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February 1 - February 8, 2025
We think about Weimar only in terms of the weakening of American democracy. While we should really think about it in terms of the world.
We are building a truly global civilization that connects us all, and that is the challenge. Precisely because this global civilization is still in the act of becoming, and has not yet arrived, and will not arrive for some time, there is this phenomenon of both intimacy and distance between the various parts of the globe. True globalization is still an illusion until technology and world governance advance a few more orders of magnitude. Yet we dramatically affect each other and depend upon each other, so that we all inhabit the same, highly unstable global system.
The entire world is one big Weimar now, connected enough for one part to mortally influence the other parts, yet not connected enough to be politically coherent. Like the various parts of the Weimar Republic, we find ourselves in an exceedingly fragile phase of technological and political transition.
I see no Hitler in our midst, or even a totalitarian world state. But don’t assume that the next phase of history will provide any relief to the present one.
We have to be able to consider that literally anything can happen to us. This is the usefulness of Weimar.
Germany during the Weimar period from 1918 to 1933 was a vast and barely united world unto itself, where the rules of order scarcely applied.
Again, this is like our world today,
in the final Weimar years, all anyone could talk about in Germany was daily politics. It was truly a permanent crisis, with one breathless series of headlines following another. The public and politicians both were caught up in the moment, in all of its intensity, unable to concentrate on what might come next because the present was so overwhelming. Everyone was hanging on for dear life, unaware of where they were going.
The former third world may be no more unstable now than it used to be, and in many cases it is more developed, but globalization has rendered it much more deeply entwined with our own destinies.
History is Shakespearean as well as geopolitical, a matter of contingencies,
order must come before freedom, because without order there is no freedom for anyone. The Weimar Republic, because it lacked the requisite order, ultimately became a threat to freedom,
Churchill was on target with his defense of the royal families of Central Europe,
The reason why the 20th and early 21st centuries have been so bloody is because the stabilizing force of monarchy in Central Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and other places is, in deep historical terms, suddenly gone.
We believe we have morally progressed in our values, with an unprecedented emphasis on such things as human rights and the environment, but this says little about the stability of a global system beset by clashing interests, fed by the aggression of modernizing dictatorships in places like Russia and China.
the Russian Revolution is more than just a corollary to the finale of the Weimar Republic. It is a panoramic amplification of it: a master key to the whole experience and consequences of political disorder.
Solzhenitsyn demonstrates—rather than merely states—the need for order above all else.
It is a conceit of the modern world, and particularly of the West, Solzhenitsyn suggests, that history is governed by reason.
Reason is like an axe to the living, growing tree of history, with its convoluted branches, each cell and molecule emerging as a matter of sheer contingency, one building upon the next—so that great events arise from innumerable plots and threads.
the axe of reason, as he puts it, is rare, and when it does fall sometimes produces absolute terror.
Hindsight is lazy in this regard, Solzhenitsyn intimates, since it reduces complexity to a counterfeit clarity.
Prediction is impossible. It is only through coming to terms with the past and vividly realizing the present that we can have premonitions about the future.
In Europe on the eve of World War I, order itself, which had lasted more or less a century since the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, was completely accepted. In other words, too few were thinking tragically in order to avoid tragedy. They didn’t realize that pessimism can be constructive and help states to avoid catastrophe. They took their good fortune for granted, and assumed it was a permanent condition.
Because the past up to this point in time is all we know, we must always exercise a monumental level of caution in order to protect our civilization from tipping over into a heretofore unimagined disorder.
Crucially, it is the very confining integration of our world through technology that gives every large event within it an added significance, so that there is no time to catch our breath. We are constantly being overwhelmed.
Order, no matter how complex the social organism, rests upon some kind of chain of command,
And it is the melting-away of hierarchy that Solzhenitsyn describes in almost tactile terms.
In this entire revolutionary process, what pierces most through the intelligent reader’s consciousness is the madness of crowds coupled with the romance and irresistibility of extremism, so that a minority ends up moving history.
