it; she was like Armstrong and Presley in that she had an aura or timbre that can still make the hairs stand up on the back of our necks half a century after her death. Muhammad Ali had an even greater effect on an even greater number of people, because he was not just the greatest of all time – he was the champion of the oppressed everywhere; and he too can still make us sit straight up half a century after the Foreman fight.

John Kennedy was a real sex maniac; the press would not let that happen today, and with Clinton, the vigilantes and the press may have gone too far; but Camelot looks further away than ever, and the word Vietnam soured one generation and scarred the nation in a way that still shows. Margaret Thatcher was too low born to lead the Tory Party, but she did; as the first woman Prime Minister of the nation that gave the world parliamentary democracy, she kicked down the door of the Establishment where and when she could, and she deserves to be remembered as one of the few soi disant leaders in the West who had any feeling at all for the prophecy that the meek shall inherit the earth.

Silvio Berlusconi lies somewhere on that uncomely plane between Mussolini and oblivion that the descendants of ancient Greece and Rome seem incapable of escaping from. Bill Gates is another instalment on the American dream, one of the fathers of the communications and technological revolutions that are changing our lives so radically, and a man who made so much money that he did not know what to do with it; having acquired his fortune the hard way, he can now repose in warm applauded grace, not a grinder, but a man of peace.

Finally, Angela Merkel, who was raised in a brain-dead police state, has now been elected three times to lead the nation that redeemed that wreck; her nation has recovered from paying the massive bill of that bail-out, and it is now the most prosperous nation in the West and the rock of Europe; naturally both Germany and its Chancellor are as a result the objects of the usual pettiness and envy from those not doing so well, but, as was Mrs Thatcher, Frau Merkel is so far ahead of the boys that it does not matter.

There briefly are the characters that will carry the narrative from fin de siecle Vienna and Berlin to New York and Silicone Valley in the twenty-first century.

PART I

PEOPLE

1

Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859 – 1941)

Queen Victoria, as well as being Queen of England and the Empress of India, was immoderately fond of the Germans. She was descended from a German (Hanoverian) line. Her mother and her husband were both German. She corresponded with many German royals. It was the most exclusive club in the world. She would marry six of her nine children to Germans. She and Albert married their first child, Vicky, to Friedrich Wilhelm Hohenzollern, the second in line to the throne of Kaiser. Both sides of the marriage were of course related to the Romanovs, the family of the Tsars of Russia.

Fritz, as he was known, was ten years older than Vicky. It was however quite a love match. Fritz was very handsome, with a cavalry kind of aura, like so many of those preposterous royals, a good extra for The Prisoner of Zenda or, better, Duck Soup. The locals thought of him as a Wagnerian hero, and called him Siegfried. Vicky was probably a bit outspoken for a Prussian court. She hated Bismarck, but probably did not turn a hair when Fritz’s dad came to the throne and declared that he did so by Divine Right, a doctrine that had had taken a hit with Magna Carta in 1215, and was put to bed by the Bill of Rights in 1689 (in the revolution that would lead to the Hanoverian succession).

The first child of the happy couple was Wily, the future Kaiser, born in 1859. He was born with a defective arm, a real problem in such a militantly military nation like Prussia. He had a weekly animal bath when the arm was placed inside the carcass of a freshly killed hare. Wily quite liked that, as he also liked sleeping with his mum when dad was way on military manoeuvres.

When he was a young man, Bismarck sent Wily to attend the coming of age of the future Tsar Nicholas, his second cousin. In those days, diplomacy was regarded as a kind of art that was best reserved for the ruling classes, the kings and their nobles. These appalling death throes of these deluded rulers would lead to the deaths of millions upon millions of cannon fodder provided by the workers and peasants and yeomen and middle classes of the West. Later, Wily would try his hand at diplomacy by writing to the Tsar saying ‘Don’t trust the English Uncle,’ Bertie, the loose, louche, and scandal-prone future Edward VII, who was married to the sister-in-law of the Tsar. Wily was sure that Uncle Bertie was directing a conspiracy against Russia in the Balkans, which was a kind of coming of age sandpit for the big hitters, and which would supply the fuse for the detonation. Wily was keen on the idea of a war between England and Russia. He told Bismarck that ‘It would be such a pity if there was not war.’ After all, the rulers could leave the fighting and dying to the ruled.

