Ideas - The Hinge Years: 1938 | The Winds of War

Episode Date: July 19, 2024

On the eve of the Second World War, Hitler annexes Austria and escalates antisemitic persecution, Japan wages war on China, and the parallel collapse of democracy in both the East and West sets the stage for war. This is the second episode in our series exploring five years that have shaped the world. It originally aired on Jan. 23, 2024.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. It's the year 1938. It's been a perilous decade, marked by economic depression, the rise of strongmen, and imperial aggression. And now, on the eve of the Second World War,

storm clouds are breaking open all over the world. Hitler annexes Austria and escalates the persecution of Jewish communities, while Western leaders opt for appeasement instead of confrontation. But look at this shot in which you see the statesmen all together, Mussolini, Hitler, Deladier, and the camera pans over to Mr. Chamberlain on the right. It is two o'clock in the morning,

and agreement has been reached. Hitler's side. Japan wages war on China, and the parallel collapse of democracy in the East and West sets the stage for a much larger conflict. This is the second installment in a series we recorded at the Stratford Festival about hinge moments in the 20th century. We recorded this series in July 2023, and since then, questions about the history of violence, extremism, human rights, and imperialism have only become more urgent as we grapple with our own era of profound change. Our panelists for today's program are Deborah

Neal, an Associate Professor of History at York University, Joseph Wong, a Professor of Political Science and the Vice President International for the University of Toronto, and Thomas Jardim, an Associate Professor of History at Toronto Metropolitan University. This is the year 1938, the Winds of War. Thanks to all of you for being here for day two of CBC Ideas Week at Stratford Festival. As we like to say, this is a discussion about the past, but there are two underlying questions that we're hoping to answer here, at least begin to answer. One is, how does change happen over time? Number two is, are we now living in a hinge moment of our own?

So let's get started. Deb, when you think about the year 1938 and the whole era that it represents, is there a scene or an image that kind of symbolizes or encapsulates that moment for you? Thank you. And thank you so much for being here. So for me, the moment, I'm going to start with a moment that's not in 1938, but I think helps us understand 1938, which is when Haile Selassie goes to the UN after the Italians have invaded Ethiopia. And in 1935, in 1936, the Italians have fought and won this incredibly brutal, aggressive war. They had tried to colonize Ethiopia in the late 19th century and failed. This time they were successful, but at great cost to the Ethiopian people.

And Selassie goes to the League of Nations and he says, what are you going to do to help me? You made promises to the small states, he says to the big powers. You made promises to them. Many people who are in this room representing their country said that you would help the small states against big encroaching powers, against imperialist powers. And we need your help and you're not helping. And it's true that the allies weren't helping. They were struggling to contain Mussolini's imperialist ambitions in part because they're worried that he's going to become an ally of Hitler. There's all these important strategic reasons that they're trying to use as justification. And what I think really stands out is when Selassie says, I'm not just here because of Italian aggression against my country. I'm here because of a principle of aggression in

general. And if you don't stop right-wing powers and their imperial ambitions now, they're going to come for you. They're going to come for your states too. And it's right in the middle of this decade. It's right in the middle of the dilemmas around Hitler, around Mussolini, around fascism. And it's a really powerful prophetic moment. So for me, I think when we think about the ensuing policy of appeasement towards Germany, that when we go a little bit further afield and we see a small power in Africa that's been trying to hold its own, and this moment at the League of Nations, and you wish that they had listened to him.

And a lot of the 1930s is when we read back on it, you think, oh, I wish they had done something then or then or then or then. Very vivid image. Thank you very much. Joe? Yes. Thank you so much for inviting me to be part of this panel as well. I was just thinking about all of the years that will be contemplated this week. 1973 was the year I was born, so I'm not sure that that... It was certainly a hinge year in my life. But anyway, I've been asked to think a little bit and talk a little bit about 1938. And when I think about 1938, I think about January of 1938, when the Japanese Imperial Army had successfully, from its point of view, invaded and taken over Nanjing, which was part of a larger campaign actually that began in Shanghai. And it certainly

has contested how many people were killed, how many people were raped, and so forth. But we know this is just a scale of human atrocity that had certainly not been experienced in that part of the world in the 20th century. But irrespective of the exact numbers, this was a clear marker, a sign along the way, if you will, of what was to come. And the reverberations, I think, are incredible in terms of setting the stage for the Pacific theater in World War II, setting the stage really for the relationship between Asia and the West thereafter. And we currently see that being played out in contemporary debates and contemporary conflicts between China, the United States, Taiwan, Japan, and so forth. But also for me, and I'll just end at this, it really signaled to me, as I think I'm a political scientist,

but we do retrieve history as a way of helping us understand the present and the future, just how fragile democracy is. Because one of the things that people, I think, understate is the extent to which actually Japan began decades-long experimentation with democracy beginning in the 19-teens through the 1920s and the remnants of which we still saw in the early 1930s in the form of Taisho-era democracy, a flawed experiment in the end as it succumbed to the forces of fascism. But nonetheless, a reminder that democracy actually emerged in Asia at the beginning of the 20th century when most people thought that that region and culture would be inhospitable to democracy.

