Status Updates From Il secolo breve 1914-1991

denso di informazioni per cui vado a rilento

H. Dice algo muy interesante sobre los gobiernos democráticos del siglo XX: la mayoría, casi todos, estuvieron amenazados no por movimientos de izquierda, sino por movimientos de derecha. Me hace pensar en lo mucho que se muestra a la izquierda como una amenaza a la libertad que justifica irse hasta lo más extremo de la derecha.

Acabo de leer el capítulo en el que habla de la gran depresión y me sorprende que el liberalismo (ahora, a veces enmascarado como neoliberalismo financiero) es entendido como algo novedoso cuando en realidad ha estado tanto tiempo rondando y ha demostrado ser completamente falible. Sería bueno encontrar un texto que explique la diferencia fundamental entre el liberalismo ortodoxo y el neoliberalismo.

My brain hurts and I love it

"Non sappiamo che cosa plasmerà il futuro, sebbene io non abbia resistito alla tentazione di riflettere su alcuni problemi dell'avvenire, in quanto essi sorgono dalle rovine del periodo che è appena venuto al termine. Speriamo che sia un mondo migliore, più giusto e vivibile. Il vecchio secolo non è finito bene."

Klepper

"There is scarcely a scientific axiom that is not nowadays denied by somebody. And at the same time almost any nonsensical theory would be almost sure to find believers and disciples somewhere or other." - Max Planck, 1933

Well damn.

☹️

"The USSR remained culturally fallow, at least in comparison with its pre-1917 glories."

"The light shining out of Communist China in the arts remained dim."

Yikes, some major Eurocentric pompousness. Kristen Ghodsee had some similar critiques of the Soviet system (particularly during the 30s/40s), but it's possible to have those and still recognize artistic merit.

"It is an interesting sign of the interpenetration of official reformers and dissident thinking in the Brezhnev years, that glasnost was what the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn had called for in his open letter to the Congress of the Union of Soviet writers in 1967, before his expulsion from the USSR."

Interesting indeed.

"The aims of Communist economic reformers since the 1950s had been to make the centrally planned command economies more rational and flexible by the introduction of market pricing and calculations of profit and loss in enterprises."

This was *one path* put forward. Another group put hopes in the field of cybernetics, and linear programming. See my reviews of "Balkan Cyberia" and Kantorovich.

"It remained a police state, an authoritarian society and...an unfree one."

"In all these respects [i.e. freedom of travel and speech] the USSR remained distinctly inferior to Tsarist Russia."

"Unlike the USSR, the USA was a democracy."

Some nuggets of conventional rhetorical wisdom from this brick of a book. Sigh.

"The shift in labour's mood was far more significant than the great burst of student unrest in and around 1968...Its cultural significance was far greater than its political significance."

"So 1968 was neither an end nor a beginning, but only a signal. Unlike the wage explosion, the collapse [Bretton Woods]...it does not figure much in the explanation of economic historians about the end of the Golden Age."

"The most convenient world for multinational giants is one populated by dwarf states or no states at all."

Some good, some cringe. Maybe not a go-to read when you're overtired.
Not feeling the hype, but gonna see this one through.

"The 1930s were, therefore, a crucial decade for the Third World, not so much because the Slump led to political radicalization but rather because it established contact between the politicized minorities and the common people of their countries."

Worth quoting Hobsbawm's take on the Spanish Civil War in full:

"Both the Spanish government and, more to the point, the communists who were increasingly influential in its affairs, insisted that social revolution was not their object, and, indeed, visibly did what they could to control and reverse it, to the horror of revolutionary enthusiasts. Revolution, both insisted, was not the issue: defense of democracy was.

"Logically, the enemies of the imperial power were also potential allies in the fight for liberation.

The reductio ad absurdum of this anti-colonialist logic was the attempt by an extremist Jewish fringe group in Palestine to negotiate with the Germans...for help in liberating Palestine from the British...(A militant of the group involved in this mission eventually became Prime Minister of Israel: Yitzhak Shamir)."

Hobsbawm's arguments for the ebb and flow of "liberal values" in political/economic rights in periods of crisis vs. boom are well-taken. Szymanski still did that better, imo, in "Human Rights in the Soviet Union".

Curiously, he's at times helpful on nuance against overuse of the term "fascism", but to the point of muddying categorical waters and downplaying its lineage with American settler colonialism.

Perhaps the most striking characteristic of the end of the twentieth century is the tension between the accelerating process of globalization and the inability of both public institutions and the collective behaviour of human beings to come to terms with it. Curiously enough, private human behaviour has had less trouble in adjusting to the world of satellite television.

Brilliant overview of major changes of 20th cent- v focused on russian revolution and ww2, would have been more accurate to not call it history of the world as very focused on developments in the west, but loved the personal anecdotes& art and science history sections which i usually wouldnt read

volviendo a leer mi BIBLIA yo no le rezo a dios le rezo a Hobsbawm ((mínimo de aquí a junio juntos de nuevo y qué sensación más guapa la de coger un libro que leí por vez primera en el grado y seguir coincidiendo y seguir aprendiendo y seguir sacando conclusiones y seguir analizando ese corto siglo XX))

I really like the digs of the four ages, of which I have all four available to me on audible plus

a really interesting history of the world wars and revolutions of 1917. so far its hard to get a firm grasp on hobsbawms politics, but theres enough meat to apply your own politics to

This book is awesome, and this time I’m actually going to finish it.

slay mama

novamente, o chá...

Magisterial, listening on audiobook. My favorite historian by far. Economic, social, political history. First third focused on 1914-1945 and the consequences of the depression. Phenomenal and enlightening.

"...the ideologies, the programs even the methods and forms of organization which inspired the emancipation of dependent countries...were Western: liberal; socialist; communist and/or nationalist; secular and suspicious of cleric[s]; using the devices developed for....public life in bourgeois societies: press, public meetings...even when the discourse adopted was...in the religious vocabulary used by the masses."

"Outside the Western Hemisphere, the fingers of two hands are enough to count the few states of the world that have not gone through some combination of revolution, civil war, resistance to and liberation from foreign occupation, or the prophylactic decolonization by empires doomed in an era of world revolution."