Stock Market Crash-1929
"Anyone who thinks there's safety in numbers hasn't
looked at the stock market pages." - Irene Peter
William H. Hall- Crimean War
Indian soldiers in the uniform of the Canadian Expeditionary Force
This was written by the sister of one of my very best friends....
CAMADOAM William Hall, V.C.: The Naval Veteran (2:44 min.)
William Hall, V.C. was born in Summerville and was the first member of
the Navy from British North America to receive the Victoria Cross, the
most prestigious of military medals. William received the medal for a
heroic rescue that he participated in during the Indian Uprising of
1758. The rescue mission captured the imagination of the Victorian
public: the mission was known to every school boy in the Empire. While
initially buried without military honours in an unmarked grave, William
was later buried beneath a stone cairn on the lawn of the Baptist Church
in Hantsport, Hants Co..
CANADA'S BEST KEPT SECRET-
The Black Battalion- Canada
Juanita Pleasant Wilbur of Kentville, Nova Scotia, Canada
They came two hundred to answer the call
But only to fall
Their way was not paved
For a country they wanted to save
The battle cry went out
But these men were ousted
Their colour was wrong
Their courage strong
From battle line to battle line they went
But no one wanted them
A checker-board army they were called
Their courage strong they still persisted
For the right to fight for a country they loved
For the right to live as all men
Free and strong
The march was on, their will was strong
From place to place they went
Rejected by all, their cry was heard
Let us do our best
Don't let us be less
Give us a chance to build a life for our children
Let us make our mark
Give us a chance to stand proud and free
Rejected and tired of waiting
They finally saw the light
You're on a flight
Over-seas you're bound
At last you found your place
A checker-board army has been born
A remembrance to my Grand-dad, Private Wallace James Pleasant and all
the black men who fought and became know as Canada's best kept secret.
We love you all so much.... to my Fannie (Clements) Brothers and to my Debbie Pleasant-Joseph ..... love you all so much....
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BLOGSPOT:
F**KING
BANKS/IMF/Corporate-Political/UN greed caused FINANCIAL CRASH- and 2day.... we
are still there and close 2 a billion are unemployed and 4.3 billion eat dirt 4
breakfast- WTF???-15 million Canadians/101 million Americans/8million
Brits/80Million Muslims/32million europeans/14 million Africans etc.-
CHEATERS/CHEATERS- August 27 updates
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BLOGGED- WORDPRESS- WORDPRESS
GETCHA CANADA ON FOLKS- check out these old photos- 1858 - 1935 Canada
INCREDIBLE CANADIAN HISTORY- Old Photographs of Canada from 1858-1935 The photographs from the Notman Photographics Archives
https://nova0000scotia.wordpress.com/2015/02/14/incredible-canadian-history-old-photographs-of-canada-from-1858-1935-the-photographs-from-the-notman-photographics-archives/
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CANADA
Bank of Nova Scotia Note
USA CAUSED THE GREAT DEPRESSION WITH THEIR GREED 1930s... and now creating another.... and the world suffered and will.... Canada's story - and that's why Unemployment Insurance Canada was formed/WHAT GOOD IS DEMOCRACY CANADA- when no-one bothers 2 go out and vote Canada?
THE DEPRESSION- cause by USA Greed....
World trade
The depression originated in the United States, and can
be dated to the the Stock Market crash of October 1929. Given the close
economic links with the much larger neighbor, the collapse quickly affected
Canada. The Prairies and Maritimes were hardest hit, along with mining areas
and heavy industry areas of Ontario and Quebec. Massive lay-offs occurred; some
smaller companies went into bankruptcy and closed operations.
Canada did have some advantages over other countries,
especially its stable bank system that had no failures during the entire
depression, compared to over 9,000 small banks that collapsed in the United
States.
Canada was hurt so badly because of its reliance on wheat
and other commodities, whose prices fell by over 50% and because of the
importance of international trade. In the 1920s about 25% of the Canadian Gross
National Product was derived from exports. The first reaction of the U.S. was
to raise tariff via the Smoot-Hawley
Tariff Act, passed into law June 17, 1930. This hurt the Canadian economy
more than most other countries in the world, and Canada retaliated by raising
its own rates on American imports and by switching business to the Empire.
The British introduction of trade protectionism and a
system of Commonwealth preference during the winter of 1931-32 helped Canada
and Australia avoid external default on their public debt. The onset of the
depression created critical balance of payment deficits, and it was largely the
extension of imperial protection by Britain that gave Australia and Canada the
opportunity to increase their exports to the British market. By 1938 Britain
was importing more than twice the 1929 volume of products from Australia, while
the value of products shipped from Canada more than doubled, despite the
dramatic drop in prices. Thus, the British market played a vital role in
helping Canada and Australia stabilize their balance of payments in the
immensely difficult economic conditions of the 1930s.[1]
---------------
USA
CAUSED THE GREAT DEPRESSION WITH THEIR GREED.... and the world suffered....
Canada's story - and that's why Unemployment Insurance Canada was formed.
PHOTOS
the Canadian Railways Terminal, Halifax, Nova Scotia, circa 1920-1930
---------------
DEPRESSION
IN CANADA- 1920-45
Great Depression of Canada
This homepage will inform you of the effects that the Great Depression had on the country of Canada and its people. It covers many areas of the Depression and the whole duration of time that it lasted.
Throughout the years of 1929 to 1939, there was a world wide Depression and Canada was one of the worst affected countries. Financially and economically the country began to collapse regardless of what was done by political power.
The Causes Of The Depression
Effects
How Provinces Were Effected
How Industry and Individuals Were Affected
Letters to Bennett
How The Population Was Effected
Groups and Expansions
Bank Of Canada and Canadian Radio Broadcasting Corporation
Relief Camps
Trekkers
Political Role
Richard Bennett and Mackenzie King
THE CAUSE OF THE DEPRESSION
EFFECTS
How The Provinces Were Effected
How The Individual and Industry Was Effected
LETTERS TO BENNETT
I have applied for every position that I heard about but there were always so many girls who applied that it was impossible to get work... First I ate three very light meals a day; then two and then one. During the past two weeks I have eaten only toast and a drunk a cup of tea every other day.
Day after day I pass a delicatessen and the food in the window look oh, so good! So tempting and I'm so hungry!...The stamp which carries this letter to you will represent the last three cents I have in the world, yet before I will stoop to dishonour my family, my character or my God, I will drown myself in.
Hamilton, Ontario
Dear Mr.Bennett: I suppose I am silly to write this letter but I haven't anyone else to write to...we are just one of many on relief and trying to keep our place without being starved out...trying to get a start without and money and 5 children, all small... I am sure we can make a go of this place...if we could just manage until next fall. Just had 70 Acres in last year and the dry spell just caught it right along with the grasshoppers.
Please help me by standing me some money and will send you my engagement ring and wedding ring as security...My two rings cost over $100 over 15 years ago but what good are they when the flour is nearly all done and there isn't much to eat in the house...
Burton, Alberta
Dear Sir: I wish to give my opinion of relief. First it is a shame for a strong man to ask for relief in this country... The best thing that can happen to a young man is to toss him overboard and compel him to sink or swim, in all my acquaintance I have never known one to drown who was worth saving...It takes hardship to make real men and women so cut out of relief...There are some people in this country who are in hard circumstances, but I can safely say there is no one having hardship that we pioneers had 28 or 30 years ago.
Blaine Lake, Saskatchewan
The previous letters are taken from Towards Tomorrow; Canada in a Changing World; History
How The Population Was Effected
GROUPS AND EXPANSIONS INTRODUCED TO CANADA
Bank Of Canada and Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission
Relief Camps
Through 1932, the Relief Camp Workers Union
(RCWU)was formed under the direction of Arthur Evans, a skilled carpenter, miner
and communist labour organizer. The RCWU grew into a strong, disciplined democratic
organization, focusing on the hopes and energy of the unemployed. In the spring
of 1935, RCWU went on strike. They filled the streets of Vancouver shouting
"Work & wages" and "When Do We Eat?". They demanded real work wages, better
food, clothing and shelter, and an end to military discipline. Despite the overwhelming
public support of "our boys", the federal government refused to negotiation
with strikers. After this, the strikers voted to take their grievances to Parliament
Hill in Ottawa.
Trekkers
HOW POLITICS PLAYED A ROLE
Richard Bennett and Mackenzie King in Power
Richard Bennett
Bennett was an "abrupt, headstrong, millionaire lawyer from Calgary"3 who dramatized King's slip as an example of tired cynicism and he accused the liberals of being unwilling and incapable of dealing with the pressures of the Depression. To get the people on his side, Bennett promised work, to promote the strengthening of Canada's industry behind tariff walls, and to "blast (Canada's) way into the markets of the world."
Bennett's first plan was to raise tariffs and in theory this would protect manufactures. He also believed this action would convince other nations to lower tariffs on Canadian goods. Unfortunately the side effects of his plan produced more damage then good. It did nothing to increase exports and in some cases increased export's costs, thereby reducing business. While the high tariffs might protect the domestic market the market was no sufficiently large enough to consume enough manufactured goods and therefore gave no longer significant life to the dyeing economy of Canada. In 1933 he was called the Nadir of Depression and became the but of endless jokes. Cars that were having to be towed by horses because gasoline could not be afforded were called "Bennett Buggies".
Bennett's other plan to hopefully get the economy on an up rise again was to start the New Policy in 1935 which was taken off the idea of the American New Deal. It was to insure unemployment insurance, a reduced workweek, and minimum wage, industrial codes and a permanent economic planning.
This policy didn't work and could not save the Conservatives or Bennett's place in politics. Many of the voters turned to three small parties: the Reconstruction party, which was a Conservative offshoot; the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, which was a socialist group; and the Social Credit Party, which was a right-winged radical movement in Alberta. Almost by default King and the Liberals won the election of 1935 and were in power again. Bennett continued ineffectively as an opposition leader until 1938 when he abandoned Canada to England.
Mackenzie King
King
dropped the new deal and declared it unconstitutional in 1937 and
instead made the new Reciprocity Treaty with the United States. He
converted the radio commission to The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
and fully nationalized the Bank of Canada. Finally he fended off
provincial demands for more money to support relief programs for the
unemployed.
FOOT NOTES
3. Lower, Arthur, J; Canada An Outline Of History; Page 163
BIBLIOGRAPHY
3. J.Arthur Lower; Canada An Outline of History; Canada; Ryerson Press, 1996
4. Microsoft Encarta; The Depression; Canada; 1994
5. Morton, Desmond; A Short History of Canada; Toronto, Ontario; McLelland and Stewart Inc.; 1996
6. Morton, Desmond; Canada In A Changing World-History; Canada; Harcourt Brace & Company Canada, Ltd.; 1988 7. website: http://www.workingtv.com/oto/otohome.html
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BLOGGED:
CANADA
MILITARY NEWS: July 2 2014- Edward Snowden hero/War and bankruptcy- NATO MUST
DIE OUT- they betray our troops coming home with mental health issues and
wounded- UN $$$trillions in waste and feeding gun and war supplies whilst
humanity starves and suffers/FLASHBOYS- the hijacking of stocks by cheaters in
the play money game/ WWI- War Bonds created the huge travesty of Great
Depression... and now we are in another one/Canada News/Afghanisan Abdullah
rightful winner/F**king Paedophiles/Canada Day/Youth Homelessness and abuse
/Mental Health Stigma challenge/news tidbits/RICH WHITE MEN USA/EU/AUSSIELAND-
and their fracking and ruination of our planet- GET OUT OF UKRAINE stop
creating a war there- shame on u/FRACKING/Children of the Secret- One Billion
Rising-No more excuses
----------------
BLOGGED:
NATO
CAUGHT IN BULLSHIT AND BEANS-UKRAINE-Edward Snowden Love- Der Spiegel-
"Prior to the Ukraine crisis, there were many asking what purpose NATO
would serve once the alliance's troops had withdrawn from Afghanistan"-
ALL THOSE $$$ SALARIES 4 THE BIGWIGS? Shame on the lot o ya-/APRIL 9 DAILY
UPDATES- Germans Poll they like their Russian Brothers and Sisters- many people
in West want nations 2 concentrate on their own nations
WW1-
THE GREAT WAR- World War I- and the ruination of banking
globally...inciting... The Great Depression-
WAR BONDS
Thus,
the Great Depression was born in the extraordinary but unsustainable boom of
1914-1929 that was, in turn, an artificial and bloated project of the warfare
and central banking branches of the state, not the free market. Nominal GDP,
which had been deformed and bloated to $103 billion by 1929, contracted
massively, dropping to only $56 billion by 1933.
Crucially,
the overwhelming portion of this unprecedented contraction was in exports,
inventories, fixed plant and durable goods—the very sectors that had been
artificially hyped. These components declined by $33 billion during the four
year contraction and accounted for fully 70 percent of the entire drop in
nominal GDP.
So
there was no mysterious loss of that Keynesian economic ether called “aggregate
demand”, but only the inevitable shrinkage of a state induced boom. It was not
the depression bottom of 1933 that was too low, but the wartime debt and
speculation bloated peak in 1929 that had been unsustainably too high.
Sarajevo
Is The Fulcrum Of Modern History: The Great War And Its Terrible Aftermath
/users/tyler-durdenSubmitted
by Tyler Durden on 06/28/2014
Submitted
by David Stockman of Contra Corner blog,
One
hundred years ago today the world was shook loose of its moorings. Every school
boy knows that the assassination of the archduke of Austria at Sarajevo was the
trigger that incited the bloody, destructive conflagration of the world’s
nations known as the Great War. But this senseless eruption of unprecedented
industrial state violence did not end with the armistice four years later.
In
fact, 1914 is the fulcrum of modern history. It is the year the Fed opened-up
for business just as the carnage in northern France closed-down the prior
magnificent half-century era of liberal internationalism and honest gold-backed
money. So it was the Great War’s terrible aftermath - a century of drift toward
statism, militarism and fiat money - that was actually triggered by the events
at Sarajevo.
Unfortunately,
modern historiography wants to keep the Great War sequestered in a four-year
span of archival curiosities about battles, mustard gas and monuments to the
fallen. But the opposite historiography is more nearly the truth. The assassins
at Sarajevo triggered the very warp and woof of the hundred years which followed.
