'Surprisingly serious consideration' was given to simply refusing the terms and letting the Allies invade, in the hopes that justice would later be done in the court of world opinion.
An interestingly similar approach to Lenin's proposal back in early 1918 (and chapter 6)...
Looking at the general level of behavior by human leaders makes me think it is surprising that we haven't managed to wipe ourselves out yet. Omens for the future look bad.
[So, to preserve its world-saving moral capital, America will: screw over its allies; consort with its enemy; impoverish Europeans so that much richer Americans can have tax cuts; and actively sabotage any policies that would demonstrate any generosity or magnanimity or even common sense. I don't get these people. It's one thing to be a usurer and an asshole; greed I understand. But being a usurer and expecting people to admire you for it is something else entirely.]
Not quite "same as it ever was", but not far off.
That is of course right, but I can also understand how maybe right after WWI wasn't the time when European calls for magnanimity and common sense would have been most persuasive.
Fair point, but that doesn't justify the self-righteousness, and America found room for that much magnanimity and more after WWII.
If anyone's interested there's a lecture series by Tooze online. Part 1 and part 2 cover basically the same stuff as Deluge (but much faster) and part 3 is entirely different, about peasant agriculture and agronomic development theory and stuff. All three have interesting Q & A sessions at the end.
Yes. But still, I don't see how they're being a 'moral' reserve. A reserve of power, sure.
Wilson was an asshole. I'm not disputing that. I just think that if it weren't Wilson, you'd get less moralizing but about the same amount of money.
I don't know. Keynes wasn't a voice in the wilderness, and Wall Street agreed with him. Don't know what the Republican leadership was saying at the time though.
This was one where even with all the detail Tooze gives, I don't feel qualified to wonder about what else might have happened differently. I do find it amazing how long it all took and wonder what life felt like in the interim.
11.1 Really? Maybe you're right, humility is called for. But alt-hist is more fun. And 11 last is interesting.
More that there are too many options and everything was in play than that I completely lack imagination, I mean. There was just SO MUCH.
True that. That was one of Tooze's core claims back in the introduction: there were problems of unprecedented complexity and interconnectedness. (I didn't mean to imply you lack imagination; more that you were selling yourself short.)
I forget, did Graeber go into the reparations write-down issue? It seems tailor-made for his thesis.
I guess I mean debt write-down / reparations restraint.
Haven't read Graeber. Recommended?
1 "'Surprisingly serious consideration' was given to simply refusing the terms and letting the Allies invade"
My impression from other works on the topic is that this was never serious, but rather venting about the terms of the treaty, and except for a few extremists (in government and out) not considered a serious option at all. The Entente had some large number of divisions on alert, ready to invade if the Germans had refused to sign, and the Germans temporized until about half an hour before the deadline expired. The Prime Minister(?) basically said (probably remembering what Germany itself had done in Russia during and after the Brest-Litovsk walkout by the Bolsheviks) that the enemy would destroy them utterly.
More than anything else it was people positioning themselves for the future stab-in-the-back myth, although to be fair some of them were just being assholes.
19 last: something Tooze says
In an important concession, which was henceforth to define those who accepted the basic parameters of democratic politics in the Weimar Republic, the Democrats and at least some of the Nationalists gave an assurance to their colleagues that despite their differences, they would respect the patriotic motives of those who took responsibility for signing the peaceimplies the backstabbing mythmakers were the ones never reconciled to democracy in Germany.
17: I'd say worthwhile (if you have the patience for overlong material), though thesis sometimes obscure, especially in recent history. Lots of useful new facts and/or spin on ancient and early modern history.