Where Oh Where Is Our Synfuels Industry?
April 23: Econ 210a: WWI and the Great Depression [DeLong]

"Vengeance, I Dare Predict, Will Not Limp"

John Maynard Keynes on the 1919 Treaty of Versailles that ended WWI. From The Economic Consequence of the Peace:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15776/15776-h/15776-h.htm: If we take the view that for at least a generation to come Germany cannot be trusted with even a modicum of prosperity, that while all our recent Allies are angels of light, all our recent enemies, Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, and the rest, are children of the devil, that year by year Germany must be kept impoverished and her children starved and crippled, and that she must be ringed round by enemies; then we shall reject all the proposals of this chapter.... But if this view of nations and of their relation to one another is adopted... heaven help us all. If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long that final civil war between the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilization and the progress of our generation. Even though the result disappoint us, must we not base our actions on better expectations, and believe that the prosperity and happiness of one country promotes that of others, that the solidarity of man is not a fiction, and that nations can still afford to treat other nations as fellow-creatures?...