Every now and then you have the impression that the Zeit Geist, the spirit of the time you tap on your shoulder and tell you “look around a little around and since everything is real is rational, realize what ‘reasons’ are guiding the world in which you live”. This summer reading three books released between 2020 and 2024 (Pierre Lemaitre The mirror of our miseriesJean Guenessia It will be what it will be And Precipice by Richard Harris and, in addition, too To my father’s courts by Isaac Bashevis Singer, published in 1956 but relaunched by Adelphi in 2024), I had the impression that the old Geist told me: realize how current the First World War is.
Lemaitre sets his novel in 1939 but a decisive part of his story describes the beginning of the Great War, and so Guenessia that dealing with the 1930s continuously recalls the events of a few decades earlier. While Harris focuses on how in Great Britain we do not understand what happens well when Gavrilo Principi assassin the Archduke Francesco Ferdinando, and finally Singer tells of his father Rabbi and the Jews of Warsaw who are heading to the devastating thirty years 1914 – 1945.
The description of the English sleepwalking unknowingly overwhelmed by the inexorable advance of the conflict that will upset the old continent; The strange disorientation of a nation like the French one that has not recovered from the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte and which will still produce giants such as Charles de Gaulle or serious political professionals such as François Mitterrande Valéry Giscard of Estaing, but also many Napoleoni in small pompous and inconsistent such as Luigi Bonaparte and today an Emmanuel Macron; The determination of a still young Winston Churchill, a little exalted but determined to defend the freedom of his people, and then anti -Semitism, well rooted in our companies from Thames to Vistla, described in the Singer background: all these themes of the summer readings have given me the impression that they spoke a lot of our days.
For some time now that I do not agree with those who speak of this era of ours as a re-edition of the twenty-three 1920s with the danger of fascisms or communisms political movements precisely produced by the Great War, it seems to me instead that the after 1992 has made us enter a season that rather remembers the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Thus the end of an agreement between the States defined in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna, and then in 1945 by the Yalta conference. Thus the emergence of a global power that challenges the dominant one: yesterday the Prussia that unifies Germany in 1871 and disputes English supremacy, today China second world power that despite the great economic divergence tries to build alternative hegemonism to the American one. Thus the globalization that reached its peaks in the early ten years of the last century, at levels reached only in the nineties of the twentieth century. Thus the domain of strategic subjects returned of highly topical when Beijing has effectively opposed the threats of high duties of Washington thanks to the control over the decisive rare lands for the modern technological industry.
Thus the intertwining between scientific development and nihilism, which two hundred years ago had a catastrophic intellectual at its center but of rare depths such as Friedrich Nietzsche and today is more product of similar-like-in. Thus the emergence of a wave of anti -Semitism that had (1894 Dreyfus case) his epicenter in a France that today appears without memory of that season. Thus also a certain illiteracy in foreign policy of American presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt (shutter but pragmatic) and Thomas Woodrow Wilson (with a generously internationalist inspiration, but a catastrophic strategy that laid the foundations for the Second World War): fanfaronate and poor strategic capacity that remind me of something of the new White House. And finally the effects of the disintegration of two empires, the Ottoman and then the Habsburg one that was standing also thanks to the opposition to the first, which seem to me to correspond to an end of the Soviet Empire accompanied by disruption effects of the processes of European unification.
So by eye the spirit of the times does not seem to me that it has deceived me and that therefore it would not be bad if the European sleepwalking and American fanfaroni, perhaps by helping the magnificent Israeli people who fight for us too but who has great difficulties in doing politics, reflected on the lesson of the beginning of the other century and would not let things go for a course that risks being increasingly accidentally. Type 1914.
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