Fritz did not succeed his father for long, and Wily was desperate for the job when his time came in 1888. As Miranda Carter says in her very fine book The Three Emperors (Nicholas II, George V, and Wilhelm II):

He had honed his whole personality to project the heartily masculine, charismatic, can-do soldier-king he wanted to be: the brusquely jocular manner, the staccato vocal delivery, the purposeful physical stance, the deliberately fierce expression he wore in public. He liked to think of himself as another Frederick the Great: politician, soldier, strategist, philosopher, cultural arbiter; someone who, through sheer force of character, would render democracy obsolete. To emphasize his similarity to Frederick, he had even adopted his habit of scribbling marginalia on official memos and documents: ‘Lies!’, ‘Nonsense!’, ‘Stale fish.’

He was, in short, an absurd but dangerous upper class absurdity like Mussolini. The advances in social engineering and national advancement achieved through Bismarck would be splashed against the wall by a clown who had simply no idea of his many manifest failings.

Cousin George (the future George V) was hardly an improvement. He got part of his education by sharing a girl in St John’s Wood with his brother Eddy and telling his diary that she was a ‘ripper.’ He could however bring down 1,000 pheasants in a day. (The ghastly idiot assassinated in Sarajevo had a similar obscene obsession.) All his suits were from Savile Row, and the guns from Purdey, with little red crowns engraved on the cartridges. His other great passion was stamp collecting, but after he became king, he collected only stamps with his own face on them. Like Wily, George was testimony to the dangers of prolonged inbreeding. His one gift to the world was probably the photographic image that was admired by the smokers of cigarettes associated with the Royal Navy.

After a mix-up about whether he should go to England, the queen offered Wilhelm an inducement to say how glad he would be to go and see Bertie – she would make him an honorary admiral of the Royal Navy, with white and gold uniform on his arrival in Cowes. This was notably big of Her Majesty because she thought that the European fascination with panto outfits – well, at least honorary military titles for royalty – as vulgar, and had forbidden Bertie from accepting any of them. Not so cousin Wily. He was thrilled to bits. ‘Fancy wearing the same uniform as St Vincent and Nelson. It is enough to make me quite giddy….I feel something like Macbeth must have felt when he was suddenly received by the witches.’

But this was more than pantomime for Wilhelm. He expected to have a say in the affairs of the Royal Navy and to give Her Majesty the benefit of his expert advice. When the Hohenzollern hove to beside a British squadron off Greece – Wilhelm was there for the wedding of his sister Sophy to the heir of the Greek throne – Wilhelm put on his admiral’s uniform and flew a British admiral’s pennant, and calmly invited himself to inspect the British ships at anchor there. Later, he submitted a plan for the reorganisation of the British Navy.

Wilhelm liked to say that he did not give balls for amusement but as lessons in deportment. They must have been hell to stand through. Members of the court were forbidden to use public transport or wear spectacles because no one was permitted to look at the monarchs through glass. Courtiers were graded and classified by colour-coded passes. The Berlin court had sixty-three grades of military officer alone. The Russian court had 287 chamberlains and 309 chief gentlemen in waiting.

These royal heads who were cousins never grew up. They had not been permitted to live in the world. They were cloistered relics.

When Wilhelm became Kaiser, he told his army that ‘the army and I were born for one another and will stick together forever if it be by God’s will through peace or war.’ He would later remind the world that the Prussian crown was his by the grace of God alone’ not by the grace of ‘parliaments popular gatherings or popular deliberations’ – he was ‘the chosen voice of heaven.’ He was therefore centuries out of date, at least in northern Europe. But under the German constitution, he was also the supreme warlord (Oberster Kriegsherr). It was fatal mis-match, and not just for Germany.

