Posted on 03/30/2009 11:19:47 AM PDT by NavySEAL F-16
IN 1934, the journalist Johannes Steel wrote a remarkably prescient book, “The Second World War,” which described the social psychology that laid the groundwork for global tragedy.
Mr. Steel was trying to peer into people’s minds and infer their actual world views and motivations — in part by examining prewar cycles of social provocation in Germany and Japan and Italy. His timing about the war was wrong — he expected it to start in 1935, not 1939 — but he was correct about many fundamentals. Yet his early readers were often skeptical and blithely assumed that there would be no war.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
FTA:
Mr. Summers told a fictional but vivid story of a big financial crisis, complete with examples of specific events and how people might react to them. Seeing it concretized as an imaginary history, and placed in the near future — in just two years, in 1991 — made it seem more real and familiar.
He said that this crisis would be preceded by an enormous stock market boom, bringing the Dow to the unimagined high of 5,400 by October 1991. (The Dow was at 2,600 on the day of the conference; 5,400 would be 13,000 today if scaled up in proportion to gross domestic product.)
Just watched H. G. Wells Things To Come over the weekend, he predicted the war and the socilaism that would eventually follow.
Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, Germany milatarized the Rhineland in 1936 and Japan invaded China in 1937, so Steel wasn’t really far off.
Steel underestimated the fecklessness of the French, British, and Russians.
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