Crashing compared to...when?
Prior to 1914....the world has crashed, in many ways, since WWI.
“Ever since 1914, everybody conscious of trends in the world has been deeply troubled by what has seemed like a fated and predetermined march toward ever greater disaster. Many serious people have come to feel that nothing can be done to avert the plunge towards ruin.”—Bertrand Russell, The New York Times Magazine, September 27, 1953.
The London Evening Star commented that the conflict “tore the whole world’s political setup apart. Nothing could ever be the same again. If we all get the nuclear madness out of our systems and the human race survives, some historian in the next century may well conclude that the day the world went mad was August 4, 1914.”–London Evening Star, quoted in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, August 5, 1960, and The Seattle Times, August 4, 1960, p. 5.
“Half a century has gone by, yet the mark that the tragedy of the Great War left on the body and soul of the nations has not faded . . . The physical and moral magnitude of this ordeal was such that nothing left was the same as before. Society in its entirety: systems of government, national borders, laws, armed forces, interstate relations, but also ideologies, family life, fortunes, positions, personal relations—everything was changed from top to bottom. . . . Humanity finally lost its balance, never to recover it to this day.” (General Charles de Gaulle, Le Monde, Nov. 12, 1968, p. 9)
“Everyone agrees in recognizing that in the whole history of mankind, few dates have had the importance of August 2, 1914.” (Maurice Genevoix, Promise of Greatness)
“Those who lived through the war could never rid themselves of the belief that one world had ended and another begun in August 1914.” (The Generation of 1914, Robert Wohl, Professor of History)
“The whole world really blew up about World War I and we still don’t know why. Before then, men thought that utopia was in sight. There was peace and prosperity. Then everything blew up. We’ve been in a state of suspended animation ever since . . . More people have been killed in this century than in all of history.” (Dr. Walker Percy, American Medical News, November 21, 1977)
“Everything would get better and better. This was the world I was born in. . . . Suddenly, unexpectedly, one morning in 1914 the whole thing came to an end.” (British statesman Harold Macmillan, The New York Times, November 23, 1980)
“The last completely ‘normal’ year in history was 1913, the year before World War I began.” (Times-Herald, Washington, D.C., March 13, 1949)
“In 1914 the world lost a coherence which it has not managed to recapture since. . . . This has been a time of extraordinary disorder and violence, both across national frontiers and within them.” (The Economist)
“The Great War of 1914-18 lies like a band of scorched earth dividing that time from ours.In wiping out so many lives which would have been operative on the years that followed, in destroying beliefs, changing ideas, and leaving incurable wounds of disillusion,it created a physical as well as psychological gulf between two epochs.” (Foreword to The Proud Tower, by Barbara W. Tuchman)
“Neither the old nor the young had any suspicion that what they were witnessing, during that incomparable season of 1914, was, in fact, the end of an era.” (Before the Lamps Went Out, by Geoffrey Marcus)
“[There was] little or no evidence of a steady rise or a ‘snowballing’ of conflicts and tensions leading directly to the outbreak of war.” On the contrary, “by late 1913 and early 1914 . . . relations among the major powers appeared to be more settled than they had been for many years.” (International Crisis, by Eugenia Nomikos and Robert C. North, 1976)
“The effects of World War I were literally revolutionaryand struck deep in the lives of almost all peoples, economically as well as socially and politically.” (Meyers Enzyklopädisches Lexikon)
“The year 1913 marked the close of an era.” (1913 - An End and a Beginning, Virginia Cowles)
“Before 1914 the monetary and the financial systems were compatible. . . . If one takes August 1914 as marking the dividing line between them, the contrasts between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries are striking. In many aspects of human affairs there has been a complete reversal of trend. . . . One major reason was the severance of the linkage between the financial system and money with intrinsic value that began in 1914. . . . The breaking of the linkage was a momentous event. . . . 1914 marked a radical, and in the end catastrophic, transformationof that system.” (Ashby Bladen, senior vice president The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America)
“By all contemporaneous accounts, the world prior to 1914 seemed to be moving irreversibly toward higher levels of civility and civilization; human society seemed perfectible. The nineteenth century had brought an end to the wretched slave trade. Dehumanizing violence seemed on the decline. . . . The pace of global invention had advanced throughout the nineteenth century, bringing railroads, the telephone, the electric light, cinema, the motor car, and household conveniences too numerous to mention. Medical science, improved nutrition, and the mass distribution of potable water had elevated life expectancy . . . The sense of the irreversibility of such progress was universal.
World War I was more devastating to civility and civilization than the physically far more destructive World War II: the earlier conflict destroyed an idea. I cannot erase the thought of those pre-World War I years, when the future of mankind appeared unencumbered and without limit. Today our outlook is starkly different from a century ago but perhaps a bit more consonant with reality. Will terror, global warming, or resurgent populism do to the current era of life-advancing globalization what World War I did to the previous one? No one can be confident of the answer.” (Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, 2007)
“Those who have an adult’s recollection and an adult’s understanding of the world which preceded World War I look back upon it with a great nostalgia. There was a sense of security then which has never since existed.”(Professor Benjamin M. Anderson, Economics and the Public Welfare)
“Historic events are often said to have ‘changed everything.’ In the case of the Great Warthis is, for once, true. The war really did change everything: not just borders, not just governments and the fate of nations, but the way people have seen the world and themselves ever since. It became a kind of hole in time, leaving the postwar world permanently disconnected from everything that had come before.” (A World Undone, G. J. Meyer, 2006)
“The outbreak of the war in 1914 is the great turning point of the history of humanity. . . . We entered an age of disaster, horror, and hatred, with insecurity everywhere.” (Peter Munch, Danish historian)
“Everywhere, the standards of social behavior—already in decline—were devastated...if the politicians and generals had treated the millions under their care like animals dispatched to slaughter, then what canons of religion or ethics could any longer inhibit men from treating each other with the ferocity of jungle beasts? . . . The slaughter of the First World War thoroughly debased the value of human life.” (Norman Cantor, The Outline of History)
“The Christian Churches are the finest blood-lust creators which we have and of them we made free use.” (Frank Crozier, British Brigadier General)
“Increasingly, the 75-year period from 1914 to 1989, covering two world wars and the cold war, is being seen by historians as a single, discrete epoch, a time apartin which much of the world was fighting war, recovering from war or preparing for war.” (The New York Times, May 7, 1995)