1917 was another year of the slaughter of the innocents. It was a bad one too for the cousins. George V thought that he should change the family name – Windsor sounded so much more reassuring than Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Nicholas II abdicated and was arrested and would be murdered with his family by the Communists. The war had shown that Kaiser Wilhelm II was no Caesar. He was in truth no kind of leader at all. (None of the three cousins was.) The generals took his title of Supreme Warlord and gave it to Hindenburg. He would later lose the rest and die unmissed and unmourned in a kind of exile.

In 1925, Wilhelm said that ‘Jews and mosquitoes were a nuisance that mankind must get rid of some way or another.’ Later he offered the prophecy: ‘I believe the best thing would be gas.’ This has led some German scholars to see Wilhelm as a missing link between Bismarck and Hitler.

These inbred, occluded royals were no heroes but their Gotterdammerung was a cataclysm for all mankind. In what is called the Great War, more than sixteen million people would die and more than twenty million people would be wounded. The West would face for the first time a gruesome fact about the modern world – the scale of death and suffering is so great that we just cannot come to terms with the extent and consequences of human evil.

About the best that could be said for any of these misfits came from a Welsh working man called Lloyd George. In 1915, Lloyd George got a stupid note from George V. He said it was ‘about as futile a document as I have seen…everything that comes from the Court is like that. But then, as Balfour said to me once, ‘Whatever would you do if you had a ruler with brains?’’

2

Henrik Ibsen (1828 – 1906)

The great Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen did more than span two centuries. He announced what we might now call the ‘modern’ world in far more ‘in your face’ manner than say Monet or Stravinsky. Joyce would be a more strident proponent of literary revolution, but not a more dedicated proponent of social change. Ibsen and Chekhov, each in his own way from the fringe of Europe, would do more than lay the foundation of modern theatre – they would profoundly influence the way that the middle class of the West would come to see the world that it was now given to them to run. At the same time, his plays, especially toward the end, summoned up the ancient trolls of his race, and the man who wanted to shake middle class from its self-satisfied torpor was a crusty old stickler for form who would insist on wearing his decorations and sitting at the same chair at the same time in the same café each day.

Ibsen was born and died in Norway but spent much of his life out of it. He maintained a child born out of wedlock, and entered into a lasting marriage, but late in his life he developed a fascination for a very young girl. He was very experienced in theatre direction, and all his work reveals a preoccupation with getting the pay right on the stage. After early attempts at historical or mythic themes, his plays deal with contemporary issues with next to no comedy.

Henrik Ibsen left Norway because he was stifled by it. He said he wanted to put a torpedo under the ark. He went to Rome and was captivated by Michelangelo and Bernini because, he said, ‘they had the courage to commit a little madness now and then.’ That is a very revealing remark. He was a member of the Scandinavian Club, that was doubtless as conservative as ex-pat groups tend to be. The torpedo launched in Rome was a proposal to give women at the Club the vote. This was 1879. The motion was narrowly lost. Members were uneasy about how Ibsen might react.

No one would have guessed it – but Ibsen came. He looked magnificent, in full panoply, with medals to boot. He ran his hand ceaselessly through his rich, grizzled hair, greeting no one in particular, but everyone in general. There was a deep peace in his face, but his eyes were watchful, so watchful. He sat alone. We all thought that he had forgiven his fellow mortals, and some even supposed him penitent…Then he began, softly, but with a terrifying earnestness. He had recently wished to do the Club a service, he might almost say a great favour, by bringing its members abreast with contemporary ideas. No one could escape these mighty developments. Not even here – in this community – in this duckpond!....Now he was no longer speaking calmly, no longer thoughtfully stroking his hair. He shook his head with its grey mane. He folded his arms across his chest. His eyes shone. His voice shook, his mouth trembled…He resembled a lion; nay, more – he resembled that future enemy of the people, Dr Stockmann….He repeated, and repeated: what kind of women are these….?

Thump! A lady, Countess B, fell to the floor. She, like the rest of us, flinched from the unspeakable. So she took time by the forelock and swooned. She was carried out. Ibsen continued. Perhaps slightly more calmly. But eloquently and lucidly, never searching for a word. …He looked remote and ecstatic….And when he was done, he went out unto the hall, took his overcoat and walked home. Calm and silent.

