Understanding the Last Hundred Years
by Richard E. Noble
Understanding the last hundred years, takes us back almost two hundred years. The key to the last hundred years, I think, begins with the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial revolution changes the whole political, economic, and social structure of the world. It shatters previous economic and social systems and establishes a counter elite to challenge and rival the old Aristocracy. Along with this new Aristocracy a whole new population of poverty stricken are born and concentrated in the new manufacturing centers called, cities.
The social outrages caused by competition and over production produce organized labor and Utopian solutions to people problems in the form of Socialism and Communism.
Socialism, Communism and organized labor in opposition to monopolized Capital, lead to protests, riots, strikes, and social disorganization in general. Social disorganization and general discontent, lead to a first hemorrhage in the form of World War I.
World War I does not serve to stem the tide of social discontent but intensifies it until a socialist/communist world wide revolution begins.
The Russians are the first to crack. They walk off the battlefield in 1917 and into a civil war and socialist/communist revolution at home. Wilson stems the tide of socialist/communist agitation in the U.S by entering the War in Europe.
The German, French, and English Governments were all on the verge of collapse. Soldiers had turned their guns around in the trenches and were shooting their own officers. Wholesale desertion was rampant. Civil war and socialist/communist revolution intensified in the German homeland until their government, as with the Russian government, also collapsed. Post War socialist/communist anti-capitalist agitation in England, France, and the U.S., and the “successful” Russian Revolution led to free world capitalist fear and paranoia. Capitalist fear and paranoia led to big money investments in any anti-socialist/communist government and especially in any governments counter to the principles advocated and demonstrated in the New Russia.
This economic capitalist backing leads to the prosperity of European dictators, and the collapse of the economies of warbling socialist agitated democracies - the Depression.
A second hemorrhage occurs with the eruption of World War II. World War II stems the tide of unemployment and economic collapse in the Democracies. Capitalist investment flows back into Democracies to counter dictatorships that had grown out of control by previous anti-Russian western Capitalistic investment. With the Defeat of Germany in World War II, the capitalist intramural war ended between the democracies and the anti-Russian dictatorships and the original Capitalist anti-Russian economic policy was re-established with the Cold War and Capitalist re-investment in non Russian Communist Europe via the Marshall Plan.
The Cold War divided the world into two major camps, and competition between these two camps has been the story up until the recent Russian collapse.
The world is now under the dominance of one major superpower. World history is at a cross roads. The future will be determined by either positive investment and shared international development to increase prosperity and meet new world population demands, or old antagonism and conflict/destructive investment ... maintaining status quo and reducing new population growth through war.
[ This piece was written in the 1980s with the collapse of the Berlin Wall.]
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