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Subject: The Power of Ideas - For Good Or Ill
CJH    9/2/2005 9:21:46 PM
Could it be possible that our explosive growth as a power and our exurberant participation in both WWI and the design of the peace to follow inspired in ultra-nationists in Germany and Japan the ideas of carving empires out of China and Russia to create a base for going on to conquer the world? On thing I remember from reading Konrad Heiden's "Der Fuhrer" was how the image of the emperor on horseback, Napolean Bonaparte, inspired in the politically divided German nation ideas which led to unification. I have also been wondering if the participation of the US in WWI and the framing of the Versailles Treaty did not emphasize to the world the potential here for world dominating wealth, power, and culture to the extent that the German and Japanese militarists knew they had to go for world domination or inevitably be dominated by the US.
 
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timon_phocas    RE:The Power of Ideas - For Good Or Ill   9/5/2005 2:40:57 PM
>>Could it be possible that our explosive growth as a power and our exurberant participation in both WWI and the design of the peace to follow inspired in ultra-nationists in Germany and Japan the ideas of carving empires out of China and Russia to create a base for going on to conquer the world?<< 1) To the extent that US power eclipsed that of Britain and France, generating a sense of “upset”, it might be said that US success contributed to expectations that old orders could be overturned. I would point to the revolutions in Russia and Germany, and the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as more proximate examples of the mutability of old, established regimes. 2) I think that the definition of a “great power” in the 19th and early 20th centuries involved colonial empires. Arguments for the empires included access to raw materials and captive markets. Japan could hardy help but draw that conclusion with all the European countries, plus America, carving colonial empires out of Asia and Africa. Germany had other historical examples to draw from, but it still wanted the empire.
 
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CJH    RE:The Power of Ideas - For Good Or Ill   9/9/2005 8:58:20 PM
I grew up in a household where a great deal of anger was expressed towards the German people to the effect that "Our boys had to go fight in Europe twice because those #&@ Germans couldn't keep their hands off of what didn't belong to them". In the case of the German nation particularly, I have wondered what made them do what they did. An explanation that might fit would be that the Germans who had been politically divided for centuries saw first the rise of the empires of seagoing nations and then, in the foreseable future, the prospect of a highly energetic and creative coast-to-coast land block state that was to be the United States and because of these they saw their future condition as that of permanent client states with their culture lost to them. It is easy today to interpret much in how foreign media react to us in the light of American cultural influence on their respective societies. This if one ascribes to these foreign media that they largely express the attitudes of their society's elites and if one ascribes to these elites that they regard our egalitarian cultural influence as subversive. I tend to do this so I wonder if a competitive sense and a desire to preserve their culture motivated the Germans.
 
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