As we have studied today, the swastika is a very old symbol the Nazis used as an Arian and anti-semitic emblem. Before the Nazis started using this symbol, swastikas had been used in many places as a symbol of health and good luck, as well as to represent the idea of the eternal return or continuous flow. The oldest known swastikas belong to Prehistory and the Bronze Age. Some Germanic tribes wore swastika amulets to keep bad spirits away.
Here you have an example of swastikas used to decorate a Greek Kantharos (780 B.C.):
The relation between the swastikas and anti-semitism was established in the 19th century. When many swastikas were discovered in the ruins of ancient Troy in Turkey and also next to the Oder River in Germany, a French philologist called Emile Burnouf stated that the swastika was a symbol rejected by the Jews, because it didn´t appear in places where they used to live. This idea is false, because swastikas can be found almost everywhere, but this relation between swastikas and anti- semitism extended.
Before the Nazis, different nationalist associations in Germany used swastikas, such as the Teutonic Order and Thule Society and it was also the symbol chosen by the DAP (German Workers´Party), where Hitler inflitrated as an informant for the army. When the Nazis designed the NSDAP flag, they included the swastika on it. They chose the red colour (meaning the social part of their movement), the white (which is related to their nationalism) and the swastika, which symbolized the struggle of the Arian man. Hitler preferred the left-facing swastika, which has been related to decadence and death, but he identified it with a whirlwind and a solar symbol.
The German Socialist Party (SPD) created a paramilitary group called the Iron Front to oppose the Nazis and they also designed a symbol to easily cover or cross out the Nazi swastikas. Their emblem consisted of three arrows pointing south-west and their meaning was union, activity and discipline.
The swastika is forbidden in Germany at present. The German government tried to extend the prohibition to all the European Union in 2005, but this proposition was rejected by some EU members. In Asia swastikas are very common, because they are related to different religions: Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism. Here you have an example of swastika on a Korean temple:
Today in
Social Sciences, we have asked Paqui what said the inspector about us. She has
told us that he was really happy, but at the same time he was angry because
next year things are going to be totally different.
Afterwards,
Laura and Ana have asked Paqui if the features of Restoration are going to be
included in the exam. Paqui has answered that we have to study all the things,
because we should know that things. Then, we have continued with the unit, and
we have reviewed some things about Fascism. The slogans that show how the
Fascists transformed Italy
into a Totalitarism, are the following:
-“All
within the State, none outside the State, none against the State”
-“Mussolini
is always right”.
-“Believe,
obey, fight”
- “Either
with us or against us”
Paqui has
explained us that the unions were replaced by “corporations”. Corporations are
sort of unions which included workers and patrons to “solve” labour conflicts.
Mussolini
was called the Duce which means the leader, the guide, he had all the power and
there was cult for Mussolini´s personality. Propaganda was used to glorify
Mussolini. We have learnt what the Lateran pact was: It was an agreement signed
by Mussolini and the Pope which meant the creation of the Vatican
City as a State inside Italy
and solved the conflict between Italy
and the Pope. The State intervened in economy with public works, subsidized
enterprises…
The Fascist
foreign policy was aggressive. Mussolini wanted to restore the splendour of the
Roman Empire and started some wars to conquer territories: occupation of Ethiopia in 1935 and Albania in 1939. He also took part
in the Spanish Civil War, supporting the rebels, sending more than 70,000
soldiers and weapons.
We have
written a new word about this topic in the glossary: Autarky= Autarquía.The
main objective was to achieve self-sufficiency, increasing internal production
and reducing imports.
We have
started the third point of the unit: Nazi Germany. We have started to check the
scheme that we had for homework about it. Germany
was a democratic republic, Weimar Republic,
which had many problems after WW1. The leaders had to face the hard conditions
of the Versailles Treaty, a strong economic crisis, unemployment, poverty,
hyperinflation ( prices increased a lot), the loss of the value of the mark in
1923 and attempts at revolution and coups d´Etat. Nazism appeared and the main
leader was Hitler. We have been talking about Hitler: he fought in WW1, where
he became a corporal. Before WW1, he was an art student. He decided to go to the School of art in Vienna but he was rejected,so the lived like a tramp. After the war, the
army hired him as an informant and sent him to report on an extreme right party
(German Worker´s Party), he became one
of the leaders. In 1920, “National Socialist German Worker´s Party” was
created. It had a similar ideology to Italian Fascism. It had three specific
ideas: Anti- Semitism (hate for the Jews), superiority of the Arian race and
they needed vital space. The party of Hitler had two paramilitary groups:
-SA:
STURMABTEILUNG
-SS:
SCHUTZSTAFFEL. We have benn talking about the meaming of the Nazi´s symbol, the swastika is a type of sail.
