The Super Summary of World History - Alan Dale Daniel [156]
As the Kaiser fled and the German parliament sued for peace, Germany itself faced a left-wing revolution. Communist cells, established all over Europe by the USSR and competing socialists movements, now attempted to take full advantage of the upheaval to gain control of governments in Germany and other troubled European nations, such as the new nations forming from the crumbling Austria-Hungarian Empire. As the German government tottered the streets became scenes of chaos. The starving populace began rioting, and the police strained to maintain order. In the short term, at least a semblance of order paved over smoldering difficulties; however, the future shown none too brightly for Western Europe as the forces of radical change swept the continent. Germany became the Weimar Republic, a weak government struggling to survive after the Great War.
As the war concluded, a horrendous influenza pandemic swept the world in 1918 and 1919 killing about 50 to 100 million people. [183] The influenza exterminating the world probably came from the trenches of World War I, when a normal strain of flu moving through millions of men radically changed in the process. Then infected men took the flu back to their home nations where it became an invisible hurricane killing anyone susceptible. Humanity found no cure, and the killing storm simply exhausted itself as survivors were apparently immune to its effects. The pandemic killed far more people than the war itself.
The Great War’s victims were many. Millions were dead, and billions spent. The Ottoman Empire, destroyed; Austria-Hungary, dismembered; Germany’s overseas colonies, and national territory stripped; German honor, shattered; the French and British populace, decimated; the world’s economy, in torment. The great world of 1900, murdered. European wealth and society was destroyed by stupidity beyond imagination.
Versailles’ Treaty stripped Germany of its army and navy, forced the nation to admit responsibility for the war, and forced its citizens to pay thirty-two billion (in 1919 dollars, much more today) in repatriations to the Allies.[184] The United States refused to ratify the treaty. Woodrow Wilson, the American president negotiating the treaty, sold out everything for his concept of a new organization joining the leading nations of the world in a setting where diplomacy substituted for wars—the League of Nations. Wilson, an idealist, dreamed of the League forming the centerpiece of a world without war. However, the US Senate must ratify US treaties, and the Senate rejected the treaty and the League of Nations. The United States signed a separate peace with Germany, bitterly disappointing the Europeans. The world’s nations went ahead with the League, but America never joined, and the USSR (Russia renamed by the communists)[185] stayed away until 1934. As organized, the League possessed little ability to enforce any rules it might pass, and passing rules was nearly impossible because taking action required a unanimous vote. It became mostly a talking club, and when talking failed the League failed. The Concert of Europe depended on balance of power politics to maintain the peace, and that produced arms races and the Great War. The League would not rely on balance of power politics that it thought caused the great conflagration, and the ideal of a mutual defense against aggression failed to prevent a swift march to a new murderous conflict.
Economic calamity overtook Germany and Europe immediately after the war, with only England and the United States seeming to emerge from the firestorm with something like their old economies intact. An illusion, at best. England spent its national treasure on the war, and it borrowed heavily to sustain itself during the fighting. The German economy launched into hyperinflation where a thousand marks could not buy a loaf of bread. At one point, a million German marks equaled about one US dollar. The United States also spent deeply to enter the war and sustain the fight. Little did the “winning” nations recognize the world economic