Yet at the same time, just how fragile it is. And if there is one concern that many of us have about the contemporary moment, it is about the fragility of democracy. Thank you, Joe. Thomas. Well, thank you also for being here. It's really wonderful to be on this stage with such esteemed colleagues. I think like many of us, it's impossible not to view this year as this year of tremendous tragedy, not only the tragedy that we know is to unfold, but in fact tragedy that was already actively unfolding in 1938, storm clouds that have not only gathered over Europe and Germany,

but that are actually sort of raining down on it already. And to me, nothing really encapsulates this sense of unfolding tragedy like Kristallnacht, that is like the state-sponsored orgy of violence and destruction and vandalism aimed at Germany's Jewish citizens that unfolded on the night of November the 9th to 10th, 1938. Now, over the course of that night, Jewish businesses were ransacked, giving rise, in fact, to this term Kristallnacht, literally Kristallnacht for the sheer amount of glass that littered Germany's streets. Hundreds of synagogues were destroyed, these centers of Jewish communal life. Jews were brutalized and murdered on the street.

Others were sent off to concentration camps. others were sent off to concentration camps. But when I think of this night and why I think of it as a hinge moment, I think of actually the recollections of one young German Jewish woman, her name was Laura Zalheimer, who lived in the city of Nuremberg. And on the morning of November the 10th, that is in the immediate wake of this pogrom, she returned to her parents' house and she found her parents sitting at the dining room table. And she just described the scene of absolute gloom and how her mother and father had had this beautiful sideboard filled with decorative china and glassware and that it lay on the floor and it was smashed into pieces. And that her parents just sat there in the state of shock. And in Zalheimer's mind, she said, you know, we had already been the victim since 1933 of persecution, of sort of

statutory limitations on what we could do, but this was something different. She said it was like being struck in the head. And she said, in fact, she recognized in it a quantum leap was the word that she used. She talks about how the next day her father went to his toy factory and he couldn't get in. He'd been dispossessed. And she really saw this as, to use the term, a hinge moment, this moment where any sense that her family had, and I think you could say this more broadly about the Jews of Germany, any sense that they had that perhaps that they could weather the storm brought by Hitler in 1933, that they could keep their heads down, recognize the new status that had been sort of

given to them in the form of the Nuremberg laws and just try to survive it, that that was clearly illusory now, that this was about open violence. This was leading somewhere much darker. And I think that as we see the Holocaust as this defining moment of the 20th century, I think we have to see Kristallnacht in 1938 as this critical hinge moment between anti-Semitic persecution of a more sort of statutory and perhaps familiar nature, and really a beginning down a much darker path that ultimately will lead us to genocide. Thank you very much, Thomas, and thanks to all of you for painting such vivid pictures and taking us back to the extent that we can to such a horrific time in our history.

I want to, of course, despite the title of this series, you know, change never happens in a moment in one year. So we are going to talk about the whole period around before and after 1938. So if we look back before 1938, so the First World War, which we discussed yesterday, ended exactly 20 years earlier. And we started our series yesterday by talking about the political forces that were kind of spreading in the period after the First World War. So Deb, back to you, can we talk about what some of those political forces and the through lines are that take us from 1919 to 1938. Yeah, I think a lot about the clash of fascism and communism. I mean, there's really three major political forces. You have the liberal democratic powers, and you have the emerging

right-wing powers, and you have the birth of communism in the Soviet Union, the birth of the Soviet Union, in fact, after the 1917 Revolution and the Civil War. So the 20s and 30s are really defined by the struggles between these large ideological forces. And the liberal Democrats are perceived by these other forces as weak. The communists believe that it's only a matter of time before the liberal Democrats and their capitalist system will fall. They're doing what they can to make that happen.

And on the far right, you have the fascists who believe the liberal Democrats are weak in the face of external and internal threats and that the only way forward is a powerful, strong man at the center like a Mussolini or a Hitler who will rescue these societies from the weakening forces and the so-called enemies within. And so the First World War, I think, unleashes two things, these powerful ideological forces and extremism of various kinds, but also unbelievable violence. And so the aims of these different political forces are upheld by not reasoned debate in parliament anymore, but on the streets. So you have these clashes in Germany in particular between the communists and Hitler's henchmen, and you have the rise of Mussolini in Italy and the 1922 March on Rome and the violent repression

of their communist, socialist, and liberal democratic opponents across the land. So I think that they're inextricably linked, the through links of the violent reaction to political problems and the extremism of the politics. And picking up on the through lines to the present, some of these debates are things that we're worrying about right now. We're worrying about extremism in politics. We're worrying about the use of force and violence to silence political