Here you have some photographs, propaganda posters and cartoons about Italian Fascism. With them you will be able to learn some of the main characteristisc of the Italian totalitarian State: constant use of propaganda, cult of Mussolini´s personality, aggressive foreign policy, attempt of rebuilding the Roman Empire
Electoral propaganda posters at Palazzo Braschi, Mussolini´s political headquarters. The first image belongs to 1929 and the second one to 1934. The Fascist Party was the only allowed, but there were plebiscites to confirm Mussolini´s leadership from time to time.
Today the Eurogroup (the Ministers of Economy and Finance of the countries that use the Euro as currency) has announced an economic loan of up to 100,000 million € to the Spanish government, so that the Spanish financial system can "clean" the huge debts the banks have since the crash of the real estate bubble in 2008. The loan will be at low interest rate and will arrive in Spain through the EFSF (European Financial Stability Facility) and the ESM (European Stability Mechanism), emergency institutions created to help the EU countries with financial problems. The Spanish FROB (Fund for Orderly Bank Restructuring) will receive the funds and lend them at very low interest rate to the banks which need to "recapitalize" and the Spanish government will be the final responsible for this help and the use the banks give to the money. But is this a bailout? Is this something similar to what happened to Greece, Ireland and Portugal?
- The bailouts provided to Greece, Ireland and Portugal were mainly focused on reducing the State debts and included a lot of instructions to do it: reduction of the retirement pensions and civil servants´ salaries, increase of the VAT and other taxes, dismissals of public workers...
- The amount of money Spain is going to receive is similar to the bailouts received by Greece, Ireland and Portugal:
Greece received 110,000 million € in May 2010 and 109,000 additional million € in July 2011.
Ireland received 85,000 million € in November 2010
- Apparently, the bailout to Spain doesn´t include additional conditions for the Spanish government, because the economic help has been presented as an injection of capital to the banks in trouble. It seems that the Eurogroup has decided to test a different solution for Spain, the 4th economy of the Eurozone and considered to be "too big to fail". The Eurogroup might have decided changing strategy and lending money to the banks directly and not to the country. This means that the banks would be the ones to fulfill the conditions imposed by the Eurogroup, not the Spanish government.
We should wait some days to realize the real implications of this bailout they don´t want to define as such. But if we look back, we´ll see that when the economic crisis started in 2007 and the USA banks had problems in 2008, the Federal Reserve bailed them out with 700,000 million dollars. The USA started its recovery first. The European Union decided to follow a different way: austerity and deficit control above all. This policy has brought a lot of cuts, the biggest attack to the Welfare State up to date, hundreds of thousands of unemployed... As we can see, the people who are in charge of the governments don´t want to learn from the past. Or maybe they forget about the parts of history that don´t fit with their plans?
Today in Social Sciences, the inspector has been with us. He has come to see how we do the class. He has told us that he was very interested to know about us. Paqui has made the lesson as always, but we haven't been as always, we have been so much quieter.
We have started the lesson checking the scheme that the other day Paqui send to us to do for homework. It was about the Fascist Italy and we had to divide it in trhee parts.
The first one was about Italy after WW1, more than 700,000 Italians had died, destroyed industries, the State had debts, prices increased.. Italians considered they weren't recompensed and there were political instability. Peasants occupied lands and workers controlled factories. The bourgeois supported extremist groups to avoid revolution.
The second part was about Mussolini. He was a former socialist who created a paramilitary group called Blackshirts (1919). Violence were use to confront workers, break strikes.. In 1921, he transformed into a political party, National Fascist Party: they defended prisate property, a strong State an aggresive foreign policy and use of violence. Supported by: bourgeoise, big landowners, industrialist, the Church and king
Victor Emanuel III.
The last part was about, how the fascists reached power and their totalitarian State. In October 1922, Blackshirts of all Italy and he used violence to demand power. The king appointed Mussolini as prime minister and in 1924 were the elections won by the Fascist Party. In the authoritarian regime, Matteotli, a socialist deputy, denounce this and was killed. All the opposition forces retired. The totalarian State, Mussolini became duce, political parties were forbidden, opposition was persecuted, unions substitued by corporations, the State controlled social life and autorchic economic policy.
