Everywhere those in power laid hold of the means of informing people - and informed them in terms opposite to the truth. In fact the new dawn was by that stage a grotesque hoax, kept alive by merciless and mendacious propaganda.Ī consistent theme in this book is that official mendacity was common to all countries, whether or not their governments depended on votes. As they drowned in what seemed an unstoppable right-wing tide, millions of victims and their sympathisers cast hopeful eyes towards what they were led to believe was a new socialist dawn in Russia. In Spain, the elected government was toppled after a long and ferocious civil war set off by a fascist rebellion. Seasoned democracies such as the US, Britain and France, whose governments had won the war, somehow managed to survive the economic blizzard, but the effect on Germany, Japan and Italy was to replace democracy with a crazed fascist militarism which speedily degenerated into racist terror and imperialist aggression.
The slump and the depression set off by the Wall Street crash in 1929 quickly enveloped Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan.īrendon fits the story of what happened in each of these nations into an international pattern. The outstanding contribution of Piers Brendon's history is his presentation of the 30s as a decade in which each apparently independent part of the world depended on the others.
Globalisation is usually presented as a modern phenomenon.
The rest of the century was haunted by the howling ghosts of the dark valley: every rise in unemployment, every attack on racial minorities, every slippage on the stock exchange, every censored broadcast sent out tremors of apprehension that what happened in the 30s might be coming again. The great hope vanished and in its place came slump, fascism, another war and the Holocaust. For a brief moment after the war, some of the optimism of that eve-of-century ball returned, only to be plunged into gloom in the 1930s, "the dark valley". The first world war, supported by the German social democrats and the British Labour Party, consigned millions of the young men of Europe to the charnel house. Less than a decade and a half later, the great hope disintegrated into unimaginable despair.
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