1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:03,546 [BLANK_AUDIO] Today, before we get into the presentation, I want to talk about the relationship

of history to current events. You'll probably notice that in these Presentations, I almost never make any reference to current events. Saying like, what we're seeing here is just like such and such that's going on in the news today. I don't do that because I feel that somehow it's not entirely playing straight with the history to kind of force a tie, see this is like that. It basically is using the history and making the past fit your image of what's going on right now. That's a lot of the way people use history. They kind of grab from history and use it to try to make sense of what's going on right now; a lot of times though, that really impairs your understanding of the history itself. So I haven't tried to make these lectures seem more relevant to you just by constantly relating them to current events, because I think frankly, it messes up your understanding of current events and it messes up your understanding of the history. Now that's not because I don't care about current events. I care a lot about current events. In different things that I do, I'm involved a lot in current events. But I think the historical knowledge is essential to current events, but in a deeper way. Take in the history, use it just to enrich your understanding of why things have happened the way they have. The way countries act. The way choices are made. Not because, oh yeah, that's going to be just like what's going on right now. But because in the same way you learn from novels,

you learn from poetry, historical knowledge can just make you wiser, make you a little more thoughtful. Okay, back to today's presentation. This is about New Wars for New Empires. In this discussion, I really want to focus on just about one year, 1937, when some really formative choices were made. In this course we've spent a lot of time trying to unpack choices. Not just to tell you people made decisions, like these mad dictators went after empires. But try to understand why they judged that the situation was right, what they were thinking. Turning these people into cartoon madmen doesn't enrich your understanding. First of all, it is important to understand that in 1937 the key dictatorships looked pretty successful. Look for instance at the dictatorship in the Soviet Union. By the mid-1930s, Stalin's power was completely consolidated. He had just completed, in fact, a war against Soviet farmers. Here's a demonstration made up for the purposes of the party photographer in which, it looks like the farmers are marching for help from the Soviet Union. In fact, many of the people probably in this picture might soon be suffering from starvation because what's happening is as you concentrate workers in the cities to man the factories you need to get food for them. If you can't get food in a free market because there is no free market, the state owns all the property, you take what you want from the farmers, you turn, in a way, the farmers into factory workers. You make them work on state owned enterprises called collective farms and everything they own, their seed, their farm tools, their produce, all belongs to the state. Farmers who won't go along with this system, well, they get left behind. And if there's not enough farm left in the countryside to feed all the farmers that were there,

they starve. And in the early 1930s, millions of people in the Soviet Union, especially in Soviet Ukraine, starved to death with all of this understood and tolerated as a matter of state policy. Led by Stalin, who was steering the ship of state. But by 1937, Stalin's rule secure, collectivization complete, Stalin is already eyeing new targets. Italy. Its fascist dictatorship has just completed its conquest of Ethiopia, creating its overseas empire. Mussolini's power seems secure. Germany. By the mid-1930s, Hitler felt he had completed his reorganization of Germany's domestic life. The German program of rapid rearmament is well underway. He's now ready to think about what's the next stage? In Japan, the Emperor Hirohito, the Showa Emperor, was overseeing a government really mainly run by the Japanese army and the Japanese navy. They put a civilian leader in charge, Prince Konoe Fumimaro. Here's a picture of Prince Konoe. Japan now controlled these large areas in the Chinese mainland. The Republic of China and Japan are not in open warfare, but the Chinese Republic is simply refusing to accept Japan's conquests. Japan somehow feels like they need to do more. They need to somehow get that Republic to agree that Japan's position is going to be permanent. So think about the way people like Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Prince Konoe and his military advisers are looking at the world. They see a situation, the world in '36, '37, they see, kind of, the way the world seems to work by then. From their point of view, their problems are: What are they going to become? What are they going to be when they grow up? The answer to all of them is large, self-sufficient world empires. They frame a choice, you can actually see it, they spell this out. One choice is:

I build my own empire with my own access to all the natural resources I need under my country's control. All the access to the markets I need, all the space that I need. Absolute control. My empire, as strong as if not stronger than any other power rival in the world. Germany has that perspective. Japan has that perspective. The Soviet Union has that perspective. And, Italy also wants its share oriented around dominating the Mediterranean world. If that's what they want to become, new empires with identities bound up in race or pan-Asianism or the workers of the world uniting together, these different transnational images of new world empires, what's the next stage? In 1937, these are the calculations the leaders of these world empires are making. But one of their factors is how to they appraise the attitudes of some of the other powers? The other leading powers in the world would be the British Empire, the French Empire, and the United States of America. Let's take a look at the situation of Britain and France, for example. They're struggling out of the worst depths of the Great Depression. The British and French economies are Stabilizing, but both feel severely weakened. Both feel preoccupied by domestic concerns. France is ruled by a popular front of the left and the center-left parties trying to hold itself together, horrified at the prospect of a world war, but knowing that it's impossible to France to even think about another world war unless Britain is on its side. From the point of view of France, the British position is key. And the British position is key. And the British are led by this man, the Conservative Party leader, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Chamberlain is a willful, powerful prime minister, strong in the management of his Cabinet. His primary concern is Britain's domestic recovery and the preservation of the British Empire

with the various compromises and defensive moves it has to make to stay together. Chamberlain doesn't want to do anything that will pick a fight with the dictators. Instead, Chamberlain is about carving out different spheres of influence, what the Germans will have, what the Italians will have. In part so they'll leave the British alone to let them have what they have. Internationally, Chamberlain's approach is more defensive as he tries to stabilize and secure the British imperial status quo. Looking at the United States of America, Franklin Roosevelt has just been re-elected for a second term in 1936. As he takes office in 1937, his primary concerns are still domestic recovery. America is still having trouble pulling itself out of the depths of the Depression. In international affairs, Roosevelt doesn't care much for some of these new dictators. At a personal level, he doesn't like them, but his country has no appetite for foreign involvements and foreign interventions. If you look around the federal city of Washington D.C., the big Cabinet departments with the biggest buildings, the most prized Cabinet positions, well that would be the Department of Commerce or to be Secretary of Labor. You give the jobs like Secretary of War or Secretary of the Navy to political friends. The American army is about 20th largest in the world. Maybe about the size of oh, say, Romania. The Spanish Civil War is slowly moving to a conclusion. What the Spanish War seems to show to everybody in 1937 is it's a proxy fight between the power players of the world. On one side, the Soviet Union and its allies. On the other side, Germany, Italy and their allies. That's really the two pillars of power. The people in the middle more and more feel like they need to pick sides between either communism or anti-communism, that same fault line that had been so

important all through the 1920s. From the point of view then of these counter-imperialisms, and by that I mean countries like Soviet Union, Germany, Italy, Japan, they're counter-imperialism because they want to supplant the power of the British Empire, the French Empire, with a counter empire of their own, to take their moment in the sun. 1937 is when they start formulating their plans for the future. They choose new wars. In the Soviet Union in 1936 and 1937, Stalin's main concern actually is an internal war. He's going to destroy the last remnants of his domestic opposition. Let's just take a harder look at the Soviet Union by the late 1930s. In this detailed map that's hard for you to make out, the stuff in green are mines and coal and steel plants done before 1928, before Stalin comes to power. The stuff in in red are mines, factories, things like that, built after Stalin has taken power. You can see where the green is centered. You can see all the red that's beginning to come into play. We zoom in here on the western part of the Soviet Union. The area in orange, that's where forced collectivization of farms has just happened. This is the zone of farm turmoil, mass starvation. You can see the old areas of Russian industry, but you can see new areas of Russian mining and industry down here in Georgia, over here in Central Asia, lots of new stuff, and then as you move out into the Soviet Far East or into the Soviet North. Supporting it, the Soviet Union has reinstituted what you might have thought was a discarded practice: mass slave labor. Hundreds of thousands, ultimately millions, of people put to work in numbers of labor camps. Symbols like this one right here, that's a labor camp. You see how they're clustered in the Soviet Arctic, often around mines.

