Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"More radical nationalists drew the conclusion that if nationalism and economic liberalism could not be combined, then the reassertion of national interest would have to be truly comprehensive - economic, as well as strategic and political."

Across the entire spectrum of British party politics, a latter day Wilsonian conception of the Anglo-American role in international affairs came to the fore."

"The reply from the dominions was, if anything, even more crushing."

"[Zinoviev] declared that the imperative to combine workers' revolution with peasant war was the 'most important discovery that Lenin made'.

"Hungary was in the unfortunate position of being both a new creation of the 1918 upheaval and, due to the privileged position it had enjoyed within the Habsburg Dual Monarchy, a defeated enemy of the Entente. It was thus perfectly placed for victimisation."

"Never before had an empire of Britain's stature so explicitly and consciously conceded superiority in such a crucial dimension of global power. It deserves to stand as an early twentieth-century precursor to Mikhail Gorbachev's retreat from the escalation of the Cold War in the 1980s." - and at the maximum extent of British Imperial power.

"Following in the footsteps of Canada, Australia and South Africa, one of the first demands of [the Indian National] Congress had been for tariff protection imports." Just to remind myself that a free trade zone among Commonwealth countries won't be magically waiting for the UK once it leaves the EU.

"A new order had been created in the Middle East, anchored on nominally independent Egypt and Iraq, but in fact based on a wilful disregard for political legitimacy, a lack that in turn rebounded on the moral foundation of the British Empire as a whole."

"A new order had been created in the Middle East ,

"The Wirth government clung to the rhetoric of reparations fulfilment. But it did so by printing cash and dumping it on the foreign exchanges....The bill was paid by the huge tax levied by inflation on German savers."

A deflationary 'wave' seems a poor metaphor, surely waves are inflationary. Is this the 'deluge' we've been promised? In truth I'm struggling with the post-war economics. The military exposition seemed so much clearer.

The deflationary wave driven forward by America from the spring of 1920 was the true key to the 'world-wide Thermidor' of the 1920s, the main driver of the restoration of order, both domestically and internationally. It is this to this day probably the most underrated event in twentieth-century world history."

"There doesn't seem to be much difference between military conquest and capitalist nibbling." - except of course the body count.

"The secret, in truth, was that he just spent more time studying, and paid more attention

"The claim that all men were created equal, Balfour objected, "was an eighteenth-century proposition which he did not believe was true." Whole passage interesting account of Anglo-Saxon racism."

"But whereas Erzberger had gambled on the fickle politics of Wilsonian liberalism, Stresemann would place his bet, on what he believed to be a more durable force, the strategic interest of American business in the future of the European economy."

"The peculiar agony of Versailles was that it forced the vanquished to will their own defeat as a conscious choice."

"The logic was simple. If the United States, by far the richest and least indebted of any of the combatants, were to grant substantial, well-publicised concessions to its European allies, they could afford financially and politically to moderate their claims on Germany."

"Prodigies can very quickly learn what other people have already figured out; geniuses discover that which no one has ever previously discovered. Prodigies learn; geniuses do."

"The year 1919 saw not just a rearrangement of boundaries in Europe. It was truly a post-colonial moment. Established hierarchies of politics, culture and ethnicity were overturned."

"Love, Joy and Peace-these are the fruits of the spirit and the essence of this world. But the fruits of the ape-mind, the fruit's of the monkey's presumption and revolt, are hate and unceasing restlessness..." Monkeys not of the world, then?

"[Girl's] bodies manufacture hormones in doses sufficiently small to leave even the most temperamental of them of them a certain freedom of choice."

"Progress and Nationalism - those were the two great ideas [Beliel] put into their heads."

"The Seventh Commandment, the Facts of Life. But there is also another fact, to which one cannot react by a mere departmentalized negation or a no less fragmentary display of lust - the fact of Personality."

"The reconstruction of West Germany after World War II has gone down in history as a warrant for the possibility of successful 'regime change'." Superb, the whole paragraph an exacting analysis of what regime change actually involves.

"If Britain would not come to terms, America would 'build the biggest navy in the world, matching theirs and exceeding it...and if they would not limit it, there would come another and more terrible and bloody war and England would be wiped off the face of the map.'"

"'We make a god of truth; for truth without charity is not God, but his image and idol, which we should neither love nor worship.'" Pascal

"And that is just the the conclusion he wants to avoid." Not sure it is: moral talk is autobiography, Hume is just not explicit about the role of memory in his account of morality."