The Twentieth Century West

Five revolutions made the West in the modern world. We will look at the completion of the industrial revolution and the current onset of the technological revolution (which is destroying minds, manners, and jobs); the horror of peoples’ wars and nuclear weapons; a world depression and the threat of a recurrence of economic collapse; the popular sterility of modernism in the arts apart from jazz; the claimed death of God, the complete absence of any alternative, and the humiliation of a world church; the rise of professional sport as a business and as the new opium of the masses; the appalling moral collapse of three entirely ‘civilized’ nations (Italy, Germany, and Spain); the depravity of three of the most evil people in history (Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler – Mao is outside our field); the way that Einstein and computers can leave us feeling powerless in a world that we now have to take on trust; wins and losses on racism; the challenges of what will be the dominant religion, Islam, the faith of the East, and what will be the strongest economic power, China; the mediocrity and possible seizing up of democracy; the extinction of the aristocracy, and the movement of wealth from land to capital; the growing divide between rich and poor; and what some see as the closing of the western mind, the emptiness of its art, and the failure of its pillars and institutions.
We shall look at these questions while looking at the lives of Kaiser Wilhelm, Henrik Ibsen, Henry Ford, Lloyd George, Edith Cavell, Albert Einstein, James Joyce, John Maynard Keynes, Sigmund Freud, Joseph Stalin, Louis Armstrong, Francisco Franco, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Pablo Picasso Charles de Gaulle, Harry Truman, Walt Disney, Elvis Presley, John Kennedy, Maria Callas, Muhammad Ali, Margaret Thatcher, Silvio Berlusconi, Bill Gates, and Angela Merkel. The American weighting is not surprising in what we now call the American century. We shall additionally look separately at the following issues: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; Two Economic Crashes; The Rule of Law and Racism; The Technological Revolution; Annihilation; and, The Death of God, Sport, and Manners?
The book is 95,000 words. It is fully annotated.
This is volume 5 in A History of the West.