Lenin

Lenin was an intriguing fellow, if perhaps having completely departed from Marx - Marx's central theme is the way in which history is shaped by great forces, and Lenin's goal was to take a small group of revolutionary leaders and forcibly change the government to make it more liberal and democratic.
Throughout history, we have seen that this simply does not work. Whenever revolutions have fallen under the control of small groups, those small groups have ended up becoming authoritarian. The Reign of Terror in France, the Napoleons, and, ultimately, the 1905 Russian Revolution, which ended up giving power to the Tsar again, ending the revolution.
Lenin's belief that small groups of people can be trusted to defy history and start things off before they are ready is inaccurate even had Marx been right.

The Dreyfus Affair

In my last summary post, I discussed the tendency of people to regard themselves as superior to other groups. Racism, of course, is a natural consequence of this, and Drumont's anti-semitic journalism and the Dreyfus affair provide good examples of racism. However, there is one other major factor that runs through this whole trend - when things are going badly, when you've just lost a Franco-Prussian war of 1870, when your Second Empire has just collapsed and been replaced with a Third Republic that already doesn't know what to do, when you're starting to feel like the chew toy in some kind of cosmic story of Europe, it's easy to just blame it all on the Jews, and that is what ended up happening.

Imperialism: Summary

This week's primary theme was imperialism, its causes, and the effects it had upon native populations. Imperialism was caused by many things, one of which was the European sense that they were superior to the rest of the world. However, I believe that the only reason it was Europe and not anywhere else that ended up becoming imperialistic was that Europe had the fastest technological advancement and sustained it the longest. They had ships that could cross oceans, so they crossed oceans and conquered. Frequently when discussing imperialism, the West is treated as some kind of "monstrosity", and that is really not the case. While imperialism was terrible, it was not a "monstrosity," it was just human nature - people tend to want to feel superior to other groups, and, when they do, they tend to conquer other groups around them. Imperialism may have been terrible, but it was a reflection of general human nature, not only of the evil of the west.

The Congo Free State

The Congo Free State's most interesting implications are those it raises in argument against the idea that people are inherently good. As Heart of Darkness would argue, the people who went into the Congo in service of Leopold as part of the Congo Free State, as well as Leopold himself, said that they had come to civilize and improve the Congo, but instead ended up making the African natives work in appalling conditions, giving them no medicine or sanitation and killing them in huge numbers primarily in order to avoid the threat of violence.
At first, I thought about arguing that this disproved the idea that anarchism could work, but the fundamental problem here was not an absence of the state, it was the presence of a large group of people with vastly less power and knowledge than another, as well as the separation of individuals from the more powerful group. Essentially, the Congo became an area that drew in all sorts of people who could achieve large amounts of wealth and avoid the pressures of society, and, when they became so free, they ended up enslaving and abusing the natives.

Imperialism in India

The most interesting thing about British rule in India was the way in which Britain managed to maintain control over a vastly larger population with a much smaller group of soldiers and a much smaller population - there were 45,000 British and 150 million Indians. They initially managed to maintain power by force, but it quickly became clear that this would not work with the Sepoy rebellion.
What I liked most about the way in which they ended up holding power was the fact that the way in which they ruled reflected so much a sense that they operated in a similar sense to the traditional Christian image of Satan - rather than actually march large armies around or invade India, they had small groups of British who played existing tendencies toward violence amongst the Indian peoples against each other and using them to further their own aims.

Weekly Summary

For this week's summary, I will merely respond to Nate's summary, thus summarizing my opinions of the week as they relate to his. It is true that everything was chaotic, wild, and changing in most places on a governmental level, but I am not sure whether the events of the actual people were as related. In Russia, serfdom was abolished, and a few serfs who were able to go to the cities now did, but the majority of people remained as serfs. To most Germans' daily lives, the only effect of Germany being one nation is a psychological and minor one. The same thing goes for Italians. The major effect that these changes would have had upon people were the wars that swept through periodically, not the vast change in perspective and culture.

The Abolition of Serfdom

Serfdom was abolished by decree in Russia in 1861, as part of a project of modernizing that had become more clearly necessary in the Crimean war, which Russia had barely won despite formerly being a power of such scope that smaller countries' mountains would actually shake when they heard rumors that Russia might be displeased. Wishing to once more build itself such an awesome reputation, Russia's abolishing of serfdom represented its wish to once more build itself into a great power, and its idea that modernizing represented imitating the west. This idea had finally become almost universally accepted long after the death of Peter the Great.
Abolishing serfdom was a key step in making Russia a more modernized country. However, it was not undertaken for the slavophiles' reasons - to make Russia a collection of traditional Russian peasant communes - and not, truly, for the westernizers' reasons, because they emphasized Western liberalism rather than Western industrial power. Industrialism was the true focus of the abolition of serfdom - it left life just as bad as it had always been for the farmers, but also gave them the ability to leave and go to cities, where they could begin the slow process of turning Russia into an industrial nation.

Realpolitik

Realpolitik is an idea that brings up the memory of Machiavelli, of politicians who care more about maintaining power than about any kind of morality. Bismarck was the epitome of this political trend - he openly said that he admired power, and he thought that he was destined for greatness, and he had a reputation for cynicism.

However, what he achieved, the unification of Germany, was much more than anyone else had been able to achieve, and in this way his realpolitik was able to achieve a romantic, idealist, nationalist dream - the German nation was able to come into being not only because of Bismarck, but because of its growing national feeling as well. Bismarck enabled national feeling to be expressed in his regime and achieved a goal the people of the nation had wanted.

Realpolitik, at least in this case, was a force for expressing what the people wanted. Rather than doing everything the people wanted, Bismarck achieved their overall goals. In Germany, at least, realpolitik let the leader get something done.