2898316pmaoa by the 1940s competitive nationalisms

Q&@
IN EUROPE
STOOD IMPLICATED IN THE MOST BARBARIC WARS
AND CRIMES AGAINST RELIGIOUS AND ETHNIC MINORITIES WITNESSED IN HUMAN HISTORY.

It was only after the Second World War that European countries were forced, largely by American economic & military power,
to imagine less antagonistic political and economic relations, which eventually resulted in decolonisation and the European Union.

Yet only on the rarest of occasions in recent decades has it been acknowledged that the history of modernization is largely one of utter carnage & bedlam rather than peaceful convergence, and that the politics of violence, hysteria and despair was by no means unique to Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy or Communist Russia.

Europe's exceptional post-1945 experience of sustained economic growth with social democracy helped obscure deeper disruptions and longer traumas. The sanitized histories celebrating how the Enlightenment or Great Britain or the West made the modern world put the two world wars in a separate, quarantined box, and isolated Stalinism, Fascism & Nazism within the mainstream of European history as monstrous aberrations.

'Totalitarianism' with its tens of millions of victims was identified as a malevolent reaction to a benevolent Enlightenment tradition
of rationalism, humanism, universalism & liberal democracy - a tradition seen as an unproblematic norm.
It was clearly too disconcerting to acknowledge that totalitarian politics crystallized the ideological
currents (scientific racism, jingoistic nationalism, imperialism, technicism,
aesthecized politics, Utopianism, social engineering &
the violent struggle for existence)
flowing through all of
Europe in the
late 19th
century.
17 aug 2017 - bewerkt op 20 aug 2017 - meld ongepast verhaal
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