The Great War #2

The Great War #2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PHpI2Abvjw

RELEVANCY

It’s holiday entertaining time, which means that aside from the usual hurdles - seating charts as thorny as the Congress of Vienna, obscure dietary preferences – home cooks are wrestling with dishes they might make once a year and recipes that must be doubled or tripled to feed a crowd.

The Wall Street Journal, 11/27/10, p A2

The miserable state of affairs in the Arab world is often seen here as the detritus of Sykes-Picot, the 1916 agreement that was the highlight of Britain’s and France’s deceitful machinations to divvy up the spoils of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. They drew borders that forged only more divisions (Lebanon), imposed monarchs where their families had no roots (Jordan and Iraq) and created a climate of conspiracy in a region where conspiracies are still hatched. The creation of Israel followed, helping give rise to Arab national-security states that claimed legitimacy through their conflict with it.

New York Times, Jan 16, 2011,Week in Review, p3

WORLD War I

• Origins and Responsibility

• Conduct of War

• Significance of War & Peace Conference

Administrative “Stuff”

E-Mail: w-tousey@illinois.edu

Course materials online:www.olli.illinois.edu/ then follow prompts: “Courses”, “Course Downloads”, “Fall 2014 Courses” ,”World War I”

-for OLLI 2, (Sept 16) – “Listening to the Past” (bring to class)

-for OLLI 4, (Sept 30)- Paul Schroeder, “The Risks of Victory”

CLUE (1ST edition 1914)

• “Gavrilio Princip in Sarajevo with a pistol.”

19th CENTURY as CONTEXT(today)

• Congress of Vienna

• 19th C Statesmanship

• Science, Enlightenment & Progress

• The Confident 19th C

Congress of Vienna

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ET9w6a00Iuk

Europe in 1815

Prince Metternich

Charge of the Light Brigade

Camillo Cavour

Italian Unification

Giuseppe Garibaldi

Otto von Bismarck

Bismarck writing to fellow student concerning his financial support (1833)

• There have been uncomfortable scenes with the Old Man, who absolutely refuses to pay my debts. This puts me into a misanthropic mood…The deficit is not so bad because I have huge credit, which allows me to live in a slovenly way. The consequence is that I look sick and pale which the old man will, of course ascribe, when I go home for Christmas, to a lack of means of subsistence; then I will make a scene and say to him I would rather be a Mohammedan than suffer hunger any longer, and that will solve the problem.

Bismarck on leaving the Civil Service:

• “The Prussian official is like a member of an orchestra, but I want to play only the music which I myself like, or no music at all.”

» Erich Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire,(1968),14.

Unification of Germany 1862-1871

Otto von Bismarck

The great questions of the day will not be decided by speeches and the resolutions of majorities – that was the great mistake from 1848 to 1849 – but by iron and blood.[from speech to Prussian Parliament, Sept 1862]

Politics are not a science based on logic; they are the capacity of always choosing at each instant, in constantly changing situations, the least harmful, the most useful.

A statesman cannot create anything by himself. He must wait and listen until he hears the steps of God sounding through events; then leap up and grasp the hem of his garment.

I wanted it like this and everything happened quite differently. I’m content when I can see where the Lord wishes to go and can stumble after him.A.J. P. Taylor, Bismarck, pp 56, 115

Western Weltanschauung-Renaissance, Humanism, Arts, Reformation, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, Political Revolution, Industrialization, 19th C Liberalism,

Progress=

CONFIDENCE

Isaiah Berlin on Machiavelli

The moral ideal for which he thinks no sacrifice too great – the welfare of the patria – is for him the highest form of social existence attainable by man…the ideal before his eyes is a shining vision of Florence or of Italy.

If you object to the political methods recommended because they seem to you morally detestable…Machiavelli has no answer, no argument….In other words you can opt out of the public world, but in that case he has nothing to say to you, for it is to the public world , and to the men in it that he addresses himself.

The citizens must be poor, militarized, honest and obedient; if they lead Christian lives they will accept too uncomplainingly the rule of mere bullies and scoundrels. No sound republic can be built of such materials as these.

Machiavelli’s values are not Christian but they are moral values….

Berlin, Against the Current, (London, 1979) p56-7

The Bury Bible – 1135 AD

Master Bertram’s Alterpiece -1379

Michelangelo’s David 1501

Hegel’s Dialectic

Thesis (Obama’s politics)

> New Thesis ( Deadlock)

Antithesis (Tea Party politics)

Marxist Dialectic

Feudalism

>Bourgeoisie

Middle Class >Classless State

Proletariat

The Confident 19th C

The fact that there has been no major war for a century and that we see continued progress in all walks of life provides

evidence that we (19th C citizens) wisely control our destiny.