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World War One Resources |
Disoriented and disillusioned people searching for new certainties and values would turn to political ideologies that openly rejected reason and praised war. Utilizing what they understood about insights into the non-rational and unconscious mind, men like Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin succeeded in manipulating the minds of the masses to a degree never before witnessed in human history. These currents began to coalesce toward the end of the nineteenth century but World War One brought them all together into a tidal wave. The Great War accentuated the questioning of established norms and the dissolution of Enlightenment certainties and caused many people to regard Western civilization as dying and beyond recovery. The war not only intensified the spiritual crisis of the late 19th century, it also shattered Europe's political and social order and gave birth to totalitarian ideologies that nearly obliterated the legacy of the Enlightenment. Paul Fussell has written that the Great War "was a hideous embarrassment to the prevailing Meliorist myth which had dominated the public conscience for a century. It reversed the Idea of Progress." Or, as the British journalist Philip Gibbs remembered:
More information | The History Guide | | copyright � 2000 Steven Kreis |
At the turn of the century most
Europeans were optimistic about the future, some even
believed that European civilization was on the threshold
of yet another golden age. Few suspected that European
civilization would soon be gripped by a crisis that
threatened its very survival. The powerful forces of
irrationalism, illuminated by Friedrich Nietzsche,
psychoanalyzed by Sigmund Freud, and creatively expressed
in modernist culture, would erupt in a conflict that
would ultimately make this century an age of anxiety.