opponents. And we will definitely get to the today, the through line. Go ahead, Joe. Yeah, I, you know, I was thinking, that's a great question, because, of course, Asia wasn't necessarily a central actor in the First World War, except the division of Asia to the, into the spoils, to the victors type thing, especially with respect to China and the response to the Treaty of Versailles. But what we saw, for instance, in places like Japan in the 1920s and 30s was exactly this conflict between liberal democracy, and in this case, an imperial monarchy. But what I think is really central to that era is, as Deb says, just the normalization of violence and the prevalence of violence. Because as I think about it, you know, Lenin's theory of

imperialism on the surplus of capital to explain why countries expand doesn't really help explain why we see an imperialist, fascist raison d'etre in Japan. I think that many people would say that, you know, what we saw there was really just the overpowering of just evil, violent forces that really belie explanation from any sort of social scientific view. I'd like to be able to model that, you know, as a sort of scientist, but sometimes I think, as Hannah Arendt says, there are just things like evilness. And when we think about totalitarianism, one has to rely on arguments around the ties between violence and evil. And while that may seem unsatisfactory for the rational social scientists that I like to think of myself as being, I sometimes think maybe that's the answer.

And that's actually what helps explain something that is entirely inexplicable. And it isn't just violence kind of between forces, but it's actually violence perpetrated against ordinary people and civilians. Absolutely. Which you described so aptly, Thomas. I wonder if we could talk a little bit more

about that very violent period leading up to 38. You mentioned, of course, Kristallnacht, but there were other things going on that kind of signaled, perhaps, maybe if someone had understood, then maybe the Holocaust wouldn't have happened. But there were signs along the way that something awful was happening, smaller than Kristallnacht. Sure. I mean, Jews, of course, were persecuted throughout European history. And I think what's interesting is that if you were to look from the perspective of the 19th century forward and perhaps try and predict where a Holocaust were to happen, I think you wouldn't necessarily choose Germany. I think the history of persecution of Jews in the 19th century under the Russian empire in Eastern Europe, even in France, was in fact much worse.

Jews in Germany were actually quite well integrated before the Nazis came to power. The intermarriage rates among Jews and non-Jewish Germans was about 25%, 50% in big cities like Hamburg and Berlin. Jews were thriving and secure. One question, by the way, which I think helps to, to my mind, get at the sort of sense of paranoia implicit in the anti-Semitism that the Nazis really helped to

amplify, that I always ask my students, and I'll ask it here, but of course I won't wait for your response, which is, you know, I always ask my students, what percentage of the German population do you think was Jewish in 1933 when the Nazis came to power? And we can't take a poll here, but I can tell you that my students tend to put up their hands and they say 25%, 15%, 30%. And I think there's a logic to those explanations because of the amount of blame that the Nazis and earlier anti-Semites placed on the Jews of Germany, that they were responsible for losing the war, that they were responsible for bringing sort of exploitative capitalism. Ironically, they were also responsible for bringing the forces of

communism and the threat of revolution. And of course, the answer to that question is that in 1933, the Jewish population of Germany was about three quarters of 1% of the population. So this is a tiny population. And I think it's a really useful tool to think about how scapegoating works and how you don't need a massive population or a significant portion of the population to blame for somehow nonetheless pulling all the strings. There's even a scholar who wrote a book about post-war anti-Semitism in Poland, i.e. where there were no Jews left. And the book is titled something like, I have to paraphrase, I think, Anti-Semitism Without Jews. And you can see that even in the absence of a

Jewish population, that these hatreds can flourish because they do something for people. Deb, and then Joe. Yeah, just thinking, thank you, Thomas. Just what you're saying is really getting me thinking about the 1930s and the question of what we mean when we talk about violence. And historians of the 30s in Germany talk about social death and the idea of structural violence. It's not necessarily going and smashing the sideboard,

which of course happens in 1938. But the stuff leading up to it is the violence of stripping people of their identities. And step by step by step, Jewish Germans are denied access to their citizenship. They're not allowed to own pets anymore even. They're forced out of their professions. And so that concept of social death as a form of violence, I think, is helpful. And I also go back to the scholar Edward Said, who talks a lot about the violence of language preceding actual physical violence against perceived enemies of a community. And so the rhetoric is incredibly violent from the very beginning of the Nazi party,

and it escalates into the 1930s, especially once Goebbels is really in charge of media. Joe. So, you know, one of the things that when we think about a hinge year, you know, we think about it as a year in which things have pivoted and changed with the presumption that as a hinge, maybe there was an opportunity to have reversed, you know, hinging the other way. And as I think about, you know, there's clearly a drumbeat that is setting the cadence through the 1930s, whether it's in the continental Europe or in parts of sub-Saharan Africa or certainly in Asia, as I've been talking about. But, you know, clearly things had been moving in a certain direction.

