More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 19 - January 30, 2018
extremists always fear a moderate adversary.
The aristocrats started on the moral decline into cafe society.
The snobbery of wealth compounded, instead of countervailing, that of birth; the insolence of the successful climber reinforced the arrogance of the titled ancestor-worshiper.
The old world, as Churchill saw it in its sunset glory, had undeniable charms, along with some less attractive features. The need for colorful ceremonial to uphold the prestige of a way of life that every year looked more and more anachronistic to more and more men generated a bright social glitter.
In retrospect we tend to see the carefree social life of pre-war Europe as a kind of death waltz on the brink of doom, but to those who took part in it, it was not that at all. People did not throw themselves into a rout of pleasures to forget their worries; they simply joined in the dance to express their sense of well-being and to manifest their solidarity.
Admiration for the achievement of foreign writers or artists was enhanced by the reverence among Europeans at the time — above all in Vienna — for art and literature generally. The universal sneer had not yet been perfected; debunking had not come into fashion.
as always with Nicholas II, it was hard to tell how much of his shiftiness was due to weakness of mind or character and how much to a kind of passive, feminine guile.
The worldly triviality, bordering on frivolousness, which so often underlies the baroque striving for magnificence and fervor,
Like the suicidal policies of Nicholas II in Russia, Francis Joseph’s youthful and naive experiment in autocracy illustrates what is perhaps the deadliest weapon in the arsenal of revolutionary movements: their ability to goad their adversaries into self-slaughtering madness.
(The so-called Turkish bath, for example, was actually the Byzantine version of a Roman institution.)
Undeveloped Serbia with its population of 4,000,000 Balkan hillbillies,
The wave of bad taste which all over Europe was twisting furniture like plasticine, bloating stone monstrously, filtering daylight through colored glass and electric light through silk and beads, put out blossoms of a particularly lurid mauve in Germany.
Art Nouveau(!)
As we know from examples closer to the present, when policemen imitate the methods of the underworld, while revolutionaries adopt the outlook of policemen, that is a symptom of a disordered or a decaying civilization.
To neutralize the chronic protest of French Socialists and Liberals against its operations on French soil, the Okhrana bribed French newspapers and journalists of the right who were willing to follow a pro-Russian line.
In Russia, in Germany, and in Austria the generals were now in the saddle. Their business was war, and war under the best conditions. All that was left for the diplomats was to put a good face on the brutal dictates of the military plans.
The fears expressed shortly after its outbreak by U. S. President Woodrow Wilson that it would “set civilization back by two or three centuries,” may have been excessive, but they have not proved wholly groundless.
The frustration, the horror, and the despair generated by war on such a scale and under such conditions gradually spread from the battlefields, darkening the whole mind of the twentieth-century West, somewhat as the Thirty Years’ War darkened that of the Baroque Age.
Even more deadly in its ultimate effects than the propaganda of misdirected idealism was the propaganda of hate.
Twenty years later the scars left on the public mind by this wartime atrocity propaganda — which of course was speedily exposed after the fighting ended — were still so inflamed, that American newspaper correspondents in Europe had the greatest difficulty in persuading their editors to print authenticated reports of authentic Nazi atrocities.
Perhaps in reading the Habsburg chronicle it is enough to recognize that history, like most human experience, is essentially tragic. The same observation applies to the Wilsonian attempt to build a new world upon the wreckage of the old one.
Perhaps now that the lesser tribal glories have faded it is easier for us to recognize our membership in the great tribe of man.