Paqui has showed us some slogan about Mussolini, they were the following:
"All within the State, none outside the State, none gone the State"
"Mussolini is always right"
"Believe, obey, fight"
"Either with us against us"
We have learnt so many words today, as always. For example:
Reward: recompensa
The Two Red Years: Bienio rojo
Seizure: ocupación
Fertile ground: campo abandonado
Corporal: cabo
Storm troops: fuerzas de choque
Bundle of sticks: haz de palos
At the end of the class, Paqui has wanted to show our projects from these years to the inspector. We have seen "Tanto, Monta's" video and we have been singing. The inspector has said us that congratulations for our work.
Here you have the presentation we´ve used today to study Italian fascism. We´ll use it too to study Nazi Germany next week. If you need it, have a look on it to complete your notes. Remember to summarize the content about Nazi Germany for Monday!
AAA, SEC, PWA, NIRA, SSA, TVA and so on. During the 1930s Franklin Delano Roosevelt´s federal government created a lot of national agencies to carry out the New Deal programs. Over 30 new agencies were created to put federal programs in practice. Here you have some cartoons about the New Deal remedies:
Roosevelt: "Of course we may try to change remedies if we don´t get results"
All these agencies and programs were abbreviated with the use of several acronyms and were known as the Alphabet Soup. On this cartoon we can see that even Albert Einstein had difficulties to understand this letter soup:
Einstein to Roosevelt: "It´s very perplexing. Relativity is so simple by comparison!"
The New Deal programs mobilized 64,000 million dollars, reduced poverty and created a lot of jobs, but some groups in the USA considered Roosevelt´s programs as a step forward towards centrally planned economy and socialism and went to the Supreme Court of Justice to oppose these this programs. This cartoon reflects this opinion:
On the right in the background we can observe Stalin saying "How red the sunrise is getting!".
On the left in the foreground we can read the interpretation the critics made of the New Deal spending program.
The Supreme Court of Justice declared some of the New Deal laws unconstitutional. Here you have a list of them and the reasons why they were considered to be unconstitutional:
John Maynard Keynes is one of the most influential world economists, together with Adam Smith (considered to be the father of economic liberalism) and Karl Marx (theorist of Scientific Socialism). Keynes´s ideas had an important role in the solution of the 30s Great Depression and the foundation of the so called Golden Age of Capitalism, which extended from the end of WW2 and the beginning of the 1970s decade.
Keynes was a British economist who studied in Cambridge and belonged to the Bloomsbury group, a heterogenous group of intellectuals who lived, studied and worked together at the beginning of the 20th century. He had a lot of personal interests and worked as an investor and businessman. He opposed to WW1 from pacifism, but collaborated with the British government during the war and was sent to the Conference of Paris as financial representative for the Treasury. He resigned due to his disagreement with the ideas of revenge against Germany and the war reparations imposed to them (40,000 million dollars). His book The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) warned about the impossibility of paying these war reparations (2,000 million dollars per year) and the danger of reducing Germany to servitude. He considered that the hard conditions imposed to Germany would be very negative for the future. Here you have two excerpts of his book
The policy of reducing Germany to servitude for a generation, of degrading the lives of millions of human beings, and of depriving a whole nation of happiness, should be abhorrent and detestable.... Nations are not authorised, by religion or by natural morals, to visit on the children of their enemies the misdoings of parents or of rulers....
The Treaty includes no provisions for the economic rehabilitation of Europe - nothing to make the defeated Central Empires into good neighbours, nothing to stabilise the new States of Europe, nothing to reclaim Russia... The Council of Four paid no attention to these issues, being preoccupied with others - Clemenceau to crush the economic life of his enemy, Lloyd George to bring home something that would pass muster for a week, the President to do nothing that was not just and right.
Keynes, John Maynard (1919) The Economic Consequences of Peace
His main ideas were explained on his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, written in 1936. Due to this book Keynes is considered to be the father of macroeconomics. He wrote a smaller book called Essays in persuasion, where he explained his ideas in a simpler way. These are the most important ideas he developed:
- He described the mechanism of crises, as it had been observed in 1929: prosperity is characterized by investing euphoria and speculation, there is a credit expansion, which leads to overproduction. Those who got credits can´t give them back and crisis starts. The consequence is credit contraction and this leads to recession.