And so when we think about, for instance, Kristallnacht, that really is, seems to me to be the loudest point of a crescendo. And yet all of the preceding events, which actually seemed to me to be small hinges, might have been ways in which we might be able to prevent this. Because after all, as I remind my own students, you know, the Nationalist Socialist, which becomes the Nazi party, was elected in 1933. And historians have pointed out that during the 1930s, we had lots of cables being sent from Germany back to the U.S. and to other powers around the world, warning of the signs that people had been seeing that this was getting a little crazy, and yet we ignored it, right? And so I was mentioning to my colleagues here, I was referring to a book written by Eric Larson in the Garden of Beasts who talks about this period

during the 1930s when the American ambassador William Dodd was sending cables back, essentially warning the U.S. State Department of what was happening, which the U.S. of course ignored. And on the eve of Trump's election, I tweeted to Eric Larson, I said, I hope history isn't repeating itself here. And he says, you know, he said something along the lines of, I hope you're right, that it's, you know, that I hope that we can prevent this. So, you know, I think there's something about how we think about hinge years. When I talk about the rape of Nanjing, that is the most spectacular example of inhumanity.

But there were lots of hinges that set that path that I wish we had been able to address earlier on. You're not alone in thinking that. We want to just make a couple more stops in the pre-1938 period before we get to 1938. And back to where you started, Deb, with Mussolini and Ethiopia. How did that set the stage for 1938, do you think? So I think when we think about imperial powers in the 1930s, we obviously focus on Germany. But Italy is an interesting case because when you look at the big powers in the 20s and 30s,

you have what some historians call the satisfied powers, meaning they like the status quo. It's working for them. That's generally Great Britain that effectively won World War I. Its empire is intact. It's 530 million people. It's doing well. And you've got France, which has its own struggles, but it has also been a winner in World War I. It has been able to set the terms under which the peace was

established. It kept its empire. Self-determination didn't apply to the people in the French and British empires because they won the war and they didn't want to give those people self-determination. But in the case of Germany and Japan and Italy, these are not satisfied powers. And Italy, you know, Italy was on the Allied side in World War I, and Italy didn't like the peace settlement. In fact, the statesmen at Versailles walked out at one point. They were so upset about it. And Mussolini really capitalizes on this to say, Italy's supposed to be a great power, but we're being denied access to the kind of colonial empire that others have. And Italy had acquired parts of North Africa in the lead up to World War I from Turkey. And now Mussolini wants to build an empire in Italian East Africa is what he's thinking. And still in the colonial world, I think that the big powers

thought of many places in the global south as legitimate targets for their imperial ambitions. And it wasn't just the unsatisfied powers. It was the satisfied powers that thought that way. And so Ethiopia becomes, for the Italians, a natural outlet for their imperial ambitions. But self-determination applies to us too. We're a sovereign nation. And so I think it's a really good example of a war that really is as much about empires struggling against each other as it is about smaller states being swallowed by their neighbors. Joe, I'm guessing you're going to bring Japan into this.

Well, okay. I'll start with it. That's another example. I'm hoping you will. The era preceding this moment is one in which there was a belief in the collective security doctrine, right? So there was this understanding that through this notion of collective security, where nation states had a collective shared interest in peace and common prosperity, that there would be a rational expectation that countries would engage peacefully and that they would deter other countries. That's what the theory was.

There were two incidences that challenged that. The first was the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, and preceding that was the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. So these were two items or these were two incidences that were thought to have undermined the collective security doctrine, which was underpinning a very fragile peace around the world at that time. And I bring that up because I think, you know, in many ways, we think of collective security, and we still do think of collective security in a very rationalistic

way. Countries won't go to war with one another if they have a shared interest in prosperity. And so therefore, as long as we can do that and we can satisfy broadly then countries won't go to war. That still is the way in which we think about this but it just strikes me that those two failures and the pivotal impact that those two failures of collective security had demonstrates as well that there has to be an ethical commitment to peace. I think this is one of the things, and again, as a social scientist, we try not to think about things through lenses of ethics because it's

just something we can't model very well in the social scientific way, but it just strikes me as a humanist that we also have to have an a priori ethical commitment to peace as well. And so when we're making these rational calculations, and I know we want to talk pre-'38, but it's the same conversation we're having now with NATO and Ukraine, right? And, you know, in talking to my friends in Global Affairs Canada and diplomats and so forth, they give me the rational utilitarian argument,

and then they'll give me the ethical argument. And they don't necessarily square. and if our commitment is to peace that it strikes me that there should be an appropriate that in those situations where the ethical and the rational may not align then we should privilege the ethical and that's where I see a real failure in the 1930s was not just a failure of rational beings, but a failure of an ethical commitment. And in his speech to the League of Nations, Selassie actually talks about,

he uses the phrase international morality, that this should be part of the conversation. Thomas? I was just going to say also, it's interesting to think what Hitler does when he comes on the scene in the 1930s because he actually does take up the liberal language of woodrow wilson when he makes his claims on austria and makes his claims on the sudetenland to say no no no no uh we want peace

and in fact as you yourself stated every nation has the right to determine its destiny. And so, hey, we have ethnic Germans living under the Czechoslovakian flag. That doesn't make sense. You know, we are all ethnically German. And so Hitler, I think, throughout the 1930s, I think, builds on these things. He recognizes where condemnation comes from. He recognizes how he, in a sense, and I think he can sort of summarize Hitler's position in the 1930s, which is planning for war and talking peace. And it's interesting that he actually uses some of the sort of optimistic and quite ideological language of Woodrow Wilson and the peacemakers after the First World War to say, this is all we want. We are rational actors here.

