Tag Archives: Twentieth Century History

What Liberals Still Have to Conserve

07 Thursday May 2015

Posted by in History, Political Philosophy, Speeches

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Tony Judt

“The left, to be quite blunt about it, has something to conserve… The rise of the social service state, the century-long construction of a public sector whose goods and services illustrate and promote our collective identity and common purposes, the institution of welfare as a matter of right and its provision as a social duty: these were no mean accomplishments.

That these accomplishments were no more than partial should not trouble us. If we have learned nothing else from the twentieth century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Imperfect improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek. Others have spent the last three decades methodically unraveling and destabilizing those same improvements: this should make us much angrier than we are. It ought also to worry us, if only on prudential grounds: Why have we been in such a hurry to tear down the dikes laboriously set in place by our predecessors? Are we so sure that there are no floods to come?

A social democracy of fear is something to fight for. To abandon the labors of a century is to betray those who came before us as well as generations yet to come. It would be pleasing—but misleading—to report that social democracy, or something like it, represents the future that we would paint for ourselves in an ideal world. It does not even represent the ideal past. But among the options available to us in the present, it is better than anything else to hand. In Orwell’s words, reflecting in Homage to Catalonia upon his recent experiences in revolutionary Barcelona:

There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.”

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Pulled from Tony Judt’s speech “What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?”, given at New York University in October 2009, the same month he became paralyzed from the neck down due to ALS.

You’ll find a modified version in his excellent collection of conversations with Timothy Snyder Thinking the Twentieth Century.

Listen to it:

Read on:

The Tragic Paradox at the Center of Twentieth Century History

05 Saturday Apr 2014

Posted by in History, War

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Adolf Hitler

“Barbarossa, as the invasion of the Soviet Union was codenamed, unleashed the greatest, bloodiest and most difficult land campaign ever fought in the history of warfare. The failure of the German army to conquer Russia did indeed guarantee that Germany as a nation would be destroyed and that the eastern half of Europe would remain in bondage to the Communists until 1989. The tragic paradox at the center of mid- to late-twentieth century history is that Europe, and the world, owed its deliverance from the tyranny of Hitler to the heroism of the Red Army. Of course, Britain’s resistance to Hitler in 1940 played its part at the beginning of the conflict, as did the enormous contribution of men and arms by the United States when they eventually entered the conflict. But the Russian contribution was crucial: it was the resistance of the Russian people to invasion, siege, and starvation, and the preparedness of Stalin to sacrifice millions of lives, both military and civilian in what Russians still call the Great Patriotic War, which secured Hitler’s defeat. To be delivered from the tyranny of Hitler, it was necessary to be delivered into the tyranny of Josef Stalin. If you were a Pole, a Czech, an East German, a Hungarian, a Serb or a Croat you did not have to be A. J. P. Taylor to see that this was a questionable form of liberation. […]

The immense strength and skill of the Red army and the titanic heroism of the Russian people in resisting invasion must have taken Hitler by surprise. To the reader sixty and more years later, the sheer scale of the campaign is not possible to absorb. Within one day, German attacks had demolished a quarter of the entire Soviet air force. Within four months, the Germans had occupied 600,000 square miles of Russian soil, captured 3 million Russian troops, butchered countless Jews and other civilians as they went, and come within sixty-five miles of Moscow. But within a further four months, more than 200,000 German soldiers had been killed, a staggering 726,000 wounded, and a further 113,000 incapacitated by frostbite.”

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Excerpted from A. N. Wilson’s Hitler — one of the more absorbing biographies I’ve read in a long while. At just shy of 200 pages, the book pays significant dividends of insight for the time and attention it demands.

Joseph Stalin