His best-known plays now are A Doll’s House, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, and Hedda and The Master Builder. After these, the going gets tough. For example, Romersholm ends on a double suicide and in Little Eyeolf a child is crippled while his parents are making love and becomes subject to the whiles of the Rat-woman who leaves his parents to make Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf sound like a nursery rhyme.

It is hard for us now to recapture just how shocking A Doll’s House was. Nora is treated like a doll by her husband until she can take it no longer and she just walks out. The last words before the curtain are: From below is heard the reverberation of a heavy door closing. That sound must have echoed round Stockholm and Berlin like a rifle shot. Women just did not do that – walking out was just not an option.

Helmer, the husband, is insufferably patronising. ‘When a man forgives his wife wholeheartedly – as I have you – it fills him with such tenderness, such peace. She seems to belong to him in a double sense.’ But it is not long before he is staring into the abyss.

It doesn’t occur to you, does it, that though we’ve been married for eight years, this is the first time that we two, man and wife, have sat down for a serious talk…..You never loved me. You just thought it was fun to be in love with me….I’ve been your doll wife, just as at home I was Papa’s doll-child. And the children in turn have been my dolls. I thought it fun when you played games with me….I have another duty just as sacred…my duty toward myself…..But don’t you see – I don’t really know what religion is.

Then the husband says that he could not sacrifice honor for the sake of love, and he walks straight into this bell-ringer.

Millions of women do it every day.

This would have been all Mandarin in the south, but it electrified the nations of the north. People sent dinner invitations endorsed ‘We will not discuss THAT play.’ One traditionalist complained that ‘one does not leave this play in the mood of exaltation which, ever since the days of the Greeks, has been regarded as the sine qua non for every work of art and literature.’

You can therefore see Ibsen’s contribution to modernism. The self-contained and self-respecting woman had arrived. As with King Lear, some demanded a happy ending. But as Michael Meyer observes in his wonderful biography: ‘So explosive was the message of A Doll’s House –that a marriage was not sacrosanct, that a man’s authority in his home should not go unchallenged, and that the prime duty of every person was to find out who he or she really was and become that person – that the technical originality of the play is often forgotten. It achieved the most powerful and moving effect by the highly untraditional methods of extreme simplicity and economy of language….’

Hedda Gabler is another snap of heathens living in a world that calls itself Christian. It must be the most lacerating role known to the stage. The ‘trolls’ have stalked mankind right into civilized society. Hedda is caught between a twerp of a husband and a sleazy judicial womaniser. She is left to face the roles of mother and mistress and she rejects both of them. She is like a caged animal, and she becomes both vicious and lethal. She is revolted by any kind of intimacy and cannot bring herself to use ‘du’ with her husband’s aunt. Her only release is in inflicting pain.

I sometimes think there’s only one thing in this world I’m really fitted for….Boring myself to death…..I say there is beauty in this. [Suicide of former lover.] Ejlert Lovborg has made up his own account with life. He had the courage to do – the one right thing…..It gives me a sense of freedom to know that an act of deliberate courage is still possible in this world – an act of spontaneous beauty.

We are near the realm of Ayn Rand or something worse. This play could just be a study in fascism.

For once in my life I want the power to shape a human destiny.

There is something demonic about Hedda. It is as if Hedda really wants to live the whole life of a man. In the result her exit comes with a different sort of bang, and she might just be the most terrifying creature eve put on the stage. The last way anyone would want to go to God would be with Hedda’s vine leaves in their hair. It is a reflection of the need in all of us to commit a madness. Ibsen said that ‘our whole being is nothing but a fight against the dark forces within ourselves.’

On film, you can choose between Juliet Stephenson and Claire Bloom for Nora and between Ingrid Bergman and Diana Rigg for Hedda. If the plays have a structural problem, it is that the men are door-mats. Michael Redgrave is as wet a wimp as you could find for Hedda’s husband and Ralph Richardson is just nauseating as the revolting Judge Brack – he reminds you of the whining, insinuating Iago of Cyril Cusack.

Ibsen is the only playwright who can hold a candle to Shakespeare. One difference is that there is hardly any comedy. But they both have one important thing in common. They were both devoted to theatre and