The World on Fire: 1919 and the Battle with Bolshevism Book

The World on Fire
1919 and Battle with Bolshevism

A definite slow starter, it can be difficult to engage with The World on Fire in the first two or three chapters. But reader endurance is richly awarded here! And becomes remarkably engaging in time as the complexities of the world of 1919, and the expanding reactions to Bolshevism, grow vibrant and contextually rich.

The idea of the world being aflame is rather more to do with the fallout of war ravished Europe, and the disenfranchisement of returning soldiers, war-economy employees now forced to adjust along with weary national strategies, and massive starvation and unrest in those countries. Bolshevism plays an antagonist role to the Allied powers and the interests of the victors and the defeated across ruined and emerging nations in Europe. Preying upon dissent and political upheaval.

The Comintern depicted as a sinister, power hungry entity which over extends past the borders of Russia to the satellite and 'bridge' states of the east into western Europe for the revolution. World-wide revolution fixates both Lenin and Trotsky despite the disastrous throes of their own Civil War. Which sees them struggling for their own political survival even as they attempt to plant agents within every Western nation (succeeding only in minor ways, with ability to do little else regardless of those agents' success), and their accompanying colonials in Asia such as India and Afghanistan in the case of the British.

I would have liked to see more emphasis on the Polish-Soviet War, and less British bias in the opening chapters, but the text is analytical, precise and surprisingly immersive for such a broad and spiralling topic at a very complex time in world history.
Post-war Germany is very intense in its telling here. Always engaging however, and the radical frameworks for the right in Munich and Bavaria that would cradle ex- Freikorps and militarists for the rise of Nazism is established in The World On Fire with miniate attention to detail as far as I can see (I have not studied this specific paradigm in detail however). I would say that for this, or the history of worker-employer relations in Western Europe, or most predominately for the truth of 1919 America's own authoritarian route, one should read this book.

Everything else is interesting but a little scattered with no great cohesive structure except that the first chapters are based earlier then the last. Otherwise locations and times are mumbled about. And though a good take on the year 1919, it feels that much is left out in this history. Which if read as the title and subject blurb suggests, such have focused more on those places specifically effected by Bolshevism. With the countries who just pissed themselves a little over it being of secondary note, not the other way around as this book would have it. It is either due to an absence of effort or of knowledge on the relevant events to the East, that the author focuses on Britain and America most after Germany. It does not feel appropriate and does so less as the story is unfolded.

Surely the Polish-Soviet War, the actual war with Bolshevism, should have received more than two pages at the end. And the Balkans, Ukraine, and accompanying satellite state of the former Tsardom should have been painted with grander kudos then as the backdrop to American and British economic and social unrests, which as we very well know held next to nothing akin with the Bolshevism. Including inspiration nine out of every ten times. As much as Lenin and Trotsky would have liked to manipulate from afar, in 1919 they barely held the region around Moscow at times. Their tendrils could not penetrate the more liberal democracies such as Britain.
An actual book of this nature, quite like this but more squarely focused on Germany and everything further east, rather than the lunacy and scapegoating of the more western establishments, may have being a more appropriate basis for the study of this book.

Not essential, but The World On Fire is worth a read.

Now just for a continued rant if you dare gander….

Now just to say something about 1919 America as investigated here, because I think it is the most worthy and noteworthy discussion presented. Namely what is catalogued here alongside all the vile reasonings and parasitic channels of industrial organisation and control, is the purposeful delegitimization of socialist thinking in America. Alongside the devaluing of labour and private rights guaranteed to American citizens in the Constitution.

The Destruction of the 'Left' in the United States, from the few actual Communists to the most grassroot Anarchists, Socialists or non-political labour workers and activists is near total by the end of 1919. If not in a person to person basis, then at least as a professional and constructive counter-arguments to the forces that yet rule America today. The Great Red Scare may have paused with that years closure but it repeated itself again in the 1930s-1980s and bizarrely has rose its head again in 2017 - when there is nary a trace of Lenin, Stalin or any other kind of Communists vision for Russia. Save waste and bureaucracy.

There was no central organisation to these movements across more than a couple state lines at most. Usually confined to a single city or a regional industry or trade, few required the level of note that was collapsed upon them in relation to any radical agenda or ideology. Nevermind the nationwide hysteria that conflated these more often than not, legitimate movements justifying the severe repression that waged in response to them. Opportunistic senators, governors, and Attorney Generals, some opting for presidential nominations preyed on the contrived fears of their citizens. Hoping that they themselves could be perceived heroes and as a man who saved the nation. Each unworthy character in the American strand of this industrial and state oppression seeking more to advance their own careers along the cursus honorum then anything else.

There was never seriously a risk of any kind of uprising let alone. Those that came closet were those that sought to defend themselves from the harrying of security and mob-rule forces. With the Justice Department, the general press and the super-patriot associations being the vanguard and forefront of the brutal instigations and denial of rights in 1919 America.

Regarding all three of these powerhouses this book serves as a fascinating progression package of professional bullshiting to justify means. Usually horrible means. And whatever the guilty-offices and institutes are today, the means of bullshit as written template continues for those who wield power, contriving and exaggerating until words become worthless. Such as the 'tons' of subversive literature seized again and again by the likes of the Lusk Committee and J' Edgar Hoovers BI (Blustering Indictment) agents from indiscriminate organisations, meetings, movements and homes much of who were proved later to have nothing to do with Bolshevik interest.
Furthermore, we move onto the Press solely as the most seamless ruiners examined here. For the crimes invoked by their deliberate misleading and manipulation of the American people, they deserve none of the scholarly, literary or especially journalistic acclaim they now enjoy today, not when there were no disciplinary actions taken against their lies. Much has gone the same today with the 2003 War in Iraq just being one example.

Through orchestrated spectacle and contrived vilification, strikes and protests for labour rights became synonymous with anti-American, anti-State and wholly foreign enterprises of espionages usually on direct order from the Communist Comintern in Russia. There were no real links, often too not even politics involved in these peaceful marches and sit-outs yet they were illustrated as the footsteps of invasion or of a brutal proletarian dictatorship. And with the press's coverage came the bigoted stereotyping and molesting of Eastern-European and Russian orientated peoples, witch-hunts characterised by strident beliefs in phrenology and racial profiling, but only when it suited the agenda. As Irish cops in Chicago, Catholic to a man were too labelled as atheistic Bolshevistic when protesting the conditions of their pay and work.
'The hair-splitting over the infringements of liberty' proclaimed by the Washington Post in the end of the year, 'would subversive the course of action' against alien invaders and default 'enemies' of America. Most strikers and activists had no connection to or general interest in the continual revolution of Trotsky or the distant ravings of Lenin. Most all citizens in Britain and America who protested the system merely wanted a degree of security on which they could rely in the post-war climate. Given that many were workers and soldiers who had indeed fought for the values of the emerging orders of the Western Allies.

Yet the propaganda instigated by papers and news outlets such as the Washington Post rallied the consent of a misinformed public for total and brutal clampdowns upon their fellow Americans and their rights. This entire book is worth the read at least for the history of illegitimate state and corporate orchestrated press and its entrenched role within policy, public life and the destiny of nations. The Washing Post, the New York Times and the New York World were among a multitude who shamelessly Red-baited the population into capitulation, in the shattering of many wholly innocent people's lives in 1919. And who created rifts in the expectations of citizens' rights and right to protest and speech in America that today have led to the storming chasms of eviscerated liberty today.

State-Terror techniques at their finest.