- Keynes also talked about animals spirits, the human impulses which can´t be explained rationally and produce economic fluctuations, for example consumer confidence in some products or a reduction of consumption which can´t be explained rationally.
- His most important contribution was the idea of the need for a State intervention when there is a macroeconomic void. The State has to intervene in order to correct the problems individuals can´t solve on their own and heal the system. The State intervention he defended didn´t mean ending with capitalism, but strengthening it to make it work better and more efficiently. Keynes didn´t think that the State had to own the means of production (as the Socialists said). The role of the State had to be the one of a regulator, to avoid risk and do what the individuals were not doing, to stimulate economy when it was depressed, in order to recover full employment. That means that the State has to act as an economic agent when the circumstances demand it. Keynes also defended the existence of institutions to control credit and money and collect economic data, so that the State could be ready to intervene when it was necessary.
- Another important idea was that times of prosperity and economic growth are the best moment to reduce deficit. If you do it during recession , you will make things worse.
- Although Keynes wrote a lot of pages of economic theory, he was a pragmatist and considered economics as a practical and instrumental science, whose main objective is providing people with all they needed to live better and have more time to do other things.
- Keynes also warned about the danger of overestimating the importance of economics. This could mean putting economic problems over other people´s needs. He was not an orthodox, but a flexible thinker, ready to prove other solutions if what was being done didn´t work.
Keynes participated in Bretton Woods Conference, the meeting called to design the international economic system after WW2. He defended the idea of creating an International Clearing Union (a World Central Bank) to lend money to the countries in crisis and help them rebalance their accounts. He also proposed the creation of an international currency, the bancor. His ideas were rejected and the USA government imposed its opinion.
As we have studied, Keynes´s ideas were very important to solve the crisis of the 30s and basic for the foundation of the Welfare States as an alternative to non-regulated economic liberalism and Stalinism. Keynes´s influence was decisive for more than 30 years. When a new crisis started in the 1970s decade, his prescriptions were forgotten and neo-liberal economists focused their interest on controlling inflation and public deficit. The recent recession has revived Keynes´s ideas and some of the most influential current economists, such as Nobel Prize Winners Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, define themselves as Neo- Keynesian.
Here you have two curious videos about a theoretical combat between John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Von Hayek (defender of the free market and the non intervention of the State in economy):
The main part of this post is based on Joaquín Estefanía´s book La economía del miedo, edited by Galaxia Gutenberg-Círculo de Lectores in 2011.
Today in Social Sciences at the beginning of the class Paqui has asked for silence two or three times because we were speaking a lot. Then we have been in silence so we have started the class.
Paqui has explained us the proposals that were to solve the crisis with the help of the Power Point. The proposals were two: invest in public works to generate job and stimulation of production and consumption. Then Silvia has checked the exercise 5 that we had to finish cheking. Afterwards we have copied a small scheme about the New Deal. Paqui has also explained us about the decisions that were taken to reactivate economy that were various such as subsidies for farmers to destroy their stocks and recover prices, minimum prices to fight deflation and creation of the Public Works Administration to build big infraestructures with public money and create jobs.
Afterwards Paqui has explained the changed that the Social Legislation suffered, such as the Social Security Act, to give pensions and assistance for retired workers and disabled or abolition of child labour. There were also a lot of reforms in the Financial Legislation, like a banking reform to avoid another bankrupt and the creation of the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) to supervise the stocks market, Paqui has also explained it.
Afterwards Paqui has explained us about the Three R Program or the New Deal., with a chart of different tasks to reactive economy. The Three R meaned Reform, Relief and Recovery and it included the creation of a big amount of federal agencies and public programs, known as the Alphabet Soup of Laws, due to the number of new acronyms created (AAA, PWA, WPA SEC, etc).Paqui has also explained us that some of the decisions taken were declared as unconstitucional by the Supreme Courts of Justice. Anyway these decisions created more workers, more demand, more consumption and more production of products. To finish with this, Paqui has showed us a graphic about the evolution of the unemployment people in the USA. The crisis didn't finished until the outbreak of WWII.
So at the end of the class we have started with the second point of the unit: Fascist Italy. Paqui has told us for homework to read pages 63 and 64 and summarize them following the next points:
Italy after WWI
Who Mussolini was and paramilitary and political groups he created and their way of acting and ideology.
How the fascists reached power and how they transformed Italy in a totalitarian state.
At the end of the class Paqui has given a song called "Roaring Depression" based on the song "American Idiot" by Green Day. Nice song!
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