And so I also think when we contemplate how Chamberlain, for instance, sort of bought into this appeasement approach, there's this broad-ranging assumption that maybe this is just about the Germans, as it was said, going into their own backyards. That maybe if we simply allow Hitler to pursue, quote-unquote, reasonable demands, peace can remain. And so I think at the time, I think finding where that moral question or the moral solution was quite difficult because, of course, appeasement only becomes a dirty word after the fact when it doesn't work. And I think a lot of people would argue, in fact, that with regards to appeasing Hitler, that the assumption is sometimes that, well, had the West taken a hard stand in 1937 or 1938, they could have averted war. And I think every evidence points in the opposite direction, that Hitler was dead set on war, that when he was handed a diplomatic solution to the crisis with the Sudetenland, he was furious. He wanted

war and he'd been denied his war. And so to have taken a hard stand, at least in the lateretenland, he was furious. He wanted war, and he'd been denied his war. And so to have taken a hard stand, at least in the later 1930s, would have simply brought the war earlier and according to the schedule which he was seeking. On Ideas, you're listening to the year 1938, the winds of war. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts, and on CBC Radio One in Canada, across North America on US Public Radio, and on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. I'm Nala Ayad. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you

love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you got to know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. War and annexation. Collapsing democracies.

Sound familiar? It's actually the year 1938. In March of that year, German troops took over Austria in what became known as the Anschluss. Then Hitler laid claim to the Sudetenland in northern Czechoslovakia with its ethnic German population. That fall, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain went to the Munich conference to seek a resolution to the crisis. In the end, he decided on a strategy of appeasement and told Czechoslovakia to submit to the annexation of the Sudetenland or confront Hitler on their own. Upon returning to Britain, Chamberlain boasted he had achieved, quote, peace for our time. History, of course, tells another story.

This is the year 1938, the winds of war. Deborah Neal, Joseph Wong, and Thomas Jardim in conversation at the Stratford Festival about a hinge moment in history, a year whose aftershocks still shape our world today. Let's get right into this episode, you know, the invasion of Austria and then the Munich Conference. Can you talk, I mean, the idea was Chamberlain talking about peace for our time. Why didn't appeasement work? Can we talk about why it failed?

I think Hitler's not a rational actor, but the British are hoping throughout the 30s that he will be. Churchill, of course, we look back on Churchill. Well, Churchill knew. If you listen to his speeches, he, from an early date, but Churchill didn't have a lot of credibility in Britain. So even though we hear Churchill now, the reality was, was that the British cabinet is very split. And part of this is because British foreign policy has traditionally not had an interest in central and eastern Europe the way that Britain has always been about maintaining a balance of power on the continent in order to preserve its ability to act freely in its global empire. So from a British point of view, having a powerful Germany is not in itself a terrible

thing. They don't like the Nazis, but British strategic interests aren't necessarily impacted in the way that Poland or Czechoslovakia strategic interests are impacted. On top of that, there's lots of people in Britain who think Germany got a raw deal in the Treaty of Versailles, and that Germany had really struggled economically. It had this massive financial collapse, which had led to this extremist government. And that maybe if we helped the Germans, if we tried to get along with the Germans, and we tried to contain their imperial ambitions in Central and Eastern Europe, that we could have a better partner. And France is a lot more suspicious of German intentions, but France is the weaker partner. And so the British embark on attempts to both contain and placate the Germans,

partly out of sympathy, partly out of strategic interests, and partly because they themselves are relatively militarily weak and nobody wants another war. The problem with the Anschluss in March of 1938 is that this is a direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles. And the marching into the Rhineland had been as well. But the marching into the Rhineland, I mean, the Rhineland is part of Germany. But Austria has not been a part of Germany. And so going in there is really the taking over of another country. But one of the real issues is that a lot of Austrians welcome it. And not everybody, that's for sure. We've all seen The Sound of Music. But that's everyone's reference point for this, including my own.

