For Lenin, “self-determination” was a clarion call not for democracy and freedom but for revolt and bloodshed that would rock the capitalist imperial… - Arthur Herman

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."

The U.S. president's consent to the Versailles Treaty did more to damage his reputation among his fellow liberals than anything else he did that crucial year. It also sowed the seeds for a bitterness among Germans that would ripen into the political movement that led to Adolf Hitler and World War II.

there was no Russian army anymore to fight. "They have voted with their feet by running away," Lenin said sardonically.