The
Great War was self-evidently an epochal calamity, especially for the 20 million
combatants and civilians who perished for no reason that is discernible in any
fair reading of history, or even unfair one. Yet the far greater calamity is
that Europe’s senseless fratricide of 1914-1918 gave birth to all the great
evils of the 20th century— the Great Depression, totalitarian genocides,
Keynesian economics, permanent warfare states, rampaging central banks and the
exceptionalist-rooted follies of America’s global imperialism.
Indeed,
in Old Testament fashion, one begat the next and the next and still the next.
This chain of calamity originated in the Great War’s destruction of sound
money, that is, in the post-war demise of the pound sterling which previously
had not experienced a peacetime change in its gold content for nearly two
hundred years.
Not
unreasonably, the world’s financial system had become anchored on the London
money markets where the other currencies traded at fixed exchange rates to the
rock steady pound sterling—which, in turn, meant that prices and wages
throughout Europe were expressed in common money and tended toward transparency
and equilibrium.
This
liberal international economic order—that is, honest money, relatively free
trade, rising international capital flows and rapidly growing global economic
integration—-resulted in a 40-year span between 1870 and 1914 of rising living
standards, stable prices, massive capital investment and prolific technological
progress that was never equaled—either before or since.
During
intervals of war, of course, 19th century governments had usually suspended
gold convertibility and open trade in the heat of combat. But when the cannons
fell silent, they had also endured the trauma of post-war depression until
wartime debts had been liquidated and inflationary currency expedients had been
wrung out of the circulation. This was called “resumption” and restoring
convertibility at the peacetime parities was the great challenge of post-war
normalizations.
The
Great War, however, involved a scale of total industrial mobilization and
financial mayhem that was unlike any that had gone before. In the case of Great
Britain, for example, its national debt increased 14-fold, its price level
doubled, its capital stock was depleted, most off-shore investments were
liquidated and universal wartime conscription left it with a massive overhang
of human and financial liabilities.
Yet
England was the least devastated. In France, the price level inflated by 300
percent, its extensive Russian investments were confiscated by the Bolsheviks
and its debts in New York and London catapulted to more than 100 percent of
GDP.
Among
the defeated powers, currencies emerged nearly worthless with the German mark
at five cents on the pre-war dollar, while wartime debts—especially after the
Carthaginian peace of Versailles—–soared to crushing, unrepayable heights.
In
short, the bow-wave of debt, currency inflation and financial disorder from the
Great War was so immense and unprecedented that the classical project of
post-war liquidation and “resumption” of convertibility was destined to fail.
In fact, the 1920s were a grinding, sometimes inspired but eventually failed
struggle to resume the international gold standard, fixed parities, open world
trade and unrestricted international capital flows.
Only
in the final demise of these efforts after 1929 did the Great Depression, which
had been lurking all along in the post-war shadows, come bounding onto the
stage of history.
America’s
Needless Intervention In The Great War And The Ensuing Chain of 20th Century
Calamities
The
Great Depression’s tardy, thoroughly misunderstood and deeply traumatic arrival
happened compliments of the United States. In the first place, America’s wholly
unwarranted intervention in April 1917 prolonged the slaughter, doubled the
financial due bill and generated a cockamamie peace, giving rise to
totalitarianism among the defeated powers and Keynesianism among the victors.
Choose your poison.
Even
conventional historians like Niall Ferguson admit as much. Had Woodrow Wilson
not misled America on a messianic crusade, the Great War would have ended in
mutual exhaustion in 1917 and both sides would have gone home battered and
bankrupt but no danger to the rest of mankind. Indeed, absent Wilson’s crusade
there would have been no allied victory, no punitive peace, and no war
reparations; nor would there have been a Leninist coup in Petrograd or Stalin’s
barbaric regime.
Likewise,
Churchill’s starvation blockade would not have devastated post-Armistice
Germany, nor would there have been the humiliating signing of the war guilt
clause by German officials at Versailles. And the subsequent financial chaos of
1919-1923 would not have happened either—-meaning no “stab in the back” myth,
no Hitler, no Nazi dystopia, no Munich, no Sudetenland and Danzig corridor
crises, no British war to save Poland, no final solution and holocaust, no
global war against Germany and Japan and no incineration of 200,000 civilians
at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Nor
would there have followed a Cold War with the Soviets or CIA sponsored coups
and assassinations in Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Brazil, Chile and the Congo,
to name a few. Surely there would have been no CIA plot to assassinate Castro,
or Russian missiles in Cuba or a crisis that took the world to the brink of
annihilation. There would have been no Dulles brothers, no domino theory and no
Vietnam slaughter, either.
Nor
would we have launched Charlie Wilson’s War to arouse the mujahedeen and train
the future al Qaeda. Likewise, there would have been no shah and his Savak
terror, no Khomeini-led Islamic counter-revolution, no US aid to enable
Saddam’s gas attacks on Iranian boy soldiers in the 1980s.
Nor
would there have been an American invasion of Arabia in 1991 to stop our
erstwhile ally Hussein from looting the equally contemptible Emir of Kuwait’s
ill-gotten oil plunder—or, alas, the horrific 9/11 blowback a decade later.
Most
surely, the axis-of-evil—-that is, the Washington-based Cheney-Rumsfeld-neocon
axis—- would not have arisen, nor would it have foisted a $1 trillion Warfare
State budget on 21st century America.
The
1914-1929 Boom Was An Artifact of War And Central Banking
A
second crucial point is that the Great War enabled the already rising American
economy to boom and bloat in an entirely artificial and unsustainable manner
for the better part of 15 years. The exigencies of war finance also transformed
the nascent Federal Reserve into an incipient central banking monster in a
manner wholly opposite to the intentions of its great legislative architect—the
incomparable Carter Glass of Virginia.
During
the Great War America became the granary and arsenal to the European
Allies—-triggering an eruption of domestic investment and production that
transformed the nation into a massive global creditor and powerhouse exporter
virtually overnight.
American
farm exports quadrupled, farm income surged from $3 billion to $9 billion, land
prices soared, country banks proliferated like locusts and the same was true of
industry. Steel production, for example, rose from 30 million tons annually to
nearly 50 million tons during the war.
Altogether,
in six short years $40 billion of money GDP became $92 billion in 1920—a
sizzling 15 percent annual rate of gain.
Needless
to say, these fantastic figures reflected an inflationary, war-swollen
economy—-a phenomena that prudent finance men of the age knew was wholly
artificial and destined for a thumping post-war depression. This was especially
so because America had loaned the Allies massive amounts of money to purchase
grain, pork, wool, steel, munitions and ships. This transfer amounted to nearly
15 percent of GDP or $2 trillion equivalent in today’s economy, but it also
amounted to a form of vendor finance that was destined to vanish at war’s end.
Carter
Glass’ Bankers’ Bank: The Antithesis Of Monetary Central Planning
As it
happened, the nation did experience a brief but deep recession in 1920, but
this did not represent a thorough-going end-of-war “de-tox” of the historical
variety. The reason is that America’s newly erected Warfare State had hijacked
Carter Glass “banker’s bank” to finance Wilson’s crusade.
Here’s
the crucial background: When Congress acted on Christmas Eve 1913, just six
months before Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination, it had provided no legal
authority whatsoever for the Fed to buy government bonds or undertake so-called
“open market operations” to finance the public debt. In part this was due to
the fact that there were precious few Federal bonds to buy. The public debt
then stood at just $1.5 billion, which is the same figure that had pertained 51
years earlier at the battle of Gettysburg, and amounted to just 4 percent of
GDP or $11 per capita.
Thus,
in an age of balanced budgets and bipartisan fiscal rectitude, the Fed’s
legislative architects had not even considered the possibility of central bank
monetization of the public debt, and, in any event, had a totally different
mission in mind.
The
new Fed system was to operate decentralized “reserve banks” in 12 regions—most
of them far from Wall Street in places like San Francisco, Dallas, Kansas City
and Cleveland. Their job was to provide a passive “rediscount window” where
national banks within each region could bring sound, self-liquidating commercial
notes and receivables to post as collateral in return for cash to meet
depositor withdrawals or to maintain an approximate 15 percent cash reserve.
Accordingly,
the assets of the 12 reserve banks were to consist entirely of short-term
commercial paper arising out of the ebb and flow of commerce and trade on the
free market, not the debt emissions of Washington. In this context, the humble
task of the reserve banks was to don green eyeshades and examine the commercial
collateral brought by member banks, not to grandly manage the macro economy
through targets for interest rates, money growth or credit expansion—to say
nothing of targeting jobs, GDP, housing starts or the Russell 2000, as per
today’s fashion.
Even
the rediscount rate charged to member banks for cash loans was to float at a
penalty spread above money market rates set by supply and demand for funds on
the free market.
The
big point here is that Carter Glass’ “banker’s bank” was an instrument of the
market, not an agency of state policy. The so-called economic aggregates of the
later Keynesian models—-GDP, employment, consumption and investment—were to
remain an unmanaged outcome on the free market, reflecting the interaction of
millions of producers, consumers, savers, investors, entrepreneurs and even
speculators.
In
short, the Fed as “banker’s bank” had no dog in the GDP hunt. Its narrow
banking system liquidity mission would not vary whether the aggregates were
growing at 3 percent or contracting at 3 percent.
What
would vary dramatically, however, was the free market interest rate in response
to shifts in the demand for loans or supply of savings. In general this meant
that investment booms and speculative bubbles were self-limiting: When the
demand for credit sharply out-ran the community’s savings pool, interest rates
would soar—thereby rationing demand and inducing higher cash savings out of
current income.
This
market clearing function of money market interest rates was especially crucial
with respect to leveraged financial speculation—such as margin trading in the
stock market. Indeed, the panic of 1907 had powerfully demonstrated that when
speculative bubbles built up a powerful head of steam the free market had a
ready cure.
In
that pre-Fed episode, money market rates soared to 20, 30 and even 90 percent
at the peak of the bubble. In short order, of course, speculators in copper,
real estate, railroads, trust banks and all manner of over-hyped stock were
carried out on their shields—-even as JPMorgan’s men, who were gathered as a de
facto central bank in his library on Madison Avenue, selectively rescued only
the solvent banks with their own money at-risk.
Needless
to say, these very same free market interest rates were a mortal enemy of
deficit finance because they rationed the supply of savings to the highest
bidder. Thus, the ancient republican moral verity of balanced budgets was
powerfully reinforced by the visible hand of rising interest rates: deficit
spending by the public sector automatically and quickly crowded out borrowing
by private households and business.
How
The Bankers’ Bank Got Hijacked To Fund War Bonds
And
this brings us to the Rubicon of modern Warfare State finance. During World War
I the US public debt rose from $1.5 billion to $27 billion—an eruption that
would have been virtually impossible without wartime amendments which allowed
the Fed to own or finance U.S. Treasury debt. These “emergency” amendments—it’s
always an emergency in wartime—enabled a fiscal scheme that was ingenious, but
turned the Fed’s modus operandi upside down and paved the way for today’s
monetary central planning.
As is
well known, the Wilson war crusaders conducted massive nationwide campaigns to
sell Liberty Bonds to the patriotic masses. What is far less understood is that
Uncle Sam’s bond drives were the original case of no savings? No credit? No
problem!
What
happened was that every national bank in America conducted a land office
business advancing loans for virtually 100 percent of the war bond purchase
price—with such loans collateralized by Uncle Sam’s guarantee. Accordingly, any
patriotic American with enough pulse to sign the loan papers could buy some
Liberty Bonds.
And
where did the commercial banks obtain the billions they loaned out to patriotic
citizens to buy Liberty Bonds? Why the Federal Reserve banks opened their
discount loan windows to the now eligible collateral of war bonds.
Additionally,
Washington pegged the rates on these loans below the rates on its treasury
bonds, thereby providing a no-brainer arbitrage profit to bankers.
Through
this backdoor maneuver, the war debt was thus massively monetized. Washington
learned that it could unplug the free market interest rate in favor of state
administered prices for money, and that credit could be massively expanded
without the inconvenience of higher savings out of deferred consumption.
Effectively, Washington financed Woodrow Wilson’s crusade with its newly
discovered printing press—-turning the innocent “banker’s bank” legislated in
1913 into a dangerously potent new arm of the state.
Bubbles
Ben 1.0
It was
this wartime transformation of the Fed into an activist central bank that
postponed the normal post-war liquidation—-moving the world’s scheduled
depression down the road to the 1930s. The Fed’s role in this startling feat is
in plain sight in the history books, but its significance has been obfuscated
by Keynesian and monetarist doctrinal blinders—that is, the presumption that
the state must continuously manage the business cycle and macro-economy.
Having
learned during the war that it could arbitrarily peg the price of money, the
Fed next discovered it could manage the growth of bank reserves and thereby the
expansion of credit and the activity rate of the wider macro-economy. This was
accomplished through the conduct of “open market operations” under its new
authority to buy and sell government bonds and bills—something which sounds
innocuous by today’s lights but was actually the fatal inflection point. It
transferred the process of credit creation from the free market to an agency of
the state.
As it
happened, the patriotic war bond buyers across the land did steadily pay-down
their Liberty loans, and, in turn, the banking system liquidated its discount
window borrowings—-with a $2.7 billion balance in 1920 plunging 80 percent by
1927. In classic fashion, this should have caused the banking system to shrink
drastically as war debts were liquidated and war-time inflation and
malinvestments were wrung out of the economy.
But
big-time mission creep had already set in. The legendary Benjamin Strong had
now taken control of the system and on repeated occasions orchestrated giant
open market bond buying campaigns to offset the natural liquidation of war time
credit.
Accordingly,
treasury bonds and bills owned by the Fed approximately doubled during the same
7-year period. Strong justified his Bernanke-like bond buying campaigns of 1924
and 1927 as helpful actions to off-set “deflation” in the domestic economy and
to facilitate the return of England and Europe to convertibility under the gold
standard.
But in
truth the actions of Bubbles Ben 1.0 were every bit as destructive as those of
Bubbles Ben 2.0.
In the
first place, deflation was a good thing that was supposed to happen after a
great war. Invariably, the rampant expansion of war time debt and paper money
caused massive speculations and malinvestments that needed to be liquidated.
The
Bank of England’s Perfidy
Likewise,
the barrier to normalization globally was that England was unwilling to fully
liquidate its vast wartime inflation of wage, prices and debts. Instead, it had
come-up with a painless way to achieve “resumption” at the age-old parity of
$4.86 per pound; namely, the so-called gold exchange standard that it peddled
assiduously through the League of Nations.
