One Could Wonder If the Extraordinary Visages... Were... Not the Tragic-Comic Masks of Some Strange Drama or Puppet-Show...

The opening of John Maynard Keynes (1919), The Economic Consequences of the Peace:

Very few of us realise with conviction the intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature of the economic organisation by which Western Europe has lived for the last half century. We assume some of the most peculiar and temporary of our late advantages as natural, permanent, and to be depended on, and we lay our plans accordingly. On this sandy and false foundation we scheme for social improvement and dress our political platforms, pursue our animosities and particular ambitions, and feel ourselves with enough margin in hand to foster, not assuage, civil conflict in the European family.

Moved by insane delusion and reckless self-regard, the German people overturned the foundations on which we all lived and built. But the spokesmen of the French and British peoples have run the risk of completing the ruin which Germany began, by a peace which... must impair yet further... the delicate, complicated organisation, already shaken and broken by war, through which alone the European peoples can employ themselves and live....

France, Germany, Italy, Austria, and Holland, Russia and Roumania and Poland, throb together, and their structure and civilisation are essentially one. They flourished together, they have rocked together in a war which we, in spite of our enormous contributions and sacrifices (like though in a less degree than America), economically stood outside, and they may fall together. In this lies the destructive significance of the Peace of Paris. If the European civil war is to end with France and Italy abusing their momentary victorious power to destroy Germany and Austria-Hungary now prostrate, they invite their own destruction also, being so deeply and inextricably intertwined with their victims by hidden psychic and economic bonds.... Paris was a nightmare.... A sense of impending catastrophe overhung the frivolous scene; the futility and smallness of man before the great events confronting him; the mingled significance and unreality of the decisions; levity, blindness, insolence, confused cries from without--all the elements of ancient tragedy were there. Seated indeed amid the theatrical trappings of the French saloons of state, one could wonder if the extraordinary visages of Wilson and of Clemenceau, with their fixed hue and unchanging characterisation, were really faces at all and not the tragic-comic masks of some strange drama or puppet-show...

Comments

[derrida derider]

Hmm, we often forget how well he could write.

And look how he reinterpreted Angell's pre-war thesis about the impossibility of a European war because of those economic linkages ...

[christofay]

Compare and contrast Keynes and Greenspan. Greenspan, central banker to the man who joined the refrain "Are we not men? We are Devo."

'A couple of questions/comments from the Fleckenstain Capital site where the moderator has always been unGreenspam.

'Greenspan trying to stop stock market boom in 1997 = raise rates a quarter of a percentage point.

'Greenspan trying to stop stock market decline = slash rates 13 times from 5% to 1%.

'I ask, which time was he really trying?

'• It's so obscene that he is trying this spin... it apperas to be complete fabrication on his part.'

And the man who traded currencies from his bed could've understood this,

'Fleck,

'In case you haven't noticed, GLD assets are exploding since Labor day:
9/4: 515 tonnes
9/5: 528
9/6: 542
9/7: 549
9/10: 559

'No wonder the gold price has moved up recently...

'• I know-- the accumulation is just amazing.'

[wood turtle]

Okay, you forgot to say who are the masks, strange drama, or puppet show. Perhaps that is somewhat related to your endless series of "clown show" postings.

[Tomas]

It is amazing how many of the problems of the world today that can be traced back to the pettiness of the peace after WWI.

[wkwillis]

It wasn't France and Italy that were what made Germany accept the Fourteen Points.
It was the United States. We threw in our divisions, eight more every month, with a hundred more in the conveyor belt, and the Germans accepted Wilson's conditional peace.