When we talk about authoritarianism, we conjure up out-of-date visions from the 1930s. But we are no more likely to do authoritarian government the way they did in the 1930s then we're likely to address or talk or do any of our other business in the way they did it in the 1930s.
In the immediate postwar era, financial crises in advanced countries were rare events, and before 1970 did not happen at all. Since then they have occurred more often, and 2008 was the most damaging of them all to date. If we have moved back to a regime of regular financial crises - like the one we had from the 1870s to the 1930s - then our economic future will be very different from our recent past.
We`re a little bit low in the 1970s, right, post-Vietnam, Watergate era, malaise, all that, but this is more like the 1930s where the very notion of liberal democracy is being questioned, and that is disturbing.
If you look at the last 150 years, about every 30 years or so, a new scientific discipline emerges that starts spinning out technologies and capturing people's imaginations. Go back to 1900: That industry was chemistry. People had chemistry sets. In the 1930s, it was the rise of physics and physicists. They build on each other. Chemists laid the experimental understanding for the physicists to build their theories. It was three physicists who invented the transistor in 1947. That started the information revolution. Today, kids get computers.
Actually, the phrase "national security" is barely used until the 1930s. And there's a reason. By then, the United States was beginning to become global. Before that the United States had been mostly a regional power - Britain was the biggest global power. After the Second World War, national security is everywhere, because we basically owned the world, so our security is threatened everywhere. Not just on our borders, but everywhere - so you have to have a thousand military bases around the world for "defense."
So the political choice today is much like the 1930s, when the global economy also broke down. The choice is between nationalism and populism on the right, or socialism reviving what used to be left-wing politics.
If there ever was a time for a cool, rational and unemotional series of responses on the part of people in Europe, it is now. One reason is that Russia's President Vladimir Putin and Trump are very similar: They are macho types, they are bullies - and they want the same thing: to weaken the EU, albeit for different reasons. Trump, for his part, is a protectionist of the first order, and he wants to make his vision work. He shows no interest in competition with others, but aims to go back to the 1930s.
Any rational human being is horrified and existentially baffled by the reality of the Holocaust meted out by the Nazis, by the majority of Germans throughout the 1930s and World War II; and by the countless countries, communities and individuals who collaborated with the vast constellation of Hitler's monsters in the gruesome murder of well over 60% of European Jewry. Codex Orféo reminds us that the root of that insanity is continuing in the form of contemporary Holocausts against other species, with equally systematic, atrocious and inexplicable madness.
I started a funny book from the 1930s called The Code of the Woosters by P. G. Wodehouse. Wodehouse is a comic genius.
Dependency is the highest political good - at least for politicians. Since the 1930s, politicians have striven to leave no vote unbought.
I have lovely memories of Los Angeles in the 1930s. I came down to live with my mother's cousin and they invited me to come and go to junior college for a year.
Whether we're talking about the New Deal or the Great Society: they didn't come about because they wanted to buy people off with "hush money." They were the outcomes of struggles. They were the outcomes, in the 1930s, of a viable socialist-communist movement. They were the outcomes of a viable workers' movement. FDR didn't give in because he wanted to shut people up, he gave in because he was under pressure. He had no choice.
A major boom in real stock prices in the US after Black Tuesday brought them halfway back to 1929 levels by 1930. This was followed by a second crash, another boom from 1932 to 1937, and a third crash. Speculative bubbles do not end like a short story, novel, or play. There is no final denouement that brings all the strands of a narrative into an impressive final conclusion. In the real world, we never know when the story is over.
Those who controlled private capital largely walked away from the US economy for the entire 1930s, refusing to pump in enough new investment even to replace the machinery and goods-in-process that were consumed during the decade.
I'm a huge fan of 1930s horror - Universal films. I grew up with them and I just absolutely love them.
The 1930s Hollywood was capable of hurting me so much. The things about Hollywood that could hurt me (when I first came) can't touch me now. I suddenly decided that they shouldn't hurt me - that was all.
Clearly the anti-Semitism in Germany in the 1930s went overboard and it was clearly a terrible moment in history.
I had just come off of doing a play in Los Angeles which actually got me the role. It was called Bent and it was at the Mark Taper Forum. I was playing a homosexual in 1930 to 1934 Berlin who is eventually put into a concentration camp for the second half of the play. I had lost about 38 pounds for that.
When the New Deal programs were passed in the mid 1930s, millions of workers were joining unions, striking, and occupying factories to fight for a better life. It was this radical labor movement that forced the establishment to make concessions.
This crisis of long-term unemployment is having a profoundly damaging impact on the lives of those bearing the brunt of it. We know this thanks to a series of careful studies of the problem conducted in the depths of the 1930s Great Depression.
I like to imagine, if I was in the 1930s and was rich and a psychopathic killer, I probably would be moving about very freely and having a lot of fun.
Working in 3D I didn't experience much of a difference, except that the cameras are very big so they can't be moved around with as much ease. It was more like, when you've seen photos of cameras from the 1930s being moved around with these huge cranes. So there was something quite sort of old-fashioned about it almost.
In the late 1930s, both the British and American movie industries made a succession of films celebrating the decency of the British Empire in order to challenge the threatening tide of Nazism and fascism and also to provide employment for actors from Los Angeles's British colony. The best two were Hollywood's Gunga Din and Britain's The Four Feathers...
Until the 1930s, the Constitution served as a major constraint on federal economic interventionism. The government's powers were understood to be just as the framers intended: few and explicitly enumerated in our founding document and its amendments. Search the Constitution as long as you like, and you will find no specific authority conveyed for the government to spend money on global-warming research, urban mass transit, food stamps, unemployment insurance, Medicaid, or countless other items in the stimulus package and, even without it, in the regular federal budget.
The government is now in a position to do what Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression of the 1930s - use a crisis of the times to create new institutions that will last for generations. To this day, we are still subsidizing millionaires in agriculture because farmers were having a tough time in the 1930s.
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