The
short of it was that the British convinced France, Holland, Sweden and most of
Europe to keep their excess holdings of sterling exchange on deposit in the
London money markets, rather than convert it to gold as under the classic,
pre-war gold standard.
This
amounted to a large-scale loan to the faltering British economy, but when
Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill did resume convertibility in
April 1925 a huge problem soon emerged. Churchill’s splendid war had so
debilitated the British economy that markets did not believe its government had
the resolve and financial discipline to maintain the old $4.86 parity. This, in
turn, resulted in a considerable outflow of gold from the London exchange
markets, putting powerful contractionary pressures on the British banking
system and economy.
Real
Cause of the Great Depression: Collapse of the Artificial 1914-1929 Boom
In
this setting, Bubbles Ben 1.0 (New York Fed Governor Benjamin Strong) stormed
in with a rescue plan that will sound familiar to contemporary ears. By means
of his bond buying campaigns he sought to drive-down interest rates in New York
relative to London, thereby encouraging British creditors to keep their money
in higher yielding sterling rather than converting their claims to gold or
dollars.
The British
economy was thus given an option to keep rolling-over its debts and to continue
living beyond its means. For a few years these proto-Keynesian “Lords of
Finance” —- principally Ben Strong of the Fed and Montague Norman of the
BOE—-managed to kick the can down the road.
But
after the Credit Anstalt crisis in spring 1931, when creditors of shaky banks
in central Europe demanded gold, England’s precarious mountain of sterling
debts came into the cross-hairs. In short order, the money printing scheme of Bubbles
Ben 1.0 designed to keep the Brits in cheap interest rates and big debts came
violently unwound.
In
late September a weak British government defaulted on its gold exchange
standard duty to convert sterling to gold, causing the French, Dutch and other
central banks to absorb massive overnight losses. The global depression then to
took another lurch downward.
Inventing
Bubble Finance : The Call Money Market Explosion Before 1929
But
central bankers tamper with free market interest rates only at their peril—-so
the domestic malinvestments and deformations which flowed from the monetary
machinations of Bubbles Ben 1.0 were also monumental.
Owing
to the splendid tax-cuts and budgetary surpluses of Secretary Andrew Mellon,
the American economy was flush with cash, and due to the gold inflows from
Europe the US banking system was extraordinarily liquid. The last thing that
was needed in Roaring Twenties America was the cheap interest rates—-at 3
percent and under—that resulted from Strong’s meddling in the money markets.
At
length, Strong’s ultra-low interest rates did cause credit growth to explode,
but it did not end-up funding new steel mills or auto assembly plants. Instead,
the Fed’s cheap debt flooded into the Wall Street call money market where it
fueled that greatest margin debt driven stock market bubble the world had ever
seen. By 1929, margin debt on Wall Street had soared to 12 percent of GDP or
the equivalent of $2 trillion in today’s economy (compared to $450 billion at
present).
The
Original Sub-Prime: Wall Street’s 1920s Foreign Bond Mania
As is
well known, much economic carnage resulted from the Great Crash of 1929. But
what is less well understood is that the great stock market bubble also spawned
a parallel boom in foreign bonds—-a specie of Wall Street paper that soon
proved to be the sub-prime of its day. Indeed, Bubbles Ben 1.0 triggered a
veritable cascade of speculative borrowing that soon spread to the far corners
of the globe, including places like municipality of Rio de Janeiro, the Kingdom
of Denmark and the free city of Danzig, among countless others.
It
seems that the margin debt fueled stock market drove equity prices so high that
big American corporations with no needs for cash were impelled to sell bundles
of new stock anyway in order to feed the insatiable appetites of retail
speculators. They then used the proceeds to buy Wall Street’s high yielding
“foreign bonds”, thereby goosing their own reported earnings, levitating their
stock prices even higher and causing the cycle to be repeated again and again.
As the
Nikkei roared to 50,000 in the late 1980s, the Japanese were pleased to call
this madness “zaitech”, and it didn’t work any better the second time around.
But the 1920s version of zaitech did generate prodigious sums of cash that
foreign borrowers cycled right back to exports from America’s farms, mines and
factories. Over the eight years ending in 1929, the present day equivalent of
$1.5 trillion was raised on Wall Street’s red hot foreign bond market, meaning
that the US economy simply doubled-down on the vendor finance driven export
boom that had been originally sparked by the massive war loans to the Allies.
In
fact, over the period 1914-1929 the U. S. loaned overseas customers—-from the
coffee plantations of Brazil to the factories of the Ruhr—-the modern day
equivalent of $3.5 trillion to prop-up demand for American exports. The impact
was remarkable. In the 15 years before the war American exports had crept up
slowly from $1.6 billion to $2.4 billion per year, and totaled $35 billion over
the entire period. By contrast, shipments from American farms and factors
soared to nearly $11 billion annually by 1919 and totaled $100 billion—three
times more—over the 15 years through 1929.
So
this was vendor finance on a vast scale——reflecting the exact mercantilist
playbook that Mr. Deng chanced upon 60 years later when he opened the export
factories of East China, and then ordered the People’s Bank to finance China’s
exports of T-shirts, sneakers, plastic extrusions, zinc castings and
mini-backhoes via the continuous massive purchases of Uncle Sam’s bonds, bills
and guaranteed housing paper.
Our
present day Keynesian witch doctors antiseptically label the $3.8 trillion that
China has accumulated through this massive currency manipulation and repression
as “foreign exchange reserves”, but they are nothing of the kind. If China had
honest exchange rates, it reserves would be a tiny sliver of today’s level.
In
truth, China’s $3.8 trillion of reserves are a gigantic vendor loan to its
customers. This is a financial clone of the $3.5 trillion equivalent that the
great American creditor and export powerhouse loaned to the rest of the world
between 1914 and 1929.
Needless
to say, after the October 1929 crash, the Wall Street foreign bond market went
stone cold, with issuance volume dropping by 95 percent within a year or two.
Thereupon foreign bond default rates suddenly soared because sub-prime
borrowers all over the world had been engaged in a Ponzi—-tapping new money on
Wall Street to pay interest on the old loans.
By
1931 foreign bonds were trading at 8 cents on the dollar—-not coincidentally in
the same busted zip code where sub-prime mortgage bonds ended up in 2008-2009.
Still,
busted bonds always mean a busted economic cycle until the malinvestments they
initially fund can be liquidated or repurposed. Thus, the 1929 Wall Street bust
generated a devastating crash in US exports as the massive vendor financed
foreign demand for American farm and factory goods literally vanished. By 1933
exports had slipped all the way back to the $2.4 billion level of 1914.
1929-1933
Foreign Bond and US Export Bust: True Source of the Great Depression
That’s
not all. As US export shipments crashed by 70 percent between 1929 and 1933,
there were ricochet effect throughout the domestic economy.
This
artificial 15-year export boom had caused the production capacity of American
farms and factories to become dramatically oversized, meaning that during this
interval there had occurred a domestic capital spending boom of monumental
proportions. While estimated GDP grew by a factor of 2.5X during 1914-1929,
capital spending by manufacturers rose by 7X. Auto production capacity, for
example, increased from 2 million vehicles annually in 1920 to more than 6
million by 1929.
Needless
to say, when world export markets collapsed, the US economy was suddenly
drowning in excess capacity. In short order, the decade-long capital spending
boom came to a screeching halt, with annual outlays for plant and equipment
tumbling by 80 percent in the four years after 1929, and shipments of items
like machine tools plummeting by 95 percent.
Not
surprisingly, in the wake of this drastic downshift in output, American
business also found itself drowning in excess inventories. Accordingly, nearly
half of all production inventories extant in 1929 were liquidated by 1933,
resulting in a shocking 20 percent hit to GDP—a blow that would amount to a $3
trillion drop in today’s economy.
Finally,
Bubbles Ben 1.0 had induced vast but temporary “wealth effects” just like his
present day successor. Stock prices surged by 150 percent in the final three
years of the mania. There was also an explosion of consumer installment loans
for durable goods and mortgages for homes. Indeed, mortgage debt soared by
nearly 4X during the decade before the crash, while boom-time sales of autos,
appliances and radios nearly tripled durable goods sales in the eight years
ending in 1929.
All of
this debt and wealth effects induced spending came to an abrupt halt when stock
prices came tumbling back to earth. Durable goods and housing plummeted by 80
percent during the next four years. In the case of automobiles, where stock
market lottery winners had been buying new cars hand over fist, the impact was
especially far reaching. After sales peaked at 5.3 million units in 1929, they
dropped like a stone to 1.4 million vehicles in 1932, meaning that this 75
percent shrinkage of auto sales cascaded through the entire auto supply chain
including metal working equipment, steel, glass, rubber, electricals and
foundry products.
Thus,
the Great Depression was born in the extraordinary but unsustainable boom of
1914-1929 that was, in turn, an artificial and bloated project of the warfare
and central banking branches of the state, not the free market. Nominal GDP,
which had been deformed and bloated to $103 billion by 1929, contracted
massively, dropping to only $56 billion by 1933.
Crucially,
the overwhelming portion of this unprecedented contraction was in exports,
inventories, fixed plant and durable goods—the very sectors that had been
artificially hyped. These components declined by $33 billion during the four
year contraction and accounted for fully 70 percent of the entire drop in
nominal GDP.
So
there was no mysterious loss of that Keynesian economic ether called “aggregate
demand”, but only the inevitable shrinkage of a state induced boom. It was not
the depression bottom of 1933 that was too low, but the wartime debt and
speculation bloated peak in 1929 that had been unsustainably too high.
----
CANADA
Welfare State
Welfare
state is a term that was apparently first used in the English language in
1941 in a
book written by William Temple, Archbishop of York, England.
Welfare
state is a term that was apparently first used in the English language in 1941
in a book written by William Temple, Archbishop of York, England. For many
years after, postwar British society was frequently characterized (often
pejoratively) as a "welfare state," but by the 1960s the term
commonly denoted an industrial capitalist society in which state power was
"deliberately used (through politics and administration) in an effort to
modify the play of market forces."
For Asa Briggs, the author of
this definition in an article appearing in The Welfare State (1967),
there are 3 types of welfare state activities: provision of minimum income,
provision for the reduction of economic insecurity resulting from such
"contingencies" as sickness, old age and unemployment, and provision
to all members of society of a range of social services. Under this definition,
Canada became a welfare state after the passage of the social welfare reforms
of the 1960s (see Social
Security).
Richard Titmuss, one of the
most influential writers on the welfare state, noted in Essays on the
Welfare State (1959) that the social welfare system may be larger than the
welfare state, a distinction of particular importance in Canada, where the
social services component of the welfare state is less well developed. In
addition to occupational welfare, there is a range of services provided by
para-public, trade union, church, and nonprofit institutions. These are often
funded by a combination of state and private sources.
Social Welfare and Social Philosophy
To some writers, the expansion
of the welfare state is a central political focus of Social
democracy because of the contribution of welfare state policies and
programs to the reduction of inequality, the expansion of freedom, the
promotion of fellowship and democracy, and the expression of humanitarianism.
In Canada such a view of the welfare state appeared in the League
for Social Reconstruction's Social Planning for Canada (1935) and in
the reports of social reformers, such as Leonard
Marsh's classic, Report on Social Security for Canada (1943),
written for the wartime Advisory Committee on Reconstruction. Politically, this
view has been expressed in the platforms of the New
Democratic Party and its predecessor, the Co-operative
Commonwealth Federation, and practised most notably by the postwar CCF
government in Saskatchewan.
In the contemporary period,
social democratic ideas on social welfare continue to find expression in the
briefs produced by the Canadian Labour Congress, Canada's largest trade union
federation, which since 1961 has been allied with the NDP; in the work of the
Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, which is closely allied to both; and
in the pages of Canadian Forum magazine. A popular form of these ideas
can be found in the books of investigative journalist Linda McQuaig such as The
Wealthy Banker's Wife.
It is the modern liberal, and
not the social democratic, conception of the role of the Canadian state in the
provision of social welfare that has been dominant. In 20th-century liberalism,
as practised in Canada and elsewhere, the responsibility for well-being rests
with either the individual or the family, or
with both. Simultaneously, there is a clear acceptance that capitalist
economies are not self-regulating but require significant levels of state
intervention to achieve stability. In relation to Briggs's definition, there is
an emphasis in liberalism on the first 2 of the 3 welfare state activities:
minimum income and social insurance.
The necessity to develop a more
cautious and residual social welfare state has been the theme of a number of
major statements and reports by British writers J.M. Keynes and William
Beveridge, and of the Canadian Report of the Royal Commission on
Dominion-Provincial Relations (1940), the postwar White Paper on Employment and
Income (1945) and the more recent federal Working Paper on Social Security in
Canada (1973). It is an approach expressed in Mackenzie
King's Industry and Humanity (1918), Harry Cassidy's Social
Security and Reconstruction in Canada (1943), and also in Tom Kent's Social
Policy for Canada (1962), which presaged the period of high social reform
from 1963 to 1968. In the contemporary period, these ideas continue to find
expression in the work of the Institute for Research on Public Policy and its
magazine, Policy Options, edited by Tom Kent.
The modern conservative
conception of the welfare state is guided by the principles of 19th-century
liberalism, ie, less government equals more liberty, from which follows the
defence of individual pursuit of self-interest and the unleashing of
competitive forces operating through private markets (see Conservatism).
The reduction of inequality, often held to be a goal if not a result of the
welfare state, is considered antithetical to the pursuit of freedom and to
material progress.
Consequently the modern welfare
state is criticized from the conservative perspective. In particular, it is
often argued that social expenditures have become too heavy a burden for the
modern state and that state expenditures on social programs divert resources
from private markets, thus hampering economic growth. According to the
conservative conception, the welfare state has discouraged people from seeking
work and has created a large, centralized, uncontrolled and unproductive
bureaucracy. Proponents of this view argue that the welfare state must be cut
down and streamlined, and that many of its welfare activities should be turned
over to charity and to private corporations. In reference to Briggs' definition
of the welfare state, conservatives support only the minimum income activities
of the contemporary welfare state.
