Balkanization of the Mind

The root economic and social causes of the two ‘World Wars’ are not only generally ignored, but to almost all, unknown. This seems to me largely to do with those who espouse competition as a very positive social good, and succeed through it, not really liking it at all. Certainly not when they’ve already got power and success, and are old. But those looking out only for themselves often miss the Big Picture and its personal implications.
Two ancient dynastic empires, the 5 or 600 year old Ottoman and Hapsburg, had gone quite senile, leaving a vast power vacuum. Otto von Bismarck of Prussia defeated Austria in a dispute over Schleswig-Holstein in 1866 then went on to defeat France and then unite Germany. He presented a clear threat to French and British expansionist interests. In the Treaty of Versailles (ending WWI, 28 June 1919), Germany was stripped of all colonies and Loraine (given to France), plus West Prussia (given to Poland) and a couple other areas. Extremely heavy reparations were imposed, while Britain redrew maps of the Middle East to its advantage.
The Balkan Wars of 1912 and 13 had led to further emasculating Balkanization (the division of the Balkan peninsula, formerly almost entirely in the Ottoman Empire, into a number of smaller states, occurring from 1817 until peace at the end of WWI. Collapse of the two ancient empires and defeat of Germany allowed the countries that became the Allies of WWII to gain considerably increased power and global influence.
However, in their pride they not only failed to take Asia as seriously as merited (despite Russia’s defeat by Japan in 1905), but underestimated the newly essential importance of international free trade. Early in 1929 the US instituted high tariffs; the stock market shuddered and quickly fell from a 1929 high of 381.2 to 198 in mid-November. Tariffs were lowered but in June 1930 replaced at even higher rates (40-60%). Instead of easing economic hardships, this increased them. The stock market fell to 140 (not that the stock market is as good an indicator of economic strength as it is generally taken to be, but I'm not going to go there right now). Post WWI US companies grew rapidly and by the late 1920s were making more goods than they could sell. Prices and profits fell. As is well known, an investment bubble based in significant part on speculation fueled by easy credit burst on ‘Black Thursday’, October 24th 1929. Panic-selling continued for three weeks. Between 1929 and 1932, American industrial production fell by 45%. Many companies were bankrupted or ceased trading; others cut costs and released workers. By 1932, over 12 million in the US were out of work. Economic confidence undermined, people rushed to secure their banked savings; hundreds of banks soon closed, with consequent losses to many. This has generally been blamed more on speculation than on tariffs. Clearly overly-inflated prices, be it real estate or stocks, can't last, but I will attempt here to show more of the Big Picture.

Soon cycles of boom and bust were being theorized about, as if economics was just a kind of weather.
The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 had led to £200 million in reparations from France and an inflationary investment boom in Germany and Central Europe. A railway empire (Bethel Henry Strousberg) crashed, bursting that speculation bubble. Perhaps the contraction of the newly unified German economy was more exacerbated by the conclusion of war reparations payments in September 1873 than by railway problems, but it was several months before that crash, on 9 May 1873, that the Vienna Stock Exchange crashed. The “panic” - called the Gründerkrach or ‘founders’ crash’... with the period from German unification to the crash the Gründerjahre (‘founders’ years’) - triggered depression in Europe and North America that lasted 65 months, until 1879.
Financial failures in the Austro-Hungarian capital Vienna spread through Europe and North America. As Wikipedia has it, euphoria over the victory against France and influx of capital from payment by France of war reparations had fueled stock market speculation in railways, factories, docks, steamships – the same industrial branches that had expanded unsustainably in the US and Austro-Hungary. Unable to sustain the bubble of false expansion, insolvencies, and dishonest manipulations, a series of Viennese bank failures ensued, causing a contraction of the money available for business lending.
Matters remained difficult, with depressed economies, a long time - until 1896.
This kind of mean myopia ("contraction of the money available for business lending") has often been useful to the Global Elite, for whom wars mostly provide but opportunity, much as financial panic helps money-farmers fleece middle-class investors (allowed to hold taxed equity until convenient to use tricks like 'crashes' to call it back - this may seem quite imaginative on my part, and I admit to having occasionally seen things that weren't really there, but I think it explains more than anything else, especially boom and bust 'cycles' do), as is an ancient habit. Old money often finds the 'nouveau-riche' quite hard to tolerate, and often finds it has the capacity to do something about that. Not always, but often.

