Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"Rather they are judgements about what we, or perhaps anyone, would feel on contemplating the object in question from a 'steady and general point of view'.

"Moral talk is autobiography."

"...for the sake of a physical pleasure and the simultaneous excitement and satisfaction of an exotic imagination, he had condemned a wife and daughter to death at the hands of maniacs..."

"Taxation was no longer a strictly national matter. To impose heavy reparations on Germany was one way out of that dilemma. But it was not the only way."

Germany wss defeated economically not militarily, because it was not economically self-sufficient. This inspired both the Nazi's lebensraum strategy and as Tooze illustrated in 'The Wages of Destruction' the Nazi's military strategy. Astonishing that we should have had to fight another world war to revise this lesson.

"up to the end the Entente continued to treat the German state as a sovereign counterpart, whilst the Reich was, in fact, collapsing into chaos."

test

"Unlike American Troops, American money flowed quickly.'

"In halting Germany's final onslaught, the Entente created precedents for inter-governmental cooperation that went beyond anything ever realised in the League of Nations."

"The year 1918 should not be confused with 1944. In 1918 it was the American Army that fought with French weapons, not the other way around.'

"...what saved that the Bolsheviks from an open capitulation to Ludendorf that would have robbed them of any historic legitimacy, was the suddenness of Germany's defeat in the West."

'Starvation and flogging, backed by machine-guns, soon produce the required effect in a community of illiterates with centuries of serfdom behind them.' - Well it certainly worked for Stalin.

"Finland became the stage for the first of a series of savage counter-revolutionary campaigns that were to open a new chapter in twentieth-century political violence." - Watson missed a trick here. :-)

"As I stood on the rails that lead via Tiflis to Bake...my thoughts wanted to go further, beyond the Caspian, through the cotton fields of Turkmenistan to the Olympiad mountains, And if, as I hope, the war will continue for sometime, we may yet beat on the doors of India." Germany belatedly joins the Great Game.

"Since 1991, all of these creations of the 'Brest-Litovsk moment', and more have come to be regarded as legitimate members of the family of nations. Now as then as then Poland and the Baltic states look to protection in the West."... and if Russia disintegrates?

"The failure to produce a constructive policy of engagement in China was no doubt in part explicable in terms of racial and cultural préjudice...As the experience of Russia suggests." Well, no: the perception of Russia from Adolf Hitler to Ambrose Bierce was equally tainted by racial and cultural préjudice.

""We are weak, we are stupid, we are divided, but we are innumerable, and in the end, if they persist. China will burst the Japanese stomach""

This comparison of the subjectivity of morality with the subjectivity of necessity really drives home what we lose by accepting the latter. I'm happy for morality to be subjective, but not for necessity to be so. Why? And wouldn't God make both objective?

"For all Hume has shown so far, it is possible for the discovery by reasoning of the truth of a certain proposition to lead one to act, even though that proposition itself cannot cause anything." reasoning distinct from reasonable?

"As the first Southerner to be elected President since the Civil War, Wilson owed his career to that postponement of justice.' Tooze's portrait of Wilson implies he was racist; ok for whites to lord it over blacks, but not ok for Germans to lord it over the French.

"Precisely because Britain was the nation from which America's own political culture had historically derived, it was essential for Wilson that Britain itself must remain fixed in the past." I.e. Wilson's commitment to his own nation's development trumps his commitment to a world of nations, the nationalist's perennial problem.

But if we allow the peculiar pathology of German political history alone to explain the derailment of 'peace without victory', we understate the significance of the rift between Washington and the Entente over the winter of 1916-1917." Militarism., dismissed by Ferguson as a significant cause of the war, is here shown as a major cause of its continuation.

"As Election Day on 7 November approached, Wilson began draughting a public statement to be delivered by the governor of the Federal Reserve Board warning the American public against committing any more of their savings to Entente loans."

'the more that Britain borrowed in America and the more it purchased, the harder it would be for Wilson to detach his country from the fate of the Entente." Likewise America and China.

'The birthday of the infanta' - was there really a time or place where a person could live without ever seeing their reflection? What impact have mirrors had on the human condition?

"The atrocious war was, Wilson believed, not a liberal crusade against German aggression, but a 'quarrel to settle economic rivalries between Germany and England.'" As the war progressed, the German's discovered that the British navy was more of a threat to German security than the Russian army.

"Through the private enterprise contacts of J.P.Morgan, supported by by the business and political elite of the Northeast, the Entente was carrying our a mobilisation of a large part of the US economy, entirely without the say-so of the Wilson administration." But the Germans blamed it nonetheless, 'Ring of Steel'

"To provide collateral, the UK Treasury organised a forced purchase scheme for private holdings of first-class North American and Latin American securities, which were exchanged for UK government bonds." Did the Nazis learn from that as well?

"It was World War I and its aftermath that made of the middle east the strategic albatross it has remained to this day." - Yes, next history reading project.