This view of the welfare state
is currently supported in Canada by many members of the Conservative Party and
by the Reform Party. The idea of the conservative welfare state had its
clearest expression in Charlotte
Whitton's The Dawn of Ampler Life (1943) commissioned by John Bracken,
then Conservative Party leader, to criticize the social democratic views
incorporated in Marsh's Report on Social Security for Canada; it also
appeared in the west in the writings of former Alberta Premier E.C. Manning;
and, in Québec, in the publications of the Semaines Sociales du Canada. In the
contemporary period, this view is prevalent in the books and briefs produced by
business-oriented research and lobby organizations such as the Fraser
Institute and the C.D. Howe Institute, and the Business Council on National
Issues, a lobby organization representing Canada's largest companies. Social
Canada in the Millennium by economist Tom Courchene, published by the C.D.
Howe Institute, is representative.
The re-examination of
contemporary capitalist societies begun in the 1960s has produced a Marxist
interpretation of the welfare state. In this view, in societies such as Canada,
which are dominated by private markets, it is the exploitation of labour that
supports the ever increasing growth of capital in the hands of private
employers. In this context, a major role of the modern state is the provision
of an appropriately trained, educated, housed and disciplined labour force
available to employers when and where necessary. To accomplish this, the
welfare state becomes involved in the regulation of women, children and the family
through laws affecting marriage, divorce, contraception, separation, adoption,
and child support since the family is the institution directly concerned with
the preparation of present and future generations of workers and in provisions
for employment, education, housing, and public and private health.
These ideas found expression in
Canada in the past in the publications of the Communist
Party of Canada. They continue to find expression in works by
university-based authors and in the pages of magazines such as This Magazine
and Canadian Dimension. See, for example, Dickinson and Russell, eds, Family,
Economy and State (1986).
Development of a Welfare State in Canada
Social
welfare in Canada has passed through roughly 4 phases of development that
correspond to 4 phases of the country's economic, political and domestic
development.
The Interventionist Phase: 1941-1974
This phase
marks the arrival of what is conventionally called the welfare state. By the
beginning of WWII, the economic and political lessons of the Depression had
been well learned. Canadians increasingly accepted the expanded role of the
state in economic and social life and expected this to continue after the war.
In order to facilitate Canadian involvement in the war, the federal government
instituted a wide range of measures including the construction of housing,
controls on rents, prices, wages and materials, the regulation of industrial
relations, veterans pensions, land settlement, rehabilitation and education,
day nurseries and the recruitment of women into the paid work force in large
numbers.
Wartime
studies which provided the promise of postwar employment and economic security
such as the British Beveridge report released in December 1942, and the
Canadian report on social security prepared by Leonard Marsh and released in
March 1943, were widely distributed and of considerable influence. The Liberal
government largely ignored these and other wartime reports such as those by
Heagerty on health and hospital insurance and the Curtis report on housing
(also written by Marsh).
Instead
King settled on a political compromise, which at first consisted of the
establishment of family allowances in l944, in order to undercut the surge in
electoral support for the CCF and the pressure from the trade unions for an
increase in wages, particularly for poorly paid workers.
After
re-election in 1945, the postwar Liberal government moved to dismantle much of the
apparatus of state intervention constructed during the war. The White Paper on
Employment, which appeared the same year, expressed the government's belief in
the approach to economic management which followed from the work of the
economist J.M. Keynes. The economy would be managed to produce full employment
by providing assistance to private enterprise rather than by engaging directly
in economic activity or by providing further social welfare measures.
Nonetheless, at the Dominion-Provincial Conference that year, the King
government presented the Green Book proposals which included social assistance
and hospital insurance measures in order to gain concessions from the provinces
on income and corporation taxes. The provinces did not agree, and the proposals
were not subsequently revived until more than 10 years later.
Pressures
for social reform continued and, under the postwar government of Louis St.
Laurent, public housing, federal hospital grants and assistance programs for
disabled and blind persons were initiated. A trade union campaign for changes
in pensions led to the establishment of universal old-age pensions for those
over 70 and means-tested old-age security for those between 65 and 70 in
1951-52. For the first time, cash benefits were extended to aboriginal people.
An amendment to the Indian Act in 1951 extended the application of provincial
social welfare legislation to native people. Lastly, the first permanent
program for the funding of social assistance, the Unemployment Assistance Act, was
put into place in 1956 after pressures from the private charities and the
provinces, which could no longer support the cost of relief.
In 1957,
the Liberal government was defeated in favour of the Progressive Conservatives
under John Diefenbaker. During the period of Conservative Party government,
permanent programs for the funding of hospitalization, higher education and
vocational rehabilitation were introduced or extended.
The Liberal Party was returned
as a reform-oriented minority
government under L.B. Pearson in 1963 on a cyclical economic upsurge.
Influenced by the American "war on poverty," by the necessity to
maintain the political support of the newly formed New Democratic Party, and by
provincial reform initiatives, Pearson's Liberal government presided over the
introduction of 3 major pieces of social legislation which constituted the last
building blocks of the Canadian welfare state: The Canada Pension Plan, which
established a national compulsory contributory pension plan; the Canada
Assistance Plan, which consolidated the Unemployment Assistance Act together
with legislation providing social assistance to persons physically disabled,
and made federal funding available for assistance to single parents and for a
range of social services including day care; and Medicare, which established a
national system of personal health insurance.
To these were added the
Guaranteed Income Supplement, and the gradual reduction over the subsequent 5
years of the age of receipt of the universal pension to the age of 65, an
increase in post-secondary education funding, and the consolidation of hospital,
medicare and post-secondary education funding in the Established Programs
Financing Act (see Intergovernmental
Finance).
The National Housing Act was
also amended in 1964 to provide loans on favourable terms to provincial housing
corporations, clearing the way for more public housing. In the same year, by
the simple expedient of a Treasury Board minute, native relief was transformed
into a parallel system of social assistance based on provincial legislation but
with lower rates. The point system was introduced into the Immigration Act
during the 1960s, paving the way for a substantial increase in immigration,
particularly from Asia and the Caribbean. This period of high social reform
ended with several further significant social reforms, in the legislation
controlling divorce (see Marriage
and Divorce), abortion and
contraceptives (see Birth
Control), all of which became more widely available and had an important
impact on women, the family and on Canadian social life in general.
In 1968, the Liberal Party, now
led by P.E. Trudeau, was re-elected with a majority government. The expansion
of the coverage and benefits of Unemployment Insurance to cover most workers
followed in 1971. New provisions included seasonal workers and maternity leave
benefits for the first time. After re-election of a minority Liberal government
(1972-74), the reorganization of Income Tax, the expansion of the National
Housing Act to cover co-operative and nonprofit assistance, and the first
significant increase in Family Allowance since 1945, were accomplished.
The Social Security Review,
launched in 1973 by the release of the Orange Paper on Social Security reform,
was intended to lead to joint federal-provincial expansion of public social
services and assistance for the working poor. The Review was stalled by an
inability for agreement and overtaken by economic decline. The only further
reform to appear was the child tax credit (in 1978), an innovation in that for
the first time the tax system was used to provide a social benefit, although
the funds for it came from an equivalent reduction in the value of the Family
Allowance.
The Fourth Phase: Erosion and the Future of Welfare, 1975-
In the
1970s, social expenditures began to increase as a result of the expansion of
the range and number of social programs. Increased funding made it possible to
improve income security, particularly for the elderly as a result of the Old
Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement, persons with disabilities,
single parents under federally cost-shared provincial social assistance, and
for the unemployed under unemployment insurance and social assistance. Parents
received a larger degree of income support for their children under the Family
Allowance. Social services, particularly child welfare and child care, improved
in quantity and quality as a result of the Canada Assistance Plan funding.
Post-secondary education was expanded to cover a wider section of the
population and personal health care became widely available for the first time.
As
unemployment grew in the 1970s, programs such as unemployment insurance and
social assistance automatically expanded, pumping more income into the hands of
people who were unable temporarily to provide for themselves. The impact of
these latter increases on public expenditures were particularly evident from
the mid-1970s, when the economy entered a period of decline after 10 years of
growth.
In the
1970s and early 1980s, rising inflation and the growing demands of newly
unionized public sector employees increased demands on public expenditures as
well. These conditions ushered in a new conservative political approach in
which previous Keynesian verities were turned upside down. Decreasing
government expenditures, particularly for social programs, were held to be the
way to return economic prosperity. The resultant unemployment was intended to
reduce pressures for wage increases, to moderate inflation and to provide a
stimulus to private economic development. Although inflation did moderate,
relatively high unemployment has meant continuing demands on social programs
expenditures.
Many of
the methods begun in the early 1980s to control social expenditures have been
used by both federal and provincial governments since that time. These methods
have included changing eligibility and benefits, particularly under
unemployment insurance and social assistance; "privatizing"
provincial social programs by contracting out responsibility for social services
(particularly those relating to children and the aged); provincial attempts to
raise revenues through medicare premiums and user fees; decreasing
social-program budgets relatively if not absolutely; imposing an eroding level
of assistance benefit; and termination of some social programs - for example,
the federal Family Allowance. The passage of the Canada Health Act in l984
effectively ended the process by which physicians in some provinces had been
opting out of medicare in order to charge higher fees.
The election
of a new Conservative government under Brian Mulroney in 1984 brought in a
repudiation of the postwar commitment to full employment and to the role of
government in the maintenance of social well-being. Shortly after election, the
new government announced its commitments to the reduction of inflation and to
the size of government, to the size of the budgetary deficit and accumulated
debt, and to an increase in "private initiative." The new government
received or initiated several reviews of social policy: the recommendations of
the Royal Commission on Economic Development, The Forget Commission on
unemployment insurance, the Neilson Task Force Report on the Canada Assistance
Plan, and a House of Commons Special Committee on Child Care.
Between
1984 and 1993, federal Conservative governments introduced a range of measures
to reduce expenditures on social programs including gradually reducing old-age
security benefits at middle income levels and above; reducing and eventually
eliminating the family allowances; reducing the range of workers covered by and
the benefits available under unemployment insurance; and terminating cost
sharing under the Canada Assistance Plan in 3 provinces in 1990.
The
election of the federal Liberals under Jean Chrétien brought in a government
which was expected to redress the balance between the economic and the social.
After taking office, the new federal government announced a social security
review. A discussion paper, Improving Social Security in Canada was
released in October 1994, providing recommendations in 4 different areas:
employment services, unemployment insurance, student loans and the Canada
Assistance Plan. The 1995 budget announced the termination of the Canada
Assistance Plan in 1996 and significant reductions in federal funding for
social assistance, post-secondary education and health care. In April 1996 the
Canada Health and Social Transfer (CHST) replaced the Canada Assistance Plan.
Between 1994 and 1998 the government cut $6.3 billion in health and social program
transfers under the CHST.
Since 1975, as a result of
these changes social expenditures have continued to increase but social welfare
has been eroded. One indication is in the growing number of soup kitchens and food banks
which appeared in the 1980s all across Canada and increased in the 1990s.
Another is in the growing numbers of the homeless. Social programs are still
designed to deal with unemployment as a "contingency," an unusual
occurrence, and not as the regular feature of economic and social life that it
has become. This fact will no doubt continue to exert considerable pressure on
future welfare state policy.
Female Perspective
Modern feminism provides an
assessment of the welfare state from the standpoint of women. While it
encompasses a range of viewpoints, the idea that women constitute an oppressed
group within Canadian society is basic to all. The work that women do, whether in
the household or in the labour force, is undervalued. Women remain the primary
care givers in the home for spouses, children and aging relatives, work which
they perform without pay in a world where only paid work is valued. A high
percentage of women, including women with small children, are now participating
in the labour force, but they are concentrated into a small range of
occupations that are often connected to their role as primary care giver. Women
remain underpaid in relation to men and have less access to higher paid
positions (see Women
in the Labour Force).
From this point of view the
welfare state, while providing many benefits, has also contributed to the oppression
of women through legislation which is based on a traditional role for women and
which reduces rather than expands their options. Family-related legislation
does not obligate separated or divorced male parents to pay their fair share of
child-related costs, leaving many women single parents dependent on social
assistance and in poverty (see Family Law,
Marriage
and Divorce, Poverty).
Inadequate public child care prevents many women from seeking paid work (see
Day Care).
Inadequate care alternatives for aging relatives places an increasing burden on
women who provide care and do undertake paid work. In recent years, these ideas
have been expressed by organizations such as the National
Action Committee on the Status of Women, a federation of women's
organizations, in magazines such as Herizons and Resources for
Feminist Research and books such as Baines, Evans and Neysmith, eds, Women's
Caring: Feminist Perspectives on Social Welfare (1991).
The Early Period: 1840-1890
In the early period of
capitalist development, the activities of the state initiated in response to poverty and
disease were largely regulatory in nature. Social welfare, considered a matter
that was primarily of local and private concern, consisted of the provision of
relief, the care of the insane and of handicapped and neglected children (see
Child
Welfare), and the incarceration of lawbreakers. After Confederation, the
provision of social welfare services continued to be irregular and piecemeal,
depending in part on the philanthropic inclinations and concerns of the upper
class - in particular of those upper-class women who viewed charitable
activities as an extension of their maternal roles and as an acceptable
undertaking in society.
Reform of this system was
predicated on the notion that the family was the basis of economic security.
The institutionalization of the family and the social reproduction of labour,
which began with legislation to enforce alimony, to regulate matrimonial property
and marriage, and to limit divorce and contraception, was expanded with
limitations on hours of work for women and children. Compulsory education
and public
health regulations were developed primarily in response to the spread of
disease and fears of social unrest. Provincial governments began to support
charitable institutions with regular grants.
The Transitional Phase: 1891-1940
Although
the primary concern of the Canadian state remained the promotion of profitable
private economic development, particularly through support of
"infrastructural" institutions, the state also came to be associated
with the provision of a plentiful supply of appropriately skilled labour
through the regulation of the relations of capital and labour, and the
maintenance of the family. This was largely achieved by the use of state
mechanisms to maintain stability in the economy and in the family, and to do
both at the least cost and risk to employers. During the same period, charity
workers and private charity organizations began to consolidate and to battle
ideologically and, generally, unsuccessfully for control of social welfare.
The appearance of legislation
compelling children to attend school and providing public authorities with the
power to make decisions in relation to "neglected" children was part
of a growing number of state interventions to regulate social welfare. Industrial
relations legislation was also passed in the first decade of the 20th
century, allowing the state to intervene in the relations between labour and
capital.