When the US Democrat Party attempts to appear pure as compared to the obnoxiously repressive, regressive Republicans (now trying to institute high tariffs again), this is but double-dealing, cynical fraud, sheer cant and back-stabbing to foolish but loyal followers. Best to recall that it was Democrats, under Clinton, who after all allowed the bizarrely named ‘Citizens United’ Supreme Court decision to stand, ultra-empowering the MegaRich, exacerbating our enormous economic divide and further enhancing the inordinate power that corporations have traditionally exercised in in the USA’s so-called democracy. ‘Citizens United’ is the name of a Political Action Committee founded in 1988 by Floyd Brown, a longtime Washington political consultant, with major funding from the Koch brothers (industrialists who then owned the second largest privately owned company in the United States, which they inherited - Koch Industries, a huge, diversified conglomerate worth approximately $100 billion). The Koch bros are, of course, Republican, but the Democrat Congress of the time could have halted this beyond-Orwellian re-definition of 'people'!
Growing numbers of Democrat candidates and congressional members (including Sen. Kamala Harris, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, former Rep. John Delaney, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and Julian Castro) have sworn off donations from corporate or business-related PACs, blaming them for the dangerous, disruptive and insidious influence of money in politics. Of the declared 2020 Democratic candidates thus far, each has declared, to different degrees, opposition to accepting corporate PAC money. But despite Democratic messaging on the issue, the reality is corporate PAC contributions haven’t changed much since Citizens United. The financiers of war are firmly in control, as they so clearly were under Obama. The Democratic Party, just like the Republican one, exists to serve its corporate clients. Will they allow the new tariffs to pass? Um, gotta say, 'you betcha'!