Nobody interferes with the mob, least of all the polished and oh-so-civilized Russian intelligentsia, who see the radical Left as composed of a purer and distilled archetype of their own values, and only awake from their dreams when it is too late.
While everyone is debating politics, Lenin, like Hitler, meticulously plans how to actually seize power, which, as Solzhenitsyn’s vast canvas makes clear, is, as they say, lying in the streets waiting to be picked up (as it was in Weimar Berlin). Indeed, in chaotic, disorderly, vulnerable moments, the politicians and the intelligentsia can be paralyzed by the singular and fanatical people who have true focus, relying on faltering institutions to stop or slow them.
However backward, reactionary, and ineffectual the monarchy was, longevity had provided Nicholas II’s royal line with legitimacy, allowing him to rule without the sharpened steel of any of the extreme ideologies of the 20th century, with all their frightening isms.
As in Weimar, the wages of disorder meant that too much hung on a thread,
To repeat, it was Churchill who preferred the restoration of the Romanovs and Hohenzollerns both, if only as figureheads, to prevent a Lenin or Hitler. In its first few months alone, Lenin’s secret police executed almost 15,000 people, nearly twice the number of those executed by the Romanovs in the entire previous hundred years.[28] This then was the 20th century: the axe-like ending of the old world with all of its stabilizing traditions, allowing for the rise of abstract and utopian movements from the Nazis to the Bolsheviks to Pol Pot and Ayatollah Khomeini, each in its own way
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as Kissinger wrote in A World Restored, “the most fundamental problem of politics…is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness.”
The key element in all of this will be closeness. We will all—Eurasia, Africa, North and South America—be exposed to each other’s crises as never before.
Geography is not disappearing. It is only shrinking.
Indeed, the smaller the world becomes because of technology, the more that every place in it becomes important.
Because of digital communications, intercontinental missiles, jet travel, space satellites, and so much else, different parts of the globe now affect each other as intimately as different parts of Germany affected each other in the 1920s and early 1930s.
Middle classes are ungrateful. They want more and more.
with the advent of precision-guided weapons, in turn derivative of the invention of microchips, state-induced violence becomes, theoretically at least, more tempting and less lethal.
As precision-guided munitions now become the preferred weapon of choice in the Western way of war, the chances of initiating violence may actually increase.
Therefore, we should not automatically assume that the avoidance of head-on, great-power war in the second half of the 20th century must continue deep into the 21st.
the social and technological forces molding those personalities. The decades of cool decision-making, especially in the United States, coincided with the print-and-typewriter age: a form of technology that lent itself to objective and detailed explanations of issues, encouraging both the public and its leaders toward moderation. President Dwight Eisenhower,
is impossible to imagine in a digital-video world of roiling passions ignited by social media.
the communications revolution has changed the way our minds work.
We now inhabit a world of megacities inflamed by social media, which rewards passion rather than cool analysis.
This is what at root fuels our permanent crisis.
Anything is possible now because while technology has evolved, human nature hasn’t, even as technology has made large-scale war more likely than during the age of hydrogen bombs.
another matter aside from the loss of protection afforded by hydrogen bombs, and which periodically plagues history, and will, we must believe, continue to plague it: that is, the problem of Kissinger’s “revolutionary chieftains,” the epitome of the dark side of human nature, men who lead revolutionary states.
Kissinger explains in Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. “The powers that represent the status quo…are at a profound disadvantage vis-à-vis a revolutionary power. They have everything to gain from believing in its good faith, for the tranquility they seek is unattainable without it. All their instincts will cause them to seek to integrate the revolutionary power into the legitimate framework with which they are familiar and which to them seems ‘natural.’ ”
while the status quo powers by their very nature seek a “static condition” in world affairs, the revolutionary power, also by its very nature, seeks the opposite: the overturning of the established order. That is why one of the marks of a revolutionary power is always to “fill a vacuum.”