The first piece of compulsory
contributory social insurance legislation in Canada, the Workmen's Compensation
Act, was passed in Ontario in 1914. During WWI, 2 important events speeded the
development of an interventionist welfare state: demands for the support of injured
soldiers and demands for the support of the families left behind. Both demands
led to the establishment of a Dominion scheme of pensions and rehabilitation
and, in Manitoba, to the first mothers' allowances legislation in 1916.
Several provinces followed with
mothers' allowance legislation of their own, but it was restricted to providing
minimal support to deserted and widowed women. By war's end, after the
incorporation of many thousands of women workers into the wartime labour force,
they were encouraged to step aside to provide employment for male heads of
households.
The postwar era also ushered in
the first (and brief) Dominion scheme to encourage the construction of housing,
but it lasted only from 1919 to 1924. While there was considerable debate
during the 1920s about whether to establish permanent unemployment, relief and
pension schemes, the only result was the passage of the 1927 old-age
pension legislation, and this was in part the result of the efforts of J.S.
Woodsworth and a small group of Independent Labour members of Parliament.
Under this legislation, the federal government shared the cost of provincially
administered and means-tested pensions for destitute persons over the age of
70. It was a modest beginning. The legislation explicitly excluded native
people from receiving pension payments.
It was the traumatic economic
conditions of the Great
Depression that forced a change in social philosophy and state
intervention. In 1930, with hundreds of thousands of Canadians unemployed, the
newly elected Conservative government under R.B.
Bennett legislated Dominion Unemployment Relief, which provided the
provinces with grants to assist in the provision of relief. Subsequently the
government opened unemployment
relief camps run by the Department of National Defense, often in isolated
locales, in order to give work at minimal wages to the single unemployed and to
keep them away from urban areas.
By 1935 the Conservative
Party's stern resistance to social reform was softened in the face of an
economic catastrophe, with estimates of unemployment at up to one-quarter of
the work force. Continuing pressure from the trade unions, from relief camp
workers, and from social reformers for jobs, better wages and unemployment
insurance, and waning popularity, led Bennett to abandon reliance on the
so-called natural "restorative" powers of capitalism in favour of
advocacy of social reform in Bennett's
New Deal, introduced to the public in a series of radio talks in 1935.
Later that same year, the Dominion Housing Act become the first piece of
permanent legislation for housing assistance.
Although the provinces objected
to the New Deal's labour and social insurance reforms and the courts
subsequently determined that the federal government did not have the power to
pass such legislation, the necessity for social reform was reaffirmed in the Report
of the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations created by Mackenzie
King's Liberal government to examine the constitutional and social questions
posed by the Depression. The Report recommended that the federal government
take responsibility for employment and the unemployed, and the provinces for
social services and those people deemed to be unemployable, eg, single mothers,
pensioners and disabled persons.
The federal Unemployment
Insurance Act was passed in 1940, after agreement with the provinces and a
change in the British North America Act to give the federal government the
authority for unemployment insurance. The Tax Rental Agreement arrived at with
the provinces after protracted negotiations early in wartime gave the federal
government the right to collect income and corporate taxes for the duration of
the war, a right it has retained to the present.
--------------
QUEBEC
USA
CAUSED THE GREAT DEPRESSION WITH THEIR GREED.... and the world suffered....
Canada's story
THE GREAT DEPRESSION IN CANADA
***
The Montréal Review, February
2009
***
-----------------
In 1940 the federal government assumed
responsibility for the jobless by introducing a national unemployment insurance
scheme (see Employment
Insurance) and employment service.
The
worldwide Great Depression of the early 1930s was a social and economic shock
that left millions of Canadians unemployed, hungry and often homeless. Few
countries were affected as severely as Canada during what became known as the
Dirty Thirties, due to Canada’s heavy dependence on raw material and farm
exports, combined with a crippling Prairies drought.
Great
Depression- Canada
----------
Great Depression of Canada
------
Great
Depression in Canada Pictures
----------
CANADA:
Universities and the Great Depression
14
December 2008 Issue No:57
------------
Films about
History - Canada - 1920-1945 & Great Depression available for
online viewing.
----------
faculty.marianopolis.edu/c.belanger/quebechistory/...Cached
The absence of a generous and sensitive refugee policy
in Canada during the Great Depression was hugely felt by Jews in
the 1930's.
--------------
Canada's
Depression-Era Deportation of Communists
----------
Comparing official U.S. and Canadian
unemployment rates shows Canada's rate was 5% lower during the Depression.
This is puzzling since other macro data do not s
--------------
Canada was hard hit by the Great Depression.
Between 1929 and 1933, the gross national product dropped 40% (compared to 37%
in the US). Unemployment reached 27% at the depth of the Depression in 1933.
Many businesses closed, as corporate profits of $396 million in 1929 turned
into losses of $98 million in 1933. Canadian exports shrank by 50% from 1929 to
1933. Construction all but stopped (down 82%, 1929-33), and wholesale prices
dropped 30%. Wheat prices plunged from 78c per bushel (1928 crop) to 29c in
1932.
Worst hit
were areas dependent on primary industries such as farming, mining and logging,
as prices fell and there were few alternative jobs. Most families had moderate
losses and little hardship, though they too became pessimistic and their debts
become heavier as prices fell. Some families saw most or all of their assets
disappear, and suffered severely.
Great
Depression, Canada
--------------
What
good is democracy when no-one bothers 2 go out and vote Canada?
Elections Canada
is the independent, ... Find your electoral district, local Elections Canada
office, list of candidates, where to vote and more. Type your postal
code:
and
What good is democracy when no-one
bothers 2 go out and vote Canada?
Elections Canada
is the independent, ... Find your electoral district, local Elections Canada
office, list of candidates, where to vote and more. Type your postal code:
and
Canada was affected mostly on the
English-canadians and french- Canadian relations. Because when king
asked the people to vote on conscription all the English
...
----------
Human
rights are not only violated by terrorism, repression or assassination, but
also by unfair economic structures that creates huge inequalities.
Pope
Francis
--------
We
must restore hope to young people, help the old, be open to the future, spread
love. Be poor among the poor. We need to include the excluded and preach peace.
Pope
Francis
-------------
Where
there is no work, there is no dignity.
Pope
Francis
------------
A
little bit of mercy makes the world less cold and more just.
Pope
Francis
---------------
LYRICS-
A LITTLE GOOD NEWS - ANNE MURRAY - 1983
I
rolled out this mornin' the kids had the mornin' news show on
Bryant
Gumbel was talkin' 'bout the fighting in Lebanon
Some
senator was squawkin' 'bout the bad economy
It's
gonna get worse you see, we need a change in policy
There's
a local paper rolled up in a rubber band
One
more sad story's one more than I can stand
Just
once how I'd like to see the headline say
"Not
much to print today, can't find nothin' bad to say", because
Nobody
robbed a liquor store on the lower part of town
Nobody
OD'ed, nobody burned a single buildin' down
Nobody
fired a shot in anger, nobody had to die in vain
We
sure could use a little good news today
I'll
come home this evenin', I'll bet that the news will be the same
Somebody
takes a hostage, somebody steals a plane
How I
wanna hear the anchor man talk about a county fair
And
how we cleaned up the air, how everybody learned to care
Whoa,
tell me
Nobody
was assassinated in the whole Third World today
And in
the streets of Ireland, all the children had to do was play
And
everybody loves everybody in the good old USA
We
sure could use a little good news today
Nobody
robbed a liquor store on the lower part of town
Nobody
OD'ed, nobody burned a single buildin' down
Nobody
fired a shot in anger, nobody had to die in vain
We
sure could use a little good news today
Read
more: Anne Murray - A Little Good News Lyrics | MetroLyrics
"A
Little Good News" was written by Rocco, Thomas / Bourke, Rory Michael /
Black, Charles Frank.
Anne
Murray 1983- A LITTLE GOOD NEWS
----------------
BLOGSPOT:
ONE
BILLION RISING CANADA- Women and the right 2 vote- country by country- Please
honour those women who sacrificed so much 4 ur privilege 2 vote - pls honour us
------------
INCOME TAX FORMED ON THE ASHES OF WWI
The Income
Tax History of Canada
Income tax
doesn't have a long history in Canada; the country has only utilized income tax
to fund government activities since World War I. The history of Canadian income
tax may be short, but it is filled with complex and fascinating moments.
1. Before the Institution of Income Tax
o Prior to 1917, the Canadian government
did not charge income tax. This was part of a plan to encourage immigration to
Canada, as the UK and the US were charging income tax during this time period.
It was hoped that by offering vast amounts of land for new immigrants to live
on and not charging income tax, Canada could encourage people from other
countries to make their new homes within its borders. Prior to the introduction
of the income tax, Canada relied on money from tariffs and customs to provide
revenue.
Causation
o In 1917, the cost of participating in
World War I had become too great, and the government was forced to temporarily
adopt an income tax system in order to finance the war effort. What was going
to be a temporary measure is now the largest form of income available to the
Canadian government. Sir Thomas White, Minister of Finance, was the man who
proposed the "war" income tax.
o 
Quebec
o As with all aspects of Canadian
provincial government, Quebec does things a little bit differently than the
rest of the country. Quebec operates its own special personal income tax
system. The province has complete autonomy to determine what sorts of income
can be taxed. For the most part, however, Quebec is remarkably similar to the
rest of the provinces in terms of administering income tax.
Current Laws: Personal Income Tax
o As with most income taxes, Canadians
today pay a percentage that is based on how much money they make. See the table
listed under the Resources section for a full breakdown of marginal tax rates
for personal income.
Not all types of income are taxed,
however. For example, types of income not subject to income tax include gifts,
inheritances, lottery winnings, gambling earnings or military pensions.
Current Laws: Corporate Taxation
o Corporate income is taxed by the Canada
Revenue Agency in most cases. However, the provinces of Ontario, Quebec and
Alberta collect their own corporate income taxes. Starting in 2009, Ontario's
taxes will collected by the CRA. Corporations and companies must pay taxes on
income and capital. Starting in 2002, some larger companies established income
trusts in an effort to reduce or eliminate their income tax payments. Only half
of income from capital gain is taxed.
2.
Related Searches
References
Resources
------------
CANADA- WW1 AND WWII- and the horrific cruelties
WW1
and WWII- German Wars/Japan
and
Canada was affected mostly on the
English-canadians and french- Canadian relations. Because when king
asked the people to vote on conscription all the English
...
------------
jafi.org/JewishAgency/English/Jewish
Education/Compelling Content/...
Jewish Soldiers and Prisoners of War during World War II: ... the Second World War? ... Hungary's
Human Losses in World War II, Upsalla University, Sweden, ...
HIGH
SCHOOL PROGRAM-
"The
Second World War was among the most destructive conflicts in human history: more
than forty million soldiers and civilians perished, many in circumstances
of terrible cruelty. During the 2,174 days of war between the German attack on
Poland in September 1939 and the surrender of Japan in August 1945, by far
the largest number of those killed, whether in battle or behind the lines, had
no name or face except to those who knew or loved them."
Martin Gilbert,
Second World War, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1989, p.1 (highlights added
(by Serah Beizer)).
---------------
'Less
Than Human': The Psychology Of Cruelty
March 29,
2011 1:00 PM ET
March 29, 2011 1:00 PM ET
30 min 0 sec
· Playlist
· Download
David Livingstone Smith is co-founder and director of the Institute for
Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology at the University of New England.
Courtesy of the publisher hide caption
itoggle caption Courtesy of the publisher
During the Holocaust, Nazis referred to Jews as rats. Hutus involved in the
Rwanda genocide called Tutsis cockroaches. Slave owners throughout history
considered slaves subhuman animals. In Less Than Human, David
Livingstone Smith argues that it's important to define and describe
dehumanization, because it's what opens the door for cruelty and genocide.
"We all know, despite what we see in the movies," Smith tells
NPR's Neal Conan, "that it's very difficult, psychologically, to kill
another human being up close and in cold blood, or to inflict atrocities on
them." So, when it does happen, it can be helpful to understand what it is
that allows human beings "to overcome the very deep and natural
inhibitions they have against treating other people like game animals or vermin
or dangerous predators."
Rolling
Stone recently published photos online of American troops posing with dead
Afghans, connected to ongoing court-martial cases of soldiers at Joint Base
Lewis-McChord in Washington state. In addition to posing with the corpses,
"these soldiers — called the 'kill team' — also took body parts as
trophies," Smith alleges, "which is very often a phenomenon that
accompanies the form of dehumanization in which the enemy is seen as
game."
But this is just the latest iteration in a pattern that has unfolded time
and again over the course of history. In ancient Chinese, Egyptian and
Mesopotamian literature, Smith found repeated references to enemies as subhuman
creatures. But it's not as simple as a comparison. "When people dehumanize
others, they actually conceive of them as subhuman creatures," says Smith.
Only then can the process "liberate aggression and exclude the target of aggression
from the moral community."
Less Than Human: Why We Demean,
Enslave, and Exterminate Others
By David Livingstone Smith
Hardcover, 336 pages
St. Martin's Press
List price: $24.99
When the Nazis described Jews as Untermenschen, or subhumans, they
didn't mean it metaphorically, says Smith. "They didn't mean they were like
subhumans. They meant they were literally subhuman."
Human beings have long conceived of the universe as a hierarchy of value,
says Smith, with God at the top and inert matter at the bottom, and everything
else in between. That model of the universe "doesn't make scientific
sense," says Smith, but "nonetheless, for some reason, we continue to
conceive of the universe in that fashion, and we relegate nonhuman creatures to
a lower position" on the scale.
Then, within the human category, there has historically been a hierarchy.
In the 18th century, white Europeans — the architects of the theory —
"modestly placed themselves at the very pinnacle." The lower edges of
the category merged with the apes, according to their thinking.
So "sub-Saharan Africans and Native Americans were denizens of the
bottom of the human category," when they were even granted human status.
Mostly, they were seen as "soulless animals." And that dramatic
dehumanization made it possible for great atrocities to take place.
