Social Scientists describe the dictatorships that mark the early 20^th century as totalitarian regimes. The implication is that the government tries to totally dominate the political, economic, social and cultural life of a country. We have seen governments dominate the political life of a country through absolutism, and economic decisions through trade and monopolies. What is new is the ventures into new eras, and the extent to which a government can expect to install their domination. The new tools these governments have are due to advancements in technology. Telegraph, telephone, and radio are linking the countries internally and externally in ways never before possible.

Totalitarianism is a style of government. It’s not a philosophy. Ironically, we have prime examples from the far left and far right. The far left we have already covered, and is known as communism. The far right we cover today. It is known as fascism. Fascism is one of the hardest political philosophies to define. Google it and see what you get. At its simplest, it has 3 key components: it is highly nationalistic, ardently anti-communist, and authoritarian. The first two components make a lot of sense. Nationalism can be very unifying, when people want to promote positives. Or negatives, like racial supremacy. The German people had been taught they have a special place in the world since Charlemagne. They wanted to return to that role after losing World War I. Anti-communism draws support from the wealthy, who are worried as socialistic or communist revolts were having success around the continent.

So if the first two components of fascism attract desirable supporters like veterans and wealthy, who wants an authoritarian ruler? We all do, when there’s chaos, or when we are scared. Have you ever been in a pressure situation where you looked to a leader for direction? Or in a noisy classroom where you wish the teacher would tell somebody to stop talking? That’s a desire for strict control. And during the post-war years, Germans were scared and the economy was in chaos. They wanted someone to restore order, and stop the riots and protests. People who are older, conservative, and wealthy like a strict government.

The first fascist government was in Italy, where Benito Mussolini came to power in the March on Rome. He followed a program that included:

A secret police force that answered only to him.
State-sponsored terrorism against Italians
A one-party state
Youth organizations
Censorship of the press
Promoting a “cult of personality” around the leader
Massive propaganda

Mussolini was the blueprint for Hitler. Hitler copied that list above, and added his version of a racial hierarchy that called for destruction of the Jewish population in Germany and the subjugation of other non-Germans. He had outlined this plan in his book Mein Kampf, where he proposed that Europe would be better managed by German rulers. Germany needed lebensraum, or living space. He wrote the book from jail after a failed March on Berlin. When he got out of prison, Hitler led the Nazi party to several electoral victories. I think it is important to remember these were legitimate political parties that were receiving approval from German voters. Once in power, Hitler moved to eliminate rivals who were not supporters and to remove constraints on his authority. Once he had achieved that, he begin murdering people who weren’t his definition of proper Germans.

I think you probably know as much about the Holocaust as any topic we cover. I’m not going to go in depth here, but some of the videos do. Remember that 6 million Jews and 5 million “others” died. Hitler started with removing the right to vote, then the right to own property or businesses. He segregated Jews into “ghettoes” (that’s originally a Jewish word.) He could control their movements and their labor and abuse them more freely away from German eyes. Eventually, the ghettoes were “liquidated” and the occupants sent to concentration camps, where they were worked to death.

The French Revolution and many of the Enlightenment reforms we see throughout Europe in the 1800s largely bypassed Russia. In 1917, an absolutist was still on the throne. Noble privileges were still intact. Unbelievably, serfdom was still in effect. So we have a country that needs change, wants change, and finally, demands change. Russians have experienced much war in the early 1900s. And in the trenches of World War I, a rebellion begins to take shape.

Russia was not properly industrialized to fight a major war. Soldiers freezing in the trenches were low on supplies or completely out. And they began to admit to themselves that they were fighting to protect a country run by the privileged and wealthy. Those soldiers often deserted, but not out of cowardice. They went home to fight a civil war.

The Russian Revolution featured the “whites,” which were troops supporting the nobility and the tsar, against the “reds” which were the working classes and peasants. The revolutionaries’ philosophy was communism. The communist party went by the name “Bolsheviks.” The Bolsheviks won, partly due to the organizing genius of Leon Trotsky and the leadership of Vladimir Lenin.