When you're little, you learn this stuff. But we know that a lot of Austrians were, if not embracing the Nazi party, they were at least resigned to it, or they were drawn in by the idea that finally the Germans of Austria and the Germans of Germany would be united once and for all. Hitler himself was Austrian. So coming into the fall of 1938, the British are both highly suspicious of Germans' intentions, but they don't have as many options as I think we think they do or that Churchill thinks we do. And so the path forward isn't necessarily clear. And to pick up on what Thomas said, it's the Germans who actually want war. And in fact, Hitler goes away from the Munich conference angry that he did not get his

war. And so it's a bad deal on all sides, which we can get into, but I'll stop there. Yeah. Thomas? The one thing I just wanted to underscore, because it runs through so many of the things we're talking about, and Deb alluded to it, which is anti-communism and the importance of anti-communism in so many of the phenomena we're talking about. I mean, with regards to appeasement, there were those in the British government who thought expressly, you know, we may not like Hitler, but we do not like the communists. We are worried about the exportation of communism, this sort of rolling empire. And what use is an unarmed Germany as a bulwark against communism? If we have a strong armed Germany, they can hold the communists back. And even though we don't like Hitler, his, you know, his anti-communist credentials are A1. And so I think there's a lot of sense that the real fear here is communism.

And this, you know, this also pervades the political spectrum when we talk about the collapse of democracy in the interwar years, all these, you know, brand new democracies that embrace it in 1918, 1919, and let it go so quickly. And I think, again, it's this fear of communism. And we learned very quickly that for many of the liberal elites who pushed the democratic goal in reform find themselves to essentially be anti-communist first and Democrats second. Joe, are there any parallels between what's happening in the West and in the East, like the collapse of democracy in Germany and then in Japan? like the collapse of democracy in Germany and then in Japan? Yeah, you know, the history, the political economic history of Germany is so mirrored, actually, in the case of Japan. Most people think of Japan as being a post-war economic miracle.

The fact of the matter is Japan actually was fully industrialized by the late 19th century, which actually equipped it with the war-making capability that it then unleashed in the 1930s. And in many ways, it actually learned industrial policy from the Bismarckian example of what precedes modern Germany. So the parallels are there. The fragility of democracy, I think, is on full display just with the collapse of Weimar. Democracy, you see the collapse of Taisho democracy in Japan as well. And the anti-communist forces, I think, are central to that.

I guess as I'm listening to my colleagues who've stressed that Hitler wanted this war and that he was angry that he was denied his war. It just sounds obviously, I mean, it's obviously true, but it just sounds so crazy to me that, and as I think about, again, the motivation for imperialist expansion, whether it be Japan in the 1930s or, as some might argue, you know, China in the 20th century or the 21st century, sorry.

It's just the motivation for wanting war just seems such an inane proposition. But I guess I'm still having trouble. I mean, I understand the arguments, and I understand the interwar fragility, and I understand the imbalance of the post-first world war compromise and the inequities of the treaty of versailles which of course sounds totally crazy because it's in the inequities in the division of the spoils of the victors but anyway the whole proposition that countries want war seems strange to me and it probably deserves a little more contemplation. Yeah, as inexplicable today as it was back then.

But maybe, Thomas, is there a short response to that? Sure. No, the only thing that I was going to say that I think is interesting to contemplate, we can contemplate the sort of political dimensions of the drive for war, but I also think it's interesting to think of that sort of gospel of war in that generation that came out of the First World War that really helps to propel the Second World War forward. And you can see this in the sort of cultural realm. If you read, for instance, somebody like Remarks, All Quiet on the Western Front, we have the kind of account that we would expect, that somebody comes out of this horrible fighting and says, you know, war is terrible and we have to avoid it at all costs. But interestingly, you have other immensely popular books that come out at the same time.

People like Ernst Jünger, his book, The Storm of Steel, he comes away from the same trenches saying, God, isn't it good to spill the blood of somebody in the name of the nation? And never did I feel so German as when I did that. And that might seem like simply the thoughts of a psychopath, but we see that that really does permeate that first World War generation, the sense that things are achieved by violence. They make people great. They make states great.

They are the opposite of the sort of flabby, sort of decadent democratic sensibility and it's the way greatness is found. I've got to say though, and as you described it, the rantings of this author who I've not read as being psychopathic sounds psychopathic to me. So, and again, I don't say that glibly and I don't say that to be pithy about it,

but it is frightening, right? It is. I do want to address one other really important aspect of the violence that we're talking about permeating that period and the conferences, many conferences. There was an international conference in July in 1938 at Evian in France to discuss the question of refugees from Nazi Germany. It is a big question, like many of these are, but to what extent, Thomas, do you think that the failure of that conference, we can draw a line from that to the Holocaust? Yeah, I mean, a direct line may be difficult, but certainly in terms of moral failure, what had occurred, now if you think July of 1938, this is in fact still before Kristallnacht,

moral failure, what had occurred. Now, if you think July of 1938, this is in fact still before Kristallnacht, but after 1933, through about 1933, and when the conference occurs, about 100,000 Jews left Germany, which is a significant number out of a total population of about 500,000. They were trying to go anywhere they could, and the Nazis made it exceedingly difficult. They essentially organized their program of what was basically forced emigration as basically a system of organized plunder. So there were immense export taxes, Jewish assets were seized. And so Jews who sought borders and open borders to take them in were seldom met with open arms because they were thought of as extremely poor immigrants. They came with nothing. According to the anti-Semitic tropes of the day that we know pervaded the minds of Canada's immigration officials, they were fundamentally an urban people. They stick