Excerpt: 'Less Than Human'
March 29, 201111:15 AM ET
David Livingstone
Smith
Less Than Human: Why We Demean,
Enslave, and Exterminate Others
By David Livingstone Smith
Hardcover, 336 pages
St. Martin's Press
List price: $24.99
Before I get to work explaining how dehumanization works, I want to make a
preliminary case for its importance. So, to get the ball rolling, I'll briefly
discuss the role that dehumanization played in what is rightfully considered
the single most destructive event in human history: the Second World War. More
than seventy million people died in the war, most of them civilians. Millions
died in combat. Many were burned alive by incendiary bombs and, in the end,
nuclear weapons. Millions more were victims of systematic genocide.
Dehumanization made much of this carnage possible.
Let's begin at the end. The 1946 Nuremberg doctors' trial was the first of
twelve military tribunals held in Germany after the defeat of Germany and
Japan. Twenty doctors and three administrators — twenty-two men and a single
woman — stood accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. They had
participated in Hitler's euthanasia program, in which around 200,000 mentally
and physically handicapped people deemed unfit to live were gassed to death,
and they performed fiendish medical experiments on thousands of Jewish,
Russian, Roma and Polish prisoners.
Principal prosecutor Telford Taylor began his opening statement with these
somber words:
The defendants in this case are charged with murders, tortures and other
atrocities committed in the name of medical science. The victims of these
crimes are numbered in the hundreds of thousands. A handful only are still
alive; a few of the survivors will appear in this courtroom. But most of these miserable
victims were slaughtered outright or died in the course of the tortures to
which they were subjected ... To their murderers, these wretched people were
not individuals at all. They came in wholesale lots and were treated worse than
animals.
He went on to describe the experiments in detail. Some of these human
guinea pigs were deprived of oxygen to simulate high altitude parachute jumps.
Others were frozen, infested with malaria, or exposed to mustard gas. Doctors
made incisions in their flesh to simulate wounds, inserted pieces of broken
glass or wood shavings into them, and then, tying off the blood vessels,
introduced bacteria to induce gangrene. Taylor described how men and women were
made to drink seawater, were infected with typhus and other deadly diseases,
were poisoned and burned with phosphorus, and how medical personnel
conscientiously recorded their agonized screams and violent convulsions.
The descriptions in Taylor's narrative are so horrifying that it's easy to
overlook what might seem like an insignificant rhetorical flourish: his comment
that "these wretched people were ... treated worse than animals".
But this comment raises a question of deep and fundamental importance. What is
it that enables one group of human beings to treat another group as though they
were subhuman creatures?
A rough answer isn't hard to come by. Thinking sets the agenda for action,
and thinking of humans as less than human paves the way for atrocity. The Nazis
were explicit about the status of their victims. They were Untermenschen
— subhumans — and as such were excluded from the system of moral rights and
obligations that bind humankind together. It's wrong to kill a person, but
permissible to exterminate a rat. To the Nazis, all the Jews, Gypsies and
others were rats: dangerous, disease-carrying rats.
Jews were the main victims of this genocidal project. From the beginning,
Hitler and his followers were convinced that the Jewish people posed a deadly
threat to all that was noble in humanity. In the apocalyptic Nazi vision, these
putative enemies of civilization were represented as parasitic organisms — as
leeches, lice, bacteria, or vectors of contagion. "Today," Hitler
proclaimed in 1943, "international Jewry is the ferment of decomposition
of peoples and states, just as it was in antiquity. It will remain that way as
long as peoples do not find the strength to get rid of the virus." Both
the death camps (the gas chambers of which were modeled on delousing chambers)
and the Einsatzgruppen (paramilitary death squads that roamed across
Eastern Europe followed in the wake of the advancing German army) were
responses to what the Nazis perceived to be a lethal pestilence.
Sometimes the Nazis thought of their enemies as vicious, bloodthirsty
predators rather than parasites. When partisans in occupied regions of the
Soviet Union began to wage a guerilla war against German forces, Walter von
Reichenau, the commander-in-chief of the German army, issued an order to
inflict a "severe but just retribution upon the Jewish subhuman
elements" (the Nazis considered all of their enemies as part of
"international Jewry", and were convinced that Jews controlled the
national governments of Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States).
Military historian Mary R. Habeck confirms that, "soldiers and officers
thought of the Russians and Jews as 'animals' ... that had to perish.
Dehumanizing the enemy allowed German soldiers and officers to agree with the
Nazis' new vision of warfare, and to fight without granting the Soviets any
mercy or quarter."
The Holocaust is the most thoroughly documented example of the ravages of
dehumanization. Its hideousness strains the limits of imagination. And yet,
focusing on it can be strangely comforting. It's all too easy to imagine that
the Third Reich was a bizarre aberration, a kind of mass insanity instigated by
a small group of deranged ideologues who conspired to seize political power and
bend a nation to their will. Alternatively, it's tempting to imagine that the
Germans were (or are) a uniquely cruel and bloodthirsty people. But these
diagnoses are dangerously wrong. What's most disturbing about the Nazi
phenomenon is not that the Nazis were madmen or monsters. It's that they were
ordinary human beings.
When we think of dehumanization during World War II our minds turn to the
Holocaust, but it wasn't only the Germans who dehumanized their enemies. While
the architects of the Final Solution were busy implementing their lethal
program of racial hygiene, the Russian-Jewish poet and novelist Ilya Ehrenburg
was churning out propaganda for distribution to Stalin's Red Army. These
pamphlets seethed with dehumanizing rhetoric: they spoke of "the smell of
Germany's animal breath," and described Germans as "two-legged
animals who have mastered the technique of war" — "ersatz men"
who ought to be annihilated. "The Germans are not human beings,"
Ehrenburg wrote, "... If you kill one German, kill another — there is
nothing more amusing for us than a heap of German corpses."
This wasn't idle talk. The Wehrmacht had taken the lives of 23
million Soviet citizens, roughly half of them civilians. When the tide of the
war finally turned, a torrent of Russian forces poured into Germany from the
east, and their inexorable advance became an orgy of rape and murder. "They
were certainly egged on by Ehrenburg and other Soviet propagandists..."
writes journalist Giles McDonough:
East Prussia was the first German region visited by the Red Army ... In the
course of a single night the red army killed seventy-two women and one man.
Most of the women had been raped, of whom the oldest was eighty-four. Some of
the victims had been crucified ... A witness who made it to the west talked of
a poor village girl who was raped by an entire tank squadron from eight in the
evening to nine in the morning. One man was shot and fed to the pigs.
Excerpted from Less Than Human by David Livingstone Smith. Copyright 2011 by the author
and reprinted by permission of St. Martin's Press, LLC.
Wy we Demean,
Enslave, and Exterminate Others
-------------
ARABIC-
Lecture
11 Hitler and World War Two The History Guide
Lecture 11 Hitler and
World War Two The History Guide
A full-text lecture that discusses Adolf Hitler's role in the outbreak of World War Two. بیشتر...
www.historyguide.org/europe/lecture11.html
A full-text lecture that discusses Adolf Hitler's role in the outbreak of World War Two. بیشتر...
www.historyguide.org/europe/lecture11.html
Lectures on Twentieth entury Europe Main The History Guide
This site contains 16 full-text lectures on the history of 20th century Europe, ... Lecture 11: Hitler and World War Two ... Lecture 14: The Origins of the Cold War. بیشتر...
www.historyguide.org/europe/europe.html
Lecture 10 The ge of Totalitarianism Stalin ... The History Guide
This full-text lecture discusses the origins and impact of totalitarian regimes in the ... Following World War One, there was a revival of traditional authoritarian ... It was Lenin, who provide the model for Stalin as well as Hitler and Mussolini. .... Then on June 11, 1937, the cream of the Red Army, stripped of their medals and ... بیشتر...
www.historyguide.org/europe/lecture10.html
EHP 22 World War II on Pinterest 42 Pins
European History A. P. | See more about world war ii, wwii and world war two. ... The History Guide [Lectures on Early European History]. 2 · Pinned from. historyguide.org. Pin it. Like. historyguide.org. Lecture 11: Hitler and World War Two. بیشتر...
https://www.pinterest.com/spojer/ehap-22-world-war-ii/
-------------
Why were Germans so cruel
during World War 2?
I think
part of the reason stems from a desire to avenge their defeat in World War I.
They felt humiliated at having lost territories and wanted to prove to the
world that they could recover them. Also, Germany was having a lot of problems
due to the economic recession, which seemed to render their citizens more
intolerant and willing to find a scapegoat. Please notice that in no way am I
justifying their acts of cruelty. I am only providing some insight into the
possible causes that may have led to or exacerbated the cruelty with which they
treated those deemed as their enemy.
and....
The reason
the German army was so good was that the army was never defeated in WWI so a
lot of the experienced soldiers were still in the army or had been recalled to
duty during WWII. Also there is the German military tradition. Historically,
Germans serve in the military, they call it conscription. Every male at the age
of 18 had to serve for 2 years. This allowed the army to have a ready reserve
of trained members. Lastly they were the best trained and equiped in 1939 when
the war started. By the time the war ended, they were fighting for their own
lives and their homes, which was a huge incentive to fight harder.
EDIT - Aside from the strong Prussian military traditions (as cited above), Hitler had some of the best Generals/Strategists/Tacticians available to him at the start of the war (1939). Men like Von Manstein, Guderian, Dönitz, Raus, Heinrici, Rommel, Model etc. The Allied initially had mediocre generals (at best). It took several years and a string of humiliating defeats before the generals that we all know and love today would finally emerge - people like Zhukov (Soviet), Montgomery (UK) and Patton (US). Even then, the German High Command only considered one of them to be a serious threat (Montgomery was never taken that seriously, and they only started noticing Patton after D-Day in 1944). Indeed, some would even postulate that had these German generals been left in charge of running the war, Germany could have either won or at least, sue for peace and kept a large chunk of Europe. Instead, Hitler got into arguments with them and started firing them left and right. Things got so bad that the Allied leadership may have even decided NOT to assassinate Hitler as he was doing such great job of destroying Germany!
EDIT - Aside from the strong Prussian military traditions (as cited above), Hitler had some of the best Generals/Strategists/Tacticians available to him at the start of the war (1939). Men like Von Manstein, Guderian, Dönitz, Raus, Heinrici, Rommel, Model etc. The Allied initially had mediocre generals (at best). It took several years and a string of humiliating defeats before the generals that we all know and love today would finally emerge - people like Zhukov (Soviet), Montgomery (UK) and Patton (US). Even then, the German High Command only considered one of them to be a serious threat (Montgomery was never taken that seriously, and they only started noticing Patton after D-Day in 1944). Indeed, some would even postulate that had these German generals been left in charge of running the war, Germany could have either won or at least, sue for peace and kept a large chunk of Europe. Instead, Hitler got into arguments with them and started firing them left and right. Things got so bad that the Allied leadership may have even decided NOT to assassinate Hitler as he was doing such great job of destroying Germany!
----------------
Russia In World War 2
The great war plan, preparations, collapse, and recovery, a revised view
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The
history of Russia in World War 2 is still being revised. In the first decades
after World War 2, the historiography of Russia's part in the war in between
1939 and the end of 1941, was largely based on a combination of the strictly
censored Russian state propaganda's version and of what was known outside
Russia, which was then closed behind the "Iron Curtain" of the Cold
War.
Eventually,
two new factors provided new insights and new proofs which enable a revision
that let us get much closer to the truth.
The first
factor was the great and laborious work of a few open-minded 2nd generation
independent researchers like Viktor Suvorov and Mark Solonin, which applied analytic
approaches to the vast scope of publicly available Russian wartime and post-war
documentation and literature, detected thousands of small details of
information that slipped over the years through the Soviet censorship, and
processed these into coherent new insights which dramatically changed our
perception of what happened, both before the German invasion (Suvorov's work),
and after it started (Solonin's work).
First and
foremost of these researchers was Vladimir Rezun (known by his pen name Viktor
Suvorov), a Russian military intelligence officer who applied his deep knowledge
of intelligence gathering and analysis methods, and of Russian military
doctrines, to Russia's World War 2 military literature, with dramatic results.
The second
factor was the partial removal of the deep cover of censorship from Russian
military and state archives for a period of just five years, between the
collapse of the Communist Soviet Union in 1991 and the gradual recovery of
conservative nationalism in the Russian government, marked, for example, by the
rise to power of Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer. This gap of five years
of relative openness was used by historians to access previously closed
archives and reach documents which provide previously unavailable proofs that
further support the claims of Suvorov and the other researchers. Since the
mid-1990s, 'mainstream' western historiography increasingly accepts both the
main claims and the main supporting facts and evidence of the pioneering work
of researchers like Suvorov, and the "history as we know it" of
Russia in World War 2 is being re-written.
The 'old'
historiography of Russia in 1939-1941 can be summarized to this:
· In August 1939 Stalin's Communist
Russia signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler's Nazi Germany in order to keep
the aggressive Hitler away from Russia.
· The
two dictatorships' mighty armies then attacked and occupied Poland from West
and East and divided it between them.
· While
Hitler occupied half of Europe from Norway to Greece, Russia occupied the
Baltic states and parts of Finland and Romania.
· To
keep Hitler appeased all this time, Stalin's Russia provided Germany, as
agreed, with large quantities of war materials and even operational support
services to assist the German war effort.
· On
June 22, 1941, Germany, together with its allies (Finland, Romania, Hungary,
Bulgaria, Italy), invaded Russia in a gigantic surprise attack.
· The
mighty German military, the most efficient in the world then, applied its
successful Blitzkrieg tactic, and the terrible unpreparedness and deployment in
concentrations close to the border of the giant Russian army, helped the
Germans to achieve tremendous and rapid victories that defeated the brave and
fully equipped but surprised and unprepared Russians, forcing millions of
encircled Russian soldiers to surrender.
· Hitler's
German military, exhausted and not equipped for the harsh Russian winter, was
finally stopped just before Moscow.
· Russia
survived and recovered from its enormous losses, increased its strength while
fighting fiercely, and eventually pushed the Germans all the way back to
Berlin, emerging from the long and terrible war as a super-power, an equal only
to the United States.
Most of this story is correct, but there
are two major problems with this story that attracted the attention of the
analytical researchers, and which I will discuss here:
1. It
appears as if in all the time of years months and weeks before the German
invasion in June 1941, the Russian military and leadership were consistently
irrational and made almost every possible mistake, not just in how and where
the majority of the giant Russian forces were deployed, but even in terms of
military planning, military procurement, and political decisions. This was
simply too bad to be true and demanded a better explanation, which Suvorov provides.