But back to the past, and how it gave us our present. Even with all of Germany’s economic problems from the Treaty of Versailles, it could have been possible for it to make reparation payments - if foreign countries hadn’t placed high protective tariffs on German goods. The protective tariffs further depressed Germany’s already over-burdened economy; faced with reparation payments they couldn’t afford, Germany printed enormous amounts of money, initiating a state of hyper-inflation. After a few years that ended and things were OK again, until…
In 1929, America slid into recession. Mormon Republican Senator Reed Smoot decided to do something to save the country’s jobs, lost, he insisted, because too many countries were selling too many goods in the United States and undermining the lives of honest, hard-working, ordinary folk. Higher tariffs and duties, he promised, would protect those jobs. As chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and working with Congressman Willis C Hawley, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, he produced the Tariff Act, which became law in June 1930 when President Heaver Hoover (apologies), a conservative Republican millionaire, signed the bill (the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill or Tariff Act of 1930), substantially raising US tariffs on 890 products. At first the bill was only to raise tariffs on some agricultural products, but special interests piled on. Before it reached President Hoover’s desk it called for one of the largest tariff increases in US history. The Act hiked tariffs on more than 20,000 dutiable goods; duties on some items quadrupled.
Other countries retaliated. World trade shrank enormously, by the end of 1934 down 66% from 1929. The US had entered the Great Depression; unemployment was 24%. Over 5000 banks failed, hundreds of thousands were homeless and economic woes spread around the world. Other countries weren’t hit as bad; US unemployment rate increased 600%, while unemployment in in France and Germany rose 200% and in Great Britain 130%. After the Crash, industrial production dropped 46% in the US, 40% in Germany, 30% in France and 16% in Britain; few developed nations were spared economic misery. Wheat price dropped 50%, but between 1929 and 1933 hundreds in the US starved to death. The jobless often became homeless, with over a million evicted. In 1932 there were 23,000 suicides in the US.
The Great Depression struck Germany hard; it was among the countries most severely affected by the Great Depression because its recovery and revitalization of major industries was financed by borrowing from other countries. Hyper-inflation had ended in ‘23, but another economic downturn started in the last months of 1927. The biggest problem was war reparations - which reduced investment possibilities and forced government to implement rigid austerity. The reparations payments were, with strange rationality, called off in at the Lausanne Conference of 1932, but foreign lending, especially by New York banks, had ceased soon after the Crash. German unemployment again soared, especially in larger cities, fueling extremism and violence on the far right and far left. The second largest German bank, the Danat-Bank, failed; the failure of several major banks in Germany and Austria in 1931 worsened a worldwide banking crisis.
Germans hadn’t been so much reliant on exports as they were on American loans, which had propped up their economy since 1924. US financiers began to call in loans; the German economy that had grown rapidly for five years wasn’t equipped for this retraction of capital. Then the US, the largest purchaser of German industrial exports, put up those tariff barriers - purportedly to protect its own companies... which soon couldn't sell anything because of Depression, unemployment, etc... German industrialists lost access to US markets and found credit almost impossible to obtain, so its industrial companies and factories either closed or shrank dramatically. By 1932 German industrial production was at 58% of 1928 levels. By the end of 1929 1.5 million Germans were out of work and a year later that had doubled. By early 1933 unemployment in Germany was 6 million.
There were few shortages of food, but millions of Germans found themselves without the means to obtain it. Thousands of children died of malnutrition and hunger-related diseases. German industrial workers in 1928 had been the best-paid blue-collar workers in Europe but were now idle. People shared cigarette butts found in gutters. Even white-collar workers and the professional classes became unemployed.
Government became unstable, Hitler came to power, and by July 1935 almost 17 million Germans had new jobs. They weren’t well paid, but were provided a living wage. In four years, Nazi Germany changed a defeated nation with a bankrupt economy into full employment with the strongest economy and biggest military in Europe. Then the relatively minor, almost normal personal problems of Adolph Hitler became magnified and exasperated by extreme drug usage.
Amphetamine, first synthesized in 1887 in Germany, had no known medical use until late 1933, when pharmaceutical giant Smith, Kline and French (SKF) began selling it as a decongestant inhaler called Benzedrine. By the mid-1930s, youths looking for a cheap high were taking the amphetamine strips out of the inhalers to swallow.
Methamphetamine, discovered in 1919 in Japan, was more powerful, and its crystalline powder was ideal for injection. Psychiatrists and neurologists quickly began accepting amphetamines as a treatment for minor neurotic depression; some believed the drug could play a role in adjusting hormonal balance in the central nervous system by creating an amplified adrenergic stimulation which would promote activity in those who were otherwise depressed.
Many Nazi leaders used methamphetamine - and also other powerful drugs. World War II leaders on both sides distributed methamphetamine to soldiers.
Clearly his usage started earlier, but from 1942, Hitler received daily injections of methamphetamine from his personal physician, Dr Theodor Morell. Hitler also took Eukodal, the synthetic opiate oxycodone, intravenously. Morell gave him 80 drugs a day, including amphetamines, cocaine and morphine. The medical records purportedly also show bull semen and rat poison (which I assume means strychnine - purportedly used to enhance the effects of LSD, but this now seems debunked, so that claim merely sounds like incendiary sensationalism). I have not read in what form, how administered or any other details. Somehow I much doubt it was over-the-counter rat pellets.
One proposed explanation is syphilis. It can lead to megalomania, among other difficulties. Easy for me to think of someone significantly on the world stage, now, who might also have syphilitic megalomania...
Whatever.
Sounds like enough drugs to render fear of consequences meaningless, and also to bring on the blow-back of unintended consequences, to me.

But some seem to think that after a century, it's time to do the tariff thing all ever again. Except maybe this time the main drug is Adderall , a combination medication containing four salts of amphetamine, purportedly effective in treating the symptoms of ADHD and narcolepsy. In therapeutic doses, Adderall is said to cause emotional and cognitive effects such as euphoria, change in desire for sex, increased wakefulness, and improved cognitive control. Be that as it may, I don’t know if anyone actually snorts it… But I note with interest that sufferers of syphilitic megalomania after a couple of decades tend to descend into GPI - 'general paralysis of the insane' ... which might well explain the reticence of some important US Democrat 'leaders' to hurry up and do what seems so painfully necessary.
But hey, nevermind. The Donald uses Neuro-24, a "genius pill" which " improves mental functions such as cognition, memory, intelligence, motivation, attention, concentration and therefore happiness and success." But wait, there's more! You can use it too - hey, Kanye West does!