Here at Vorkuta, for example. Or down here in Central Asia. Or here near the border of Mongolia. Or further into the Soviet Far East. This whole zone, the Kolyma Valley in Soviet Far East in Magadan is simply a zone of labor exiles. This vast network of camps, slave labor facilities, forms what the later Soviet author, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, would call the Gulag Archipelago. Gulags being the Russian term for these forced labor camps. In 1936 and 1937, Stalin begins embarking on the systematic purges of a large portion of the whole Communist leadership. Most of the top officials in the Red Army are executed. Hundreds of thousands of people shot. Stalin is concentrating on waging a war within, part of forging the Soviet Union that, perhaps in his view, will be that much more ready to wage external wars to come. By the summer of 1937, the Japanese have also made some fateful decisions about what they're going to do to solve the problem of the Republic of China. Let's take a look first at this map. This area in pink up here you see: these are the Japanese possessions in 1937. Their basic plans are to pick a fight with the Republic of China, destroy its forces, humiliate them and then try to persuade them to accept peace. It's useful to remember in thinking about a map of China, that the most populous, industrious agricultural regions of China are pretty much to the east of that line. So you can see the significance of the Japanese plans to occupy these huge areas in China's northeast and also this area around Shanghai. These moves begin in the summer of 1937. So if you compare these two maps side by side, you can see how, within a few years, the Japanese had completed their initial conquest and expanded even further. You can take a little closer look how Japanese conquest keep expanding. So within a few years, by 1940, they're working their way down the Yangtze Valley down the Yellow River Valley and so on. More and more footholds on the Chinese

coast. This is the scene in Shanghai in the summer of 1937. What you're seeing here is the main street in Shanghai called the Bund. The Chinese are streaming from the bottom of your picture up into the main area here. They're crossing from the Chinese controlled parts of Shanghai into the international concessions, the international settlement part of Shanghai in which they'd be under the protective jurisdiction, for awhile, of the British and the French and the Americans. These thousands of people looking for refuge speaks for itself. As the Japanese are making their moves, the Germans are contemplating theirs. We have a remarkable insight into Hitler's thinking through a meeting that he called in November 1937 among his closest allies, a meeting where he lays out his master plan and says that, by the way, if something happens to me this is my last will and testament. He basically lays it out as a problem of race and space. Here, he says, are 85 million Germanic people. They need all the room they need in which to form a powerful empire. They need space. Without expansion, room to expand mainly to the east, they're not going to have sufficient space. In saying this, Hitler's really only saying secretly what he'd actually been writing in books going back to his memoir of the 1920s, Mein Kampf. But some people didn't really believe that Germany would have such ambitious plans. They thought it was a narrower, more nationalist agenda to overthrow some of the constraints that had been placed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. But, no, Hitler's ambitions were far, far broader than that. He would need large scale imperial expansion to the east. He recognized that there are only two ways to do this: either through wars or through cooperation with others. He explains and rejects cooperation with

others is going to be impossible; they'll put to many constraints on us. It's going to have to be wars. Probably will be wars with Britain and France, he expects. It's just going to be a matter of time. And then it's simply working out the development of the master plan, which he explains has to be completed by the mid-1940s. To understand his plan, we can look at the map you would have looked at if you were a college student in 1936. Here's a map of Europe in 1936. Let's take a closer look at Central Europe. From Hitler's perspective, in 1936, he's just scored a nice victory. This area right here called the Rhineland was demilitarized under the Treaty of Versailles. The German army wasn't allowed to base in this area. Germany reoccupied, re-militarized the Rhineland in 1936. The British and French shrugged their shoulders and let it happen, assuming that this was just part of Germany recovering from the perhaps somewhat unreasonable constraints that had been placed on it by the Versailles Treaty. Now Hitler is turning his attention to reuniting Germany with the Germanic peoples of Austria. He'll move to annex Austria early in 1938. But the next main target will not only be the German speaking peoples to be found here in Czechoslovakia, but really the whole Czechoslovak state itself. And then from there, Germany's expansionist plans are bound to point towards the end of Poland. So if you step back and take stock of all of this, there is the Italian Empire consolidating its Mediterranean and African holdings, helping Franco win in Spain. The German Empire quietly, 1937, making plans for major wars in the east, anticipating that that might mean a war with Britain and France, another major European war. The Soviet Union already moving to wage an internal war that will kill hundreds of

thousands, even millions, more of its citizens, preparing itself for something else. In the Far East, Japan, in the summer of 1937, moving to occupy large portions of China, recreating itself in its own image of the new pan-Asian empire. As these plans unfold, the rest of the world, and especially the leading democracies, are going to confront more and more desperate choices. And it's to those choices we'll turn next. [BLANK_AUDIO]