2. It appears as if once the fighting started,
the quality advantage of the formidably efficient Germans over the poor Russian
soldiers was so great, that it resulted in amazing, enormous, total and almost
immediate German victories that dwarfed even their great victories in France a
year earlier. The alleged tremendous rate of German success in destroying the
giant Russian military in the first days and weeks of the invasion, was simply
too high to be true, and demanded a better explanation, which Solonin provides.
The scope and details of each of these
issues are vast, worthy of the full books that the researchers published. I
apologize for the inevitable briefness in presenting them in the limited scope
of an essay.
The most prepared for war - the great Soviet war plan
It is well known how the western allies
prepared for the invasion of Normandy for over two years, how they considered
every possible aspect of the enormous preparations, trained huge forces, some
purposely trained for specific roles, invented new purpose-designed weapons and
other equipment, and even conducted smaller scale invasions in order to find
out early enough where they were wrong and fix it before the big operation.
Under Stalin's dictatorship, Russia's
military, industrial, domestic, and diplomatic preparations for a second World
War were of greater magnitude. Furthermore, in August 1939 Stalin was in a
position in which he could prevent Hitler's invasion of Poland, the invasion
that started World War 2, and he knew it well and said so. But at that decisive
point in history, instead of preventing war, Stalin did the opposite. He
cleared the way and provided guarantees for Hitler to invade, after he knew for
sure that this will start a war not just in Poland but also in Western Europe,
a war that the Communist ideology expected, planned and prepared for, and
desired. Then, with Germany at war with Britain and France, Stalin's Russia
moved to the 2nd phase of its long term preparations. Russia moved to a maximum
effort war regime in which it enormously expanded its military force and
military production rates, expanded its territory westwards, by force, which
also gave it a long common border with Germany, and finally in 1941 began to
mobilize millions and transferred its enormous attack-oriented forces to the
German and Romanian borders, and prepared to enter the European war in a
gigantic attack that would:
1. Immediately
cut Germany's main source of oil in Ploesti, in southern Romania, just about
120 miles from the Russian border, in order to paralyze Hitler's armed forces
for lack of oil (as eventually happened in 1944).
2. Defeat the exhausted Germany and its allies
across the entire front from the Finland in the North to the Black Sea in the
South - a mirror image of the German attack that eventually started in June 22,
1941.
3. Continue with the Communist
"liberation" of the entire Europe, by advancing all the way first to
Germany, then to France, and Spain, bringing all of Europe under the brutal
totalitarian regime which the Russian people already "enjoyed" then,
that made Russia one big prison with countless prisons in it.
Hitler's Germany managed to be the first
to attack, by a narrow gap of a few weeks at most (Suvorov's conclusion, based
on various evidence, is that Russia's Red Army was going to attack on July 6,
1941, so Hitler got ahead of them by exactly two weeks). The German attack
forced the Red Army put its operational plans aside. It returned to those plans
and implemented them three years later, except that since by then the situation
was different, Communism occupied only Eastern Europe, not all of it.
The plan to invade Germany and conquer
all of Europe in the name of Communism's expansionist ideology, is likely the
greatest secret of World War 2 that remains officially Top Secret. The
Communist Empire kept that secret for five decades, preferring to appear
peaceful and militarily incapable, even dumb, than to appear as the aggressive
expansionist "Evil Empire" that it always was. And modern Russia,
nationalist but no longer Communist, understandably might never officially
admit that either, although key evidence slipped out of their control.
Some key details :
· Expansionist Ideology - While Hitler's
Nazi ideology publicly officially and repeatedly declared since the 1920s that
its goal is nothing short of global domination by force, the Communist Soviet
Union declared the goal of global conquest by force, but it started even
earlier. The Soviet Red Army's official defining goal is the same. Not national
defense but rather global conquest by aggressive global war to bring Communism
to power everywhere.
· Although
they were natural enemies for centuries and fought each other so many times,
including in the first World War, the Communist Russia made an allegedly
irrational secret deal with post-WWI Germany in 1922, even before Hitler's era,
in which in return for secretly providing nothing more than training grounds
and facilities for the German military to keep its shape and further develop
advanced military technology and tactics in total violation of the peace treaty
imposed by the western countries, Russia in return got direct access to the
best and latest tactics and military technologies of its most capable past and
future enemy, the German military, which was indeed the most efficient and most
technologically advanced military force in the world then. The mutual strategic
interest of the two enemies created a secret deal that enabled a dramatic
improvement of Russian military doctrines and technology, and supported a
recovery of German military power after WWI, which was later turned against the
western powers, as Communism predicted and wanted.
· Since
1931, despite its bad economic situation, Russia increased its military
industry potential to that of a super-power. Masked as public sports, it
trained ten of millions of men in expensive state-paid military 'sports' like
parachuting, gliding, flying, weapons training, and other 'sports'.
Participation was initially voluntary, and then became mandatory. By 1935
Russia had 140,000 glider pilots, and in Dec. 1936 the government's youth
newspaper called for training 150,000 aircraft pilots, all state-paid and of
course quite expensive. By 1941 there were 121,000 'civilian sports'-trained
pilots. The other pilots were of course trained, and then mass-trained, by the
Russian Air Force. The number of flight schools in the Russian Air Force increased
to 12 in 1937, to 18 in January 1940, to 28 in Sept. 1940, and to 41 in early
1941. Russia trained military and para-military pilots and paratroopers at an
enormous cost and at an incredible rate which even dramatically increased in
1939 and then even further in 1940, far beyond any reasonable defensive need.
In 1941 the Russians had a million trained military paratroopers, a fantastic
number, suitable only for a gigantic war of aggression, not for defending
Russia as plain infantry. Tens of millions were 'just' trained in the cheaper
'sport' of weapons training. By June 1941, after more than doubling the
manpower of the regular military, Russia had an additional reserve military
force of 29 million already trained soldiers.
· In
August 1939, Stalin had secret negotiations with Germany and, seperately, with
Britain and France. On one hand, Hitler told Stalin he was going to attack
Poland and needed to know whether Russia will allow it (or even participate) or
will it fight against it. On the other hand, Britain and France assured Stalin
that if Hitler will invade their ally Poland they will declare war against
Hitler. Knowing that, and knowing that Hitler did not believe in Britain's and
France's resolution to defend Poland, Stalin gladly promised his support to
Hitler. It is true that due to the 'weakness' of the French and British
proposals, Russia had strong reasons to choose to make the deal with Hitler as
it did, but historians now have the proof that Russia made the deal with Hitler
with explicit intention and knowledge that this will start a European war that
will first exhaust Germany France and Britain and then the fully prepared
Russia will attack Germany and will occupy all of Europe. Stalin clearly
explained all that to his government in a meeting on Aug. 19, 1939, in which he
told them exactly why Russia is going to sign (four days later) the deal with
Hitler's Germany, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, that cleared the way for Hitler
to start World War 2.
· Between
August 1939 and June 1941, when Germany was at war in the West, Russia devoted
all its resources to prepare for war with Germany. In that period the regular
Russian army expanded from 2,000,000 soldiers to 5,500,000 soldiers, and many
millions more were given military training in order to be called as ready
reserves once the war starts. In fact, between Aug. 1939 and June 1941, the
Russian army expanded and moved towards the western border from remote inland
regions at such rate that the German intelligence simply could not keep track
of it, and was therefore terribly wrong in its estimates of the size of the
Russian force it was about to attack.
· The
Russian military industry, that was already enormous, switched, in January
1939!, to an extreme wartime regime, and produced vast quantities of tanks,
aircraft, and particularly vast stockpiles of ammunition, so much that there
was a separate government minister for ammunition production beside the
minister of military industry. Work hours increased. In June 1940 the entire
country switched to seven days of work per week, then work hours increased too,
initially to 10 hours per day, then to 12 hours per day, and since mid 1940 the
penalty for any failure to provide the requested quotas or product quality, or
even just being late for work, was years in prison. This wartime work regime
was so extreme that later, even in the worst days of the war, there was no need
to add to it, since Russia was already making its maximum war effort since
before Hitler invaded. The Russian army's General Staff also worked since 1940
around the clock, preparing for war like mad, although Russia was still
allegedly with excellent relations with Germany. Since Feb. 1941, under Zhukov,
the Russian army General Staff and units' staffs worked 15 to 17 hours per day,
seven days per week, preparing for war.
· The
military production and mobilization effort in Russia since January 1939 was so
extreme that it could not be sustained for a long time. It was a major
countdown for a planned war, exactly as designed by the Russian military
doctrine, which defined not only wartime tactics but also put equal emphasis on
detailing the optimal path to an optimal planned war - a full scale
mobilization of the nation and the industry, to be followed by a gigantic
surprise attack and the occupation of the enemy countries.
· All
resources were put into mobile aggressive military measures and units (tanks, a
million paratroopers !!, tactical attack aircraft, etc), not into defensive or
'static' measures ( land mines, fortifications, anti-aircraft units, long range
bombers etc.). The entire doctrine of the Russian armed forces was aggressive.
Defensive tactics were not taught at all and were considered defeatist in an
army that by definition was intended to conquer all other countries.
· Millions
of maps of Germany and Romania were distributed in the Russian army. Maps of
Russia were few.
· Hitler
always intended to invade Russia and declared it, but the war against Britain
forced him to delay that, but when Stalin annexed the eastern part of Romania
by ultimatum, and got his army to a distance of just 120 miles from his source
of oil in Ploesti, Romania, that's when Hitler realized how dangerous his
position was, and that he had to move fast, so although this meant war in two
fronts (Britain in the West and Russia in the East), a thing that Germany
always wanted to avoid, he ordered his army to prepare to invade Russia as soon
as possible, "in the first clear days of May 1941". Unexpected
complication in the Balkans eventually postponed the German attack until June
22nd, 1941.
· In
June 1941, shortly before the German invasion, Russia removed border fences and
other obstacles along its western border, to enable rapid border crossing - of
the the Russian army moving West, not in order to help the enemy cross into
Russia. The entire NKVD border guards force evacuated the border and moved
inland, replaced in their positions by regular army units.
· The
majority of the Russian army and Air Force and enormous stockpiles of
ammunition were concentrated along the border, not inland. Furthermore, the
enormous piles of ammunition were plainly deployed in the fields and near the
border region's train stations, exposed to the weather, not in weather-proof
depots and bunkers, so they could not survive the autumn rains and the winter.
This in itself has only one meaning, that Russia was going to invade Germany in
the summer of 1941.
This
enormous amount of ammunition was placed very close to its consumers, the
artillery, armor, and infantry units, and was going to be consumed soon, in the
planned Russian attack. Russia even placed many new large ammunition factories,
built in 1939-1941, close to the border, not inland, where their output could
be quickly shipped to the border, but where they were also very vulnerable in
case of an invasion into Russia.
· The most significant concentrations
were in Poland and along the Romanian border in the South. Along the southern
end of the Romanian border, near the Black Sea, and near Ploesti, were very
large concentrations of mountain infantry, Marines, amphibious units,
paratroops, bombers, which were far more useful to attack Romania's mountains,
and oil fields, than to defend the Russian flat terrain behind them. For
defensive purposes, the entire Russian military array at the southern end of
the border was simply irrational, and very vulnerable to attack, but it was
perfect for attacking Romania and cutting off Hitler's oil supply as fast as
possible.
· The
only doctrine in the Soviet military was that of a full scale surprise attack
that comes after a hidden mobilization, and followed by deeper attacks into
enemy territory. Nothing else was taught in Russian military academies.
· The
modern Russian military historiography is full of evidence that the Russian
army was preparing since 1940 for a planned aggressive war against Germany.
· The
Russian Air Force always used long range heavy bombers. In August 1939 Stalin
ordered to abandon further procurement and development of heavy bombers and
shift all resources to tactical ground attack aircraft, which are more suitable
for an aggressive war, in which the plan is to conquer vast enemy territories
in a fast war, not destroy its cities with bombers in a long war of attrition.
This is exactly like what happened in the German Air Force, for the same
reasons. Britain and the US developed long range bombers - but they did not
intend to conquer enemy countries. Germany, and Russia, did. Also, the date of
Stalin's decision, and other similar military procurement and mobilization
decisions, matches that of his his main decision to star a war to conquer
Germany and the rest of Europe, the decision in Aug. 19, 1939 that opened the
door for Hitler to invade Poland and conveniently start that war for Stalin.
· In
June 1941, behind the Soviet armies on the border, in addition to the military
police units that were supposed to block deserters there were also three full
mobile armies of the NKVD, the Russian secret police, and of Communist party
officials. Their role was to take full political control of the occupied
countries and eliminate all resistance. Blocking deserters is useful for
defense too, but such an enormous political-police force is useful only for a
planned war of occupation.
To summarize, driven by its expansionist
Communist ideology, Russia (then the U.S.S.R, or Soviet Union) planned and
prepared in every possible military and civilian aspect, and at an enormous
scale and cost, to an aggressive war of invasion and occupation, and NOT to a
war of defense. While Hitler's aggression was genuinely his own, Russia
cynically used it with the intention that while Germany and the western powers
will exhaust each other at war, which they did, Russia will maximize and
complete its enormous preparations for war, and will in the summer of 1941
perform a gigantic surprise attack that will first cut Hitler's Romanian oil
supply, then defeat Germany, and then continue to complete the occupation of
all of Europe, all the way to Spain. This was the largest, longest, and deepest
pre-war effort ever in history, but it was knocked out of course (yet partially
implemented later, in 1944, resulting in the occupation of 'just' half of
Europe) because of a combination of three factors:
1. In
mid 1940, following the Russian ultimatum to Romania, Germany's ally and only
source of oil, Hitler realized how urgent it became for him to strike Russia (
which he always intended to do ) as soon as possible and regardless of his
unfinished war with Britain and lack of readiness for the Russian winter. In
July 1940 the German military was ordered to prepare to invade Russia as soon
as the weather will permit in May 1941.
2. Stalin was repeatedly warned by his
intelligence services, military advisors, and by Britain, that the Germans are
also preparing a giant surprise attack against Russia, and was advised by
Zhukov and the General Staff to start the planned Russian surprise attack
earlier, in May 1941, instead of waiting to complete ALL the preparations, but
Stalin, relying mostly on the verified fact that the German military was not
ready for Russian winter conditions, dismissed the warnings and preferred to
wait just a little more t complete the preparations for the Russian surprise
attack, but that was a little too late, and Hitler struck first, not prepared
for winter, but still at enormous power, with the world's most effective army
then.
