"Kim Stanley Robinson - A History Of The Twentieth Century, With Illustrations" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

now running things. One could trace the roots of late capitalism to Great
War innovations found in Rathenau's Kriegsrohstoffabteilung (the "War Raw
Stuff Department"), or in his Zentral Einkaufs-Gesellschaft. All business
had been organized to fight the enemy; but when the war was over and the
enemy vanquished, the organization remained. People continued to sacrifice
the fruits of their work, but now they did it for the corporations that
had taken the wartime governments' positions in the system.
So much of the twentieth century, there already in the Great War. And then
the Armistice was signed, at eleven A.M. on November 11th, 1918. That
morning at the front the two sides exchanged bombardments as usual, so
that by eleven A.M. many people had died.
That evening Frank hurried home, just beating a thundershower. The air was
as dark as smoky glass.

And the war never ended
This idea, that the two world wars were actually one, was not original to
him. Winston Churchill said it at the time, as did the Nazi Alfred
Rosenburg. They saw the twenties and thirties as an interregnum, a pause
to regroup in the middle of a two-part conflict. The eye of a hurricane.
Nine o'clock one morning and Frank was still at the Dowlands', lingering
over cereal and paging through the Guardian, and then through his
notebooks. Every morning he seemed to get a later start, and although it
was May, the days didn't seem to be getting any longer. Rather the
reverse.
There were arguments against the view that it was a single war. The
twenties did not seem very ominous, at least after the Treaty of Locarno
in 1925: Germany had survived its financial collapse, and everywhere
economic recovery seemed strong. But the thirties showed the real state of
things: the depression, the new democracies falling to fascism, the brutal
Spanish Civil War; the starvation of the kulaks; the terrible sense of
fatality in the air. The sense of slipping on a slope, falling helplessly
back into war.

But this time it was different. Total War. German military strategists had
coined the phrase in the 1890s, while analyzing Sherman's campaign in
Georgia. And they felt they were waging total war when they torpedoed
neutral ships in 1915. But they were wrong; the Great War was not total
war. In 1914 the rumor that German soldiers had killed eight Belgian nuns
was enough to shock all civilization, and later when the Lusitania was
sunk, objections were so fierce that the Germans agreed to leave passenger
ships alone. This could only happen in a world where people still held the
notion that in war armies fought armies and soldiers killed soldiers,
while civilians suffered privation and perhaps got killed accidentally,
but were never deliberately targeted. This was how European wars had been
fought for centuries: diplomacy by other means.
In 1939, this changed. Perhaps it changed only because the capability for
total war had emerged from the technological base, in the form of mass
long-range aerial bombardment. Perhaps on the other hand it was a matter
of learning the lessons of the Great War, digesting its implications.
Stalin's murder of the kulaks, for instance: five million Ukrainian