Great Recession,Great Depression Compared:A Path to Superpowers

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When Empires Die

1915Saturn-0°-Pluto1947|1915Saturn-90°-Pluto1947|1915Saturn-180°-Pluto1947|1915Saturn-270°-Pluto1947

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World War I, which begot World War II, emerged from an inabil­ity to peace­fully trans­fer from empire-centric world to one of indus­try friendly nation-states. The entire 1915Saturn-Pluto1947 wave fea­tured the com­plete process: from end of empire, to def­i­n­i­tion of the post-modern nation-state, to final def­i­n­i­tion as a proxy con­flict, i.e., Cold War. Episodes of first com­plete Saturn-Pluto wave of 1893Neptune-Pluto2384 set the stage for the 20th cen­tury, if not for the entire Neptune-Pluto period. 1915 cov­ers World War  I, which ended the Russ­ian, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. In their place, emerged nations based more on ideas than dynasty and name, more tuned to money and indus­try than rank and priv­i­lege.


The Wars: Before and After

When WWI began, the Ger­mans thought they could end it in weeks. Gen­er­als on both sides expected a short affair that would pro­vide a test for shiny new weapons. By end, those assump­tions seemed more night­mar­ish than silly. The war began on horse­back and ended in tanks. It began with con­cerns on the sea, but was often fought under it. Radio and air­planes com­pli­cated things even more.

By 1947, these ‘toys’ seemed quaint. Mis­siles hurl­ing nuclear war­heads would be the new deadly fron­tier. Any reluc­tance to adopt tech­nol­ogy to needs of war­fare had long van­ished. Sci­ence turned into another flank in mil­i­tary con­tests and with it came the need to pay for it. Both sides chose dif­fer­ent means based on ide­ol­ogy and his­tory, but a whole new map emerged as 1915Saturn-Pluto1947 came to an end.

New Economies, New Military

[ad] Along with these changes came new eco­nomic needs and mod­els to suit them. At the root of these changes stood the need for nations to depend on others–few could sus­tain their pop­u­la­tion with­out some sort of import, a dynamic that has only grown more acute. This real­ity lies behind some of Britain’s fear of the Ger­man Navy; the more for­mi­da­ble foe could poten­tially block­ade the island nation. That Britain had sub­stan­tial trade by sea exac­er­bated these fears. Ger­many, whose indus­trial out­put had tre­bled since uni­fi­ca­tion in 1867, on the other hand, felt a right and a need to expand its mar­kets. Now add to this equa­tion Japan and the United States, both also dis­play­ing for­mi­da­ble eco­nomic strength and navies that could match the other two men­tioned here, at least in out­put. The impor­tance of these fac­tors, par­tic­u­larly, is con­firmed by Russia’s fate. Its fee­ble indus­try, rel­a­tive to other pow­ers, led to crush­ing loses at the open­ing of World War I, a major con­tri­bu­tion to the 1917 Rev­o­lu­tion. The evi­dence of the impor­tance of ‘the industro-military com­plex’ gets born out in the next war, won, essen­tially because one side out pro­duced the other. Even when two sides never actu­ally faced one another, as hap­pened dur­ing the Cold War, the abil­ity to pro­duce goods, whether for con­sump­tion or war, played a huge fac­tor on why regime died while the other did not.