3. The human factor of morale. When the Germans
invaded, instead of fiercely fighting back, the mighty Soviet military machine
collapsed and disintegrated at an incredible rate.
The missing part of the Red Army's collapse
It is obvious that suffering a surprise
attack by millions of soldiers of the world's best army is shocking, and can
result in a military collapse, in high rate of casualties, in organized and
unorganized retreats, in surrenders of entire encircled units, etc. Also, the
German Blitzkrieg tactic was designed to achieve mass encirclements that will
result in mass surrenders of encircled enemy units. The fact that the majority
of the Russian ground and air forces, even some naval bases, were deployed
close to the border, deployed in the fields and forests in pre-attack
concentrations instead of being dug-in, or fortified, or deployed in deep
arrays of multiple lines of defense, and further the fact that very large
forces and equipment were still on the railways to the front when the Germans
attacked, so that they or at least their vehicles were still stuck on trains,
all that can further explain the tremendous losses and chaos that the Russians
suffered in the first hours, days, weeks, of the German invasion.
But what Russian historiography censored
for decades, is the large scale of total morale collapse of Soviet armed forces
and Communist party establishments which escaped, 'disappeared', or surrendered
before they even were engaged in battle. Millions, from privates to
Generals, individually or as entire units, abandoned their tanks, guns, air
bases, without battle, and escaped on vehicles or on foot, or simply
disappeared into the nearby villages and forests.
Fighting and then losing is one thing.
Massive and rapid escape without a fight and massive voluntary surrender, are
another, and Soviet censorship tried to hide that, by further intensifying the
myth of the destructiveness of the German attack, and by further intensifying
the belief that the entire red army was right on the border. There are reports
of entire unit staffs which escaped without battle and were found again
hundreds of kilometers to the East. There were tens of Generals who disappeared
and were never located again. There are reports of tank divisions which,
although they were not right on the border and were not engaged in fighting in
the first day, miraculously 'lost' 100% of their tanks and other fighting
equipment in the second day of fighting, without actually being engaged in
battle, and then escaped hundreds of kilometers eastwards almost without losing
a single truck even to technical malfunction. There are reports of entire Air
Force regiments which reported that they suffered negligible or no losses in
the air or on the ground at the first day, and then simply abandoned their air
bases and escaped by trucks and on foot. In 1941 Russia lost millions of
soldiers. Only 32% of the reported losses were the dead and wounded. Millions
surrendered, many of them as fast as they could, and so many others escaped
from the front, either disappeared or remained in service, but only after a
distant escape and after abandoning every weapon or equipment, even rifles and
light mortars, that could force them to stay and fight.
The apparent reasons for this mass
unwillingness to fight were:
· A further intensified mental shock of
those who were always trained educated and taught others that attack and
victory are the only possible option, and suddenly found themselves under
massive surprise attack for which they never planned or prepared.
· Stalin,
the murderous dictator, was surrounded with people who told him much too often
what he wanted to hear about Russia's preparations for war. The enormous
reported numbers of material production and manpower training were perhaps
correct. For example the figures of vast mass-training of pilots (which, by the
way, were NOT volunteers, unlike pilots anywhere else in the world), and
received minimal training, in order to keep up with the enormous training
quotas dictated by Stalin.
But what
Stalin never suspected, was the possibility that in his regime of mass terror
and fear, where so many millions were imprisoned and millions others killed by
the police, and where tens of millions starved for years in order to pay for
the enormous cost of the vast effort to convert Russia with a period of just
two decades from a mostly agricultural country to an industrial militarist
super-power with gigantic military power. Stalin never suspected that under a
massive attack on his brutal regime, the people, the millions of soldiers who
previously suffered from the regime, millions were former political prisoners
of which many were recruited from hard labor prisons directly to war front
military service, will favor surrender to defending their homeland, or will
have no willingness to fight immediately as they realized that since they're
country is being massively attacked there's a good chance that they can escape
from the war without being punished by the formidable regime. Given the
possibility that for the first time in their life non-cooperation with the
Communist regime will NOT be severely punished, so many favored that option,
and that's something the Russian censorship could never admit.
So while in
all material aspects Russia was enormously prepared for war, and could
therefore theoretically manage much better than it did, even under a massive
surprise attack, in morale terms, the Russian people in the front (which
rapidly moved East all across the long front), were generally unwilling to
fight for their terrible terror regime once fear of it was lost since the
regime itself was being attacked and in danger.
The Russian people starts fighting seriously
"One of the great laws of
war is Never invade Russia" - Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery
"History knows no greater display of courage than that shown by the people of the Soviet Union" - Secretary of War Henry Stimson
"History knows no greater display of courage than that shown by the people of the Soviet Union" - Secretary of War Henry Stimson
There were heroic exceptions of
very persistent and fanatic Russian fighting of course, right from the very
first moments of the German surprise attack. For centuries, Russian soldiers
and civilians were known for their toughness, their ability to persist in
terrible conditions. That's part of Russian culture, regardless of whether it's
a result of having to survive Russia's cruel weather, as some suggest, or not.
The Russian border fortress in Brest,
Poland, for example, with 4000 Russian soldiers, was massively attacked and
encircled immediately when the Germans invaded. Despite being besieged,
outnumbered 10:1, running out of food, water, ammunition, the Russian defenders
fought fiercely for five weeks, while the war front moved hundreds of
kilometers behind them, and later resistance of a few survivors continued
underground for months. For the Germans, Brest was a very bitter first taste of
the type of fierce Russian fighting they would later experience in Stalingrad
and elsewhere.
In the city of Smolensk, on the main road
to Moscow, the advancing Germans encircled in the 3rd week of fighting a large
Russian force, but unlike other encirclements, this force did not surrender. It
kept fighting fiercely, counter attacked the Germans, and eventually succeeded
in braking out of the encirclement in order to continue fighting. Similar
persistent fighting took place in Odessa, Murmansk, and elsewhere, and
especially in Leningrad, which remained besieged, terribly starved, and shelled
since the 3rd month of the war, and kept fighting for over two years until the
horrible siege was finally removed by the advancing Russian army.
What eventually changed the attitude of
the millions of Russian soldiers and made such persistent fierce fighting the
norm of the Russian army everywhere, was the gradual realization that they were
under an attack of unprecedented deliberate cruelty that intended to literally
decimate and destroy the Russian people, as Hitler ordered his army and S.S,
according to the Nazi ideology of a war of racial destruction of the German
"masters race" against the Russians in the occupied territories which
were treated, both civilians and captured prisoners of war, with terrible
cruelty that intended to make them all die of cold and starvation. Vast numbers
of Russian prisoners of war died of starvation and of exposure to the harsh
weather, and so were countless civilians in the captured villages who were
either mass murdered or simply stripped of their winter clothing and left to
die of exposure in the snow. With time, a stream of surviving starved refugees,
both civilians and escaping prisoners of war, were able to escape back to
Russian held territory and tell their terrible stories of the German treatment
of the population and of captured soldiers. Many did not have to say a word, it
was enough to see how starved they were. Russian media and military propaganda published
their stories and pictures, and many were moved from one army unit to another,
to be shown and heard. This, more than anything else, ignited what the Russians
still call "The Great Patriotic War". The Russians everywhere
realized that even compared to the cruelty of Stalin's terror regime, the
alternative of Nazi occupation was far worse, and that they are literally
fighting to avoid extinction by the Nazis. Initially heroic and fanatic Russian
fighting was the exception, then it intensified when the Russians were
literally fighting for home and family, in the battle of Moscow, and later, as
the horrible realization of the monster they're facing became known to them,
the Russians fought the toughest war in their tough history, with key examples
Stalingrad, Kursk, and so many other places in their giant country. That way,
although Russia lost about 85% of the enormous military production potential is
prepared for the invasion of Europe, although it lost before the end of 1941 a
military force that was more than double the size the that German intelligence
originally estimated as the entire Russian force, Russia survived, recovered
its military production far beyond German reach, recruited new millions of new
soldiers instead of those lost, and fought a lengthy and costly war of
survival, and revenge, that destroyed Nazi Germany, and Russia, despite its
enormous losses, ended World War 2 as a super-power.
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World War 2 Insightful Essays
Welcome.
This website aims to enhance insight of interesting and exciting World War 2
topics. Instead of over-detailed or too technical essays, its focus is
presenting and explaining why and how things happened the way
they did in World War 2, with a better perspective of when they happened
during that war. I think it's more useful and interesting to learn about World
War 2 that way.
This website is a collection of independent essays, so although it will take me a long time to "fully" cover that war, the available essays already provide substantial content. I'm adding essays as my time and muse permits.
Enjoy reading...
This website is a collection of independent essays, so although it will take me a long time to "fully" cover that war, the available essays already provide substantial content. I'm adding essays as my time and muse permits.
Enjoy reading...
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Sections: Strategy
, Battles , Weapons , People , Intelligence
Strategy
The
"Big picture" perspective of the strategy and war effort of the
warring nations in World War 2.
· Causes of World War
2 - the root causes of World War 2.
· The biggest mistakes - the
alternative decisions which could dramatically change the course of the war.
· When did Hitler lose the
war - an attempt to mark the time when Adolf Hitler lost the chance to win
World War 2.
· The turning
points of World War 2 - a list of the great strategic turning points of the
war.
· Russia in World War 2 - the
great war plan, preparations, collapse, and recovery - a revised view.
· Timeline - the main events
timeline, before and during the war.
Battles and operations
The dramatic battles and operations, from
vast campaigns to small but important raids, in land, at sea, and in the air,
that decided the outcome of World War 2.
· Kursk - the greatest tank battle
of the war, and the last major German offensive in the East.
· Stalingrad - the German
army's greatest defeat, and a major turning point of the war.
· Midway - in this
battle of aircraft carriers, Japan lost the initiative in the Pacific.
· Blitzkrieg - the German
tactic of rapidly advancing tank forces and massive air support.
· Doolittle's raid -
America's first air raid over Japan, that hit Tokyo in total surprise.
Weapons
From the ancient spear, to today's
GPS-guided bomb, many wars saw the appearance of new weapons based on amazing
technologies, but none saw such a dramatic and diverse flow of exciting new
scientific developments and new weapons as World War 2. During six years of
war, the most scientifically advanced nations recruited the best minds and
enormous resources to an unprecedented arms race.
· German secret
weapons - Germany's advanced "wonder weapons".
Land weapons:
· Infantry weapons -
rifles, sub machine guns, pistols, and other weapons.
· T-34 - simply the best main
battle tank of World War 2.
· M4 Sherman - the main American
tank. It won by numbers.
· German tanks - Panzers,
the German tanks which stormed Europe.
· Tiger - the most formidable
German tank. Lethal, heavy, and almost indestructible.
Airplanes and air weapons:
· The Manhattan
Project - the making of the atomic bomb.
· Kamikaze pilots -
suicide warfare in World War 2, and its military and cultural rationale.
· Messerschmitt Me-262 - the
world's first operational jet fighter.
· RADAR - the technology which
revolutionized air and naval warfare.
· Bombers - the strategic
weapons that struck at the enemy's heart.
· De Havilland Mosquito - the
most versatile and successful allied aircraft.
· P-51 Mustang - the
American long range fighter which defeated the Luftwaffe over Germany.
· Stuka dive bomber - the airborne
element of the German Blitzkrieg weapons.
· Fallschirmjager - the
German paratroopers and their combat operations.
Ships and naval weapons:
· Submarines - they almost
defeated Britain, and paralyzed Japan. Also about frogmen and human torpedoes.
· PT boats, Torpedo boats - The
fast night raiders of the sea.
Leaders, Generals, Heroes
Despite the mobilization of millions,
individual people greatly affected the course and outcome of wars. National
leaders, Generals and Admirals, aces and heroes, and brilliant scientists.
· Leaders - a complete list of
the national leaders of the countries which participated in World War 2 .
· German Field
Marshals - a chronological review of the German field marshals of World War
2.
· Adolf Hitler - It was his
war. He wanted it, and he started it. The ultimate aggressor, and the ultimate
evil.
· Hermann Goering -
Adolf Hitler's brutal and greedy deputy, and head of the Luftwaffe.
· Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto -
Japan's best Admiral, who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor.
· Otto Skorzeny -
Germany's commando leader, nicknamed "The most dangerous man in
Europe".
· Erich Hartmann - a
young German fighter pilot who became the highest scoring ace in history, with
352 victories.
· Hans Joachim Marseille - the
most amazing fighter pilot of World War 2 .
· Knights Cross - the
medal awarded to Germany's greater heroes and commanders, and its recipients.
· Quotes - a few selected wartime
quotes which are still very meaningful today.
Intelligence
In World War 2, military intelligence
dramatically advanced. The use of new scientific methods and technologies, as
well as great human efforts involving endless work, great risks, and brilliant
thinking, made intelligence become an equally important part of the armed
forces, a crucial element for victory.
· Enigma - the German military
cipher machine, and the allied efforts to break its code.
· Luftwaffe bomber wing KG 200 -
this top secret unit flew the most special missions with the most special
aircraft.
· Navajo code talkers
- American-Indian Marines who used their complex native language to form an
unbreakable code.
Military Theory
How to fight? How to win? - the following
essays answer these questions, and provide many concrete examples from World
War 2.
· The principles of war
- the timeless rules of thumb for fighting, strategy, and tactics.
· The mechanisms of
defeat - the various material and psychological ways to achieve victory.
---------------
... Politics &
Society > History > War and Military History > World War 2 >
Why was the Russian front so feared by Germans ... Germans fought
with cruelty ... World ...
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Impact on
societies of the First World War And yet the ‘German Atrocities’
... Atrocities’ contributed to the image of the war as a crusade against
cruelty, ...
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#JeSuisTunesia
- love from Canada - u pilfered
Tunesia's treasury??? and u want Canada 2 take u as a refugee...???
Seriously???? do u know the real plight
of the beautiful refugee... u cockroach..... WE LOVE TUNESIA... proud beautiful
and brave #JeSuisTunesia
Billionaire
brother-in-law of ex-Tunisian president loses refugee bid in Canada
#JeSuisTunisien
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-even
though we ain't got money -i'm so in love with ya honey
1994-
Anne Murray- DANNY'S SONG
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