Lenin promised the peasants “Peace, Land, and Bread” to support the communist cause. Those three ideas sounded good to a war-torn, poor populace, and communism sounded a lot better than serfdom. Karl Marx’s class revolution had finally occurred, but in a rural state instead of an urban one. Lenin realizes Marxism must be modified to fit Russia, and so he establishes the “New Economic Policy.” Large industries will be owned by the state, but private business, homes, and farms remained in private hands. It’s a blend of communism and capitalism.

But Lenin dies after a series of strokes and the NEP dies with him. Josef Stalin wins a brief power struggle with Trotsky and runs him out of Russia, which is now called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Trotsky is found years later in a Mexican hotel, hacked to death with an ice axe. Stalin will put Russian leadership in a chokehold for the next thirty years, killing 10 to 20 million of his own countrymen in a process of combining farms known as collectivization. If you opposed Stalin, you were eliminated.

The world didn’t know the full truth about collectivization for decades, but some of those eliminations were very public. Stalin would sign “death warrants,” targeting business, political, or military leaders on the charges of treason. Thousands were executed for essentially being potential rivals for Stalin, or formerly pro-Trotsky. He was an extremely paranoid man.

Stalin’s economic plan was to put the entire economy on a quota system, known as 5 Year Plans. He wanted to avoid the embarrassment of World War I, when the Russian economy failed completely. However, his 5 Year Plans were unrealistic. The economy couldn’t meet his expectations, leading to more executions. But that fear, and effort, readied Russia for World War II. Stalin was convinced it was coming. He was right, and receives credit for Russia staying in World War II until the end. But that success was built on a mountain of skulls.

You may have had elderly family members who survived the Great Depression. If so, they probably told you about it. My grandmother was born in 1908 and died in 2004. She could remember the tail end of World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, Korea, landing on the moon, Vietnam. She saw almost the entire century, including the inventions of radio, television, computers, the Internet, space flight, microwaves, X-rays, the birth control pill, and pet rocks. She could talk about all of those things, but when she talked about the Depression, she got serious. Very serious, and she wanted you to get serious, too. She wanted me to understand that the Depression represented poverty, struggle, and constant worry about money and food. 25% of America was unemployed in 1933. Rates of nutrition-related diseases and still born babies skyrocketed. People were suffering.

The major question you have to ask about the Great Depression is simply: What caused it? And we have a built-in problem before we get an answer-so many modern arguments do not honestly address the question, instead they argue for their own economic philosophy and try to retroactively apply it to the past. Good luck wading through it. I don’t wade through it all. I pick nine causes for our focus. Feel free to add some. They include:

Transitioning economy from World War I
Unemployment
Overproduction
Inflation
Overextension of credit
Lack of diversification
Maldistribution of wealth (working class did not have any money to spend)
Collapse of world trade
Stock market crash

Maybe the most important lesson learned from the Great Depression was how intertwined the economies of the richest nations in the world had become. American businesses had supplier and customers worldwide, and owned part of corporations around the world, too. So when one economy crashed, others wobbled as well.

Another lesson learned was to not let capitalism run unchecked. Every affected government began to put checks in place to prevent future failures. Workers’ rights, government spending programs, marketplace regulations and oversight programs were created or expanded.

The Depression was a product of World War I and a cause of World War II.

There are three required videos this week. Hey, it was a big war. Europe began fighting in 1914. There is not one cause to this war. There are several storylines that have been simmering in European history for decades and they finally boiled over.

The early moves involved

the Balkan Wars ousting the Ottoman Empire, creating new nations in Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Montenegro and others. Those nations are vulnerable to greater powers.
The great powers have been in 2 major alliances for decades. The Triple Entente included Britain, France, and Russia. The Triple Alliance included Germany, Austria, and Italy. Austria and Russia both eyed the new territory seriously.
Archduke of Austria Franz Ferdinand is assassinated.
Germany issues the blank check to Austria.
Austria issues an ultimatum to Serbia.
Austria mobilizes, including moving troops between Serbia and Russia.
Russia mobilizes, including moving troops to their German border.
Germany attacks according to the Schlieffen Plan. France is attacked, Russia will be later.
Britain and France retaliate against Germany.
Italy switches sides, joining the Entente (now Allied Powers).
The Ottomans join the Alliance (now Central Powers).
Russia leaves the war in 1917.
The US enters in 1917.

