History May Be Partly Bunk: Part Seven by Dave Jaffe.

  History May Be Partly Bunk by Dave Jaffe. Part Seven.




    In 2007 I turned 65 years old. As this happened, the world economy nearly went into a death rattle.
It survived but only after drastic surgery. Meanwhile I hopped on  a plane and flew into the growing city of Kelowna a few hundred kilometres east of Vancouver. Then after a few days under a warm sun, I drove home in a Greyhound bus.
     On the bus I chatted with a young seat mate. "Things look bad," I recall telling him. "We'll see how it all works out." In fact the world economy was falling into its greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930's. Yet once again this economic collapse seemed to have no great impact on me. In fact my life improved. Once again I realized that I was living in what John Berger called " a pocket of exemption." Or was it true as Henry Ford once said, "History is bunk." ? In other words the great events written down by historians never had the impact on most people that the recorded histories claimed?
   Wherever the truth lies, I realized soon enough that the world economy was in terrible shape. The big American banks stopped lending to each other and soon stopped lending period. Lehman Brothers a huge American financial institution went bankrupt. And millions of Americans lost their homes.
     What caused this great economic crisis? Robert Reich, a U.S. economist and onetime Labour Secretary in the Clinton administration blamed the rising tide of inequality for the economic collapse. Others fingered the semi-fraudulent financial trades on Wall Street of worhless bonds that were made up of mortgages lent to low income people.
    Yet whatever caused the crisis, the whole problem started on the U.S. financial centre  on Wall Street in New York City, and then surged across the world. This is exactly what happened  at the start of the Great Depression in 1929. In that crisis tens of millions of people suffered and lost their jobs. The newly elected U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt who won the 1932 presidential election tried to stimulate the American economy by bringing a whole swath of new government programs that he called 'The New Deal'.
     "We tried the gold standard," Roosevelt told his aide Raymond Moley, "and that didn't work out. Now we may try the silver standard. And if that doesn't work we'll try something else." But Roosevelt assured Moley that in the end the U.S. government would finds a solution to the world's economic problems.
    Roosevelt's New Deal only applied to the U.S. of A. Hit hard by the Great Depression, Germany ended up under the rule of dictator Adolf  Hitler. Hitler prepared for war and the invasion of most of Europe. Japan embraced militarism and invaded China. In Italy the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini unleashed his air force against Ethiopia and then conquered it.  All over Europe and parts of the Americas, racist and anti-Semitic groups flourished and grew. "The lights are going out all over Europe," said  British diplomat on the eve of World War One in 1914. Yet he could have said the same 25 years later. The Great Depression triggered wars and preparations for war.
     Would the same thing happen now in 20007 in the midst of what was soon called 'The Great Recession'? Time would tell.