together. I'm using quotation marks around my words here for those listening on the radio. And even those who applied to open farms, the de facto Minister of Immigration, Frederick Blair, said they won't stay on farms. They stick together. And we don't want to have foreign strains of blood in Canada, etc. So this conference is called in July of 1938. And essentially what happens is that 32 nations come together under the auspices of discussing this tragic refugee crisis spurred by Germany's prosecution of the Jews. And what happens is you have 32 nations, each line up to say how outraged they are, and each just as quickly say there's unfortunately nothing we can do. And we know, in fact, that Mackenzie King, our prime minister,

was very leery of sending anybody to the Evian conference. And it was, in fact, that Mackenzie King, our prime minister, was very leery of sending anybody to the Evian conference. And it was only when he got guarantees that he was not being what he called baited a trap into forcing Canada to accept more Jews, that he allowed somebody to go under the express instruction that they were there to listen, and that if the United States, which led the conference, were to propose any major solutions that Canada was to oppose them. And so the ultimate result of the Evian conference was that 32 nations huffed and puffed and condemned Germany, and only the Dominican Republic of all those nations agreed to take in any refugees. They took in ultimately about 800. And we know what the German response is. The Germans laugh and they say, oh, listen to this. You've

been criticizing us and how barbaric we are to Jews. Now you all get together for an opportunity to do something and nobody wants to do anything. So don't come talking to us about what it is that we're doing. So I do think that this was this moment, this possible moment of hope where the world could have come together and opened its doors to Jewish refugees, sent a signal to Nazi Germany, but they didn't. And they, in fact, only reinforced the logic of further persecution. In fact, Frederick Blair, the, again, de facto minister of immigration, he even says, well, the worst thing would be a successful conference because then what do you think the states of Poland and Romania

and other places with Jewish populations don't like? What are they going to take from this? They're going to think, let's start pushing them out, and Canada will take them, and the United States will take them. Very important moment to linger on when we're talking about the past informing the present. Moving far too quickly into the aftermath of 1938. Of course, the walls fall in

and we have huge events, you know, with the Second World War. And then there's a change in the world order or there's an adjustment. Can we talk about what that shift is? Like, how did the tectonic plates of the global order shift with the eventual defeat of Germany and Japan?

Maybe Deb's starting with you. Just a small question? Broad strokes, yeah, very broad strokes. But what's the major adjustment there? So I think that in the 1930s, looking at the British again and their reluctance to partner with the Soviet Union, and this is one of the reasons why they end up in the dilemma that they're in. They won't come up with a deal to save Czechoslovakia if it includes the Soviet Union. And so they don't want them at the table. This is one of the main problems in their ability to deal with Germany. For the first two years of the war,

the Soviet Union is an ally of Nazi Germany, which I think sometimes we all tend to forget. I mean, two years is a long time. It's only with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 that the Soviet Union joins the Allied side. But after that, they become allies. And I think there's a moment there where there was a hopefulness there. I mean, you know, our great Russian friends Churchill talks about during the war. But what I actually think happens after the war is you see more of a reflection of the worry and hostility and pain of the 1930s leading to new kinds of problems in the world where immediately, because ideologically the Soviet Union and the West are so far apart that you end up with another war. The war that they were trying to avoid in the 1930s is the war they get into with the Soviet Union afterwards. And it's a cold war, but with plenty of hot places, in fact. So I think the Teutonic plates were not done with

ideological wars and the clash of different empires. Just the chess pieces have moved around the board. Joe, chess pieces? Yeah, we now see some Asian chess pieces, which I think is really important, actually. You know, you see, oftentimes people will talk about the 21st century as being Asia's century. I would make the argument that the latter half of the 20th century really was Asia's century and really put into place the various chess pieces that are on the board now, and some of them increasingly powerful. In the immediate post-war period, of course, you see the installation of a democratic constitution in Japan in 1946-47. You then begin to see the economies of the East Asia region just

growing at a breakneck pace. The fastest growing region in the world would have been in East Asia through the latter half of the 20th century, culminating in China's meteoric rise over the last 20 years or so. I think some will call it the largest human economic transformation in the history of humankind. So, you know, this really sets the stage now for what I think is an extraordinary shift in terms of the stage on which global politics plays out. And this is also a region that is very much benefiting from, or I shouldn't say benefiting, is very much in the crosshairs of the emerging Cold War and the conflict between the Soviets and the West and it's very clear

at this point that with the exception of China pre-1970s most of Asia had sided with the West and had benefited enormously from its security umbrella but also benefited enormously from foreign direct investment preferential trade agreements, various economic agreements and so forth that really saw this region rise. So this was a tectonic shift of an extraordinary magnitude. So to turn briefly to the legacy of 1938, before we take some audience questions, you know, we often hear about how these times are reminiscent of those times, you know, where truth is optional. There's more of the us versus them.