The US entered late. If we focus on the big picture, I will argue America entered because our economy was intertwined too closely with Europe to stay disinterested. Specifically, Germany’s use of unrestricted submarine warfare angered the American public. Germany’s invitation to Mexico to attack us, known as the Zimmerman telegram, also contributed. So after sitting out for nearly 3 years, America declares war in 1917.

Once we declared war, we entered the most technologically advanced war in human history. Tanks, planes, and especially machine guns had transformed the battlefield. Never again will we fight wars with our hunting rifles from home. This war was defined by machine guns and the tactic of trench warfare. The death toll exploded, climbing over 10 million. Britain lost over 800,000 troops. France, Germany, and Britain all lost over 1 million soldiers each. To put that in perspective, if you include all of America’s wars, the US military has lost about 1.3 million soldiers in total. Half of that number is from our Civil War, so we have never experienced a war with this kind of concentrated destruction. I have included a few documentaries about the battlefield, but I want to remind you this war transformed everyday life back in America as well.

On the “homefront”, economies were geared to support a large war effort. Historians refer to these all-encompassing wars as “total wars,” which I argue the US has only done three times: our Civil War and the two world wars. Total wars are rare. This war involved a huge draft, women going to work in unprecedented numbers, African-Americans moving to the North to pursue factory jobs, the government freezing prices and wages, propaganda to keep morale up, rationing goods, and selling war bonds to finance the war effort. You were constantly reminded, in your hometown, that a war was happening elsewhere. Most American citizens have never had the experience in our era.

When this war thankfully ended, America found itself in an unprecedented role: we were one of the superpowers deciding the fate of other countries. President Wilson tried to map out a departure from the past in his “Fourteen Points”, but European allies were determined to punish Germany. It forced Germany to pay reparations and confiscated land from Germany and Austria. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles is a near-complete failure, contributing to the Great Depression and World War II.

This chapter is the reason you take this course. Almost every country on the planet, including the USA, was a European colony at some point. That’s an incredibly strong legacy for a small group of countries. European languages, political customs, economic systems, religions and more have had an outsized influence on the rest of the planet due to this colonization.

To truly understand this chapter, you need to understand what Europe had been doing for the 400 years prior. Since Columbus, European countries like France, Britain, Spain, Germany and others had been in a competition to colonize the rest of the world. Why? For profit. Don’t let anybody lie to you. For money. In the 1800s, the last unclaimed countries were falling.

There were reasons to colonize, and reasons to stay at home. Grabbing new territory is known as “imperialism.” The idea that we should stay at home and mind our own business is known as “isolationism.” This conversation is alive and well today. It is the dominant conversation in American foreign policy, especially in the 1900s until today. For our purposes, I’m only going to discuss the reasons for Imperialism. I cover Isolationism in US History II.

To understand Imperialism you have to start with economics. You take territory to raise money. So the first reason as to why we go overseas is usually for profit. Through selling goods overseas, importing goods (especially raw materials) to America, and using overseas labor for greater profit. Other reasons include:

Military/strategic value. Hawaii is a good example of this. If we didn’t take it, somebody else was going to.
To Westernize the rest of the world, so they could benefit from scientific and technological advancements.
To Christianize the rest of the world, as most Christian faiths teach you should spread the message.
Prestige. Everybody likes a good story of brave people who conquer far off lands.

Understand that I understand the following: that list is very one-sided. There is a legit objection to each of those points. I also understand that a lot of Americans think we should stay out of foreign wars. But you need to understand that after World War II, the U. S. government has engaged in an era of imperialism. Leaders love to point out that we don’t take colonies, but we absolutely politically and economically dominate other nations. That is a marked break with early American history, where Isolationism dominated.

Europe has taken a diametrically opposed trajectory since World War II. They decolonized, leaving the world a much more unpredictable place as European policies were easier to predict than dozens of independent nations acting in their own self-interest.

The debate about Imperialism has now shifted to economic domination of other, poorer countries. You will hear the United States referred to as an “economic imperialist” by our critics.

Note