October 04, 2018 Thursday
Bedtime Story
Keynes Warning
This passage reflects the warning that
Keynes gave to the Allied nations and to the world the peril at which the
treaty was inscribed.
“Economic privation proceeds by easy
stages, and so long as men suffer it patiently the outside world cares very
little.
Physical efficiency and resistance to
disease slowly diminish, but life proceeds somehow, until the limit of human
endurance is reached at last and counsels of despair and madness stir the
sufferers from lethargy which precedes the crisis.
The man shakes himself, and the bonds of
custom are loosed.
The power of ideas is sovereign, and he
listens to whatever instruction of hope, illusion, or revenge is carried to
them in air…
But who can say how much is endurable, or
in what direction men will seek at last to escape from the misfortunes.”
We now know the answer to these questioning
thoughts and it is something all governments need to known about and learn from
it too.
It is almost certain that nobody then had remotely
imagined that as the treaty was being signed in Paris a foot soldier who served
in the military courier with the Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment 16 would be
so shocked and embittered by the German capitulation in October 1918 that it
would completely transform his world view.
This young military courier would later
embrace the ‘stab-in-the-back myth’ that asserted that the German Army remained
“undefeated in the field” but was “stabbed in the back” by civilian leaders,
Jews, Marxists designating them as “November criminals”.
I am absolutely positive that back then
nobody, not even someone as sibylline as Keynes, could imagine a small powerful
orator such as Adolf Hitler could transform a nation totally defeated and
crushed into a leading military power in a matter of decades specifically using
the Article 231 or the War Guilt Clause of the Treaty of Versailles as the
railing ground to exploit the anger and resentment felt universally by the
Germans.
What I not positive about is of Adolf
Hitler ever coming across this book of Keynes and having read it.
Unlike Lenin Hitler I cannot make a claim
of him to be a man of high intellect though even as a child he was a rebel and
a person of extremely strong will who refused to obey the commands of his
father or conform to the strict discipline as his school protocol would demand.
Ironically some two decades later or so as
the Führer and Reichskanzler (leader and chancellor – a title specifically
created for himself) he would command the most disciplined armed forces of the
world – the Wehrmacht).
The Wehrmacht in the years to come would
form the very core of German politico-military power.
In his Mein Kampf which was published just
6 years after Keynes’ bestseller which by the way turned out to be an even
superior bestseller by far (by the end of the war 10 million of it had been
sold or distributed besides having high demand in libraries and being quoted
widely) Hitler wrote:
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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