Arthur Herman Quotes

Both men were obsessed with the power of mind over matter, and held the belief that by sheer force of will, one could send physical events in a certain direction simply by insisting that history dictated such a course of action. This belief would become one of the moral diseases that would afflict the twentieth century until its end. Here, in April 1917, was where it would start with Lenin and Wilson. And whereas Lenin had Marx to encourage him in this conviction, Wilson had Hegel and his own belief in an omniscient providential God.

In 1892 the Hungarian doctor and journalist Max Nordau published his Entartung (Degeneration), which he dedicated to Cesare Lombroso. Despite its size (almost six hundred pages), the book became an international bestseller and soon appeared in a dozen languages. Nordau had expanded the Lombrosian analysis to show that "degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes … lunatics; they are often authors and artists." Charles Baudelaire and the French "decadent" poets, Oscar Wilde (Bram Stoker's original model for Count Dracula), Manet and the Impressionists, Henrik Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, Emile Zola, as well as Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche — all the leading lights of fin de siècle culture, in fact — came under Doctor Nordau's critical microscope. He concluded that they were all victims of diseased "subjective states of mind." The modern degenerate artist, like his criminal counterpart, lacks a moral sense: "For them there exists no law, no decency, no modesty." Emotionalism and hysteria, as well as that old disease of Romanticism, ennui , pervade their works and outlook, Nordau proclaimed, because of their enfeebled nervous state. "The degenerate and insane," he wrote, "are the predestined disciples of Schopenhauer."

Wilson worried that the Constitution itself would not survive: "a nation can't put its strength into a war and keep its head level; it has never been done."13

Petrograd (St. Petersburg's new name since the outbreak of war, when the government decided that "St. Petersburg" sounded Teutonic)

For Lenin, “self-determination” was a clarion call not for democracy and freedom but for revolt and bloodshed that would rock the capitalist imperialist order down to its foundations.

In exposing to the entire world the work of the ruling classes, as expressed in the secret diplomatic documents, we address the workers with the call which forms the unchangeable foundation of our foreign policy: 'Proletarians of all countries, unite!' "31

Wilson imagined a conversation among European leaders as they realized they had been wrong, and Wilson right, about the war. "Do you not think it likely that the world will some time turn to America and say, 'You were right, and we were wrong. You kept your heads when we lost ours . . . Now, in your self-possession, in your coolness, in your strength, may we not turn to you for counsel and for assistance?' "23

now with his peace offer on the table, it would be even more imperative that the United States not choose sides, in order to preserve its moral leadership over the planet.

the first meeting of the Assembly was put off until early January, but not before Lenin had its most conservative party, the Kadet Party, outlawed as "enemies of the people."

The only thing that could save the revolution, Lenin wrote in 1913, would be a war between Austria and Russia. "But it's scarcely likely that Franz Josef and Nikolasha [Lenin's nickname for the czar he despised] would grant us this pleasure."41

Did Wilson suffer a stroke on that day in late April? The evidence strongly suggests he did. It may not have been severe enough to render him unable to attend meetings or to cause him to withdraw from public settings, but that he was physically and mentally a different man after the date seems indisputable. If it was a stroke, it would leave him impaired just when he most needed his strength.

Theodore Roosevelt was less impressed. He wrote that "peace without victory is the natural ideal of the man who is too proud to fight" — a sideways shot at Wilson's manhood and his naïveté. Roosevelt also reminded Americans that in 1776 it was the Tories, the loyalists to Britain, who had preached "peace without victory," and likewise the Copperheads, or sympathizers with the slave-owning South, who preached the same during the Civil War.

When, two years later, the Paris Peace Conference wrapped itself around the principle of self-determination, it was automatically assumed that the principle posed no threat to the existing colonial empires of the victorious powers — the United States included.

As for Japan, the rejection of the racial equality clause and, by implication, of Japan's status as a Great Power equal to France or Britain doomed those Japanese politicians arguing for an accommodationist, pro-Western slant to their country's foreign policy, especially toward the United States.

For medieval thinkers, this was an eye-opening revelation. Side by side with divine truth, Averroës was saying, lay another truth, that of the natural world. This insight earned Averroës an admiration equaled by no other living non-Christian. It is why Dante praises him in his Divine Comedy and why Raphael gives him a prominent place in his School of Athens.