You know, they're very reminiscent of the days of the rise of the Nazi party and the machinations in the 30s. Is that an overstatement? Is that a fair statement? I'll just ask that wide question. So I'll go at it two ways. One, I think that no, I think it's a fair statement. It's a fair observation. It's also human tendency, I think, human nature to try to draw these parallels and to infer lessons. I think that we tend to contemplate these things through a negative lens, right? That we are relearning, hopefully, lessons to prevent the most inane or the most atrocious kinds of inhumanities that we saw earlier on. And to that end, I think that there are lots of parallels.

You know, I've been spending over the last four years or so, spending more time in Africa and several countries in Africa, both in East and West. So Ghana, primarily in the West, and in Kenya in the East, and Ethiopia as well as Rwanda. And when I was recently there, I was commenting to my friends, I was saying, you know, forgive me for invoking this language, but it really does feel like it's sort of the scramble for Africa redo, right? That you're seeing currently the great powers competing in yet another playground that's not theirs. And you see the Russians there. You see the Wagner Group there.

The Americans are there. And the Chinese are there. And I'll tell you, it's a little unnerving when you're the only Chinese person getting out of the business class cabin of an airplane in Africa because people assume that you are there to poison their waters and to extract their resources. And probably nine times out of ten, they're right. So I think that history is repeating itself. And so when I use the term scramble for Africa redo, people are not at all offended by that. And indeed, they are very worried.

People are not at all offended by that. And indeed, they are very worried. That being said, I think, again, and I began my comments by talking about the fragility of democracy as having been borne out in the 1930s in the Asian context. But I also see there's a real opportunity for hope. Because when we think about the 1930s and the period that precedes it. There was the dimming and the extinguishing of the democratic potential in Asia, but there was a democratic potential in Asia, in that it emerged out of a set of experiments that began in the 19-teens, where we saw the rise of independent organizations, labor unions in Japan,

the rise of independent organizations labor unions in Japan where we saw in China the new culture movement of the 19 teens in which issues like democracy and science were front and center where people like John Dewey and Deweyism and pragmatism where the reigning sort of philosophical ideologies in places like China you can really see that there was a potential for democracy. And so as I think back about whether history is portending the present, I think there's lots to be cynical and anxious about, but I think there's also lots to be hopeful about if we learn the right lesson. A quick statement from each of you. When you think of 1938, what do we learn from that year and what's around it about how change happens in history?

Just a final thought from each of you and then we have to wrap it up. That history is a combination of big structural factors and forces beyond our control and contingent factors, individuals making decisions in the moment. And it's those two things coming together that I, that's how I see change happening. And so there are ways to go against the forces and structures that are governing our lives, but those choices can get increasingly narrow in a crisis. But human decision-making in the moment really does matter. Joe? I've heard the term moral failure a lot today,

and I think that the 1930s really exemplifies moral failure. But it also strikes me that moral failure is the one thing that we as human beings can actually address. And so notwithstanding all of the structural pressures that we can account for, ultimately it's human decisions guided, hopefully, by some kind of moral principled commitment that should and could lead us to a more prosperous, peaceful future. Great. And Thomas?

That's a tough one. I mean, I think one thing that strikes me about reading about so many of the events that occurred in 1938 is that I think one of the most, one of the more dangerous perspectives we may have today is that we are immune

from some of the changes that occurred then. And I think to me, one of the bottom lines is that we are not. Like when we look at the erosion of democracy, I think we have this tendency to think, well, we have democracy now, and it's a given that this will be here and that people support it. It's a given that our co-citizens will remain co-citizens. All these things that occurred in 1938 from the perspective of 1900 would have also seemed crazy. So I think my sense is that, you know, while all erosions of democracy don't lead to dictatorship

and all persecutions of people don't lead to genocide, I think these things are always possible. And that is about this process of change that we may live in societies that we feel have benefited immensely from the historical lessons that we've absorbed. And I think we have. But I also think that what the history of that time period teaches us is that when circumstances change, when people feel politically threatened, economically threatened, socially threatened, we can change very quickly and with it the whole sort of course of history. So I think my underlying sense would be that we have to be vigilant in the face of things that we may not recognize can change to such a degree, but we can't be placated by any sense that we take for granted the institutions that we have

and the sort of social ideas that bind us together, would be my sense. Thomas, Joe, and Deb, what an honor listening to all of you. Thank you. What a privilege. Thank you so much for your insights. Thank you.

Wonderful. On Ideas, you've been listening to The Year 1938, The Winds of War. It's the second in our series about hinge years in the 20th century, a collaboration with the Stratford Festival in Ontario. On today's program, our panelists were Deborah Neal, Joseph Wong, and Thomas Jardim. Our series continues with Part 3, the year 1963, Social Revolutions. This series was produced by Philip Coulter and Pauline Holdsworth, with production assistance from Annie Bender. We recorded this series in July 2023. assistance from Annie Bender.

We recorded this series in July 2023. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Our acting senior producer is Lisa Godfrey. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.