Orion Digest №4 — End of an Era

The 20th century stands as a landmark in history for the end of a historical era, and the dawn of the current age, tumultuous as it may be. Entering it, the technological innovations of the Industrial Revolution had reached into the field of military might, philosophy reacted to the approaching storm with either a gloom of nihilism or a unfettered hope for the future. Tensions between nations and a sense of inevitable war on the horizon lined up the dominoes for what would become known first as the ‘Great War’, and later as merely the first chapter in a century of horrors…

World War I was a dangerous mixture of the classical outlook on warfare and more modern technology and tactics, which taught us that war is no longer a glorious affair for the pride of one’s nation (not to say that it ever was, but it certainly used to be seen that way, in the past). People didn’t always go looking for trouble, but war didn’t often carry the same emotional trauma and devastation as WW1 did, consisting of civilities and grand gestures on the battlefield, with forward marches and drummers and firing volleys. WW1 stuck soldiers in a dirty, terrifying, and never ending stalemate over small strips of land for months at a time.

The nations that went into the war, used to what war had been for centuries, were unprepared for the brutality with which this war would be fought, with many of the new inventions being relatively unused on the battlefield, but they would emerge sobered by the experience, understanding at least partially that war had changed. Where the war before had been a set of wary alliances with a general focus on nationalist pride, the governments that came out of the conflict realized that such a conflict could not be allowed to devastate the fields of Europe once more, and Western nations sought some unity out of the chaos, and thus was born the first iteration of what we know today as the United Nations — the League of Nations.

An immediate issue with the League was the debate over how the aftermath of the war should be handled, and the decisions its members made ended up leading to the very next war that would rock the world once more. In addition to questionable changes in Eastern European territories that led to turmoil over cultural differences, the blame for the war was pinned on Germany, and the responsibility of reparations fell to it as well. While Germany certainly had a large hand to play in the events of the war, whether or not the citizens as opposed to the former leadership were at fault was questionable, but they were saddled with the burden regardless, leaving a taste of bitter resentment that lingered for decades.

Later failures of the League of Nations would showcase a different problem — a lack of sufficient action on their part to curb the tide of tension and war that led to the second great conflict of the 20th century. After WW1 ended, nations began to turn away from each other again, scarred but not quite learning from their previous mistakes, and nowhere was this separation more evident than with the Red Scare. Russian revolutionaries, dissatisfied with their autocratic government and following altered principles of Marx and Engels, overthrew the Tsar in a civil war in order to establish a socialist government in their country. This new and unorthodox ideology, combined with the bloody revolution used to establish it, caused paranoia in some Western nations, which would last well into the end of the century.

Meanwhile, as economic recession spread across the world in the decade preceding the Second World War, Germany’s bitterness and desperate situation met with an unfortunate leader — Adolf Hitler, who rose to the position of Chancellor and became known and feared for his fanatical and anti-Semitic ideals, implemented a state of fascist rule in Germany.

Both the socialism of Soviet Russia and the fascism of Germany would become alternative ideologies to more moderate forms of government seen previously, and even long after the fall of each of their respective pioneers, branches of both have split off and taken root across the world, as people explore the potential of both as a system of government and even take inspiration, for better or worse. I will say personally, I support a form of democratic socialism for reasons I will discuss in good time, but fascism proves too oppressive and terrifying an ideology for me to touch.

In simple terms, fascism is a state dominated political ideology that believes in power from a single party, often a dictator (as was the case with Hitler) that highly regulates society and oppresses dissenting opinion. Crushing any opposition and maintaining a tight grip on every aspect of society coupled with a highly expansionist military campaign to lead to a terrifying image that left a scar on the world. To this day, we still are reminded of the terrifying image of Nazis storming across Europe, conquering nation after nation and subjecting them to absolute rule. It’s no surprise that movements claiming to be their successors haven’t seen much success or support.

On the other hand, much more arguable is the Soviet Union, the nation that became of the Russian Revolution. The Soviets also used a more authoritarian form of government that planned out the economy, but while the quality of life and social freedoms could differ from ruler to ruler, the idea in mind at the beginning was to create a nation where people were economically equal, and the economy was kept balanced by being state-run rather than a potentially privatized set of monopolies.

Soviet theory involved spreading the economic system to other nations, to free their workers from capitalist dominance. Not only would this provide them allies more sympathetic to wide-scale policy, but in their eyes, it would prevent economic inequality and abuses of workers’ rights — a growing network of nations for the people that could work together. To this day, many parties try to takeaway lessons from the Soviet Union’s example (with degrees of variation) and several nations did end up transferring to a socialist system (if only briefly).

When it came time to fight a second war, the League of Nations found itself unsure about how to handle the growing threat of Germany, with most members afraid to start another large-scale war while Hitler moved slowly into Europe, and the U.S. wanting to distance itself from international affairs. This hesitation resulted in mainland Europe being lost to the Nazis and their allies, and it would only take a direct attack for the U.S. to finally get involved. The lessons that WW1 taught had to be relearned due to the lack of effort on the part of the League of Nations. After the first war, they thought that the world could go back to normal, but WW2 served as another reminder that the world had changed.

And it would change even more with the end of WW2, as unearthly destruction was revealed with the first usage of the atomic bomb, millions were dead as a result of even more destructive technologies and brutal campaigns of war, the nations of the world were thrown even more out of balance than last time, and the divergent ideologies put the jumbled world at odds with each other. Such is the era we live in now — the post-WW2 era has seen the state of the world churn and change in many ways, but the all-out war seen in Europe and the Pacific has never been replicated due to the elephant in the room — the fact that the last war ended with potentially world ending technology.

The post-WW2 era, however, is coming to its own end, as the fragile sense of structure that has been pushed closer and closer to the brink by surveillance, small interference based wars, terrorism, and descent into corruption is reaching it’s collapse. Not the end of the world, mind you, but certainly a build up to the end of the general post-WW2 era that has defined our world, and I believe that one organization, which I will explore next time, is key to understanding this era — the United Nations.

- DKTC FL